Oh no! The type of capitalism where we have to compete!
Make it go away, Daddy Trump!
Good. Fuckem. They make shitty, oversized trucks that are a danger to pedestrians and people who drive reasonably sized cars anyway.
My boss in the UK got one. In bright red. It looks like he’s driving a fucking fire engine.
I mean, didn’t Japanese and Korean automakers already do that?
Yes. They did. That’s called competition. It forces companies to improve by destroying them, except they don’t want that. And politicians don’t want that, cause it makes corruption unstable.
Killed Detroit too, though. But, eh, helped other parts. It’s life.
Thus already in the 90s with the TRON OS a different approach was chosen by US regulators - threaten Japan with sanctions if it’s allowed to compete with Windows inside Japan .
They can’t threaten China, but they can prevent Chinese competitive goods from entering US market and improving its economy again.
Bad economy - poor and stressed people, poor and stressed people - worse political decisions, worse political decisions - good for middlemen which in our age shouldn’t exist frankly. We have the technologies for direct democracy, it’s not 1920s.
Maybe GM could, I don’t know, innovate?
Six months ago I moved from the US to a country where BYD and other Chinese brands are available. In the past I owned GM cars. The former GM executive is correct. After trying Chinese cars I find it extremely difficult to justify paying 40-60% more for a car made by GM or anyone else. GM’s best selling cars here are made by its Chinese joint ventures and aren’t available for sale in the US, and they are the only GM cars I would buy.
They’re pretty well known here for low quality flashy vehicles, with premiums for luxury not quality.
American manufacturing seems very incapable of change. If things worked this way for decades, why change it? Meanwhile the world moved on and they ask themselves why doesn’t anyone wanna buy american…?
You think Americans can’t change, just look at German Automakers. They are stuck in Perpetual denial. VW only moved electric because of the massive diesel scandal, otherwise they also would have been like every other car manufacturer.
Because it’s available to anyone. Not just Chinese owned companies and every other auto maker has similar taxes.
Dam maybe some of the American automakers who took billions in subsidies should have built cheaper cars instead of the largest trucks possible to skirt regulations.
I literally can’t afford an American car, i can afford a BYD tho.
I bought a used Chevrolet Bolt '23 which is the closest I could get, they’re still relatively cheap and mine has been working great.
I can afford neither, but if I had to save up for one it would be the BYD.
American cars are just large, stupid and inefficient. Also the parts are very expensive here in New Zealand
The same thing happened in the 80s with Japan. The Japanese were no longer making crappy cars but small and very reliable, affordable cars. Detroit was still making rust buckets, obsessing over powerful engines with bodies that rotted out and defects galore. Detroit got beaten up badly (Chrysler had to get a gov bailout) until they cleaned up their act and improved their products. Protecting Detroit from competition would’ve just saddled US consumers with decades more of crappy, overpriced, low quality, cars.
http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/how-detroits-automakers-went-from-kings-of-the-road-to-roadkill/
We still don’t let in the small pickups the rest of the world enjoys.
Did Japan back then pay their assembly line workers the equivalent of $5k USD/year (in today’s dollars) and have nearly no worker protections? Not a rhetorical question; I just don’t know. Seems like Japan had a better standard of living back then compared to Chinese workers now, so I would guess their workers were compensated and treated better.
Not defending US auto corps (or any corp for that matter). The regulatory capture in the US is insane, and workers aren’t treated as well as most of the rest of the first world.
Japan back then had (and still has) an interesting socioeconomic system, a bit similar to samurai clans went cartels, where workers are supposed to work all their life in one place (or close to that), don’t squeal about worker rights and such, but be covered by lots of company-provided social nets and guarantees.
Japan used state capitalism to promote it’s auto industry and other key sectors to sustain strong growth. America’s weakened billionaire owned government system is just being strip mined into the ground. We won’t be able to compete in an economy that’s only product is wealth extraction because of our massive corruption.
Back then American industries were just complacent due to insufficient competition, and Japan’s industrial development was a bit of a miracle (that “living in year 2000 since 1980s” joke).
defects galore
A friend of mine from high school attended the GM Institute and became an engineer for them. One of his first projects was on a team that bought a Lexus and an Infiniti when they first came on the market and took them apart to see how many production defects they had. He said a typical American car at the time (and this was in the '90s after quality had rebounded somewhat from its disastrous nadir) had 300-400 defects. The Infiniti they took apart had 2. The Lexus had 0.
