‘We will not survive’: Toyota, Honda and Ford CEOs issue chilling warning about China — and it could hit your portfolio
And, a recent tour of one of the Asian powerhouse's vehicle plants has proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt, at least to Honda President and CEO Toshihiro Mibe.
"We have no chance against this," Mibe said upon a visit to a Shanghai parts factory, commenting on its seamless automation across all levels of production. Logistics, procurement and all aspects of the process were so automated, in fact, that he did not spot a single human worker on the supplier's floor.
Ford executives saying even three years ago that China was way ahead of the game
Toyota's CEO has likewise said regarding not just his company, but the industry in general, "unless things change, we will not survive"
https://moneywise.com/auto/auto/toyota-honda-ford-ceos-warning-china-portfolioOpen linkView original on lemmy.zip433
Comments304
Well that's capitalism. It's what you wanted right? Competition to keep you on your toes?
Looks like the invisible hand of the market favors what the people want more than what bosses think we can take.
Please keep buying our shitty cars, we won't survive otherwise.
To be fair to Honda or, here, Toyota…
Worth finding a clip if anyone isn’t familiar
TBH, Chinese cars are pretty shitty. Their EVs have thermal runaway at an incredibly higher rate. BYDs storage facility just went up because a car sitting there caught fire.
As far as price, yeah it's not competitive when they pay their workers 10% what Western countries do and give them a coffin apartment to stay in. Then steal the IP from other countries so they have nothing in R&D.
Here's their clone of a Taycan, which also finished dead last in reliability tests because people were burning alive in them and crashing because systems would go nuts causing crashes. You enjoy your Chinese EV you saved money on, just keep that shit a mile from my house or "crappy non Chinese car" https://autopostglobal.com/electric-future/article/51496/
not really
This is not capitalism as China is net-lossing market acquisition.
This is called "dumping" and is not a feature of capitalism in any way. In fact, every single economic school that likes capitalism is against it. Generally net-loss market acquisition is very bad thing for our society as it privatizes gains and socializes losses. i.e. if EV market suddenly implodes many people would be holding the bag and if EV market succeeds then only a few people profit.
Marxists themselves classify net-loss acquisition as a failure of late-stage capitalism (which is fair) but when .ml's favorite flavor of authoritarians do it then it's ok lmao
Dumping is the natural end of overproduction or under consumption. It's also a tool to secure new markets. Capitalists employ it to get new customers and minimize losses. That's why Walmart exists in small towns and why previous season's stock goes on sale.
What we see here is a state capitalist entity participating in a global capitalist market using the tools available to them to secure new markets. There's more than one tool at play here too: the article talks of the advanced state of automaton as the differentiator with domestic producers. At the scale of automation described, even if not sold at a subsidized loss that's still gonna produce a cheaper product.
This doesn't make sense in this context of dumping. It's intentional overproduction for market capture not some inbalance in the market.
This is fundamentally opposite of capitalism, in fact as I said in the original comment market capture is inheritly anti-capitalist. Walmart, China etc. use abuse of power for an unnatural capture of markets. This is closer to authoritaniasm than capitalism.
Most capitalism haters fundamentally misunderstand what they're hating it for. It's valid to hate capitalism for it's insufficiencies (it can be gamed and needs intervention) but it's silly to attribute everything to some magical all powerful capitalism in the sky - this just reeks of low brow scare tactics like the red-scare.
Market capture is one of the major goals of capitalism because it allows for continuing, unconstrained profits.
When you control the market people have no choice but to turn to you if they need what you sell--regardless of quality.
Securing markets through control of supply doesn't stop being capitalism just cause it's done (perceivably) unfairly.
I feel like you're going a bit into the weeds here. That's goal of any participant in game theory - capture and win as much as possible. So it doesn't matter what economic framework you're using every participant will try to claim the biggest piece of the pie. At least capitalism tries to address this with "checks and balances" of competition while other systems just blindly work on faith that human virtue will be stronger than game-theory which it absolutely might be, at some point?
To be fair, the kind of capitalism you're talking about is/would be heavily regulated. In a free-market, which most people refer to when referring to capitalism due to messaging from Republicans, dumping is a perfectly fine tool. Is it ethical? No. But who cares? It's a free-market.
Any system ought to be. There's no system that you can just let loose and have it self correct for itself, that's a fairy-level of a delusion. People are very smart and will always figure out how to game a system.
