Oh no! The type of capitalism where we have to compete!
Make it go away, Daddy Trump!
Tbf notoriously China subsidizes BYD to net loss so its not exactly capitalism.
All car manufacturers world wide are subsidized.
https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent-totals
Of course China can make cheaper cars, because most car manufacturers get their parts produced in China anyway.
They phased out their subsidies in 2022
They still have a trade in program to get ICE vehicles off the road.
So do a lot of other governments, to be fair. It’s one of those industries that employs a lot of people, and it’s always bad press to close it when a bit of money could have kept it. Certainly cheaper than putting thousands of people on benefits.
Plus there’s subsidies for domestic sales as well. The UK at least had a grant for plug in cars that they ended a few years ago, presumably just to get the infrastructure up and running.
But then the new vehicle price is neither here nor there in the long term, since most people drive used vehicles anyway. What matters is how many vehicles trickle down to the masses, and whether wear on the battery is a concern. Some of the early smaller models didn’t have great batteries to start with, but as a daily driver to the shops and work it’d probably be fine. For some reason the conversation always drifts over to “but what about that one time you drove across the state” or “remember that time you transported a fridge”, as if that’s something people can’t work around for the once a year they do it.
How does it compare to tesla in terms of privacy, ownership (DRM) and stuff?
Good. Fuckem. They make shitty, oversized trucks that are a danger to pedestrians and people who drive reasonably sized cars anyway.
My boss in the UK got one. In bright red. It looks like he’s driving a fucking fire engine.
My old boss was a huge man who went around in a little yellow convertible. We called him Noddy.
May I suggest calling him Fireman Sam?
BYD?
Giant chinese car manufacturer. They’re the most popular PHEV Manufacturer in Australia and is rapidly growing in Europe.
I mean, didn’t Japanese and Korean automakers already do that?
Yes. They did. That’s called competition. It forces companies to improve by destroying them, except they don’t want that. And politicians don’t want that, cause it makes corruption unstable.
Killed Detroit too, though. But, eh, helped other parts. It’s life.
Thus already in the 90s with the TRON OS a different approach was chosen by US regulators - threaten Japan with sanctions if it’s allowed to compete with Windows inside Japan .
They can’t threaten China, but they can prevent Chinese competitive goods from entering US market and improving its economy again.
Bad economy - poor and stressed people, poor and stressed people - worse political decisions, worse political decisions - good for middlemen which in our age shouldn’t exist frankly. We have the technologies for direct democracy, it’s not 1920s.
We have the technologies for direct democracy
One from the list, yes.
Maybe GM could, I don’t know, innovate?
Targeted tariffs and protectionism can help a situation like this, combined with subsidies like the ones Trump cancelled, to give legacy manufacturers a temporary respite to retool and innovate. However backtracking on your transition, reverting to the tried and true short term profits is just hiding your head in the sand. GM will find itself increasingly marginalized and more years behind. You can’t hide behind trumps skirt forever
As an European living in Asia and can’t help but cringe at American cars. They’re so far behind. And it’s the car country. Japan has better cars and better rail. Embarassing.
They have some wonderful new finamcial products released just this quarter!
Where free market? It will regulate itself /s
Well China did subsidize that industry massively, to a point were their domestic market is flooded with very low margins. So the market is already very distorted. But I find it hard to hate on that because flooding the market with electric vehicles and solar panels is better than anything economists are coming up with.
Plus people usually bring it up in a stupid way. Yes they did. Yes we do that too (for all the “we” on the internet). Some amount of that is entirely normal on the global market.
The real problem is US conservatives who understand car manufacturing is a strategic industry but do not want to give that guidance to aid the transition to new technology, US politicians who can’t cooperate on a coherent long term industrial policy, US politicians who can’t look beyond short term profits for their corporate owners, or outrage headlines for their constituents. There’s nothing magical about Chinese companies taking over the industry, nothing hidden, just politicians establishing a strategy and sticking with it long enough to benefit
It will. It really does regulate itself, no /s needed.
Except that happens via some businesses going bankrupt and some adjusting.
And either it’s free enough for monopolies to crash, or regulated enough for monopolies to be killed, or both.
If it’s neither, then you have today’s tech industry.
EDIT: And here the fears are that big companies will go down with their shareholders whining and their political cronies suffering and so on. Whether you want free market or literal socialism, the main problem is in separating private narrow interests from the state machine.
