It is not a free market when you ban something. Just saying.
while you’re at it guys, could you force the current administration to release the remaining unredacted Epstein Files?
Land of the thief, home of the slave.
Grand imperial guard, where the dollar is sacred
And power is god.
Banger fucking song
But enough about China.
I want tiny Japanese trucks, byd cars, and every car in the world to be available for purchase in “the land of the free”
What happened to the free market?
Capitalism needs protection because the socialists are better at capitalism than the capitalists are. After all, capitalism only works long term with a strong state to ensure market competition. Who better than a bunch of literal communists to see this and actually try and create a long term functional market economy?
China is straight up capitalist. They produced more billionaires than the US for the third straight year. The people do not own the means of production. The government shares more in common with fascism than it does socialism.
It’s free in the sense that the wealthiest businessmen are free to decide how the rest of the country shound live.
Maximum freedom for the maximally wealthy.
And getting the big money out of politics is communism, according to these fascists.
It literally is communism, in the sense that capitalist states are always controlled by big money, and the only way to prevent that is to do a communist revolution.
I want a Chinese car
I want a Chinese car that isn’t a national security risk.
Sorry capitalism can’t do that. Only the glorious PRC can have electric Chinese cars.
Plenty of capitalist countries can have electric cars, including but not limited to Chinese cars. The problem isn’t capitalism here, it is the US.
There are several different problems here and banning Chinese cars is possibly the worst solution. And with Trump and magats in charge, a better solution is off the table anyway.
Problem 1: American automakers don’t make anything good and it’s all expensive.
Problem 2: Americans need jobs, everyone buying their (second) most expensive belonging from abroad transfers manufacturing jobs abroad.
Problem 3: EV transition in the US isn’t going as strong as it should be.
Problem 4: China has EV subsidies for cars sold to other countries. This allows for dumping stock at below cost prices, after already having super low production costs (among other things China is the world’s battery manufacturer, Chinese EVs get batteries for much cheaper; also Chinese labor costs are at most a quarter of union labor in the US). Usually EV subsidies, if they exist, are on purchasing, not production.
The solution, to me, isn’t banning Chinese EVs. It’s a further increase of tariffs on cars made in China and then that tariff money should be used to fund an EV purchase subsidy so that all EVs get cheaper for the end user to buy (yes, said subsidies would also apply to Chinese EVs). Now if BYD or whoever wants to sell a ton of cars in the US, they have to manufacture in the US, which means they have similar costs to other manufacturers (minus the batteries of course, nothing to do about that without causing a ton of issues. You can’t just increase tariffs on Chinese batteries because non-Chinese manufacturers need them too).
My proposed solution would directly affect #2 and #4 in a positive manner, be better for #3 than outright banning Chinese EVs, but not as good as simply allowing them to dump nearly-free cars on Americans (which would of course increase in price once the competition is dead) and forces the American automakers themselves to sort out #1 because right now much of their competition is the German big 3 and Toyota, all of which are expensive too (shit, I consider Toyota more expensive than the Germans because I look at used cars, I love depreciation)
But what do I know, I’m not American and don’t know shit about economics and trade wars and don’t even own an EV.
It is pretty much what the EU is doing. Tariffs on Chinese cars to compensate for their subsidies and brand agnostic subsidies for EVs on the domestic market (also applicable to Chinese cars of course, but equally to everyone else, levelling the playing field).
We have yet to see if the European producers are going to survive but they at least appear to have gotten the memo on at least competing in the sector of not oversized, affordable EVs again. Renault is pretty successful with its R5 and I would think also the new Renault Twingo should sell well for example.
In the US the car industry has pushed itself into a corner it cannot get out anymore, except maybe Tesla, which does know how to build efficient and somewhat affordable cars. It just chooses to go the opposite way because the guy at the top is a lunatic. The rest of the sector doesn’t even know how to do it, even if they wanted. They are heading to their Kodak/Nokia end game. Except Nokia found a way out by offloading the damage to a foreign company stupid enough to purchase the doomed branch and consequently refocusing on the other branches that it could secure a future (for Nokia that was mobile communication infrastructure).
Lobbying for walling off the US market while making laws to postpone the death of oversized combustion engine vehicles, will postpone the inevitable but only by so much. At some point the US will be the only underdeveloped country left, still choking in traffic fumes, I don’t think it would even get that far before everything collapses among US car producers.
How about you people actually make competitive vehicles?
Legacy pensions funds make them unable to compete. Or atleast it used to, not deep diving on that
Yes, it’s the people who put in decades of hard work, not the cocaine snorting golden parachute executives, costing US auto makers their chance to compete. That might be it.
Edit: If only there were some way for citizens united to do something to help those poor executives.
I mean, both are bad for legacy automakers. AFAIK even engineers at BYD get paid less than factory workers do at any UAW plant and they don’t have pension funds to worry about. But on the other hand, the executives at BYD also don’t make what the execs at Ford and GM do.
That’s why you tariff shit from countries with really low wages if you want to protect your own industry. Not grounds for a ban on Chinese EVs in my eyes, but grounds for higher tariffs for sure.
If they paid us fairly, then we could afford to buy their expensive cars. Then, the competition from cheap Chinese cars wouldn’t be nearly so big a problem for them.
Their greed keeps coming back to bite them in the ass, but they’ll do anything at all to avoid sharing the wealth.
The CEO of Ford drives a Xaomi. He could have any car he wanted, and he chooses a Chinese car. It’s ostensibly for market research but he’s said he really doesn’t want to give it up. So yeah they’re cheap, and also I think China might just genuinely make better cars at this point. While China has been investing into manufacturing and consumer tech the big three have been dragging their heels and kicking and screaming because they see engineers as cost centers and that is biting them in the ass as well.
he wouldnt drive his own companies car, which are likely hazardous on the road.
