cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15089465
Americans Are Open To Cheap Chinese Cars. That’s ‘Scary’ For The Rest Of The Auto Industry
“American companies are scared of the open market when it works against them, yet refuse to make better products”
There is a good reason why American companies are scared. It almost never works out for them. Sony vs Zenith TVs is a great example about how a foreign company improved on a technology (color tv) and made zenith look like a stingy dinosaur overnight. Instead of selling color TV’s zenith just doubled down and sold cheaper shittier TV’s. By the time color was standard, their reputation was ruined and no one wanted a Zenith when Sony was the best. Sony however wouldn’t have been able to get into the market without help from zenith in the first place.
They should stop choosing the “double down on making products shittier part”.
You could’ve been telling the story of the 80s automotive industry. Or really any American manufacturer.
And part of the reason why I am not on speaking terms with our regional sales teams. I gave up trying to explain what integrity and continuous improvement is.
True
The issue was that Chinese EVs are ahead of Western EVs due to aggressive subsidy and investment by the Chinese government to get ahead. So the market has been distorted which is what was “scary” according to the quite in the article that spawned the headline.
Having said that, I’m not sure I believe that Chinese EVs will be better quality. They may be cheaper and they may even have technically advanced but from experience of other Chinese products, quality is not a word I’d associate with them.
The US government can do the same, and they do bailouts for companies often too. Isn’t that also meddling in the free market? Why didn’t the US government incentivize EV then?
Pretty sure that’s a core part of Tesla’s growth model.
One of the ways they have are through CAFE credits - incentives for higher fuel efficiency and electric vehicles, since at least 2012. However the credits are tradeable, so legacy manufacturers instead bought credits from Tesla, and other EV manufacturers
BYD is so ahead because they were making batteries for a long time before going into ev business. Also I would not say tesla quality is high either
Look into Harley Davidson, they should have gone bankrupt multiple times but were saved by high tarrifs placed on imported bikes.
Harleys are so ridiculously overpriced it’s hard to believe tariffs on the competition would make any difference
I definitely wouldn’t waste my money on one, much better bang for buck out there.
due to aggressive subsidy and investment by the Chinese government
yes. similar to a lot of western products.
All the best and worst shit you own is made in China. If you don’t want cheap shit don’t buy cheap shit, but these cars are really nice and inexpensive.
These cars are in tons of countries outside of China and they are very well received.
What do you do when you need something fixed? Can parts be had?
You can order them and then have a mechanic fix it for you. It’s the same way in America.
I agree with you. China is manufacturing cheap products because that’s what (a lot of) consumers want as well. They also make expensive quality products, too. I have friends who like to rag on Made In China products but they love the quality of their iPhones which are just Designed in California.
Americans aren’t going to care about quality that much if their monthly payment is only $200. As long as a Chinese EV is reliable long enough to make it’s total cost of ownership much lower than American EVs or ICEs they will line up to buy them.
The American market has been desperate for a cheap and reliable car, a role Japanese automakers used to fill, and both US and Japanese makers know it.
i wanna Datsun
American cars have their own subsidies as well. I mean the government bailed them out of dying several years ago.
We shouldn’t have bailed them out. We should have bought a public controlling interest in them.
I don’t know about other countries but US has both pretty strong incentives and protectionist barriers. However they’re meant to be temporary. This is legacy automaker’s chance. A few years for the government to help them transition, but they need to be willing to come out of the closet. They’re throwing that opportunity away
If anything, American companies have a massive resistance to change. Change has a risk and a price, and they’re determined to stick with what works. Like the movie industry…why make brave and risky moves to make a unique movie when you can retread old ones or wring every penny out of a franchise?
