apnews.com/article/china-byd-auto-seagull-auto-ev-cae20c92432b74e95c234d93ec1df400
Chinese EVs “could end up being an extinction-level event for the U.S. auto sector”
TransportIt was an extinction level event for the big 3 when well made and reliable cars from Japan took off in the 80s as well. Turns out that Us auto had sucked, produced poor products and competition was great for the consumer. The US manufacturers were forced to get better, which they mostly did, and the consumer got far better cars.
Same can be said today with massive and overpriced vehicles the only option. Sad we need to resort to punishing the consumer to protect us from our own desires to buy a good car, an EV, for less than $25k.
Yes, if it wasn't for Japan agreeing to limit exports to the US it may well have killed the industry in the US.
Japanese car makers might be in trouble as well.
There was an article in February about a "Corolla Killer" EV, cheaper than its legacy fueled competitors.
Automotive manufacturing is at or close to a tipping point.
Electric drivetrains simplify vehicles and make them more reliable. The motors are already simpler and much cheaper to build than ICE engines. Transmissions can be (almost) eliminated. Manufacturing techniques more easily automated and standardised.
Most Japanese manufacturers have resisted the opportunity. Toyota has even aligned themselves with the luddite conservatives here in Australia. None have a good EV alternative for sale now, and few in the pipeline.
Japan is doing what america was doing in the 80ies. Its no surprise. If you fail to innovate and compete, then someone else will do it.
Next year Toyota has some game changing battery tech coming out though. /s
The UK motorcycle manufacturers had a similar death at the hands of the Japanese marques. When they first arrived, it was expected the Jap bikes would be rough copies of Brit bikes. When the Brit manufacturers finally got one and tore it down, they were amazed to discover that it was more like a sewing machine.
I have two vintage Japanese bikes. A 1969 CB350 that was chewed apart in a barn by goats for decades, surviving through Canadian winters. Carb clean, tank clean, new points, new plugs, new battery, it has run ever since. Then I have a 1973 Honda CB750 that I’ve taken on multiple 2,000+ km trips, had to store outside with just a cover over it in the winter, and it still starts up every time and runs great. Japanese bikes are invincible. And don’t get my started on 1st Gen KLR650. That bike is impossible to kill.
I have a 79 Yamaha xs650 sitting behind my shed, and has been for 3 years. I’m still not absolutely sure it wouldn’t turn over first kick if I gave it some starting fluid and a new lead acid battery lol. Like I really doubt it, but I’m still not sure.
I had a Suzuki GSX-R. it is a 600cc inline 4cl that runs at 14,000 RPM's and makes over 100 HP.
I regularly drove the thing like I stole it and I have never had a single mechanical issue with it. It barely depreciated in value at all while I owned it and I sold it for about what I paid for it.
It's rare to see something basically race spec that is also reliable. It was a marvel of modern engineering.
yep, make a crap poduct then protest when someone makes a better one. The US is being held to ransom by private interest groups.
It seems like only yesterday I was strafing so many of your homes. Here I am today, begging you not to make such good cars.
~ President Benson
It's only "an extinction level event" because it took until 20 fucking 24 for Ford to realize they need to "design a new, small EV from the ground up to keep costs down and quality high."
That's what consumers have been asking for going back years, if Ford only just realized they need to fill that niche, too, maybe they deserve to go out of business?
US automakers were so busy making every car bigger and bigger and bigger, they forgot that just maybe there are some people out there that might like a small, affordable car.
The craziest part is seeing the "same" car driving, compared to a model from a decade or more ago.
To use a generic car, if you see a 15 year old accord driving around, it looks like some micro smart-car, compared to any sedan today.
And even then - sedans in general are a dying breed, everything is a massive SUV or truck now.
I feel like every single time they redesign cars, the only question they ever ask is "OK, what if we make it BIGGER????"
I almost wept when I saw that Honda was discontinuing the Fit.
Like WTF man?
The fit was one of the best cars I ever owned. Drove it for 200,000 miles and the only thing that needed to be repaired in that entire time was the air conditioner.
I had the manual version and while it wasn't a race car by any stretch of the imagination it was fun to drive and responsive. It was also inexpensive when I bought it.
I was really disappointed when they discontinued it.
Thats exactly why they discontinued it, you didnt need to switch and buy a new car
Yeah. Definite sadface to that.
Similarly, even when they get it right, the ruin it in the end. Chevy released the 'Bolt' a few years ago, and there was finally a car that my family and I could afford that made sense. 300 mi. of range (more or less depending on driving and terrain) great interior space, surprising cargo space, and even the basic model (which we have) has a load of cool features.
They are, of course, killing it as of this year. The new 'Bolt EUV' is, wait for it, bigger (of course), but they didn't bother to upgrade the battery, so it has less range. They made everything inside bigger too, so it has less overall passenger space and less cargo space.
I nearly bought a bolt, but at the time I was looking the range was 224. At the time at a top speed of 80 miles an hour which if you were traveling at that speed you were killing your batteries as well. Add in winter and you can chop a third to half of that off.
Sadly, at the time I was commuting 50 miles each way on a tollway where the average rate of speed was 70 to 80 mph. Just didn't line up.
But I did really like the form factor of it. Was a nice looking car and exactly what I was looking for. Here's the hoping that other auto manufacturers come out with something similar.
You have never needed to switch out a Honda and buy a new car. That has been their selling point since day one. It is true of every model they make. A Honda Accord will last until the end of geological time. But people still get tired of their old cars and buy new ones. And if the last one they had was super reliable, they will be more likely to buy another one when the time comes. They stopped selling the Fit in the US because their sales numbers plummeted.
Honda US is lame compared to other markets. The Honda E is so fucken sweet and i wish it was sold here. Even the suzuki Jimmy would be amazing to own. They are small and practical in a city environment
I'd kill for a Jimmy in the states. Had so much fun with this on vacation in Iceland.
