- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
You must log in or # to comment.
Who could have ever foreseen this result when we outsourced all of our manufacturing and skilled labour to China???
It’s almost like chasing thoughtless, short-term profit gains is a horrible idea.
Our design engineering is lacking too. I read not long ago how the president of Ford said how they tore down a Chinese EV and said “we got it all wrong.” I’m in the automotive manufacturing industry and we source some parts from China. The factories I work with are all IATF/ISO certified and they can make parts for 10x less AND not require a minimum production that would last me 5 years. And the comment about working around the tariff is absolutely true. One of our Chinese suppliers started building a plant in Thailand not long after the election. State of the art. less tariff. Quality parts. My first order is shipping this week.
Chinese industry knows how to manufacture at scale. With a hundred year head start, US auto manufacturing is still a joke.
We didn’t just outsource, and it wasn’t cheap. We went in and built the industries and trained the people to make it happen. Apple Tesla and others. We built the capacity for massively competing industries overseas.
Alternate headline: “The World’s Carmakers Have Become Too Fat And Bloated To Compete With China”.
This is my take too.
It’s not that America and Europe can’t compete. It’s that they’ve got their fat asses propped up on piles of misbegotten cash and are too fucking lazy and greedy to make a good product.
The world’s car makers struggled to compete with Japan back in the '70s, but I would argue that struggle gave people access to better vehicles.
Turned out the winning move was to make affordable cars that were fuel efficient to operate and people would rush to buy them.
I mean, from what I can see half of them aren’t even trying.
Then don’t. Make cities walkable and invest in public transport.
China is also doing that, believe it or not.
In my experience, the best we can do is change the bus schedules so you have to walk further to a bus stop and wait longer for a bus that never arrives at the scheduled time…
This would be ideal.
I don’t about the china and Europe already have a lot public infrastructure such as trains and walkable cities. We are behind there too
I wonder if the fact that most American and European carmakers are stubbornly clinging to the 1800s technology known as the internal combustion engine while Chinese ones are actively embracing the modern technology that car buyers actually want has anything to do with it 🤔
What? Rubbish. Total incomprehensible rubbish.
Right, time to get the coal burning in my steam tractor!!oh, mister fancy with his coal tractor. Whale oil too good for you?
European carmakers have dozens of EV models on the market, and they are dominating the EU market though selling poorly outside it.
While rapidly shrinking, the ICE market in the EU still accounts for about three quarters of the market. This is why some EU carmakers (notably Stellantis) have shifted to a Kodak strategy in an attempt to make short-term gains over the coming decade.
European carmakers have dozens of EV models
Yes, but they make many times more ICE ones than that, despite the fact that consumers generally prefer EVs as long as the price is right.
and they are dominating the EU market though selling poorly outside it.
That’s probably heavily influenced by national and EU subsidies and other regulations designed to give them significant advantages over non-European competitors, rather than what European drivers want.
the ICE market in the EU still accounts for about three quarters of the market
Because of the aforementioned stubbornness and preferential treatment more than anything else.
The EU was going to ban new ICE cars by 2030, before lobbying from the major car making countries succeeded in pushing it back to 2040. I just hope they won’t succeed in their current efforts to push it back even farther if not repeal the regulation entirely 😮💨
European carmakers have dozens of EV models on the market, and they are dominating the EU market
Yet the north American manufacturers have (at best) only 1 or 2 models of EV available, and those are priced in their luxury range, then they complain that nobody wants to buy EVs, so they double down on massive SUVs and unnecessary pickups.
Removed by mod
Went for trucks for greater profit margin and lower regulations but lost the volume game. For capitalists, they sure suck at it.
Even if you ignore the US obsession with trucks, western manufacturers labour costs are much higher and there aren’t subsidies on manufacturing EVs, only buying them. Chinese EVs get manufacturing subsidies and then in many countries they also get a local subsidy at the point of purchase. It’s an underhanded tactic, the Chinese government is essentially paying people outside of China to buy Chinese EVs so western competiton would die.
US car makers get tax incentives and bailouts, effectively subsidized by the government as well.
The US government doesn’t pay Ford to make me, an Estonian, a car so I wouldn’t want to buy a Volkswagen.
That’s what china does.
Edit: Loving the downvotes.