In other words, a non-intelligent system will always be conquered by an intelligent participant, always.
Where capitalism extremists do delude themselves here is that "capitalism can be a sufficiently intelligent system" (the invisible hand) if it defers intelligence to game-theory level competition: because we all check ourselves we end up low-key giving intelligence to the system. Unfortunately this is just impossible to stabilize without unified borg-like society where everyone plays under this unified system but it also doesn't mean there isn't value of introducing some intelligence to the markets under intelligent supervision.
I believe any intelligent system will be corrupted, or manipulated for greed. It's why I believe in complete anarchy. A complete lack of state and authority. All beings equal, all provided what they need. And everyone works with their unique skills for a better future.
Adding intelligence doesn't make it any better. It just makes the system more exclusive for the powerful. It's a higher barrier to entry. But the entry is still there.
We both believe in utopias. And we both hope for systems in which human beings aren't the most vile creatures on earth.
It was a pleasure conversing with you and many blessings to you.
Cheers! I'm a fan of anarchy as well :)
Thoughts on what I think is the standout from their comment?:
And yet here we are, in a capitalist society, and it's the current reality.
Wild.
We are not in "capitalist society" that's a bit of an immature take as we have many ideologies and systems at play. We should identify weaknesses of all systems and use a buffet style policy making not subscribe to religion of specific rule. There are many great things in capitalism, there are many great things in controlled markets, there are even some great things in authoritarianism (i.e. wartime readiness).
Personally I don't believe system design is all that important — it's human virtue that drives all of this. A sufficently virtuous society would thrive under any policy framework as it would be capable of identifying faults and self correcting towards a more balanced interpretation and enforcement of any rule.
Capitalism is destroying our planet. You can only spin that as positive if you don't care about our species continued existence.
nope, shitty people and authoritaniasm is destroying our planet. Often quite literally too.
They’re the same picture.
Shitty people don't get to run everything into the ground unless we let them. That's a feature of capitalism.
Besides, authoritarianism and capitalism aren't mutually exclusive.
We've been ruining the environment for a very long time, and that started with the industrial revolution precipitated by, you guessed it, our very own U.S.
You have been eating from the garbage can of pure ideology.
I'm glad the US doesn't privatize gains and socialize loses.
That's all true and China needs to be actively worked against to prevent their market manipulation but we can't forget the reason American auto makers can't compete is because America has manipulated the the markets so much they are uncompetitive also not capitalism, now they are trying to reverse course 180 before china is unstoppable by letting in a bunch of cheap labor, a lost cause if you ask me America will never be a manufacturing center again but you don't need to beat China just create competition and they will fall eg stabilize and incentive Mexico to create manufacturing and hope the tech industrys in America remains a monopoly or we're SOL.
This is not about pure capitalism, though. The reason Chinese EVs are so successful is that the Chinese government heavily subsidizes those companies. I would not be surprised if they sell cars at a loss. So the issue is exactly the opposite of capitalism. It's pure capitalism being crushed by big government
The government investing in infrastructure upgrades instead of forever bring lobbied by the fossil fuel industry is big government now?
Not saying CCP isn't big government, but "crushed by big government" is very strong imagery
What do you think Walmart does when they go to a new market?
Or what amazon did for many years, or Uber, OpenAI, etc. Most startups really.
What you're describing is capitalism, whether you like it or not
Good these are companies that fought the transition to EVs every step of the way. Toyota in particular. Which was ironic after releasing the Prius
Toyota is way too conservative. After nailing hybrid tech early on, it seems like they wasted the opportunity to put it on every vehicle they make which would have been such an amazing step forward, instead of treating it as a weird niche for so long.
Also that bz4x or whatever deserves a spot on the worst cars of all time list, just straight up ewaste.
Yeah. Spot on. And the Busy Forks not only has an awful name, not only has awful styling, but it is an extraordinarily bad EV by any measure. E-waste indeed
Wait, I haven't read up about it. What makes it so bad?
Well the wheels fall off, that's not ideal. (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM)
Other than that it has poor battery size for the cost, slow charging, and poor efficiency (burns more kW per mile/km).
There are more criticisms, but they're the big ones. It is just not a good EV.
And the wheels really did fall off initially, they had to do a recall. Was a design error.