Civics were once the size of the fit. Now they're larger than Accords used to be. Accords are now the size some Oldsmobiles used to be. We traded our 2007 Civic in for a Tesla model 3 and that car is not compact by any means. I was surprised how large it was in person when sitting next to our old civic. The S is huge - bigger than my 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass.
Same here, I loved mine. The design of the interior was some sort of black magic. Like, how the hell was such a small car so roomy? I hauled a dryer in it once.
If they would have made an si (or type s) version with just 200hp, I'd still own it. RIP Fit.
My partner and I are still using our 2008 manual Honda Fit. It's still in great condition and we love how versatile it is, and how much we can store in it. One time we fit 6 big wooden pallettes inside with the back seats folded down. Some guy in a truck was laughing at how much we fit in that tiny car haha. In fact we love ours so much my mum got herself her own Honda Fit. It was a sad day to learn they'd discontinued them.
They had a limited amount of hybrid fits released in EU and in Japan, and an EV version of the fit with limited release in 2012 (you could only lease them). An EV fit would be an amazing car to have available nowadays. The Chevy Bolt might be the closest thing to what an EV Honda Fit could be, but I think it's still not quite the same. Apparently those are being discontinued too which is odd because sales spiked in 2023.
3-400 mile range, AWD, pure electric Fit.
I'd be ALL over that. Especially if they made it more performance oriented, but not necessary.
Technically they didn't discontinue it, they just don't sell it in the United States any more. I think it just wasn't profitable for them here. :(
my neighbors each have a fit in the driveway, 2 more in storage for parts. I drive a hybrid accord and my mom drives a 2012 civic. All bulletproof cars. long live sedans and hatches!
I was planning on getting a Nissan micra and then they discontinued them now people are trying to sell them for more than brand new because of demand.
Nissans also have a godawful reputation for long-term reliability. Avoid, avoid, avoid. Stick with Honda, Toyota, and Subaru and you can't go wrong.
Agree, and add Mazda to that.
Glad someone mentioned Mazda. I've had two now, including my current vehicle. They've both been exceptional cars. Fun to drive, reliable, great gas mileage, good looking - I might stick with Mazda for a while.
Discontinuing it for us. Still on sale in much of the world, and the fourth generation looks amazing.
Ironically they made the cars bigger and bigger because they were trying to avoid reducing their emissions. They invented a whole new class of car because the emission targets for sedans were lower than they wanted, and then through marketing attempted to convince everyone that they NEEDED bulky big ass trucks/SUVs.
I wish I could double-upvote. Relaxing emission standards as vehicle footprints get larger is such a ridiculously stupid idea which obviously would push consumers into big, expensive, energy inefficient vehicles.
“Capitalism breeds innovation” lol
Yeah I'm in Japan right now and the cars stood out. The front looks so squished in and it makes their cars so much smaller. I wondered why/how then realized as the science of engines improved rather than bigger cars or more unnecessary horse power they just shrunk the engine footprint. Pretty smart and I wish we would do the same.
Well, not quite. They didn't just shrink it because they could.
The kei car (smashed front like you're saying) wasn't really popular in Japan until the government introduced a bunch of tax/insurance incentives for them. The tax paid used to be on average 1/4 of a normal car.
The government put these incentives in place to encourage people to buy these cars that conserve energy. Japan is nearly 100% energy dependent (foreign sourced energy) ever since they shut down their nuclear plants after Fukushima. This is also the reason why Japanese automakers are so resistant to EV adoption and are instead pushing hydrogen vehicles, electricity generation is very costly in Japan.
Those tax incentives ended in 2014, and kei cars have fallen out of fashion since. It used to be roughly half of all new cars sold were kei cars, now it's more like 1/3.
It is true as others said that the lower speed limits in Japan (100kmph at most, which is about 60mph) mean more powerful engines aren't necessary, making the shift more practical than it would be elsewhere, but it still wouldn't have happened if the government didn't basically pay people to buy these cars (like the US is currently doing with EVs).
We have. Modern engines are significantly smaller than they used to be.
Their cars also don't need to get up to 80+ mph for highway use, which is a big difference. Only need an engine that performs well up to ~50 mph (~80 kph), and it'll do just fine on the big toll roads and satisfy 95+% of Japanese use cases.
Meanwhile, I had a car in high school that could barely reach 70 mph if pushed, and I never could have continued to use that when I went to college, since I needed to use interstates.
Bingo. It's irritating as hell when car shopping for something small and efficient, and the only things popping up are either old or huge.
A Mirage G4 is wider and taller than a 1990s Corolla. And people whine about how small the mirage is.
My brother-in-law and father-in-law came from France and were taking photos of all of the giant ass cars and trucks (especially trucks) that were here in America and just laughing. They are literally going back to France to show these pictures to other people just to laugh at Americans “bigger is better” insanity.
There's a guy in my neighborhood who drives one those monstrosities and it won't fit In his garage.
The thing is him and people like him don't even use it for work it's just a status symbol for them.
90% of the houses on my street have a white full size pavememt princess pick up backed in the driveway because it won't fit in the garage. It's bizarre going outside at night when they're all home. Looks like the male version of Stepford wives.
The best part about all of this is that the size of parking spots, and the amount of parking space on sidewalks in the city, have all stayed the same. A stretch of sidewalk that could fit 2 cars now fits 1 truck, it's maddening.
I can't see to safely turn on to the main road from my apartment anymore because these giant fucking trucks are always parked on the side of the road. They're like walls and they have no business being in cities. Clearly the roads weren't designed with them in mind.
Dude I literally have this same problem! This giant Dodge Ram parks outside my apartment entrance every day, and I can literally only see into the street when I'm almost completely pulled out.
Don't forget their aftermarket portable suns aimed directly at your eyes instead of, you know, downwards.
US automakers were so busy making every car bigger and bigger and bigger, they forgot that just maybe there are some people out there that might like a small, affordable car.
This is the same concept of new built homes
Could you imagine a builder that built neighborhoods full of 1 story ranch style 3 bedroom houses from the 1960s? You couldn't build them fast enough.