Anyway, the US auto industry has a long history of institutionalized exceptionalism, I can’t find it right now but there’s a quote from one automaker that, when confronted with a suggestion that change is needed, the response is essentially “you’ll buy what we tell you you’re going to buy”. IOW they dictate what the consumer wants and gets. And maybe they’re gambling on more protections against Chinese companies so they don’t have to change and can maintain their control. Incentives just seem to be soaked up and disappear. They jack up the prices to the consumer so there’s no real help, like Tesla raised their price to match buying incentives offered by the government to consumers. Straight up greed.
short sighted greed. That behavior makes sense only if you’re focused on the short term and don’t care about the future of your company
Time and again the quarterly report has taken precedence over the long-term wellbeing of a company. Think of the value for the shareholders.
American Cars look like relics from the last century when compared to Chinese design and capabilities, that is why the American car companies do not want Chinese brands in their market because there is no way they can compete with them.
Chinese brands just arrived in Mexico and it has been a massacre for american and European brands, a lot of car dealers have been closing lately and you can see in the streets that most new cars are Chinese. The Chinese dealers have impeccable service and the architecture is impressive. Prices are 1/3 of the European cars and 1/2 of the American Cars. The only ones that might be able to compete are japanese and Korean car companies.
Every country does this that is a red herring. Does your country have public schools that produce people who work in the automotive sector? Congrats you live in a country that has an agressive subsidy and investment in the automotive sector.
Cheap labour under a command economy is hard to beat, I’ll grant you that. But the best counter to that is to focus on high quality construction, like Toyota does, for example
People were saying the same thing on quality about Japanese car when they first arrived on the market.
so what? the us subsidies stuff all the time too.
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“Americans Are Open To Cheap
ChineseCars”“People don’t have money. That’s scary for companies selling expensive products.”
Best to make being poor illegal. That’ll light a fire under the lazy asses of the working class! /$
The issue is that there aren’t low cost cars anymore. Everything is over 25k and the used cars market is insane.
So yeah, no shit we want cheaper cars.
Yeah, it’s wild to me. I was looking to replace a vehicle and cheapest ev was just over $30k. But none have been in stock, only $45k+.
Shocker. People don’t want to pay $40k + to commute to work.
A lot of people want a reasonably priced car that can commute, have enough range for something fun on the weekend, and have a stereo that isn’t total shit.
But the rub here is that it’ll be like a new Walmart opening in your town. Before too long everyone is shopping at Walmart and all the small local businesses shut down because they can’t compete with the prices and purchasing power of one of the largest corporations in the world.
Once that happens, all those workers get jobs at Walmart and then spend 80% of their paycheck buying products from Walmart. This leaves the town poor as a majority of the money circulating around gets sent out to Bentonville Arkansas where it goes into the Walton’s bank accounts to be used to hire more lawyers to get them out of yet another vehicular manslaughter charge.
This shit is how the US wound up like we are today with rampant homelessness and shit wages, but all people care about are seeing those low prices on the store shelves.
But for the most part are American cars bringing that much more value for the price? If the average American car lasted 250,000 miles with little maintenance, maybe that would be worth the price.
BYD and other Chinese manufacturers are only able to sell at these low prices because the government is paying a portion of the manufacturing costs which isn’t sustainable long term. What will happen is that they’ll continue to subsidize them until they put a bunch of competitors out of business and then end the subsidies. Their prices will shoot up, and we’ll be right back in the same situation we are now with high purchase prices. The only difference is that a lot of American manufacturing (union) jobs will have disappeared because of it.
The US government can and should be directly financing mining and making lithium batteries. There’s enough lithium and cobalt scattered around the world to not give China full control over the price. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Until a more energy-dense battery chemistry goes mainstream: lithium is our only option to stop burning (some) oil. Batteries needs to be fully embraced regardless of who’s currently setup to profit. China just thought ahead and the US wants to throw a tantrum.
The US government can and should be directly financing mining and making lithium batteries.
It is. My employer is making bank on it right now.
Great but this had nothing to do with selling cars with massive, unsustainable subsidies as the price of lithium is just one part of the cost to manufacture a car. Furthermore, their goal isn’t to get more people into EVs. It’s to increase power and influence by selling their product at prices so low, nobody can compete against them. Once the competition is gone, a monopoly forms, subsidies end, prices skyrocket, and ideas and innovation stagnate.