Now recalls happen very often to all companies but for straight up safety issues they're rare. They tend to be a lot smaller issues.
The thing with the wheels though is just indicative of how little care they took with it, Toyota are renowned for quality, sure they're boring designs but they're built to last right ? Well this one seems to be been designed by the work experience kid and a punishment detail who clearly didnt want to be on a BEV.
Oh, shoot, yeah, I do now remember about the wheel recall! You're right; Toyota has fallen in quality. I'm now recalling Genesis overtaking them in JD Powers' reliability ratings... I've gotta review this stuff more. So sad, but we really should never have brand loyalty.
You can just buy a JD Power award btw. The auto manufacturers pay to play. Its a marketing company.
Oh? TIL...
How will you know its electric if it doesn't look like shit otherwise?
What makes you say that? I don't really know much about cars, why is that one particularly bad?
Compared to everything else on the market it had big problems with reliability, range, charging speed, and it was overpriced.
I think everyone expected that Toyota, with its hybrid experience and the benefits of seeing all other EVs on the market wouldn’t make such a poor attempt. It felt like they were poisoning the well, as if not wanting to compete in the EV space in the first place.
I never owned one so I can't say this is true, but from what I read over the years, those early hybrids weren't great for performance/driving feel compared to other vehicles. They worked, they were efficient, but at the time turning all their cars into it probably wasn't a winning path.
I do agree about the early hybrids, The OG prius was a dog. But I feel that they sorted it out quickly enough, engineered out the potential reliability issues of a more complex drive train, brought down the price of batteries and motor tech, etc.
They had a huge advantage in solving these problems before anyone else was touching hybrid tech, and then largely squandered the lead, and a chance to make everything they sell cleaner and more efficient.
Because unlike Tesla, they need to sell cars and make money.
I've been wanting Honda to make an affordable all-electric car for years. Based on how BYD is selling, I'm guessing I'm not the only one.
Instead they keep making bigger and bigger, gas-guzzling vehicles, with bells and whistles we don't need, saying that's what sells and they can't make an electric vehicle they're happy with.
Well, too bad. It seems I've bought my last Honda, sadly, because my next vehicle will not burn gasoline.
On the same boat and yes it's depressing. It's also depressing that nobody seems to be thinking about all electric small cars, or even normal width cars, at least where I live. Teslas and BYDs here are about as wide as buses. I can only dream of Honda or Toyota making an electric vehicle no wider than 70% of the lanes they're supposed to drive on.
They did. The Honda e was the perfect tiny EV, except for its massive price tag and small-ish range. And of course, in classic Honda fashion, as a promising but flawed attempt didn't succeed immediately, they promptly abandoned the segment instead of capitalizing on acquired knowledge, battery technology advances and price drops. Given how successful the Renault 5 is, I'm pretty sure a 2nd gen e at half the price would have been a massive success.
Of course, being Honda, they changed their mind and came back with a significantly worse SUV.
They would probably not have managed to slash the price in half with one generation.
The original Honda E was € 35.330 in 2020, which was a difficult sell given the small 170km range.
Half price would mean an electric car for ~€ 18.000
Looking at other Western manufacturers (e.g. Peugeot, Citroen, Volkswagen, Dacia) for a fair comparison, that is a stretch even today. Most EVs don't really go below 20k, and 25k seems to be the current range for affordable EVs.
The issue is largely the cost of the battery. That cost has come down over the years, but not to the extent that Honda could have suddenly slashed the price of their EV in half.
Edit: That is not to say Honda shouldn't have kept releasing more EVs.
I'm just pointing out that they probably would follow the same path as the other Western automakers that have pretty consistently been releasing EVs over the past decade orso.
So it wasn't even close to being perfect was it? Those are like the two most important aspects
No perfect in a cute little way
Renault seem to offer quite a few these days that are fairly small.
Renaults are rare in Australia (and for some reason also disliked by aussies in general ). I would say the most popular brands are BYD, Tesla, Honda, Toyota, Kia, and Hyundai, easily more than half the cars you see in circulation today. I can probably count with my fingers the amount of times I've seen a Renault while driving.
Hey ? There's dozens, if not hundreds of them, Chinese, European, Korean...
Oh. In the USA huh ? Damn, shame about your govt blocking them all. Maybe you'll change things up at the mid terms, good luck with it.