You just described my old neighborhood near st louis. It's a good school district (near creve coeur, mo) and the 1960s houses have premium finishes (our house had terrazzo floors), and more importantly they are relatively cheap (most houses sell for under $250k for ~1.6k sf).
And yet, the houses sit on the market for months, often getting pulled from listings, because single story ranches are so unpopular now. Notice when you zoom in that all the houses for sale are way under the "zestimates" of surrounding houses. That's the "single story ranch" penalty.
Larger vehicles have higher profit margins. US automakers CEOs live and die by their ability to show ever increasing quarterly profits.
In the 70s the US makers mostly ignored the small, fuel efficient, and high quality cars of the Japanese. When gas was short and prices spiked the US makers were left with little to sell.
Today, in an era when the average new vehicle is north of $40K the Chinese can sell a really nice EV for less than $20K. They even have EVs for less than $15K but they probably wouldn’t meet US safety standards.
The US makers and the UAW begged for protection. I just hope the high tariffs only act as a pause to give US makers time to catch up to the Chinese making smaller and cheaper vehicles. My fear is they’ll sit on their thumbs and continue to be motivated by short term profits.
The vehicles kept getting bigger because of the CAFE footprint rule, and nobody seems to want to fix it.
A larger wheelbase (footprint) means a lower mpg is allowed. So instead of R&Ding and making more fuel efficient vehicles, just make them bigger so you don't have to spend money on innovation.
The size of new vehicles in USA is just OEMs trying to avoid improving fuel efficiency and vehicle emissions. There’s a loophole in the law that allows vehicles with certain size chassis and height to avoid the laws that would otherwise make their products more efficient - and as we’re seeing now - more competitive with foreign makers, like China.
“Capitalism breeds innovation” lol
Bingo!
I drive a 2005 Mazda B2300, a compact, entry-level pickup that was one of the last if its breed. It's been a phenomenally cheap, reliable, and useful vehicle to own and people ask me weekly if I'd consider selling it. Clearly there's an interested market.
I just watched this video about why we can't have small trucks in the US anymore. TL;DW is that the CAFE standards (laws that mandate new vehicle fuel economy) are poorly designed, and allow auto manufacturers to simply keep increasing vehicle footprints year after year instead of innovating engine technology.
Add that to the usual government corruption, American auto manufacturers lobbying to gain an unfair advantage over their competitors instead of simply developing better, more desirable products, and you have a recipe for where we are now.
And you can bet that when the shit hits the fan and Ford, GM, etc. suddenly can't compete in EVs, they'll get another bailout at taxpayers' expense.
Well worth a watch if you've ever lamented small trucks' extinction.
Oh, but if they fuck up the taxpayers will simply be forced to bail them out. No need to think required.
Best they can do is a $80,000 ev sports car
Completely redesigned from the ground up souls of EV enthusiasts.
Every major car manufacturer in the US and Europe is shitting themselves at the growing prevalence of Chinese EVs. Some countries in the EU even considered banning them.
US/European car manufacturers only have themselves to blame. they decided to double down on petrol and diesel and not invest in the R&D required to provide diverse entrants to the EV market. They decided that short term profit is preferential to long term investment. They've even tried to lobby governments into pulling out of the 2035 diesel/petrol car ban (successfully doing so in the UK).
It's funny, one key factor to economic growth is innovation. You could say that communist china is out-capitalisting the west.
The same thing happened with Japanese auto manufacturers back in the day. American companies kept pushing bigger and bigger cars, then Japan entered the US market with small fuel-efficient cars that were more affordable, and they rapidly gobbled up market share to the point the US government had to intervene.
This is going to keep happening, by the way - the US car companies will always push for bigger and bigger cars, only to collectively shit a brick the moment someone enters the market with a small, affordable, fuel-efficient vehicle that doesn't require selling a kidney and your first born.
Short-sighted greed is the reason why shit like this keeps happening. Short-sighted greed is what ruins kingdoms/countries.
Too bad the top bosses remain immune to consequences of that greed.
Capitalism has no long term mechanisms to work against itself for climate survival.
Short term profit margins, like 10-20 year company success cycles has really screwed us over as an economic system to respond to climate change.
It's just not a long enough narrative view for the system itself. Like, it very much operates within single human lifetimes to build wealth to spend wealth.
The EV strategy for most automakers has been to make the new thing focused on luxury while they work on the conversion. The high profit margins are supposed to fund R&D. Of course, you have to sell them for that to work. China went directly for small, cheap, functional transportation for the masses. The free market is showing us what the market wants.
EDIT: there also seems to be a heavy dose of government subsidy, low worker pay and selling at a loss to gain market share. Of course, we could do the same here in the US if we wanted to.
Let's be perfectly honest. It isn't that the market doesn't want to fill the niche of small affordable car.
Its that its using every tool and law at its disposal to not allow someone else to fill the niche, which is something that isn't talked about enough.
We need more laws to prevent companies from straight up abusing laws to prevent competition.
The car market is so fucked, they dug their own grave and now they can't bully an entire other country they've written their own death warrant. Still to this day, they've written laws to not allow other car companies to sell cars at dealerships. You still can't buy Teslas like other cars.
Its so fucked, even an egomaniacal billionaire can't get around how fucked and gated the car market is. It seriously needs to be completely rebuilt, there is no saving it now.
Good riddance, this is not a bad thing. Let them all fail, so another good company can take their place.
I'm tired of all these companies getting bailed out, let shitty companies die
there also seems to be a heavy dose of government subsidy, low worker pay and selling at a loss to gain market share. Of course, we could do the same here in the US if we wanted to.
We sorta did. We gave EV automakers like Tesla huge tax breaks/subsidies. -Over 2.4 billion I believe. Although Tesla paid some of those subsidies back to the gov.
The smallest car Ford sells in the US is The Mustang.
Yeah dude this whole tariffs on Chinese EVs is so fucking stupid.