The Chinese companies get all the same tax incentives, bailouts and R&D grants that western manufacturers do. They’re eligible for the same purchase subsidies that western EVs are. They’re just also subsidized as a means of economic warfare against western vehicle manufacturers.
Removed by mod
Yes, the tariffs counter the artificially low price. At least on the more expensive models, as tariffs aren’t a flat fee per car like the subsidies. You’re then still left with a workforce that’s paid about a third if not a quarter of what they’d be paid in some European countries that manufacture cars.
If we really wanted European EVs to be competitive with Chinese, unions need to be abolished and wages lowered. Unfortunately, we ALSO want people to have good living conditions, so that’s sort of a no-go.
ChatGPT says 10-15% of the cost of a typical car is labor
a workforce that’s paid about a third
So that would give Chinese manufactured vehicles a 6-10% price advantage
We wish
Okay, now add the labour of every other step of the process too. The 15% is at VW’s own factory. But they buy parts from, among others, Bosch and ZF who also have employees producing the parts.
Then also add the labour costs for R&D. BYD’s average employee salary in China, including everyone from manufacturing to design to engineering to leadership, was less than half of what the manufacturing plant employees make at VW’s German plants and still significantly less than the Bratislava plant. Only top level leadership at BYD gets high salaries.
Which is why VW has been fighting the IG Metall union for the right to close down plants they can’t afford to run because their cars aren’t expensive enough to be profitable at these labour costs.
It’s gonna suck for everyone involved, but that’s just what you have to accept if the biggest economy in the world has both super cheap labour AND manufacturing subsidies. It’s game over for everyone else unless people are willing to take a major pay cut.
Are you implying Chinese people do not have good living conditions?
I have been in China only a few months working on the assembly line. Work was long and tough, but the pay was good and they’d give you free housing and food. Plenty other workplaces were available if you wanted to work less hours.
look at the squalor!
Yes, surely the manufacturing plant employees live in downtown high-rise buildings next to a beautiful park.
Do you want me to post a photo of Central Park or Times Square? That certainly shows how the American manufacturing employees live.
Removed by mod
That was 14 hours a day 6 days a week. It was non specialized jobs mostly filled by people getting their first job moving from the farms to the cities. Many people changed job within the first year. 40 hours work weeks were available. Regarding work safety, factories I visited were quite good, modern equipment and practices. I have seen machinery being used quite commonly which would elsewhere be considered highly specialized. Not sure about free healthcare, I did not get to need the hospital.
I’m not saying it’s the best country in the world, but in general the people I met were happy and enjoyed a good life without many problems.
China has universal healthcare, at many tiers from zero to half co-pay.
Pension Insurance: Provides retirement benefits after a required number of contribution years (typically 15 accumulative years).
Medical Insurance: Covers healthcare costs. In many cities, this is combined with Maternity Insurance.
Work-Related Injury Insurance (Workers’ Compensation): Covers medical expenses, rehabilitation, and disability compensation for occupational illnesses or workplace accidents.
Unemployment Insurance: Provides financial support if you are laid off.
Housing Provident Fund (HPF): A mandatory savings account where both the employer and employee contribute, which can be withdrawn for housing-related expenses like buying or renting a home.
Ew that sounds like the American system. Disgusting.
Removed by mod
Yea sorry, most of us don’t want to live under Russian rule.
Removed by mod
Lisbon to Vladivostok is a Russian ambition for sure, but not one of partnership lmao, it’s an imperial ambition going back to the actual Russian Empire.
It’s an underhanded tactic
It’s a normal tactic
Then why does nobody else do it? Why doesn’t Germany pay their manufacturers for every car built?
Nobody except for the world’s biggest economy can afford to literally subsidize manufacturing of luxury goods for overseas markets.
https://www.gtai.de/en/invest/investment-guide/incentive-programs-in-germany
For the us, there was a combination of
- lots of research support
- loans and grants to retool factories
- developing a stable market through consumer incentives
- growing the market by investing in high speed charging along highways
See all that is being done in China too but it’s not even the issue. The issue is car manufacturers receiving a direct subsidy on all cars produced. Nobody does that and generally selling things for under cost long term is considered illegal because it’s a way to establish a monopoly in an established market.