No
At a 30 sec glance at your history and based on your reference to Renaults in Oz then first question - WTF - it's 3am over there, go to bed !
Then 2nd question, what exactly are you lacking in the way of small car options ? Another 30 sec dig suggests Oz has any number of small BEVs available all of the usual culprits from China, Korea and Europe are available (as they are in most countries, Canada being 1 exception for a few more months, and obviously the US).
https://www.cars24.com.au/car-guide/best-selling-bev-models-australia-2025/
Nissan Leaf, MG4 and BMW iX1 are not exactly F150s - they're all reasonable sized hatches.
Yes there are plenty of people driving large cars in Oz (I'm from there originally) and they're now feeling the pain of the fuel prices, it will shape their behaviour, particularly the city folk driving Ford Rangers etc without ever taking them off road.
If I've guessed wrong on the country whatever. There's very few countries outside of North America that don't have small and medium BEVs easily available
You got the country right. What's your idea of a small car? When was the last time you drove in Australia? How large are the lanes where you live?
Of the cars you listed (or better said the website listed) only the Nissan Leaf is under 1800 mm width ( 1780 mm ). With a length of 4490 mm it's not exactly a small car though, but I'll grant you it's within an acceptable size range for a vehicle. I haven't seen many around tbh. The MG zs EV follows closely at 1809 x 4323, acceptable sizes but not small.
The Tesla T3, TY (you see these two a lot), Kia EV5, and BMW ix1 are well above 1900mm width. The T3, by far the most popular, is exactly 1933mm W x 4720cm L, the TY only 3cm longer. Hardly, hardly what I'd call a small car.
The other models listed are all above 1800cm width, and their lengths are over 4200 mm.
Let's compare these sizes against popular PICKUP models. Ford Ranger: 1910 mm x 5225, Volkswagen Amarok: 1910x 5350, Mitsubishi Triton 1815x5305, BYD Shark3 1994x 5195, Nissan Navara 1850 x 5120.
TESLAS ARE WIDER THAN PICKUPS. Why??? Most other EVs have comparable widths to those of a pickup. Is that small?
Examples of actually small cars: Honda Jazz 1694mm x 3996, Toyota Yaris 1710x 3940, Suzuki Swift 1735x 3840, Nissan Micra 1665x 3780, Fiat Mini Cooper 1744 x 3876. These are relatively recent models. If you look for older ones, before 2020, you'll find even more under 1600mm. Before the 2000s, you get cars even narrower than that.
New roads might take the current average car sizes into account, but nobody is broadening already existing streets.
Mate, you're all over the shop.
So to address the initial point, I'm now in the UK where roads are much narrower than Oz, and yes I'm driving in Oz every few years.
The basic issue is not that small cars aren't available in Australia, it's that no one buys them. A holden or ford ute, or a Volvo station wagon was a large car in the 80s, now the supersized Yank trucks (and the Jap ones made for the American market) are everywhere. A Toyota Hilux now is massively bigger than it was 25-30 years ago. If people didn't buy them, they'd stop selling them. The traditional ute was selling at the same time as the 4wds that got bigger and bigger - and wiped out their market share even before the Libs killed the car industry.
So. You can buy small cars in Oz, and you can buy small EVs - it's just that no one actually buys them.
BYD Atto is small even by Euro standards,
https://bydautomotive.com.au/atto-1
ditto the Fiat 500
https://www.fiat.com.au/fiat/500e-electric
There's probably more I can't be arsed looking up.
Bottom line your issue is with your fellow drivers buying tanks instead of smaller cars, they exist, and many are in fact sold to city buyers, both in dino juice and electric versions
The new Honda Super-N looks pretty small and is way better value than the Honda E was.
I don't need a car, but if I did that would be what I'd get.
What will be your next vehicle then?
I honestly don't know. Probably BYD, based on how things are going...
Maybe the Honda Prologue, which I only just found out about. But I'll keep driving my gas guzzler Honda for a while, since ei don't drive it a lot so it will last a long time.
But really my point is that they've had a lot of chances to get ahead of this and they keep sticking to gas and hydrogen and not moving forward on electric.
Oh, I totally agree; I was just wondering. I really love the look of the Hyundai Casper but I think a nice, solid sodium-battery vehicle with great reviews would be amazing...