I mean I get it in a sense, but if our free market isn’t working then let us buy the cheap Chinese EVs and vote with our wallets. Cause trust me we’ll all be clearly saying cheap ev over some expensive and yet still shitty ev.
I personally like some American cars a lot. But this pandering to the American auto manufacturers has destroyed innovation and created a stale market that has skyrocketed in price and not quality.
Of course quality it still there, but each year the premium for a “good” car goes up.
(Reminder that average, or median I don’t remember, car purchase last year or so was nearly 50,000 USD).
Straight up is gonna be a repeat of what happened to Harley Davidson. Smaller, sleeker and cheaper Japanese motorcycles were threatening to to take over the market so instead of spending the capital needed to compete with them, they just got the US government to put on a bunch of tariffs as America started cracking down on Japan in general.
30 years later and the sales of Harelys are way down because they're seen as for being for old people Japanese motorcycles ate their lunch around the world as they could focus on the at the time, less lucrative but growing international market well Harley focused more and more on the US market.
It's not just that they're "seen for old people"- they're shit fucking bikes that perform like shit and have a wretched, old, racist consumer base. Fuck Harley and fuck Harley riders.
Yeah, I hear "Harley" and I think "scumbag," so that tracks.
Yep, that's their brand. That and lawyer shitbag weekend warriors that buy their merch because they think it makes them look "baddass."
The US market insists on EVs being better than gasoline cars in every way. They have to have a 4 sec 0-60 with a 300mi+ range and end up charging $60-100k. If you make a $25k EV with a 150mi range that does 0-60 in 12s, they would sell and probably be 1000lbs or more lighter. I would buy an EV commuter like this right now. If it’s cheap enough, I don’t need it for a road trip. I’ll rent something or take my other car for that. Most of us have a sub-30mi commute every day and just need something that gets us to work.
There's absolutely no reason to make an EV that goes 0-60 in 12 seconds, though. It's so easy to make EVs fast, you'd be going out of your way to make a slow one.
It's too bad so much auto manufacturing is based in key Midwestern swing states so candidates on either side of the aisle have extra motivation to appease the companies and the auto workers.
In capitalism we can’t have anyone actually competing except the few we’ve allowed, who all offer the same things at the same price.
Yeah but look at all the different brands of white bread you can buy! I tear up just thinking about it
Capitalism is only good when we prevent competitors from bringing their cars over to protect dinosaurs and relics of American industries
Don't forget decades of outsourcing manufacturing.
Their business model is lobby to sanction other countries so they can raise prices, price gauge, pay shitty wages, take all the profits then rely on subsidies and bailouts to "save the American workers". They do not invest in staying competitive because they can get Americans to pay for that.
To be fair, the F150 has been the number one selling vehicle in America for a long time. It’s not like Americans didn’t want big cars. They still do. I think it’s a tale of two markets. The U.S. and the rest of the world. Demand around the world for small, economical vehicles has been strong. Much less so in the U.S.
If there wasn't demand for small cars, they wouldn't risk the 'extinction' of auto manufacturers that only produce large ones.
Consumers have been asking for a small EV for years? What are you talking about? In the US the Chevy Bolt has been around for years and even though they are incredibly cheap and of high quality Chevy has never made money with them. You can buy a new one for under $20K if you include the $7500 tax break. Chevrolet wanted to drop the car due to the fact that it never made money but for political reasons has decided not to.
Ford also had a an electric Ford Focus in 2011 that was a decent car with 100 miles of range, but no one bought them. So you are just plain wrong that consumers have been asking for these cars for years.
I would've considered a Bolt, but the piss-poor charge rate (55 or 60kw) was a dealbreaker. Better EVs can charge roughly 4-5x faster if needed, and if you're driving a good distance, you really want that charge rate.
That and I think it's ugly.
same happening in Germany and the industry is winning the same.
So same exact story they told when Chinese imports first started getting popular.
"We refuse to meet customer demand for these smaller more affordable cars, so maybe the government can just stop them from meeting that demand?"
The Big 3 have always refused to actually compete and have to be dragged kicking and screaming to adjust their offerings to match current demand.
"Ford CEO Jim Farley has seen Caresoft’s work on the Seagull and observed BYD’s rapid growth across the globe, especially in Europe, where he used to run Ford’s operations. He’s moving to change his company. A small “skunkworks” team is designing a new, small EV from the ground up to keep costs down and quality high, he told analysts earlier this year.
Chinese makers, Farley said, sold almost no EVs in Europe two years ago, but now they have 10% of the electric vehicle market. It’s likely they’ll export around the globe and possibly sell in the U.S. "
Except there is, or will be a 100% import tax in US for Chinese EV's
They might have to put an import tax on Mexico too.
"Some members of Congress are urging Biden to ban imports of Chinese vehicles, while others have proposed even steeper tariffs. This includes vehicles made in Mexico by Chinese companies that now would come in largely without tariffs."
By trying to keep competition away from the US all the gov is doing is ensuring that US automakers won't have to innovate or change anything until we repeal the tariffs.
Are we really going to delay transitioning to EVs just because Tesla can't get its shit together?
it’s not tesla, but all the legacy automakers.
It's all of them. No US automakers are offering economy electric vehicles for affordable prices.
It's the exact same situation as Japanese cars in the mid 70s. Gas started getting expensive, smog became a major concern, and American automakers refused to change while Japanese imports offered a product that met the times. To be honest, US automakers never really caught up in that market either, but the market bailed them out when the gas crisis ended and Americans started to fetishize minivans, then SUVs and pickups, which were all well within the big 3s wheelhouse. The legacy manufacturers need to build a product to compete or someone else will, whether it be BYD or someone else.
Every so often the very survival of the US auto industry ends up being threatened by someone making a small car that keeps it simple, with no frills, the cheapest piece of shit car seats you can buy, a basic engine, and it's cheap enough even with union labor prices that ordinary people can afford it new.
It's crazy that in the US used cars are becoming unaffordable because the prices of new vehicles are insane. Like a 2012 used car with 100k miles is listing for 19k near me.