And if we had universal healthcare it would actually be cheaper to produce those cars. Canada is proof of this.
YEAH CAPITALISM - no competition allowed. Protect us from those damn commies …… and their free market competition
Fucking communists and their free markets and open competition! None of that for us, please.
(Poe’s law: This is meant to be taken as absurdist humor.)
Free market in action
Fuck off, American car makers who no longer make any cars except the mustang and the corvette
Promise?
Did you know that the C5 Corvette was one of the most fuel efficient 20th century GM products? It was so fucking aerodynamic that it made 30mpg on the highway, even with its pushrod 2 valve per cylinder 6 liter LS engine rated nearly 400 horsepower. The contemporary fish-eye Camaros were close to that figure as well, when equipped with the 3.6 liter Buick V6, because again they were very aerodynamic.
It’s illegal to build a car that aerodynamic these days because it doesn’t pass modern pedestrian safety laws. See, if you’re going to kill a pedestrian with a car, you’re legally required to make initial contact at thorax height like any of the bus-nosed pickup trucks on the market today, not at shin level like 90’s GM sports cars.
I don’t buy the “efficient cars aren’t buildable today” nonsense.
Civic, Accord, Nissan cars, Sports cars- all buildable, all pass safety regs. The “big 3” American companies simply DECIDED to not build them since their garbage pieces of shit can’t even begin to compete with something like a simple Civic. I hope the big three drown to death in their own stupidity.Japanese cars, hybrids aside, aren’t efficient. They’re more efficient than American trucks of course, but they achieve low fuel consumption only through their small size.
I’m not kidding when I tell you that I achieved the same highway fuel consumption on my mate’s 2005 Mazda 3 1.6, 5 speed manual, as I did on my 1999 Chrysler 300M 3.5, 4 speed auto. The Chrysler had just over twice the power and it was a bigger car. And older. AND it was an old slushbox auto. The important considerations: Despite all the extra length, width and engine size, the weight difference somehow was only about 300 KG. And the big engine had a wide enough torque curve that they could allow for really tall gear ratios, it sat at about 1500-1600 rpm cruising at 90 km/h in 4th gear. The Mazda I believe was nearly 2500 rpm at 90 km/h in 5th, but I could be remembering that wrong.
Around town the Chrysler lost more of its fuel economy than the Mazda of course, but then it was a huge ass car with a huge engine - the difference was still nowhere near what one would expect it to be. And of course with a 3.5 exactly when the gas prices were at their lowest in ~2015-2016, well, I accelerated away from every light with a grin on my face so that probably makes up for much of the city fuel economy difference (which I honestly don’t remember the numbers for - it varies by traffic density anyway and I didn’t drive the Mazda in cities much, it wasn’t mine).
I then drove a ~2005 BMW 5 series diesel (E60 530d). Completely blew both of those out of the water with fuel economy. Think I got 4l/100km on the highway when the other two were 6-6.5.
You are right, though. Efficient cars are buildable today, there’s just close to no reason to do it in the US where gas is essentially free compared to, say, the EU. It’s the same reason people in Gulf states love driving their Nissan Patrols (Nissan Armada in Yank terms). The fuel’s so cheap, fuel economy doesn’t matter.
The brutally honest truth is that people are just willing to pay more for bigger cars and not just a little bit more, but more than the manufacturing cost increases with size. Make a car bigger, it gets 20% more expensive to produce but people will pay 50% more for it. It’s a no-brainer.
You can still buy cars that get <=4 l/100km on the highway, even with modern emissions requirements messing shit up for you (DPF regen cycles cause diesels to use more fuel for example).
My father’s 2017 Toyota Avalon gets 2 mpg better than my 2003 Chevrolet S10. How does a slickly shaped sports sedan make 20mpg when a 23 year old pickup with an engine that was primitive even then make 18? Meanwhile a 90’s Corvette can make 30.
Now that’s odd. The Avalon doesn’t fall into the trap the Mazda did where the engine was way underpowered. I wouldn’t call that engine or transmission super modern by any means, assuming the 2GR V6 and 6 speed auto, but not ancient tech either.
I don’t know, I have to wonder if it’s weight.
I thought that competition was good for capitalism?
OH you meant WE have to compete with each other for resources to survive, but YOU and YOUR PROFITS are guaranteed in the Constitution?
That’s exactly what they meant this whole time. We are the rubes.
LOL, capitalism my ass.
They can push laws rapidly when they want to (i.e., being paid by lobbyists), but when it comes to picking up rubbish, making the water drinkable, or holding pedo billionaires accountable, suddenly the gears of government are slow and need thorough “debate”.
Free markets hurt capitalists.
The free market is when you jam your invisible hand on the lobbying scale, right?
Right? These cunts love to tell us of the benefits of capitalism and the free market such as lower prices from competition driving the market, but then they cut off said competition that is not in their price fixing enshitification club. Can’t wait for them to tell us we do not own the vehicles we purchase because the software on them is a license. Basically like a mobile phone or a console.
This sentiment is why I use Linux, build my own PCs, and use aftermarket OS on phones…I hate it too, and wouldn’t be surprised if somehow they’re already doing this or will soon if not.
I am a 100% FOSS boy-oh. Down with corpo greed!
The USA is Capitalistic Communism. Drug Companies do research with taxpayer money then reap profits.
Bailouts and market manipulation like not allowing Chinese cars.
AI is gonna crash hard and the companies already have their hands out.
Only the profits are private.