"We took zero action to compete and relied on protectionism and other forms of corruption to stay in business knowing that China was pulling ahead, we refused to plan for the future and harvested all the money for our owners instead and now we're fucked unless you bail us out! Not the owners, of course, who could afford to bail us out, they will continue siphoning money even though they're clearly incompetent, we need your taxes" ... How about no?
Capitalists sound strange when they are faced with actual competition. That's... kinda the whole point guys.
Yes, but there also is a legitimate issue related to staffing.
Everyone should be in unions, but unions ARE going to fight this level of automation to the bitter, as it will result in job cuts. In this particular instance, I think if you cut the CRO compensation to 0 they'd still be in trouble against some of these factories that automate almost the entire process.
This is the kind of "machines coming for your jobs" that's realistic. AI may be a bunch of vaporware, but this stuff is different.
How many of those companies spent literal billions of dollars on stock buybacks to inflate share market price over the last decade instead of investing in the people and facilities and products to remain competitive. Even if there is dumping I doubt it's anywhere near the combined spent on share price inflation buybacks & savings instead of investing in the workers and business, these companies enjoy unjustified tax breaks and subsidies from their governments as well.
This is a the economy being equated to wealth/investor class problem. Workers in and around cities want cheap affordable evs & charging infrastructure for renters, mechanics and parts producers want to build and work on affordable evs. People who own stocks expecting growth returns and executive compensation want to sell 10 cars a year for a trillion dollars each if they could.
Yeah, this is what bad leadership is. Lack of leadership really. China and the US both found themselves the manufacturers of the world.
China took the money and built an infrastructure. The US took the money and destroyed unions..
It all went up oil subsidies..
They thought they had captured the market and could get away with anything because there were no other options.
Now there are options. They fucked around, now they find out.
The only reason these cars are so cheap is because they have no humans manufacturing them and have heavy subsidies from the government.
Are you really saying you would have been happy to hear that a CEO laid off all their blue collar workers and took government bailout money?
You think they have no employees at all? BYD had over five times the employees than Ford! And subsidies? In the US, we bailed out our auto sector during the Great Recession and heavily subsidize our auto sector via tariffs. Plus no car plant had been built in a generation without heavy state and local tax breaks and subsidies.
Seriously. What are you smoking? Cause I want some.
It's right there in the blurb, you don't even need to read the article:
"“We have no chance against this,” Mibe said upon a visit to a Shanghai parts factory, commenting on its seamless automation across all levels of production. Logistics, procurement and all aspects of the process were so automated, in fact, that he did not spot a single human worker on the supplier’s floor."
No, I don't think they have no employees. But your five times the employees thing is misleading. BYD Corporation has 5 times the employees as Ford, but that is for the entire BYD corporation, including their batteries, cell phones, fork lifts, solar panels, semiconductors, and rail transit systems. BYD Automotive is closer to 2 times the size of Ford. BYD is also vertically integrated, meaning they build a lot of the parts/components that go into their cars. Ford outsources a lot of parts and components.
OH NO! THE FREE MARKET IS WORKING BUT NOT IN OUR FAVOR!!!
Genuine question is this the free market?
Is the CCP subsidizing these super cheap cars?
Which isn't to say the US isn't doing the same. 2008 should've meant the death of much of the American auto industry
Oh they likely are, just like the us does for their own auto industry. The free market part is simply a cheaper car that appeals to more people, it coming from China is the only thing really holding it back. Well and maybe the spying, but I don't know how bad these are on that front.
Don't forget the headline that came out the other day about how new US cars post-2027 model year are required to have federal surveillance installed.
We're already being spied on, and I'd much rather China be doing it than fucking Palantir.
We are not being spyed on as long as we are not american or don't buy new cars.
Every state does internal espionage on its citizens, and external espionage on other states.
Just because you don't live in USA or China doesn't excuse this.
Yes, but that is no reason to invite more of it. And this is not even government spying (they get the data I am sure) but corpo. A bad thing happening does not make it OK or normal.
You're not inviting more of it. You're trading spying done by one nation/corp with spying done by another.
Unless you think European espionage is somehow better than Chinese espionage.
The CCP didn’t just subsidize cheap cars. They built out the manufacturing capacity to produce them at scale.
As China’s demographics shifted and long-term labor supply came into question, they leaned heavily into automation and industrial efficiency.