If a domestic carmaker produces something cheaper, "fiduciary duty" obligates them to sell out to big auto if the cash buyout is big enough. If a foreign automaker produces something cheaper, congress says "No you're not."
It's at the point where I would genuinely prefer if the US didn't have an auto industry, because the domestic auto industry is actively harmful to the US consumer to the point that we would be genuinely better off if all of the US auto companies went bankrupt and shut down. Would there be job losses? Yes, absolutely, and the domestic auto industry is such a vampire to the rest of the economy that we'd still be better off.
If you want higher living standards, then you should be demanding the bankruptcy of Ford and GM, because they're actively harmful to the US economy.
like rivian, tesla was introduced as a luxury/premium brand. legacy auto makers that offer cheaper economy cars are ones most effected and to be blamed for delaying and pushing back on change.
legacy auto makers that offer cheaper economy cars are ones most effected and to be blamed for delaying and pushing back on change
The bolt is phenomenal for an entry level electric car fwiw
The US car industry keeps being threatened by a "keep it simple, stupid" car from someone who uses the cheapest piece of shit car seats you can find, a basic engine, a smaller and more basic car frame that requires less metal and less labor to construct, and it keeps happening.
They keep pushing bigger and more expensive cars with higher profit margins, and lots of Americans simply can't afford that shit. They need a car that won't put them in the poor house, something basic that will get them from Point A to Point B.
Instead of offering the consumers what they want, they keep pushing the government to block foreign competition as they buy up any domestic carmakers.
They've been goofing off with government bailout money, playing fast and loose. This was the inevitable result of kicking the can down the road.
200% of $12K is still less any EV on the market.
Given a choice between letting billionaires have a slightly bigger yacht and doing ANYTHING AT ALL no matter how small that might reduce CO2 emissions the American government will pick enriching billionaires any day.
But but the wealth will trickle down, surely.
"Competition is good!!!"
"Wait, no, we didn't mean that competition"
Doubling the price of some of these Chinese EVs still makes them less expensive than cheap US cars.
The Chinese already announced that they're just going to correspondingly subsidize the Chinese EV makers. It'll be a ladder of tariff and subsidy until one side decides the juice isn't worth the squeeze--an even less likely thing to happen since its not economics driving this--its defense and politics.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't the US just increase the tariffs ad infinitum, where the chinese will have to continually subsidize them out of government pocket?
Couldn't the US even ban chinese EVs outright? Does the latter set a dangerous precedent?
Are you sure you want to go that route? Not even the sanctions worked in Russia and it must be clarified that China's economy is much larger, China can trade with 95% of the rest of the world even if the USA isolates itself.
sanctions aren't working in Russia?
they definitely are, but Russia tries to frame it in a way that makes it look like they're doing just fine
To be exact, the Chinese subsidies are in cars sold domestically - just like subsidies that Tesla received.
So Americans won’t be able to buy Chinese EV’s, but the rest of the world will be able to. If American cars don’t sell in the rest of the world, that’s still a pretty big hit.
We have a variety of Chinese cars including a variety if EVs from BYD and MG and GWM available in Australia at reasonable prices as well a a selection of your ridiculous oversized “trucks” or utes as we like to call them at unreasonable prices. I see lots of Chinese cars on the daily and the occasional Ram or similar parked across two spaces at the local supermarket.
We killed off our local car industry quite a few years ago for a variety of reasons so have no tariffs on imported cars (all our cars are imported). I have to say the quality of the BYD cars in on par or better than Tesla and streets ahead of the Ram type trucks.
That creates a few year window for US automakers to get their shit together, but it won’t last indefinitely if the entire global market shifts that way.
“Oh no we’ve priced ourselves out with greed :(“
Don’t really feel bad for any of these companies when they’ve done everything in their power to make wrong decision after wrong decision.
I have been asking forever why do I need to spend minimum $60.000 to get a nicer looking car.
Surely they could DESIGN something good looking and keep the price around $20.000 - $25.000.
But no, if you have $20.000 you have to drive a Prius or Camry.
Can't wait for chinese to put out exotic looking EVs around that price.
Hey man Camrys are awesome!
lol you think you can get a Prius for 20k. Base is 28k and good luck finding a dealer that will let one walk for that. Not saying impossible but laughably difficult.
I think I saw something recently like you cannot buy even a base trim of a brand new car for under like $25k in the USA anymore.
But I'm too lazy to look it up right now.
Oh look, the federal government is bailing out the American auto industry. Yet again.
Maybe, just maybe, the federal government should also light a fire under the executive asses in that industry to innovate and embrace EVs before we are all hip deep in water and super storms.
“This is a catastrophe for us and therefore the American people. We spent decades destroying EV innovation and not innovating so you have to keep buying our trucks. Bail us out please! Don’t let the evil Chinese EVs in! It’s bad for you. Keep using oil”
Isn't that how capitalism works? Superior product outperform inferior product.
No, No, No. Capitalism works when you crush your competition and convince your customers that you product is the only one worth buying. It has nothing to do with it being better. It only has to do with better marketing.
Modern Capitalism:
- Have a marketable idea. Doesn't have to be good, just marketable.
- Sell investors on that idea.
- Use investor money to market product and artificially lower it's price.
- Once you have market share, buy out competitors.
- Lower quality, raise price, prioritize investors over customers.
- Cry to the government when company starts going under because your product is shit now.
- Government bail out.
Can't let those filthy poors think they can cut venture capital out of the game! I'll buy out every good idea to keep it away from the public. Good ideas are expensive! Gotta make sure they're stuck with my cheap, shitty ideas.
Aka enshittification
Marketer here. This is accurate. I’ve worked for too many companies that offered inferior products and services, and only ever wanted to invest in more sales reps or other dumb things, and thought my work alone would generate growth with little to no investment elsewhere (not even in better marketing). The best marketing you can do is dish out innovative, competitive products/services at fair prices and let you reputation speak for itself.
