Protectionism only works in the VERY short term. If the USA doesn’t pull its finger out of its ass and make affordable good EVs, then its automotive industry will crash and burn. Because the rest of the world unaffected by tariffs will be buying Chinese (or Korean / European) EVs and not American ones because they’ll be expensive and suck.
I am genuinely curious if CCP subsidizing cheap steel and aluminium on the global market can be sustained and for how long. If they control output then they’ve probably got the land resources and authority to keep it up for decades, right? Somebody should do a study on this.
Anecdotally cheap Chinese EVs are all over Costa Rica and even there they’re generally known to be garbage. Like how do you get a fairly car rusty in Costa Rica? Even if you live exclusively on the beach you’d have to have some really bad paint and 0 rust prevention done.
If you do then congratulations. All of the data your car would collect is already out there for sale to the CCP.
If you’re talking about people who have high level sensitive conversations in cars, then yes. But that’s an incredibly small group and they have those conversations in government vehicles that are all made in the US.
It doesn’t make sense to bar an entire sector of EVs over it either though. Caring about it only when that country does it is the peak of bigotry and simping for the executives who would happily grind you down for profit.
What u think they will do if they invade/become the dominant global power. My country is at a far greater risk of Chinese invasion than urs. U set precidents the west follows like the good little vassals we are.
As for the un thing that’s idiotic the us has veto power.
Europe isn’t banning Chinese cars. They stopped following our lead after the UK joined us in Iraq. Our paths go together many times but they come to that conclusion on their own.
Obviously I don’t know what country you’re in but the US has 10 trillion dollars more than the Chinese to throw at the problem and we’ve long held the position that China doesn’t get to invade anyone.
I’m talking about the mass deployment of spying devices across an entire country mapping every street running facial recognition collecting military related data. The idiot who buys the var who cares its everyone else.
The data they can just scrape from Google maps? Hell they can see where soldiers are deployed because of their fitness apps sharing running routes on social media.
They aren’t banned for the surrounding areas. They don’t want them on military bases or used by government/military officials.
That’s kind of funny though, we have satellites. We know what their bases look like. Unless they drive their cars into the facilities we can’t get anything extra from their car.
Because no car company would ever lie about the software there cars are running or go to extreme measures to hide that its not what it claims to be when being tested.
Fix no, reduce attack surface 100%. Lets say hypotheticaly u know a foreign country is going to fuck u in the ass would you A let them fuck u with 60million dicks or B make it expensive so u are getting fucked over less.
You could similarly argue that phone makers should concentrate on making and taking calls. Turns out, that’s not what consumers care about once a certain bar is cleared (a pretty low bar; call quality is notably bad on many modern cellphones). They care more about other stuff like… being good at navigation.
This has been put to the market test in China. For EV purchases, most consumers turn out not to care about the “car” aspects beyond a certain point. If the car drives okay and has acceptable safety, what matters is the Internet-based bells and whistles.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the Biden administration will announce plans to roughly quadruple tariffs, to 100 percent from the current 25 percent, as well as tack on an additional 2.5 percent duty.
And Semi Conductors. But that’s besides the point. This is corroborated all across major media. You’re just gaslighting at this point, hoping someone reads your comment and just never checks.
However, EVs only change one aspect of cars: How they go vroom vroom.
They are still heavy metal boxes operated by random people. Most drivers suck (myself included probably), they are lazy and don’t follow the local law on driving.
They are absurdly dangerous, for people inside other cars, themselves, and pedestrian. Anytime someone goes too early with their car it’s potentially an accident with death causes. Same if they spin their funny wheel a little too much.
Imagine yourself overtaking a car on the highway. Now let’s say the driver slips by accident, wheel stairs to your sidey giant death machine crashes yours from the side, and its a horrible accident.
Besides that, car infrastructure is absurdly expensive, and becomes even more expensive Everytime it needs to be renewed. The city I was at school at is literally one of the poorest in my country after having endless money in the 70s, because they built too many roads. They built some roads not on the ground but in large pillars, and it’s literally falling apart.
Lastly, cars take up tons of public space. Cities designed (or rather bulldozed for) cars sprawl, need huge parking lots, huge streets, produce noise pollution, regular pollution.
There is much more but that should suffice for now.
That being said, I doubt we can ever go truly car free. Remote regions do not have enough people for good public transit to be maintainable, and the distances are often too long for walking or biking. Deliveries need some kind of individual vehicle. Some of that can be addressed with EVs and car sharing.