Six months ago I moved from the US to a country where BYD and other Chinese brands are available. In the past I owned GM cars. The former GM executive is correct. After trying Chinese cars I find it extremely difficult to justify paying 40-60% more for a car made by GM or anyone else. GM’s best selling cars here are made by its Chinese joint ventures and aren’t available for sale in the US, and they are the only GM cars I would buy.
They’re pretty well known here for low quality flashy vehicles, with premiums for luxury not quality.
American manufacturing seems very incapable of change. If things worked this way for decades, why change it? Meanwhile the world moved on and they ask themselves why doesn’t anyone wanna buy american…?
You think Americans can’t change, just look at German Automakers. They are stuck in Perpetual denial. VW only moved electric because of the massive diesel scandal, otherwise they also would have been like every other car manufacturer.
Even if they changed how would they win?
They’re just too expensive to manufacture as compared to chinese ones.
If they are too expensive due to cost of labor, they can do, look at other comments, increased automation.
With automation China’s advantages over US are mostly in the bureaucratic efficiency area. Both in the government’s parts interacting with big companies and in the companies themselves.
US big companies are just too used to preferential treatment and solving market problems with lobbying, which worked when they were the spearhead of progress or something.
I am union so don’t misunderstand the comment, but doesn’t BYD rely heavily on terribly paid non-union labor to reach it’s price advantage?
No, it relies on massive automation. Similary their solar industry etc
For example
It brings up a valid point. Assembly line manufacturing will soon require massive automation lines to remain profitable, and without massive government assistance in not just money, but education and training, these kinds of automation factories will likely never be fully realized here.
Tesla somehow manages to do well(at least prior to the nazi events). Still at a good price in Norway.
But all other manufacturers have dragged their feet with EVs, and that price cost of starting is large enough that they are in trouble. I’m not a huge fan of China, but they did the investment and are ahead exactly because of that (and crazy subsidies). Being left behind is their own fault imo, and I think that applies a lot to EU as well. Eg. WV.
They could try going for quality or features.
But instead they are only going for size, what 94% of the world does not care for or want. (this includes the 5% of Americans)
American car companies are focusing on their highest profit center, massive trucks. Milking that market for the short term.
…… regardless of their long term survival. It seems extremely short sighted.
Dunno, seems like a global problem. European car companies are scared too. And they don’t make those big cars.
The only issue I see is that china is very hostile with how it deals with other countries, otherwise this is just the trend of how things work out. In the 80s, it was the japanese car industry.
They’ve got to keep their profit margins, or the CEO’s and shareholders might need to take a paycut.
Because it’s available to anyone. Not just Chinese owned companies and every other auto maker has similar taxes.
So here is the thing.
U lost. The moment I need American people to bail you out, you need to treat American people way way the fuck better.Worker rights, mandatory vacations, work protections, pensions, guaranteed healthcare etc.
Bailouts are unacceptable period. Trained workers, factories, factory hardware, logistics specialists, engineers, patents and so on - they all remain in the economy. That a company fails and goes bankrupt is not a bad thing. It’s just that company. Not the industry as a whole. If there are no additional mechanisms.
Somehow Americans seem to have forgotten that the kind of “capitalism” which gets defended is about this exactly - a company goes bankrupt, too bad. There are other companies which will hire its workers and buy its assets. Possibly new companies created by its former employees. Its shareholders have gambled and lost, well, their problem. That’s what an unregulated market is, by the way, and not bailouts to big fish and horse dicks for small fish.
If something works differently - workers don’t find a new place to work in, factories go to scrap metal, engineers go flip burgers, patents are collected by trolls, and new companies are not being created, - then something has been broken by an existing policy.
Patents are the worst of it, but also non-compete clauses, legal impediments for creating new businesses, legal expenses making it harder, - these things have to be removed.
I mean, people on Lemmy love to dream of something like what you list, those things are good, but maybe fixing some basic things about what you already have is no less useful. Especially since these fixes do not cost any money to maintain, while, well, pensions and healthcare do.
Okay but see none of tjose are stock buybacks or exec bonuses, so…
So they dont care about making cars for the world market, they just want regulations to allow them to milk the american market…
As is tradition
Dam maybe some of the American automakers who took billions in subsidies should have built cheaper cars instead of the largest trucks possible to skirt regulations.
I literally can’t afford an American car, i can afford a BYD tho.