Your approach is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Who’s going to develop a more energy dense, climate friendly solution if the entire market is controlled by a single entity?
The batteries are about half the cost of making an EV. A $30k car literally has $15k+ worth of batteries inside. The Chinese are prepared to produce batteries today. China will not be able to arbitrarily limit global supply in the future. Global lithium supply is not analogous to oil prices and OPEC.
Lithium ion batteries are not produced by 1 entity and the tech has been around a few decades. People are absolutely innovating better, more sustainable, and less toxic battery chemistry. Lithium is just the best option we have now.
You keep focusing on the lithium market while I’m speaking about the automotive market. If China makes EVs unprofitable for the rest of the market by selling them at an artificially low price, who is going to be left to build them once the dust settles?
In other words they are doing the exact same thing the US government is doing. Remember the stock swap?
I have no idea what you’re referring to with “the stock swap.”
The US government does provide subsidies for EVs, but it is different in that it doesn’t solely apply to US companies or companies directly controlled by the US government and they aren’t being used for cars sold in other nation’s markets. Any player in the industry can receive them provided they meet the criteria which is why American, South Korean, Japanese, and various EU-based companies are currently receiving them.
2008 Stock swap with GM. Thanks for admitting the hypocrisy of everyone defending the big 3.
Big 3 shills: give me tax dollars
Also Big 3 shills: our competition gets tax dollars and it is unfair
The CEO of GM could personally blow me and I still won’t give them a dollar.
I think this argument must have been written in 2008 because nobody here is defending the “big 3” and the “big 3” doesn’t even exist anymore as Dodge/Chrysler is owned by a European company and Ford/GM manufacture most of their cars in Canada and Mexico. The most American vehicles these days are Tesla, Toyota and Honda. I even specifically pointed out that US EV subsidies apply to manufacturers from multiple countries…
If you think this is some sort of “gotcha,” I have bad news for you.
The cost of cars went up dramatically during this last period of greedflation. I’m not going to cry for the domestic car makers. They’ll get a bunch of government money to continue being shitty.
No it’s more like Aldi and Lidl coming and opening up next to the big supermarket of the town. The local shops have already been killed by Walmart or in my country Tesco. Aldi and Lidl come in and undercut the giant and skim off a portion of the trade, and a portion of the people work there instead. The big supermarket can’t muscle them out because they’re far bigger companies than they look.
I would love to have an Aldi nearby instead of whatever Kroger behemoth I’m stuck with.
Aldis is the reason I can barely tread water with all my part time jobs.
Sounds like capitalism isn’t the most stable way to structure civilization.
I think we ended up with rampant homelessness because banks turned housing into an investment instead of asset and your local Karen made zoning laws to keep POC. Shit wages are also pretty simple to explain stock buybacks were allowed and encouraged allowing.
Also your comment feels like it is from 2003 you have to update your propaganda periodically.
People will be Open to affordable cars from anyone if the traditional makers don’t start offering affordable vehicles.
I’ll pay extra for three things: efficiency/electrification, longevity/repairability, and a UAW sticker. What I won’t pay extra for is a giant car, executive bonuses, and car salespeople.
Whose fault is it?
Chinese EV manufacturers, on the other hand, are already five to 10 years ahead of their American and European rivals, Kumar said. A lot of that is thanks to aggressive investments in the EV industry from the Chinese government.
It’s amazing what kind of leaps you can make with government funding research.
Don’t forget the IP theft!
Stealing IP from SUV companies to make cheap EVs is insanely based
Everyone does that though. My favourite is the original Xbox and everything from around the same time having notoriously bad capacitors because a faulty electrolyte formula was chain stolen.
Interesting, I’d love to dig on this, any reference?
Yet US has incentives, mandates, and protectionism. Why aren’t US manufacturers 5-10 years ahead?
I assume lobbying
From the average American’s perspective? Probably still China. China always bad. Always.
Americans are also so lacking in moral consistency that they’ll throw their racism and xenophobia to the side just to save $1.