Sadly, EVs are being presented as the all around solution.
They partially solve the fuel and the bad air problems. In exchange they damage roads way more (I recall reading that the damage is proportional to the vehicle weight to the fourth power, probably with some more nuance) and that also creates substantially more rubber micro particle pollution. They also happen to be more dangerous in the event of a crash. Plus the additional challenges with grid load, which some people dismiss with silly ideas like having said cars act like load balancers (that would be a mess to scale).
In most cases, EVs are not a solution to mobility, they are a solution to save the car industry from real solutions to climate change, namely spamming trams, trains and buses (in sparse locations) all over the place.
Ironically, cars are stopping me. Roads used to be for walking, and now they’re for cars. They gave us sidewalks and now some places don’t have them, and are unwalkable. The bike lanes either don’t exist or are too dangerous to use. It’s all roads and stroads now, with speed limits dangerous to pedestrians, and large SUVs meaning that car crashes with a pedestrian are more likely to end in death.
The amount of people in cars has also crippled public transportation. Buses aren’t quick, and there are so few of them in general. Not to mention the lack of high speed trains, and the inefficiency of our subways.
Giant parking lots with no cars took our parks. Took our public spaces. Took our nature. And they’re everywhere. Everywhere I look is dull, grey asphalt.
It’s depressing to be outside. And where would I walk to? Everything is too far away to walk to. It used to be a 5-15 minute walk away. Now it’s more like 40 minutes to hours…
I’m tired of human interests and public transportation being overlooked so that people can drive a couple minutes faster to their destination. When people in Europe, Japan, and China can just… get on a train.
I literally do that to go to work and university. I walk to my local train station 20 minutes and it’s amazing that I can. It makes me wake up, even as someone who hates to get up early and gives me time to listen to music, podcasts or think about personal stuff.
That being said, it’s not true that no one is stopping me. All those idiots that park in the sidewalk are stopping me. All those idiots that endanger me with their crappy super heavy metal boxes are stopping me. I literally have to stop when I want to cross the road.
And besides that, walking is only possible if you don’t live in a car infested hellscape (luckily I do for the most part). Otherwise, the next destination is hours away by walking, rendering it pointless, and walking becomes very dangerous.
With how china keeps implanting everything with spyware, I agree to keep them away from the heavy tech incorporated cars. Really wish we could transition away from using chinese shit
All auto manufacturers put spyware in their cars now. This isn’t a china problem, this is an everyone problem. We need anti-spyware laws that apply to everyone.
The Tariff is actually against Steel and Aluminium heavily subsidized by the CCP and flooding the market. At no point in Biden’s speech did he talk about EVs or electronics.
The whataboutism doesn’t help. It’s a wrong practice regardless of nationality. But since the house and senate is bought by the corporations, at the very least ban those who you can.
It’s not a whataboutism when that’s the other choice. This isn’t out of left field. I can buy Chinese data scraping, Japanese data scraping, Korean data scraping, German data scraping, or American data scraping.
Right now Germany actually wins that contest because GDPR just might have an impact.
A whataboutism would be me talking about American labor practices in farming. Not great, but also not relevant.
I agree. If this were actually addressing the problem in question (bad faith actors harvesting data) then sure, but it isn’t really because the other options are still suffering from the same problem. If anything, this entire discussion is a whataboutism to avoid talking about how more electric cars lets us phase out the ice ones.
I wasn’t going to go there because projection is, unfortunately, very effective at making the other party look immature when they correctly call you on it. But yes the entire discussion of data harvesting is a whataboutism. It’s not relevant unless someone stops doing it.
China is subsidizing EV production and selling cars below cost. Allowing them to be sold in the US would kill the domestic EV market. How is that better for Americans?
Also by claiming “developing nation”, which is up to the nation to decide for themselves instead of having someone else decide for them, the planet’s second largest economy gets to claim WTO rules that the recipient (country) pays delivery. That’s why you can buy something from China for $1.50 and yet it costs $150 to send it back if it doesn’t work.
For a few years, until the American automakers go bankrupt, as you said, then the Chinese automakers increase prices 10x.
…and the legacy auto industry gets taught a valuable lesson as companies who refused to modernize go bankrupt.
What a valuable lesson, get subsidized by an authoritarian government so that you can offer vehicles below cost. Also be sure to add spyware for the aforementioned authoritarian government.
