What is less excusable to me is the concerted attempt to prevent Chinese car companies from building their own plants on US soil, like many other foreign automakers do. Even the proposed BYD plant in Mexico has them freaking out and I wouldn’t put it past the US to use terror attacks to prevent that plant from getting up and running. To me that indicates this is less about protecting jobs than it is about protecting industry profits.
I want my BYD
allowing obviously superior and cheaper Chinese EVs into the states at MSRP would obliterate the automakers
The automakers will be fine. Burgermobiles are still huge money.
State mandated Wuling mini EVs for everyone, and they all must come with cringe anime itasha wraps and cat ear attachments on the roof.
I would rock that so hard. I got the perfect wrap, too. It's the Jazz cup pattern, with that one picture of Miku with the leek.
So bad it wraps (heh) back around to being good.
Take off the Miku and I'll be driving this around town blasting 90s music. (I don't even have a driver's license)
Keep the Miku and blast 90s eurodance and carameldansen
Now this is a car!
The only thing you need to know is that some parts of the American bourgeoisie are going to make an absolute killing as middlemen and rake in billions and billions of profit from such schemes, while you, the common folks, are going to have to pay the expensive price even for a cheap electric vehicle in the name of “supporting American domestic industries”.
fuck the tariff. US automakers obliterated themselves and are trying to make it a global suicide pact.
they turned into banks pushing financial products, cannibalized their domestic production capacity and undermined the social reproduction of their own labor force. they hollowed out their product value and, despite the relative power of organized labor in the UAW compared to like... everybody but cops, they gutted their workers too. i'm not going to let the crisis of US automaker capital formations be reframed as an attempt to protect american autoworkers or anyone in the working class. there might be an argument if 100% of these tariff revenues were going to renewable transportation infrastructure, but i would still call that regressive and perverse.
i understand the logic behind the UAW supporting the tariff and wouldn't tell them not to, but it can barely even be considered a near term solution unless their contracts start pushing for
- significant worker power on the boards, like >50%
- ultimately licensing / adopting tech for renewables into production.
it's pretty clear the capitalists have never given a fuck about long term viability of any of these organizations, so of course the only way they'll make a good decision is if they are shoved to the side by the people investing their time and hoping for a future.
i don't think a typical production worker gives a shit about who signs the check or who invented the technology, if the wage is right, the checks clear, and the work is safe. plants could be cranking out windmill dynamos, tidal turbines, solar panels, battery tech, grid connected vehicles, or cheap EVs. that is what is gonna do for us all.
The existing tariffs were already prohibitively expensive for Chinese automakers. The new ones won't change much. The old automakers will still get their lunch eaten in every country but this one and the US's military and legacy automobiles will continue to kill the ecosphere as before.
I was hoping to get a cheap Chinese EV when I next need a car. Now that will cost twice as much thanks to nationalist sinophobia.
China is in a fine position either way, though. They will fully replace any demand for American cars in the vast majority of the world. And the US will just be offloading these costs to their workers, raising the price of hiring an American by the amount their cars are overpriced, making it even harder for the US to compete.
Chinese automakers do so well they sell to the USA market WAY below cost just because they can.
You can cash in your xibucks to get a rebate on a Chinese EV.
Automotive tariffs have robbed the US of so many awesome vehicles.
This seems like it would be setting off terrible, terrible signals to the investor class too.
For American manufacturers, even if they have a somewhat higher labour cost structure, they should have a few "home field advantages" to make it at least initially competitive:
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They should understand their customers better than the foreign devils-- have the Chinese manufacturers even DRIVEN anything with more horsepower than a freight locomotive and a carbon footprint two-thirds that of the entire city of Chongqing? How would they possibly understand what Americans want?
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Some aspects of their cost structure might be more amenable; they aren't schlepping supplies and vehicles across entire oceans, they have established dealer and service networks, they've already paid the right bribes to various regulators.
If they can't at least compete in that scenario, then basically all you have is a firm that lives as a protected novelty, subject to the whims of government subsidy and trade policy. That feels like telling an institutional investor "Go and buy stock in a tourist heritage railway, that's a vital growth business right there!"
On a high level, we can assume this is going to be a repeat of the 1970s with Japanese imports: Detroit continues to do what Detroit does while haemmoraging market share, eventually they have a series of come-to-Jesus moments where they make the electric K-car (or just start selling BYDs under license in the Geo style) to try to reposition themselves, but eventually the size of the market meant that "foreign" cars ended up being made domestically anyway. The smart play would be to jump to the end of the board: which state wants to be the first to get a Chinese EV plant running and generating local jobs and tax revenue?
China will never understand the average American citizen's desire to roll coal down the middle main street, driving home drunk from a gender reveal party that started at least 3 wild fires.
Which is why BYD will never install a secondary diesel engine next to the electric motor for the sole purpose of pumping out black smoke that serves no purpose.
China is finished.
holy shit a good post from somebody outside hexbear or lemmygrad
Death to America
Federation is worth it for this
It sucks. There's a solar panel tariff coming too.