I would kill for a small electric truck… Telo is calling my name, but they don’t have a functioning product yet.
Right there with you on small trucks, the kid and I have been drooling over the Slate even if it is Bezos. I drive a '98 Ranger, and we’ve been kicking around the idea of a Ranger electric conversion.
When Americans of all political stripes finally wake up to global realty, they’ll most likely do it lying on a sidewalk, naked in the rain, with their fingers in their ears saying na-na-na-na-na-na…
People will eventually have to face that the economic golden age of the 1950s and 60s wasn’t a normal state we can return to if greedy billionaires just let us. The rich definitely grabbed the biggest share of the prosperity, but that brief era of prosperity wasn’t normal, it was entirely abnormal, and it’s been over for quite a while. We’ve been fooling ourselves and keeping it going for the last half century by living on credit, and that’s about to end. I don’t know what new era is about to start, but the American era is over.
That might be true, but also a certain revolutionary purging of world politics would do a lot to return to something close to that. The golden age happened after the world war and decolonization, when western countries were full of veterans, and laws governing their lives were much simpler.
Internet-assisted direct democracy, open borders, open trade, radical changes in patent laws, simpler laws generally - all this can exist.
We simply have too much legacy everywhere strangling development.
The bad guys are trying to make it appear that the only legacy that can be stripped is that of French revolution ideals, human rights and civilization. That actually we don’t have to strip, that is all good. Just them.
It’s normal. Sometimes humans need surgeries, and sometimes a part of an old building has to be dismantled - maybe there’s a pipe in the wall that leaks, or maybe you need to retrieve a human skeleton found using some new technology, whatever. And you throw out garbage regularly.
So a reform for direct democracy (with ranked choice between variants having, say, 1000+ initial supporters in some incubator to get to the vote itself, because we have computers, storage and connectivity to make everything desirable for such) IMHO would go a long way to fixing half the problems in the world.
Meanwhile, instead of trying to compete they cripple all EV advancement to make a quick buck on fossil fuel.
Maybe the USA should heavily invest in the industry of the USA, just like China does, in order to keep up? No, then USian companies would have oversight & have to meet expectations, and we all know that they wouldn’t want that.
That would require companies roll profits back into development and their employees instead of pocketing it all, schemes like stock buybacks and wall st traders.
I hate that the US is like this. People would EASILY pay more for American if the quality was there. But ffs they don’t even try anymore. They just make slop and expect us to pay more for it.
Which sucks because I did use to think that “Made in the USA” meant better quality.
Also labor price is unmatched. Nobody would work for the wage they give to children in China, so you can’t really go that much cheaper while not sacrificing safety.
Not saying Chinese cars are that well made.
Like we don’t have child labor here in the good ol’ USA.
Very few children work in china right now, Chinese workers even have 5 days of vacation a year by law.
That’s 5 more than the US…
There were probably more children working on farms in the US than in china, and I remember something about Florida wanting to reinstate child labour again?
This is the slavery they are refrencing i think.
BYD did get caught using slave labor.
http://apnews.com/article/brazil-slave-labor-china-car-factory-byd-991c5670eefdd564fd465648b77b3869
That’s true, but we could subsidize the cost of labor too. People make a living wage, but the company pays less than that because government covers the difference.
China has compulsory education for children just like America. There’s no child labor in China.
They pay adult workers less in China, but these yuan has 7x buying power than the dollar in China
That’s what Chinese propagandists want you to think, there are way more people living in (borderline) poverty (per capita) than in the US.
Social media is being fed with a slice of mainland China, but anything beyond that is people struggling to keep ends meet.
American cars have sucked compared to Asian cars since the 1970s. I don’t understand why people are acting all surprised that this is true in respect to BYD. Sure in the past products designed in China were stereotyped as poor quality knock offs of western designed goods, but in the past decade Chinese engineers have increasingly proven themselves as perfectly capable of making solid, innovative designs that improve upon those of their competitors. I think it’s kind of fucked up that everyone is so suddenly upset about China’s role in the world economy since everyone was completely fine using them for cheap labor over the past several decades and are just mad that Chinese companies are beating them at high skill labor and technology. Chinese companies do have an “unfair advantage” given how much they are backed by the Chinese government but American companies receive all sorts of money from the government for all sorts of things as well.