I bought a used Chevrolet Bolt '23 which is the closest I could get, they’re still relatively cheap and mine has been working great.
I can afford neither, but if I had to save up for one it would be the BYD.
American cars are just large, stupid and inefficient. Also the parts are very expensive here in New Zealand
The same thing happened in the 80s with Japan. The Japanese were no longer making crappy cars but small and very reliable, affordable cars. Detroit was still making rust buckets, obsessing over powerful engines with bodies that rotted out and defects galore. Detroit got beaten up badly (Chrysler had to get a gov bailout) until they cleaned up their act and improved their products. Protecting Detroit from competition would’ve just saddled US consumers with decades more of crappy, overpriced, low quality, cars.
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/how-detroits-automakers-went-from-kings-of-the-road-to-roadkill/
We still don’t let in the small pickups the rest of the world enjoys.
Did Japan back then pay their assembly line workers the equivalent of $5k USD/year (in today’s dollars) and have nearly no worker protections? Not a rhetorical question; I just don’t know. Seems like Japan had a better standard of living back then compared to Chinese workers now, so I would guess their workers were compensated and treated better.
Not defending US auto corps (or any corp for that matter). The regulatory capture in the US is insane, and workers aren’t treated as well as most of the rest of the first world.
Japan back then had (and still has) an interesting socioeconomic system, a bit similar to samurai clans went cartels, where workers are supposed to work all their life in one place (or close to that), don’t squeal about worker rights and such, but be covered by lots of company-provided social nets and guarantees.
Japan used state capitalism to promote it’s auto industry and other key sectors to sustain strong growth. America’s weakened billionaire owned government system is just being strip mined into the ground. We won’t be able to compete in an economy that’s only product is wealth extraction because of our massive corruption.
Back then American industries were just complacent due to insufficient competition, and Japan’s industrial development was a bit of a miracle (that “living in year 2000 since 1980s” joke).
5K/year isn’t exactly poverty when rent is <200, phone data is 20, and you can get pic for 1.50 USD. I too would like them to be treated better, but I dont know if their overall situation is worse than the average american worker making 50K, but spending 24K on rent, 12K on car payments, and 16USD if they eat out.
defects galore
A friend of mine from high school attended the GM Institute and became an engineer for them. One of his first projects was on a team that bought a Lexus and an Infiniti when they first came on the market and took them apart to see how many production defects they had. He said a typical American car at the time (and this was in the '90s after quality had rebounded somewhat from its disastrous nadir) had 300-400 defects. The Infiniti they took apart had 2. The Lexus had 0.
I would kill for a small electric truck… Telo is calling my name, but they don’t have a functioning product yet.
Right there with you on small trucks, the kid and I have been drooling over the Slate even if it is Bezos. I drive a '98 Ranger, and we’ve been kicking around the idea of a Ranger electric conversion.
When Americans of all political stripes finally wake up to global realty, they’ll most likely do it lying on a sidewalk, naked in the rain, with their fingers in their ears saying na-na-na-na-na-na…
People will eventually have to face that the economic golden age of the 1950s and 60s wasn’t a normal state we can return to if greedy billionaires just let us. The rich definitely grabbed the biggest share of the prosperity, but that brief era of prosperity wasn’t normal, it was entirely abnormal, and it’s been over for quite a while. We’ve been fooling ourselves and keeping it going for the last half century by living on credit, and that’s about to end. I don’t know what new era is about to start, but the American era is over.
That might be true, but also a certain revolutionary purging of world politics would do a lot to return to something close to that. The golden age happened after the world war and decolonization, when western countries were full of veterans, and laws governing their lives were much simpler.
Internet-assisted direct democracy, open borders, open trade, radical changes in patent laws, simpler laws generally - all this can exist.
We simply have too much legacy everywhere strangling development.
The bad guys are trying to make it appear that the only legacy that can be stripped is that of French revolution ideals, human rights and civilization. That actually we don’t have to strip, that is all good. Just them.
It’s normal. Sometimes humans need surgeries, and sometimes a part of an old building has to be dismantled - maybe there’s a pipe in the wall that leaks, or maybe you need to retrieve a human skeleton found using some new technology, whatever. And you throw out garbage regularly.
So a reform for direct democracy (with ranked choice between variants having, say, 1000+ initial supporters in some incubator to get to the vote itself, because we have computers, storage and connectivity to make everything desirable for such) IMHO would go a long way to fixing half the problems in the world.