Cheaper product outperforms any other product because no one can fucking afford anything.
Our cars are getting pretty expensive, what do we do?
China: "Let's make a smaller, more afforable car."
US: "Let's convince people that a monthly car payment is a lifelong thing, and lets convince people that they can take longer term loans out for them! Then we can make cars even BIGGER!!!"
"Why not? The housing market's been doing it for decades!"
It really is going the route of housing.
In like 95% of America there is no reliable transport. You have to have a car.
Car payment, plus insurance, plus fuel is all easily $700 a month for nothing too special. You get to trucks or slightly higher end vehicles and you’re pushing $1k in transport costs. It really has become a second mortgage
This is why everything is going to be a service: ownership is only for the owners.
Car loans and mortgages are, functionally, just another form of rent.
I know many cases where people traded in cars they never finished paying off, splitting the balance with the cost of their new car.
Houses too: either you die before you finish paying for it, or you get evicted when you can't, but either way unless you're one of the lucky few who can afford to pay off a mortgage and never have to take another one, ultimately your house is property of a bank--you're only borrowing it.
This is also why they front load interest in the amortized payments. They get all the profit, and statistically keep the property at a high percentage rate. As far as I’m concerned, interest should be a flat fee over the life of a loan. Banks are ripping off the poor, and we’ve done nothing to solve this. People with capital (banks) would be doing just fine, if people failed to pay the loan and they had to resell a property. We are just letting people get ripped off and calling it normal.
10 year car loans are now a thing.
Consumers told you what they wanted 20 years ago. You ignored them. BYD did not.
It sucks for the workers, but Reaping, meet my good friend Sowing.
Unfortunately our government is too paid off to prevent the sowing from happening, at the cost of the American consumers, the environment, and our taxpayer dollars, all to benefit incompetent and greedy American automakers.
Good! US car manufacturers had their chance but instead lobbied against Electric, bought up electric tech and sat on it so others couldn’t use it, etc.
They were willfully bad at developing electric vehicles, so they could stay on top of ICE, this benefitted them for many years, now they pay the price of intentionally stifling tech that would have helped us decades ago.
American manufactured intentionally held back human progress to enrich shareholders, I hope their companies burn to the ground.
Good.
If that's what it takes to kick Ford in the ass and make them realize that building nothing but ever bigger suburban tanks is a bad idea then they deserve to go bankrupt.
Honestly, this. Japan almost did it in the 80s, but rather than learn their lesson, American car manufacturers doubled down on tying gas guzzling autobesity to self-identifying as a freedom loving, red-blooded 'Murican.
Just make the vehicles people actually need, sell them only to the people who need them.
Trucks are for hauling things, not telling everyone you have a small penis.
SUVs don't really have any purpose at all.
Minivans only make sense if you're going to carry passengers or cargo.
In fact, we could get rid of half the single-occupant commuters by having a functional public transportation system: why not retool your factories to ramp up that production.
The size growth of vehicles is unintended consequences to the Obama era emissions standards. I like the intent of the standards, but car manufacturers were lazy and preffered short term profits over investing in R & D for greater efficiency.
Yea it's sad. They figured out that if they built normal cars on a truck chassis they didn't need to meet the emissions standards for small cars.
Then they convinced everyone that they needed big cars that could tow things and go off road which are things suv owners rarely do if ever. This was all intentional by the auto makers.
I think and extinction-level event is what the US auto industry actually needs. These companies tanked themselves into bailouts once already in the last couple decades, I think that's enough.
Top Gear - Jeremy and James in China (Part 1)
What gets me is people have been talking about Chinese cars for over a decade yet none of the legacy brands have really done anything except try to limit them coming to America. Top Gear made this episode in 2012. The way to do this correctly isn't to make tariffs on Chinese EV's so high that they will never get here. The way is to limit them a little and subsidize vehicles that are made in the USA more. I don't think legacy auto manufacturers deserve another bail out; I'd rather see new players come into the scene at this point as we know Ford, GM, and Dodge can't innovate or think past the past.
To be fair, Ford never needed a bailout and didn't receive one in the 2000s. They have a decently robust European and global market, so domestically they can float a bit but also they see changes to the global market and can react accordingly.
Also until charging infrastructure is more prevalent and there are solutions for apartment dwellers, EVs will remain a fraction of overall sales.
It’s circular logic, EVs won’t become more prevalent until there is more charging infrastructure, charging infrastructure won’t become more prevalent unless there are more EVs.
Here you’re moot and a good example of the flaws of relying on “the market”. China wanted EVs to become the dominant vehicle in their streets over ICE, so they leveraged their government power to make things happen. Now over a quarter of new Chinese cars sold are fully EV with the percentage continuing to grow. Environmental policy requires government intervention to make change happen, China is one of the few countries whose government is not beholden to fossil fuel interests to actually do what needs to be done.
When protectionism makes your auto industry lazy and unresponse to consumer demands anything from the 'outside' becomes an existential threat. Good riddance to bad rubbish, better companies will emerge eventually anyway.
The US auto industry deserves an extinction-level event, though.
Consumers have been complaining for years about the price of cars, and carmakers kept responding with even more expensive vehicles. Every announcement I see is about someone coming out with a new $100k pickup truck. When people press them on affordable cars, the automakers either ignore them or claim that it can't be done.
Now China introduces affordable cars and suddenly our government steps in to prevent them from selling them here. It was bad enough when corporations engaged in anti-consumer behavior, but now we're seeing the next step in that moral corruption- government supported anti-consumer behavior.
Our government is siding with corporations over our own people, all because they decided to get in bed with auto unions (let's not forget that when they had an "EV Summit", Tesla wasn't invited. It was never about EVs, it was about supporting unions)
The US auto industry deserves an extinction-level event, though.
I mean, the U.S. auto industry basically all went bankrupt years ago. They genuinely would have disappeared if the U.S. government hadn't bailed them out. GM itself was even nationalized and owned and operated by the U.S. for a brief time.