Americans have come to think of Chinese products as bad quality because of the American companies who engage them for cheaper labor. Walmart was known to order products made to a certain spec one year, then the next year demand the company increase production, but for the same amount paid as the previous year. The Chinese company, not wanting to lose the contract, obliges, but corners have to be cut. It should be called Americanesium, not Chineseum.
Derek Guy (Die, Workwear!) posted a thread a while back (I think about 6 months ago) about how the Chinese can and do make great quality products, pointing out high quality fabrics. Give them money to buy good raw materials, give them a decent wage, and they’ll put out a good product. Honestly, they probably have a more fair work ethic than some American companies that just feed their CEOs massive salaries or are owned by private equity.
Its largely american cope that they are not that good at manufacturing anymore. Chinese factories build things to spec, and the customer asks for cheap, so they get cheap.
Honestly, there’s a wide range of quality of stuff produced in China, but the expensive stuff isn’t getting brought over. The better stuff is either being used domestically or exported to India/SEA. From my limited experience importing stuff, the biggest common factor is the lack of final quality control. I ordered some small diesel engines because no else makes those but Yanmar and Yanmar prices themselves way out of my range. Even Yanmar doesn’t sell a 5hp engine. The 196cc Chinese diesel was well designed, the parts well built, but final assembly lacks consistence on the bolt torque spec and there was metal shaving left in the crank case. The bigger, more expensive diesel made by a different company had much better quality control, although it’s still necessary to flush the crank case. No one over there seems to do that.
They went through a period in the 90s where they had a huge leap in quality and almost matched Japanese imports of the time. I’d say GM is the only one who’s drivetrain quality is still on any comparable level with Asian imports. Ford gets some parts really right but then their beancounters make really dumb cuts to critical components that make many of their vehicles near lemons. I can’t think of a worse car manufacturer in the world right now than Stellantis, and they aren’t an American company anyway.
The “unfair advantage” bit has been incredibly funny to me ever since I sat in a call to prepare a joint research proposal and the representative of a certain large euro automotive supplier told us that their company would only participate in any project if they got at least a certain amount of government funding.
So free markets are a terrible idea now and countries practicing import substitution weren’t impoverishing their people.
US hypocrisy at it’s finest.
Our free market’s good, yours is the problem! Gotta read the fine print!
Free markets were always a terrible idea, the USA economic system was basically founded on principles of regulation of goods like tea, tobacco, and alcohol.
„Free market“? Speaking of hypocrisy. Chinese car brands are so heavily subsidized they probably cost the Chinese economy more than they make selling them at the moment. China is clearly trying to drown the global market with cheap cars so they can ramp up prices immensely once they have killed the competition and have become a monopoly. China hasn‘t been the extreme low income country to produce super cheaply for a long time and they couldn‘t produce cars this cheap in a free market situation.
Many countries and the EU have measures against such practices because state run operations with the sole purpose to destroy an industry (which this is) undermine the very idea of the free market or even trade relationships.
Alternatively we could start subsiding local car makers and play the same little game China is playing but more cars is honestly the last thing we need right now. Tariffs are a much smoother option to deal with this even when they have a bad rep.
Ideally we use that generated money from tariffs to subsidize public transport so we don‘t get cheaper cars but cheaper alternatives but that‘s still just a dream I‘m afraid.
Whatever the case, one should look at super cheap cars and what that means in the long run more critically.
Alternatively we could start subsiding local car makers
We have been. Bailout after bailout. For the longest fucking time, and have had insane trade rules and tarrigs in place for decades and decades. I’d argue this is what it looks like to have another country finally being able to play on a level playing field.
After the auto industry intentionally killed public transport.