That’s the real reason these cars are so inexpensive. It’s not just lower prices, it’s a fundamentally different cost structure driven by scale, integration, and advanced manufacturing.
What’s unsettling competitors isn’t cheap cars themselves.
It’s the ability to consistently produce cars more cheaply than anyone else.
Aww man, China is dumping to gain market share for EVs? That's crazy. If only car manufacturers had adapted to EVs sooner and researched more into better battery technologies, they might not be in this position. Get fucked. This whole, every car has to be super luxorious in America is getting ridiculous. I looked at a rav4 last year and the "features" they included in the base model was mental. I just want my car to go when I press the pedal. Brake. And a CD Player. I don't need half the shit they put in American market cars. Doesn't help that I have a large family that needs to travel far, frequently. So, my hands are tied with getting an SUV. I'd kill for a better train transit in America. Next car gets to be an EV though. Cause that's the sedan.
In my area last year I was legitimately looking at all options. Toyota lot was the biggest disappointment. They had 1 RAV4 that was completely stripped, cloth seats, barely any features etc. but somehow the payments were still $150 more per month than leases on better equipped EVs at that point (prior to the federal tax credit expiration). I asked the Toyota guy if he had any other competitive options and he tried to tell me I should get a massive truck (Tundra).
The guy at my lot said, "you won't be able to find what you're looking for; cause even if we stripped everything out, it would still be the MSRP base price." And I was just floored by that. I walked off the lot, went home and got a PHEV from Mazda and ended up $2000 under asking; had to stay for hours though. Best I could do cause the only comparable cargo and seat size EV was a KIA EV7 (the suburban looking one). I wanted the Ioniq5, but a buddy of mine had a problem with his and Hyundai was terrible to him. Everything else in that size was just too expensive because all the EVs at that level have so many useless features.
It's worse than that- the Toyota distributors in my area have a regional monopoly and add a non-negotiable $2000 worth of useless crap to every car for 500 miles.
$129 screen protector for the radio $80 for a bag of red USB cables $700 for "enhanced warranty protection" $1200 for nano-ceramic-ionic-polymeric paint and underbody coating
Wouldn't they still be in the samw situation as China can afford to dump indefinitely?
They cannot dump indefinitely. That is impossible with current global circumstances. Also, if companies actually invested in EVs sooner, costs would be down already and China would have a harder time dumping. The biggest issue currently is, China can dump for longer than manufacturers can catch up. You reap what you sow, though.
They can. China has near limitless funds lol. It's like the US with military spending except they're doing a trade war rather than conventional war.
But they cannot sell them all. Eventually the well runs dry and they will have overstock and the wave will come to shore. The cracks in the foundation seem to be there. But I may be, and probably am, wrong. I studied engineering, not geopolitical based economics.
Car buyers usually buy a new one every 5 years at most while the rest of us buy used. They can keep going for long enough to put at least a few western companies out of business.
Source on China "dumping"? All I see are unsupported accusations that are wholly explainable by the power the lobby of the automotive industry has
In Australia.
Illegal Storage at Jamberoo: BYD was caught storing more than 1,600 vehicles at Jamberoo Action Park without the necessary council approvals. The storage facility was discovered as the water park attempted to reopen for the summer season while its car parks remained filled with new EVs.
Inventory vs. Sales Gap: As of late 2025, BYD had reportedly imported approximately 51,000 cars to Australia but had sold only about 38,000 units, leaving a significant surplus of inventory.
Carbon Credit Strategy: Some analysts believe the stockpiling is linked to a government loophole that allows manufacturers to accumulate carbon credits based on the number of electric vehicles imported, rather than just those sold.
The plan was China was going to sell cars like legacy auto has been doing for the past 120 years. USA said no. USA created China's over capacity. Not China.
I will fully admit my only data is anectodal evidence from friends overseas.
Edit: I'll also add, I distinctly remember reading abouy China selling zero mileage used EVs. Which lines up with dumping practices.
That one was less dumping and more subsidies fraud, IIRC
Ah, fair enough then. I concede.
Good morning. You old style car companies (and it is not just the US ones, count the European companies in, too) slept through the last decades. They tried everything in the book to supress EVs, and still keep developing fossil fuel cars to be released in ten years.
And now they start to wake up, seeing that the world moved onwithout them, and they cry.