Do you even understand what below cost means? No amount of modernization will counteract it.
You’re saying “they”, but it’s you. And no you didn’t, repeating what you said before isn’t addressing the issues.
Adressed twice.
Never addressed at all, you pivoted to the oil industry. You didn’t address the subsidies from China or the unfair trade practices.
America will not subsidize to that level, if they could, and no amount of innovation is going to combat subsidization or the unfair trade practices.
According to a Bloomberg article, China will sell EVs at under $10,000, undercutting the price of the average American EV by $50,000. Are you seriously arguing that “investment to lower cost” will reduce the cost by 85-90%? That’s simply a ludicrous assertion.
You think US products won’t have spyware?
I don’t think that collecting anonymized usage data, is the same as unlimited spying going back to an authoritarian government. So no, absolutely nothing comparable.
Never addressed at all, you pivoted to the oil industry.
Directly answering a question is not pivoting. You asked if I knew about producing below cost. Yes, there are lots of examples of subsidies in the oil industry.
You didn’t address the subsidies from China or the unfair trade practices.
I did. Twice.
America will not subsidize to that level
Course it could. Have you seen the defense budget? Take some of that.
no amount of innovation is going to combat subsidization. Are you seriously arguing that “investment to lower cost” will reduce the cost by 85-90%?
I said the solution was subsidies and innovation.
I don’t think that collecting anonymized usage data,
Are you certain it is anonymous?
is the same as unlimited spying going back to an authoritarian government.
Honestly, everything you have said is dishonest and/or disingenuous. The idea that the price of the vehicle is going to be reduced by 90% as a result of subsidies and innovation is both stupid and dishonest. You should also look up the definition of authoritarian.
Honestly, everything you have said is dishonest and/or disingenuous.
Nope. Dishonest would be failing to recognise the legacy auto industry’s failure to invest sufficiently in EVs and related infrastructure. A disingenuous person would try to argue purely with xenophobia.
The idea that the price of the vehicle is going to be reduced by 90% as a result of subsidies and innovation is both stupid and dishonest.
Isn’t that exactly what you are claiming the Chinese are doing?
You should also look up the definition of authoritarian.
You should take a good look at American justice and law enforcement.
They aren’t exporting them below cost, that’s why they want to export. Inside China every company tried to start an EV division because they heard Apple was doing it and assumed it must be a good idea. Now the market is topped out and the biggest companies are trying to price the smaller ones out of business (which still isn’t below manufacturing cost because China regulates that and is nervous about having tons of cars from bankrupt companies on the road). They export with a huge profit margin to make up for the domestic price war.
Well, they’re actually heavily subsidizing steel and aluminium, which are coincidentally what these Tariffs are for. It was never about EVs specifically.
It’s not so much about where it goes, more so the fact that it doesn’t stay in America. This is about saving the American auto industry. Whether it’s for the jobs that would be lost or the profits of the shareholders.
You misunderstand. This is protectionism plain and simple. US car companies are horribly inefficient. Better yet, the US car cartel eliminated most of their budget models to push trucks and SUVs that are more expensive. It doesn’t take much to undercut them, so the US government is banning the competition.
So what about Tesla, Kia, Hyundai, Nissan, Toyota, Subaru, and all the rest? You say we can’t afford cars yet 15 million new cars are sold every year here. New cars have never been something that just anyone can buy which is why the used market is so much larger.
Selling Chinese EVs here below cost isn’t going to improve anything. It’s just going to put a bunch of competitors out of business and drive wages even further down.
The cost of cars has not scaled with incomes. EVs are also much cheaper to manufacture yet because of lack of competition they only sell luxury cars. Nissan admittedly tried but I think that was just too early to market with a mediocre product.
The added price is likely partially due to the development costs for these companies retooling their factories and doing R&D to develop these new platforms in a company that has been building ICE vehicles for the past 50-100 years. Luxury vehicles bring a markup that helps to offset these costs until these vehicles become more ubiquitous, parts are easier to source, and prices come down. You can’t compare the cost of a brand new design to something like the Camry which had the general design ironed out 40+ years ago.
If you look at sales numbers, the Model 3 is outselling the cheap alternatives like the Leaf and Bolt 20:1, so it seems like many people are willingly choosing to pay more rather than buy the econobox option. The average sale price for a (any) new vehicle is around $50k currently, and there are a multitude of options in that price range.
