Oh no! Is it time for the auto industry to collapse, get 81 billion dollars, change nothing, and berate the American consumer for being too poor to buy their cars that now cost twice as much for no specific reason other than capitalism again?
It sure as hell isn’t time to ride the bus or build a train. So I guess we’re doing your thing.
Have they tried CLOSING more EV Plants and DISCONTINUING More EV Models? That MIGHT help!
-CEOS!
That was a blatant choice to back old fossil fuel money against alternative forms of energy. Nobody made trouble for them. They made trouble for themselves. It’ll always happen when you pray at the temple of capitalism.
One of the most hubristic miscalculations of the 20th century was the Western managerial class in the 1980s and 1990s assuming that globalization would permanently consign developing nations to the manufacturing of cheap plastic junk while domestic blue collar jobs were offshore.
The higher ups in Western corporations operated under the arrogant delusion that their own expertise would forever remain insulated from global competition. They fundamentally failed to foresee that the very countries they relegated to the bottom of the ladder would inevitably ascend the complexity and cognitive value chains.
The same market forces that the managerial class so eagerly unleashed upon others starting in the 1980s are now beginning to affect their own bottom line, and suddenly what was once championed as “optimization” and “the future” as they dismantled the livelihood of the working class, has become a crisis. It serves them right, how it bites back.
Don’t forget union busting and a general failure to pay workers enough to afford their products. Billionaires’ greed always fucks us over.
End of the day, I can’t afford a new car no matter who makes it. $30,000 for a DRM’ed shitbox that will shut itself down if I’m 30 minutes late on a payment? No, thanks.
And China’s moat is the ecosystem that they are building around EVs. The mining and refining tech for lithium, battery tech, motors, drivers and manufacturing that will be impossible for any other country to replicate.
News about global trade deficits isn’t mildly interesting. It’s mildly boring.
Yeah this is the wrong comm, should be /c/actually_infuriating@lemmy.world
They did it to themselves. By limiting competition in a lazy move to maintain dominance they have lost.
Don’t worry the invisible hand will save them
/s
Oh, they haven’t lost. It’s us who have lost. Government is protecting their profits.
They have definitely lost.
US auto makers were too busy doing stock buybacks and building Canyoneros while the Chinese were building next gen factories and investing in battery technology. The Chinese government has subsidized their auto industry to dominate the EV market while the USA subsidizes their auto industry but with wild and often stupid swings in expectations.
That may be true, but do Chinese EVs smell like steak and seat 35?
Didn’t think so.
Canyoneeerrrroooo!!!
Drill, baby, drill!
China has subsidized the shit out of their car industry. Dumping trillions of renminbi across every vertical and then ramping up production to flood every market with a deluge of cheap EVs will do that.To their credit they are also willing to let bad car companies die and the good ones take their place.
Not that we couldn’t have done the same but the people elected a party which has a walking orange disaster of a president into power and they are doing their very best to hand the future to the Chinese.
So basically China is winning this particular war because they’re doing it smartly.
China tends to take a 1000 year perspective on things…
In the west we can hardly think 3 months ahead of the present moment.
.
Good. They are overpriced and full of shit that supports the fascists.
supports the fascists.
Isn’t that true for the Chinese EVs as well? The billionaire owners of the EV industry are all tied, willingly or unwillingly, to the authoritarian regime of Xi Jinping
As sad as this is, this is all the fault of the current automakers. The EV1 showed great promise but it was killed off despite the pleas of their drivers. It was just too cheap and convenient to keep making ICE cars and ripping off their customer base. When the innovations of Chinese manufacturers started looming over the horizon, the US did what it always does and wall off the domestic market with tariffs. Content with their captive market, they did token efforts for EVs but kept pumping out $80k+ gas powered behemoths. I’m aware of Tesla being the exception but frankly fuck that company, Elon Musk’s Nazi shit ruined it and I wish it’ll go under.
I wish he would just sell it and let it actually become a worthwhile company. If he would just fuck himself out of the equation I think Tesla would be a lot better.
It is known as the Nazi car brand now which is wild when Volkswagen still exists.
And the oil industry. Also, nobody wanted to spend the money to build EV infrastructure.
Yes. ‘EV infrastructure’ is just “reliable power” and successive conservatives in the administration and judicial interrupted only by shackled progressives for brief periods hasn’t done anything to maintain or grow any infrastructure in America, including a reliable power grid.
For example, I support a tiny company who happens to produce an additive required to make 75% of American water safe and palatable since the distro pipes are such shit.
(Honestly, I know why they posted feds at the gate, now, since if hillbillies or qanon took the plant out - they hate vaccines and fluoride, so it’s not a stretch - America would be super-fucked generationally)
Ironically, expansion and maintenance of infrastructure like the power grid become a voting issue only when it’s past breaking, and US car makers have staved off that crisis of Obvious proportions by their very meddling.
I’m just glad we’ve decided to keep feeding America their power … for the time being. Because in addition to being in a flood risk area, the only plant producing the chemical required for American drinking water happens to be powered redundantly from a Canadian feed.
US vehicles are huge, Earth killing dinosaurs. And like the dinosaurs, they will be extinct someday.
No one buys America cars expect Americans. This isn’t new.
In many countries Ford and Tesla are on the top 10 lists. The Ford Puma is the number 1 selling vehicle in the UK right now. If you had said “American cars don’t have the majority of sales outside of America” you’d be right, but “Nobody buys them” certainly isn’t true.
Yes i was exaggerating, it want literal. I mean no one wants to buy American 😂