On the other hand, so many things in America have become so expensive many people are priced out of the market. Perhaps they will save the $1.00 because if they don’t, it doesn’t happen. The average price of a new car in America is more than $47k. That’s a lot of money.
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Have you ever handled anything made in China? It’ll be something invented somewhere else, implemented worse.
American Automobile industry decided back in the 1970’s they were going to pull as much value out of the consumer as they possibly could, which destroyed the reputation of American cars being the best made vehicles in the world.
Americans want value, and to stop being screwed by more and more expensive cars which suck and break down, so are open to alternatives which is why the Japanese car imports exploded in popularity.
China is looking for influence, and so the “value” the CCP wants, is other than monetary to exploit the American populace, and this is one way they’re looking to achieve that.
So instead of expensive cars that suck and break down, we’d have cheap cars that suck and break down. Which is technically better, I guess.
“Foreign oligarchs are taking over!” - domestic oligarchs probably
This! This! This! Goliaths like GM could make competitive affordable cars tomorrow if they decided they’re were going to make money off building good cars instead of ripping off consumers, financialization and oligopolistic tactics.
Is it possible that Americans just don’t have any good domestic options for an adorable EV…
Hey, the Eggasus is plenty adorable.
Still waiting for someone to make a Catbus EV though.
If I hadn’t made a spelling error I would have never heard of the Eggasus, which looks terrible but definitely adorable.
Pretty sure you mean affordable, but I think adorable fits because the cars are smaller for which we also don’t have good options!
I’m just going to leave the typo in because it’s funny
Apparently when everything’s made in China, it gives China a bit of an advantage…
… who’d have thought, except everyone who said so when the west started outsourcing all their manufacturing work there.
Fyi, the US is the second biggest manufacturer after China. And per capita the US is a bigger manufacturer.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/manufacturing-by-country
China still handles nearly a third of all manufacturing in the world, and the US only a sixth.
For sure, China is a manufacturing juggernaut, no question. They also have 4 times the population of the US. But in terms of raw numbers, absolutely China is the biggest manufacturer
Every time I go to buy something “Made in USA” from a hardware store, it’s measurements are all like 5/8ths of a freedom eagle.
At least the Chinese stuff uses metric, even if it’s generally less robust
And every dly that goes by that companies send more shit there to be made blows my mind until you realize that corporations have no loyalty to the country in which they reside and stay only as long as the country subsidizes them and allows them to get away with paying no taxes.
dly?
Day
Also having a government which invests heavily in its infrastructure
Silly Clinton!
Make small trucks you stupid pieces of shit! Make them SMALL.
Fuck the chicken tax, I want my Toyota helix.
Capitalists hate competition.
Aside from the chicken tax, Trump also slapped another 25% tariff on Chinese cars specifically because fuck you if you want a small cheap EV.
And it’s not only about tariffs. Many regulations benefit big cars. There’s CAFE, which ties emissions limits to a car’s footprint: the larger the car, the less stringent the emission standard is. General Motors average fuel economy has actually gotten worse in the past 5 years. And, there’s a $30k tax break for small businesses that buy a vehicle for work that weighs over 6,000 lbs. fully loaded.
Did you know the US has had a “gas guzzler tax” since 1978? It applies to every car that gets less than 22.5 mpg. Except for SUVs and pickups, those are for some reason exempt. The US also has some of the lowest gasoline taxes among rich nations, giving very little incentive to buy a car that consumes less fuel.
US federal safety regulations and crash tests, contrary to European ones, do not consider anything other than the occupant of the car. The risks to pedestrians or cyclists are not a consideration at all when evaluating the safety of the car.
Consider that car makers make substantially bigger margins on the large vehicle segment, and the reasons for all these nonsensical regulations start becoming clear.
Yes! I hate how the ‘small’ trucks nowdays are still full fucking size.
I used to have an old ass ford ranger and that beast was great.
Fairly fuel efficient considering it’s age. Fitted perfectly on the road.
It wasn’t 17 feet off the ground for no reason. You could easily load and unload the bed.
I got so excited when I heard they were bringing it back.