The fact that one of the most powerful monopolies in the world went bankrupt and was forced to be bailed out by taxpayers more than once should really be a disqualifier for any future endeavors.
you accidentally forget to pay ur credit card minimum for one month and you’re docked so many credit score points that you’re ineligible for being given a loan.
but we bail out these megacorps time and again and just keep letting them operate like nothing’s amiss
shit’s borked (intentionally, to favor those with means)
Is it a level playing field? In China workers rights are pretty non-existent and there’s no OSHA equivalent, at least not to the degree we have in the US. Then add in government subsidies, lower worker pay, reduced R&D costs because they pilfered the engineering from a US company, and you end up with a very lopsided market.
To be clear, I am in no way defending the US auto industry. They have little customer loyalty for a reason – low quality, overpriced, subscription dependent vehicles with terrible warranties, expensive service requirements, and invasive telemetry. They need more competition to force them to make more consumer-friendly decisions, but China is hardly a fair competitor.
In China workers rights are pretty non-existent and there’s no OSHA equivalent, at least not to the degree we have in the US
How much maternity leave d’you get in the US? Cause in China it’s a minimum of 90 days up to 180. And an extra 15~30 days of pat leave. Mandatory paid holiday? US: 0 China: 11. Sick leave? US: 0 China: months (at reduced rate). Vacation? US: 0, China: 1 to 3 weeks.
An employer that fails to allow an employee to take annual leave must pay that employee 300% of the employee’s daily wages for each unused vacation day
The work sfatey certainly remains an issue, like any developing country, but things are rapidly improving.
Efforts at work safety shall be oriented around people and reflect the principle of people first and life first, with top priority given to people’s life safety. The philosophy of safe development shall be adhered to and the principles of safety first, prevention as the main target as well as comprehensive administration shall be followed to forestall and resolve major safety risks at the source.
http://en.npc.gov.cn.cdurl.cn/2021-06/10/c_786248.htm
Things aren’t all roses in China, but y’all have to get off of your high horse when you know fuck all other than bland ass propaganda.
When was the second bailout? Or the first if you’re referring to something older.
You can‘t compare a bailout with an aggressive offensive. Especially since western car makers and many other manufacturers outsourced to China in the process. There are few to no parallels to be drawn here. A more accurate, albeit tasteless comparison would be the China opium wars. Because that‘s essentially what they‘re aiming to do: Making us addicts to their product. They‘re selling us the stuff at a loss because they know we‘ll come back for more and before we know it we‘re completely hooked. It‘s the exact same thing they‘re doing with Temu and TikTok.
We have subsidized the big three many times, and they return nothing back. At this point, they should be nationalized.
You have a very simple way of looking at things and are part of the problem that is going on.
Your ignorance is showing. Tuck it in.
You tankies really have a way with words.
It’s not a free market.
BYD is heavily subsidized .
Pretty sure big oil and car companies have been bailed out by the US government in the past. Plus america designs most of its cities so that you need to own a car. Seems like both markets are equally “free” at the end of the day.
The majority shareholder at GM is the US treasury.
One of the majority holders at Stelantis is their workers’ union.
A one time loan which made money is hardly a subsidy by comparison to China right now. That’s an absurd comparison. Apples to oranges. Hell apples to baseballs.
There is also CAFE standards that made small, effecient vehicles require extremely high emissions standards while allowing looser standards for larger, less effecient vehicles. Effectively limiting foriegn market influence while increasing both the price and size of the average vehicle on American roads.
That’s not a competitive subsidy though. Anyone can and don take advantage of those emissions. The US does not have access to China subsidized materials or labor to compete in that market.
BYD could build here and take advantage of that.
They have never considered actually competing have they?
They’ve actually done the exact opposite. The lobbying, the import laws, the absence of a foreign export market, and the manufacturing of cars that would never pass safety laws anywhere else, all resulted in the kind of dogshit that Americans have to experience now. Why improve if you’re the only player
Detroit is easy to hate but there’s more wrong here than how much can-do energy they wake up in the morning with. If they competed on features and quality they could never compete on price. Everything we do to keep the dollar strong makes it impossible to manufacture here.
Couldn’t have a thought further from his mind
Nah man, that’s not the purpose of unrestrained capitalism. The point is to get big enough that you can buy out all the competition, then make your product cheaper and cheaper once there’s no one to compete against. It’s a bit like an economical algae bloom.
Michael Dunne has been competing the entire time, for the Chinese. His statements here aren’t fear, they’re shillery.