It's a wonder that they are still around. People talk about China subsidizing their auto industry. Well, the U.S. has done pretty much the same thing.
What an awful headline. The production of EVs is necessary to prevent an ACTUAL extinction-level event. Comparing the total eradication of the species to a few thousand people having to get new jobs is unhinged
The production of EVs is necessary to prevent an ACTUAL extinction-level event
Thanks for pointing out how insanely ironic the headline is. Ugh.
the auto industry is more than happy to sell us ICE cars until we all boil to death
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16d
American EV companies saw Tesla and tried to chase them, assuming people will pay a premium for EVs. Tesla is a high end brand, and attracted that clientele.
Tesla can move down market with the Y and 3, and cost reduce.
The US manufacturers missed this point. They think their current business will continue unchallenged, because redesigning assembly lines for EVs would threaten profits with more capex, and need less maintenance (which they make a lot of profit from).
But EVs are going to be too convenient. With the surrounding charging infra, the will cost less for a consumer to own (over the lifetime of the car).
Disruption is coming and they need to start acting like it's an extinction level event
No worries. Americans don't want small cars.
-Ford
Good the US car manufacturers and their dealerships need a wake up call. Even with 100% tax some of the Chinese EV are still cheaper then regular us cars.
Are we supposed to feel bad for the automakers that have been bleeding us dry for the past few decades? The only people I feel for are the workers that are gonna lose jobs.
This should not be a surprise. Top heavy, bureaucratic, steeped in tradition, resistant to change and innovation, saddled with bloated labor costs, interested more in shareholder profits than R&D, with cars sold through a network of dealers with corrupt, inept service centers, who place insane premiums on the sales price…..Yes, it’s a safe bet to say that the legacy auto makers are in trouble. These flaws are deep rooted, systemic and can’t be fixed.
Good. This is just like the Japanese destroying US car industry which had shitty products.
No US car maker wants to sell anything except giant SUV and trucks and they are all overpriced and badly built. Even now there's no reason not to buy Japanese or Korean.
Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work? Adapt or die? I know they will say China subdizes them, just as we subsidize our industries? I am sure we want to protect out business, but if our companies are willing to gouge us far beyond theirs, shouldn't ours die?
In true capitalism yes. But in our capitalist system the government stops innovation by isolating our industries from foreign competition. Because our government is run by the corporations for the corporations.
Other countries aren't going to do the same. Seems like protecting the weaker entity when the market is supposed to decide. Also how can we be serious about climate change over profits if we are protecting US profit?
This won’t happen.
Media saber rattling.
American automakers still suck though.
I thought this was the free market? Shouldn't they just pull themselves up by the bootstraps?
Why is this a concern of ours?
You don’t have the freedumb to buy cheap Chinese cars apart from Polestar/Volvos
They’re great BTW
There’s no such thing and has never been such a thing as a “free market”.
It’s a meaningless political buzzword.
China economic system is also not communist. It was converted from communist to a state-capitalist model of Mercantilism following Deng Xioping’s “four modernizations” reforms of the 1970s/80s, in which he declared “to get rich is glorious!”.
Since then China has been following the same model of economic development that led to the economic success of the other “asian tigers” - Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.
The western elites were fine with that as long as they could invest in China to beat down western working class wages, create new markets for their brands, and integrate the Chinese elites into their “Richistan”.
China’s elites pretended to play along for a few decades to grow their power and wealth, but now they are revealing they don’t give a shit about Richistan. They’re nationalist more than they are classist.
Extinction level event for auto makers that stalled and lobbied against EVs for decades, but not for consumers!
Inject the cheap Chinese EVs directly into my veins please.
It baffles my mind how much money and effort they spend on stalling the inevitable instead of capitalizing on it.
Yeah, you'd think one of them would have thought "hey, while everyone else spends money lobbying against better cars, I'll take that same money and just build one!"
That sounds like common sense but then again maybe thats why Im not a CEO.
Because ICE require constant maintenance, repairs and proprietary parts which means more money for car companies.
EVs on the other hand can go years without maintenance and pretty much any electrical engineer could fix it with some training.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The last time I saw GM and Ford in the news it was because they were doing stock buybacks… think in the billions… imagine they had spent that money on R&D or literally anything else to improve their car or manufacturing technology.
yea and im fine wirh that. fuck these megacorps selling us overpriced junk, then act all surprised when it comes to light that it really is just overpriced junk, and someone can make it waaaaay cheaper for the same/better quality
This is such a complicated question. In general I'm against protectionist tariffs, and I think the old guard car manufacturers are badly in need of a kick in the ass. EVs are orders of magnitude simpler than internal combustion engines, and so will be cheaper to manufacture, but auto makers will never pass those savings on to the consumer unless they are absolutely forced to.
That being said, China isn't and has never been competing in good faith in international markets. Unlike the Japanese car boom of the seventies and eighties, I don't believe that China is just trying to offer a better product at a fair price. From day one they've been stealing trade secrets, flagrantly violating patents laws, and subsidizing their manufacturing to destroy competition, with the goal of making others dependent on Chinese manufacturing. It would be a huge mistake to let China undercut our domestic auto industry to death, because they will absolutely use that as political leverage, much like Russian natural gas in Europe.
But I wish American and Japanese manufacturers would hurry the fuck up and fill this market segment.
Yeah at the end of the day american companies just need to create a good EV product.
They need to create an affordable one also. The costs of cars has gone crazy. I get that we can define a level of cost that is fair but we currently seem to run a work cost program for protecting car company costs and crazy pensions that are massively funded through the public's overpayment. There needs to be a balance and it appears there is currently no balance.
They need to create an affordable one also.
Exactly. Everyone started with higher end ones (mostly), which kind of made sense while they worked the kinks out.
But they have had PLENTY of time to improve. And yet what have american automakers done? Focused on bigger and bigger and more expensive cars every single year. Sometimes it really stands out, when you see like a 15 year old Toyota Camry driving around, and it looks like a kids toy compared to everything else on the road. But that used to be the normal car. Now it feels tiny, as automakers have abandoned the small and cheap segment for so long.
