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?
I want tiny Japanese trucks, byd cars, and every car in the world to be available for purchase in “the land of the free”
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.
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?
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
Free market in action
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.)
“The Art of the Deal”, chapter 5, “Ban Competition”.
Of course they do
