Mildly Interesting

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.

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.

There is a legitimate reason to not want Chinese government subsidized cars to undercut American auto makers, but it’s also correct to say that American automakers can’t compete with Chinese automakers right now even if they were in a similar cost footing.

It’s hard to feel bad when GM intentionally killed electrics back in the 90s, the ship where America leads the world in EV production may have already sailed then. We may yet see the American auto industry have its Kodak moment.

The auto industry collapsed a long time ago and they stopped listening to consumers about the same time. Now only foreign cars are manufactured in the US.

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.

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.

It's sad watching the U.S. and Japanese auto industry self-destruct in slow motion. There are a lot of smart and capable people in the auto industry, but the management are stuck in an 80s design and manufacturing process.

They did it to themselves. By limiting competition in a lazy move to maintain dominance they have lost.

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.

Good. They are overpriced and full of shit that supports the fascists.

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.