The U.S. government should block the import of low-cost Chinese autos and parts from Mexico, a U.S. manufacturing advocacy group said on Friday, warning they could threaten the viability of American car companies.
“We need to convert all cars to electric ASAP to save the planet!”
“-Wait, not like that!”
Seriously though, when I visited China recently, I was blown away by how many cool cars are there. In the US we have like 3 companies that own the entire market of similar vehicles.
Tip: stop only producing big ass models that have high margins. It’s like the only thing they learned from the great recession was that they would be bailed out by the government. People do not want to spend $50k on a car.
They need competition. But the imported cars are being heavily subsidized by China to build the market.
Maybe let the tiny cars in? Because there's minimal competition there at the moment and people would buy the heck out of a cheap small car. Maybe will push market in right direction
Did the US automakers nuke all of their small, inexpensive offerings due to lack of demand or their inability to sell those vehicles for prices they deemed ‘acceptable’?
I’ll support this only if the us automakers promise not to export their oversized and poorly built emotional support vehicles. Because the US automakers by their own admission would only be able to survive because of US government support and, I don’t want to have wanky yank tank’s converting more children to homogeneous paste in my country.
Just give me a little corolla with crank windows and a EV motor. I don’t need some sort of futuristic spacecraft. Give it the exact same model as the cheapest gas vehicle, just give me electric, that’s all I want and it seems like they are too stupid to figure it out.
They're not, its just that decent electric drive trains are kinda expensive. Old 4 cylinder engines with simple transmissions are actually pretty cheap to manufacture in comparison. There are some that work fine (Mini Cooper Se for example), but they usually have a fairly short range of under 100 miles.
BYD is selling a low end EV in China for $12k. They have nice cars in the $30k range. They have built out a supply chain that makes this possible (cheaper labor, too).
Just don’t get one from 2017-2019. They’ve been recalled at least twice for going up in flames. As of now you’re just not supposed to charge them overnight or park them inside of a structure.
They were not getting high enough margins on the Bolt so they planned to kill it off in favor of the Silverado and GMC Sierra EVs. They got a lot of shit for it since that is by far their best selling EV so they backpedaled and said they were only taking a year off and it will be back on the Optium platform. Unfortunately that likely means they will be using GM’s garbage infotainment system that has led to tons of their EVs being recalled.
Kona, ID4, I think the BMW is the i3, mini se, I can’t remember the name of the Fiat, Bolt.
They are there, Tesla just made everyone think they needed 300+ miles of range. If you can get by with 50-75 miles of around range, and most people can, you can grab one of these used for a good price. The problem is they didn’t sell well, so they had very short runs.
Chinas economy is closer to a single party than communist. Their economy, while heavily steered by that single party and the government shares in ownership of production (socialism), is likely more capitalist than the US. If you can make it faster or cheaper then go for it. They don’t enforce IP rights that hand monopolies to big companies. There are not laws that lock in outdated business models via cronyism.
So, it’s vital that we allow US car manufacturers to continue selling us exorbitantly priced cars, loaded with software subscriptions and spyware, unchecked? OK, got it, we’re on it y’all!
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