No shit. Americans would eat up a 20K EV. There is demand but no will and it's no wonder that so much of our economy is dependent on the ICE. Parts suppliers, service centers, gas stations. Much of the resistance is the incumbents in the market resisting the change. And now the horde is at the gates.
An F150 is going for $90k. The US auto market is committing suicide.
It's baffling to see American automakers make the same mistakes they made 60 years ago. Making big crappy cars that nobody can afford and then whining to the government about competition.
Honest moment: I don’t know if I would care. Yes, there’s the workforce, but as far as the companies go, there were multiple chances for America to have been the world leader in EVs. Don’t forget GM chose to go with the Hummer instead of the EV-1. I have a hard time seeing this predicament as anything but the outcome of poor leadership and management.
Maybe focusing only on $40,000 EVs wasn’t a good strategy. Adapt or die. They had all the opportunities in the world to adjust
That's what happens when US politics, lobbyists, money hungry capitalists kept fossils high up and EV low. We got lapped.
Some manufacturers deserve to be extinct. I ain't panicking.
The US manufacturers keep building enormous SUVs and trucks, they will have problems. Most people cannot afford them, even used.
It won't happen. As a strong advocate of free markets for others, the United States will impose tariffs of 200% or 300% on Chinese cars, and that will solve the issue. Americans can continue happily buying expensive, low-quality cars.
US auto industry is a joke and has been for decades.
A lot of traditional industries in the US have been a joke for a while tbh.
I’m all for more competition in the automotive space. Some of the EVs being designed in China look nice and if their quality is in line with price, I’d consider one for sure.
American car companies had years if not decades to set themselves up. And yet they still produced the same boring gas guzzlers. Perhaps a little competition is in order to make capitalism work.
I agree. And the reason IMO is that China has constructed an integrated manufacturing system which generates workers with the necessary skills and which pools capital to invest in technology, both at the local and national level. It’s not just that they have a large scale industrial policy but that localities develop niches, just like in ye olde days when clusters of craft would develop, using local capital pools that connect to regional and up. So you have one area that makes the most intense ball bearings and similar parts, at all different scales, while another area specializes in a variety of fasteners. We do not have anything like this kind of savings and directional policy relationship. We don’t have the savings to begin with: the basic identity of savings to investment is heavily weighted in China’s favor because they have a much higher savings rate.
On top of this is something really hard to beat, which is the Chinese mentality about work and the meaning of life. Americans work extremely long hours, but the Chinese see a purpose in work, in doing work well, which Americans often lack, if only because we come from so many places and backgrounds that we share very little. We talk about Chinese cooperative effort and IMO tend to miss that individual Chinese people buy into that because they find fulfillment in their lives from doing their work. And from enjoying what else life holds. I think we, by contrast, often we hate work or see it as a necessary evil.
And the relationship of the individual to the state is different too. Compare how China has built vast amounts of modern housing, and it’s all landscaped with parks and playgrounds, stores and schools. (Want to see what’s wrong with Russia? They build big apartment buildings with haphazard parking strewn around the bottom, like no one cares at all about your quality of life.) Look at us: no healthcare and even when you’re old the cost is often prohibitive or doesn’t cover what you need, like your teeth wear out as you get old but you get no dental coverage. We can’t build housing that’s affordable, let alone in sufficient volume. China by contrast overbuilt. (They’ve done that before, although not on this scale, and population growth caught up in those areas.) Again, they have savings. We talk about free speech and individual liberty, while they seem to respond to a different set of priorities. The idea used to be they would become more like us, but that assumed they wanted to be like us in the ways we think define us. They are like us in the sense they have stuff now, and they like stuff, but they are not at all like us in other ways.
In concrete terms, I’ve been thinking about an EV but I don’t want to spend $70K when I can see China coming.
If you want to see what I mean, look at the construction of high speed rail in China. It’s astounding. We tend to simplify that to land use: they bulldozed their way through property. What we miss is, IMO, is that this took a huge amount of coordinated effort to generate the workers, the tools, the designs, the skills, the methods, you name it. They learn how to do something, scale it up, and roll it out. They’ve been doing the same thing with EV’s: putting chargers into smaller and smaller places to extend the potential reach of the cheap cars they’ve now capable of building. We focus on what that will do to our market, but they’re building for their market too, which means they generate huge capacity. And huge learning potential.
Americas utter failure on this front is 100% rooted in the denial climate science. When other countries rationally identified a problem and set about to find a solution, we dithered over whether the problem existed. America saw China going all in on solar panels while we elected Trump and doubled down on fossil fuels. Then the same thing with EVs. America is too busy creating and listening to propaganda about EVs to see that the game is already over.
Oh no! Anyways, $12k is a good price so I’ll take one EV please.
..if these start out like Chinese dirt bikes, then we're screwed. but if they are quality, like some of the latest model Chinese dirt bikes..then we'll have a suitable replacement for Honda Civic
If US car makers would stop treating EVs as luxury items and start treating them as economy cars and entry level vehicles, this wouldn’t even be a consideration.
If Americans start buying subcompacts or China starts building Pickups/land cruisers call me
I hope so badly that it is. Us auto makers spend more time and money fighting off foreign competition than they do actually innovating and pushing for quality products. Let competition drive the market!
The following submission statement was provided by /u/IntrepidGentian:
"Ford CEO Jim Farley has seen Caresoft’s work on the Seagull and observed BYD’s rapid growth across the globe, especially in Europe, where he used to run Ford’s operations. He’s moving to change his company. A small “skunkworks” team is designing a new, small EV from the ground up to keep costs down and quality high, he told analysts earlier this year.
Chinese makers, Farley said, sold almost no EVs in Europe two years ago, but now they have 10% of the electric vehicle market. It’s likely they’ll export around the globe and possibly sell in the U.S. "
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cu5a61/chinese_evs_could_end_up_being_an_extinctionlevel/l4gc2r3/