And yet even if that were true, where is the economic policy targeting that? You don’t throw a tantrum and tariff the world, but could do something useful with targeted penalties on one hand and incentives for your own legacy manufacturers on the other. I could be convinced by that
But reality looks a lot more like fear and xenophobia
Chinese EVs get manufacturing subsidies
US federal government spent $85B on US automakers since 2008. State governments more billions. Where’s the cheap cars?
The US isn’t paying for every car manufactured. The Chinese government has also spent tens of billions in R&D grants and such, we’re not even talking about that, we’re talking about the simple fact here that if I buy a Chinese EV, China is essentially paying me to do it (or rather, paying their manufacturers to build them), PER car. Not some lump sump investment into their manufacturing years ago.
The US isn’t paying their manufacturers every time a new EV rolls off the line destined for another country.
Well maybe neoliberalism was a bullshit economic theory all along and state intervention is actually superior.
state intervention is actually superior
For every EV built, Chinese government pays the manufacturer, but it’s not exclusive to EVs built for the domestic market. It’s EVs built for any market.
That’s tens or hundreds of billions each year that the Chinese government could spend on its own people, but instead spends on trying to make western car companies bankrupt.
Is it actually better in some way for Chinese people in their day to day lives if non-Chinese people to get cheaper cars, or is that modern day colonialism, trying to gain more resources in the long term at the expense of people living in other countries?
OK, look buddy, I’m really not a fan of genocidal anti-democratic autocracies, but with your silly arguments you’re making me argue for them. Yes, it’s good for the average Chinese person. The average Chinese person gets a fucking national heavy industry, with millions of jobs in manufacturing, R&D, services etc. Are we really going to pretend here that does not benefit Chinese workers?
And are we really going to be shedding crocodile tears that it’s somehow unfair to us in the West when we have been glazing billionnaire’s dicks for the last 40 years of the neoliberal era? We have built an economy on neoliberal fantasies of trickle down economics, we empowered money hoarders to do financial speculation and all it got us is the 2008 meltdown when even fucking Ayn-Rand-fuckboy Alan Greenspan admitted he had the model wrong.
And since 2008, we have concentrated insane wealth in fucking insane billionnaire hoards while our societies suffer under austerity, with no investments in actually meaningful education, in industry, in research beyond bullshit bubble schemes like AI. And now we cry for “colonialism”? Give me a break. Give me a fucking break. We cut our own dicks with fifteen years of austerity and under-investment. And now that the Chinese learned our game and are beating us in our own fucking game, we cry “colonialism”? Colonialism doesn’t get anywhere near to what they’re doing. Colonialism is what we’ve been fucking doing for 200 years to the entire Western Hemisphere and Africa. Now we cry “colonialism” when we don’t have the fucking balls to build an economy that’s not predicated on sucking capitalist dick? Give me a break.
The industry already exists. It’s being juiced artificially so they could sell goods to other countries under cost.
Same money could be used for e.g healthcare. China has a pretty US style healthcare system, just a bit cheaper. Instead it’s being pumped into private companies that already have a cost advantage before said subsidy.
What they’re supporting as a nation is illegal in a lot of places, which is why they’re met with tariffs. Which, btw, China also does. They use tariffs too. Dumping is a means of establishing a monopoly.
You mean China has a comparative advantage? Maybe the West should make more port instead.
Think U.S. car manufacturers did a couple billion of of stock buybacks over the last few years. If only they had invested that money back into the business to make better vehicles.
Short term profit and doing compliance cars and half assed attempts with certain irrelevance in a decade or so, or choosing to forgo profit and really go for converting to EV.
Every board room figuring a golden parachute in 10 years sounds really good.
For years it was all about cheap labour in China but what it really is about is innovation and robots. Western car makers have largely missed the warnings by assuming the Chinese market was like our own.
The other point is that capitalism has been whinging about market distortion while the Chinese government was planning for dominance.
They don’t even need cars to do it. The BBSHD kit from Bafang I’m gonna throw on the bike I’m building will save me thousands of miles on my existing car.
China is keeping me from buying a new car by helping not need to use one.
I’m partial to this explanation, what do you people think? I’m not an expert
Summary: Western car makers don’t make cars, they assemble cars from parts they buy. Their business is procurement and they don’t engineer the car from the ground up to meet a product vision. Rather, they’re trying to make something from the same old parts and suppliers of the internal combustion engine times.
It’s “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” but for cars