I agree, but I think we’ll have to wait for the technology to mature a bit. It seems the battery chemistry and design are what’s stalling things but lots of companies are investing in new tech like solid state batteries.
This makes the most sense. Sell them here. Built elsewhere? Tax the shit out of them. You can avoid the tax by creating American jobs and having them manufactured here.
Yes, why not? They aren’t prohibited, they’re just being given a disadvantage compared to American made vehicles being sold in America. A tax for notoriously poor labor standards, we can call it. If they want to use a union shop somewhere in middle America they can avoid that tax altogether.
That’s literally in the textbooks as the kind of thing you’re not supposed to do. If you keep protecting US companies they will never get better. Prices will never come down.
Anti China Republicans are going to HATE this! They would MUCH rather Elect the man whose Daughter got over 70 patents FASTTRACKED in China once he was elected!
The US doesn’t control the supply chains. Biden subsidizes EVs as well. US labor is too expensive and the resale value of EVs are very poor. If there is a country that can make EVs cheap enough, it is China. The EU and US stand no chance. Even with safety standards and 27% tariffs, Chinese cars are still cheaper, and the quality is good. US currency is artificially too high. US traded in their manufacturing for financialization. This is a case where Joe Biden can’t beat the global market, with the rest of the world buying China. American EVs are a flop.
No it literally wouldn’t. It’s absolutely possible to produce smaller lightweight vehicles with the exact same standards. But unfortunately we’ve all been pushed towards larger vehicles. Simply because they make more money on them.
It doesn’t matter what size car Americans build, they simply can’t compete. Larger vehicles are a cultural preference and fits the American environment.
If this was true, the Chinese EVs could be allowed in and no one would buy them. I personally want a smaller car that can comfortably seat 5 and has additional safety and comfort features (backup cameras, lane assist, heat pump climate control, etc.). This could easily be done with a sedan, hatchback, or station wagon. The only cars that have these features that I know of are SUVs.
Not exactly true when they’re selling them for $10k-$15k. The Bolt is comparable to a Chinese EV and they only sell around 2k per month while something like the Model 3 sells 50k per month.
If you lowered the price of the Bolt to the price of a 10 year old used Camry, I’m sure it would sell a lot better but this is an artificial price that completely distorts the market and puts a lot of people out of work for what amounts to a temporary savings. This is the whole point of tariffs. They level the playing field for everyone.
Where I live, the base model of the Chevy Bolt is $41k, and doesn’t have heat pump climate control (or isn’t talking about it). It also doesn’t look like it would seat 5 comfortably. Now, even without the spectre of financially supporting Elon’s antics, I don’t see a lot of reason to pay another $10k for a reasonably similar car. People are weird. 🤷♂️
Often what people say they want and what they actually spend their money on are not even in the same ballpark. This reminds me of all the guys from /r/Cars who’d say they dream of some stripped down vehicle with crank windows and no features but when manufacturers make them, nobody actually buys them.
Yeah I know. By popular demand. They didn’t plan to bring it back until people complained about one of the only affordable EVs being removed from the market. But it’s coming back on their ultium platform that’s been plagued with problems.
Just producing EV versions of Honda Fit or Ford Fiesta like what the Chinese EV makers do is enough. Instead, they keep producing EVs with luxury features (and high price tags) then surprised people won’t buy them without subsidy.
The Bolt isn’t cheap though (almost 2x of Honda Fit price), and wasn’t produced in sufficient quantity. The Chinese EV companies are somehow able to produce entry level EV models with minimal features at a price cheaper than Honda Fit and they’re selling like hot cakes both domestically and in neighboring Asian countries.
With the $7500 credit, the Bolt is the same price or slightly cheaper than the Fit when you account for inflation.
China is able to sell these vehicles for this cheap because the government is giving these companies cash to sell them at these artificially low prices. That’s the whole point of this discussion and the proposed tariffs as none of the competition will be receiving subsidies at these levels in order to compete. China is also known for lax worker protections which helps to drive the costs down further at the expense of the workforce and is not something they’ll be able to do if they manufacture here.
Subsidy definitely helps, but those Chinese car manufacturers are able to squeeze their parts suppliers hard, so they’re able to sell their cars cheaper even without subsidy. For example, their gasoline cars are about half the price of comparable Japanese models, even with engines sourced from GM/Ford.
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