Then of course it’s a full size (aka oversized) pickup that got worse mileage than the 30 year old version.
The Ford Maverick gives me hope. If something like that came out in a full EV format my Model 3 will know its days are numbered.
I have a 1998 toyota tacoma that I use daily only because there is no other new vehicle on the market that’s like it. It’s built on a car frame, and its tiny, and handles just like a car - it’s amazing.
https://minitrucks.net/collections/vehicles
I don’t see any hiluxs, but there are some good deals there
the U.S industry has up to the time when BYD finishes its factory in Mexico to design more sub 20k vehicles.
If our domestic market won’t give us the cheap EV we have been begging for, then I’ll take a cheap Chinese car.
Sounds like Ford might be the answer here if they release a cheap car.
Tesla all but cancelled their cheap EV by firing the whole new car development teams yesterday.
We will eventually have a golden age for cheap EVs, it’s just too bad the domestic market is going to be so far behind.
I’ll buy a new electric car from anyone. It just needs:
- Over 175miles on a charge
- To cost less than $30K
- To not collect any data on me
My longest regular drive (few times a year) is around 75 miles each way. I just want to be able to do that without worrying about charging.
I could afford something that’s $45K, but I don’t want to, I don’t need that much car.
And not data-mining everything I do to sell to my insurance company, is really a standard thing that should never happen.
Just about anything else I’m flexible with. And from what I’ve seen, it should be relatively easy to build that car.Bonus point if I can get an actual color!
Something that’s not black, white, or grey.Bonus point if I can get an actual color!
Something that’s not black, white, or grey.Best we can do is wet putty gray
I believe the data mining for insurance is opt in for most if not all EVs at least currently. As for collecting your data in general? Most do that but you could always just unplug the cell modem.
The problem is opt in isn’t actually opt in because they’re depending on the integrity of the scummiest industry in America. They’re supposed to sell you on it and they get a bonus for everyone that signs up. So what actually happens is that page gets clicked through before you know what it is.
It’s plain to see on page 420 of the TOS. It’s right there duh!
Never, ever trust an opt in/out at all unless it’s open source and audited. Otherwise, you have to trust that they’ll do the right thing.
Or, hope that unplugging is not only possible, but doesn’t break anything else.
At least Hyundai might be collecting and sharing data without consent, and I wouldn’t be surprised if others do it too. Based on just this anecdote from Security Now, but still. https://piped.video/watch?v=GR28LQbIiAY&t=3471
The difficult part of this is that you’d have to have a car with 30% + 15% more range than your minimum, because your daily usage will be between 80% at full charge and 10% at lowest charge, and you will lose 15% efficiency in cold weather, snow, rain, headwinds.
So for a minimum of 175 miles of range you really have to shop for a car with ~250 miles of range to be usable for you. I strongly believe we will see cars in the 30k price bracket with 250 miles of EPA range, but they are going to come with tech.
75mi x2 ways, is 150mi.
150mi x1.15 (15%), is 172.5mi.This also isn’t daily driving. It’s a few times a year at most. So the 150mi trips would pre-aranged 100% charge days.
Daily driving is less than 50mi. Closer to 30 really. So yah, I really only need the 175 miles of range.
The rare road trip that’s longer, would be once every 2-3 years at most. I’d just rent something for those trips.And when I say less than $30K I mean less. Not the in $30K price bracket. The $20K+ bracket. Maybe $28 or 29K tops, if it had some killer feature I really liked.
This reminds me a lot of how American car companies built giant land yachts until the Gas Crisis, and then had to compete with cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable Japanese car brands. Car companies know that we need to maintain a certain level of industrial output to stay competitive geopolitically, so they know they’ll get bailed out if they fail. So they’re gonna keep making these mistakes.
Is there a Chinese electric hot hatch or roadster that doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles?
Plenty. None that I would trust to save me in a road accident, though.
Outside of the USA, those giant pickup truck are outright illegal, or would have an annual road tax of USD 2000. That’s how tiny cheap EVs are made safer elsewhere
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