It'd be one thing if we could actually build anything in this dumb country, then maybe it could be justified. Or if these were even nationalized enterprises where we could guarantee fair wages and that the money actually gets spent on the desired objective. But any state subsidies here just immediately get hoovered up by capitalists.
We don't have the brains, or the facilities, plain and simple. Our failed education system has churned out a population of proudly ignorant buffoons.
I have never bought an American car and I never will
Literally the worst cars you can buy
USA: We want you to embrace capitalism you God damn commie bastards!
China: Ok here's a load of cars we'd like to sell you.
USA: No not like that!
Also all this nonsense about undercutting due to state subsidy. That's exactly what the USA has been doing for years. However in China that money actually makes things cheaper. Rather than helping make profit for share holders.
That’s exactly what the USA has been doing for years.
while forcing the third world to adopt free market neoliberalism at all costs
Protectionism can probably be done right, but this isn't it. I think the US will fall further behind and so will it's "green" transition (especially if Tesla actually implodes and takes its vendors with it).
I also know that the US is not going to push back against consumerism, so it doesn't matter how many products like cars that they make more efficient - they will always want more. And also that EV adoption enables the US to continue ignoring public transportation.
Maybe the tariffs will kill US industry in a state of climate chaos where it can't recover, and this is the degrowth we've been asking for all along?
If America was doing it because we were investing in our own EV production, then I would be fine with it, but we're not doing that. We're doubling down on gas guzzling monstrosities that can run over half a dozen children that the driver is physically unable to see, so I'm against it.
I don’t think anyone here believes that EVs will solve the world’s problems. But the government believes that, or rather they promote that belief, and yet they refuse to even manifest that belief because they make inferior products designed by a toddler
Are you trying to argue in favor of pro-American chauvinistic protectionism and fueling a cold war trade war?
market forces invisible hand price demand curve meeting in the middle innovation incentives building the future technological advancement climate mitigation
we have cheap and good EVs, batteries, solar panels and other green tech that we make ourselves well before you do
I just really want a cool 3-wheeled electric cargo bike style micro EV. If that is made in the US (it won't be because car-culture brain worms of all the 'decision makers'), it will be unaffordable and have terrible usability.
Let a million micro EVs bloom!
3-wheeled electric cargo bike style micro EV
I would kill for a production version of this.
It's so fucking funny
On the one hand, you have the federal government doing a protectionism on regional industry by discouraging the importing of manufactured goods
and on the other hand, all our local auto-manufacturers are de
-investing from electric cars! So the one valid reason to implement a tariff, to develop your local productive capacity, is rendered fully moot! It's amazing, capitalist economies really do produce results you'd never see under a planned or mixed economy...
EVs literally do nothing to ameliorate climate change and therefore don't matter. so the tariff is just one more in a long series of the empires hopeless attempts to combat chinas ascent
Death to America
Tariffs are okay when emerging economies use them to protect and nurture their budding industries.
It's kinda the opposite here.
fuck cars no matter what
We have to do it because China is CHEATING.
THEYRE MANIPULATING THEIR CURRENCY
We oppose the capitalists of our country
I hope our ghoulish politicians here don't follow the USA on this one and I can get a sweet Chinese EV that was destined originally for the US.
Is there any truth to liberal claims that they blow up and are unsafe just like the bazinga mobile?
Is there any truth to liberal claims
bruh
Death to America
It's not something I pay attention to. I'll never be able to afford one of those death traps anyway
badly made lithium batteries or ones exposed to very adverse conditions regardless of quality (eg submersed, very excessive heat) tend to do that. in a similar way gasoline tends to, you know, explode too, under explosive conditions.
ive been seeing many dolphins quietly zipping around town lately and no explosions so far, will keep you posted. dont submerge the dolphins though.
Xi-V
The tarrifs are stupid though. If the US is just gonna build fucking stupid massive ev trucks, the industry should be decimated.
UGotFW
The only worker friendly tariffs is using wage differential in the sector, but crucially contingent on its size (updating yearly). Chinese get paid 3-4 times less? Cool slap 200 percent tariff, they get paid the same? Too bad, git gud
Doesn't this still just translate into higher prices for all workers? Particularly for the US where the majority of workers are in the service industry
It's not like labour costs are the thing making the US automative industry uncompetitive
It speeds up wage equalization across the world, i find it disturbing that women in bangladesh can make a t-shirt for 3 bucks a day, some dipshit with a printer can put some sign on it and get paid 30 bucks an hour
so china will make special usa factories where they pay workers usa salaries, the price will rise by like 40 percent, still less than a tariff, but everyone happy
Im describing what i think worker-led trade policy should be, not like that unions have that amount of power
americans can't compete with chinese EVs, simple as. china spent what? the better part of a decade developing new energy tech?
the us was giving infrastructure money for elon musk to buy twitter. i really thought they had some 4d chess plan happening under the tables and tesla would take over any day now...........
what a missed opportunity for them.
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