I work in a USA manufacturing plant that has nine figures worth of EV motor manufacturing lines cancelled, sitting around collecting dust since the new administration changed all the regulations and incentives.
and people didn't buy them. did everyone buy a Bolt or Leaf last year????
Ford sold 823,000 F150s JUST LAST YEAR. Then the ponytail and birkenstock crowd blames the companies.
Don't charge $100,000 for a regular fucking vehicle?
Seriously, all the useless expensive shit they add to vehicles to make them unmaintainable data miners is why they're going to get slaughtered.
Give me an electric pickup with 4WD and crank up windows. Preferably no radio. I'd buy one of those Slates in a heartbeat if it were 4WD, as much as I hate Jeff Bezos.
I don't think that's why they are too expensive.
China is pumping out nice cars for like 15k and I guarantee you it has all sorts of data mining. China could probably make one of those Slate things for like $5k.
They all have data mining, regardless of country. China subsidises EVs even when they're sold abroad, to kill the competition. Of course most legacy manufacturers have also lost the plot when it comes to affordability. To make matters worse, many of them also have to deal with expensive union labour. Chinese labour is still much cheaper.
"They're just heavily subsidized, not actually beating us!!"
Pure cope.
This has been SOP for China for 2 decades.
Talk about cope.
That's dumb.
No, Chinese EVs are not $15K in export markets, they are over $25K.
yeah hoping the Slate can turn this shit show around.
And if I WANT a radio, I’ll go to a local business and get one that meets my needs installed. I don’t want some POS touchscreen with clunky, badly written software.
Chevy Bolt was under $25,000. No one bought them. Total sales in Q2 2025: 33.
But they sold hundreds of thousands on $100K pickup trucks.
The Bolt was discontinued in 2023 and won't be made again until 2026. Not really surprising that a vehicle that is no longer being made isn't selling a lot.
I didn't even know the Bolt was around in 2025. Perhaps they should've done a little more to let the public know about them. I think they really wanted to use them for tax purposes, not take away sales from vehicles that make them much more money.
It kind of wasn't. While you could buy a Bolt in 2025, they stopped making new ones in 2023. Anything on the lots was just leftover inventory, so not surprising nobody was buying a vehicle that wasn't current.
especially EVs, who need recharging to keep batteries at healthy levels.... I wouldn't want one that's sat on a lot for 14 months.
I love EVs, but we can't treat them exactly the same as ICE vehicles and the Bolt never had the range to be a really popular contender with americans.
I see. The whole 33 thing was very misleading.
Well I need a vehicle, not a chevy bolt
Okay, so you're getting out-competed in the market. Pay proper wages, invest in innovation instead of executive salaries, and take a slimmer profit margin to help your customers.
It is way bigger than that.
The traditional model of manufacturing has been multiplied by 10, "traditional" auto makers will not be able to afford retooling to even produce anything close to the volume of byd and their ilk.
Did you not read the story? The reason why they can't compete is because China has NO wages to pay. Their plants are fully automated.
Paying proper wages would make Toyota and Honda even LESS competitive.
There is no such thing as total automation, there are always people keeping the machines in order. Even then, it's a skill issue on Toyota and Honda's part. Labor will reorganize like it always does, and it's not like any of these companies care more than they have to about labor.
The primary advantage China had was government subsidies prioritizing long term more than the private investors could. In theory the private investors could make most of the same decisions an industrial capitalist state can, but they are too self interested for that collective action. They don't care about helping any individual state, their money moves freely across the globe, and they are only in it for themselves.
It's a race to the bottom. But at this point, why even try to stop it?
The trouble is the opposition is subsidised so they can pretty much run negative margins and still turn a profit.
Paying proper wages is the opposite of what would help here.
All auto makers are heavily subsidized, US automakers most of all.
I don't think Ford's getting paid a 5 digit sum to sell me a Mondeo lol, not that they even make those anymore.
If we add up all their subsidies, bailouts and hand-waved fines, we probably end up pretty close to that amount
The majority of it is loans though. Any Chinese EV manufacturers literally get paid per car they sell.
As for the EV subsidies in most countries, those get paid out to buyers usually, not sellers. Germany's not paying Mercedes for every car they sell in China or the US, etc.
Maybe its true. Regardless, article sounds like anti-worker propaganda to me. China is gonna eat our lunch! Better take a pay cut, and be glad you're not laid off!
I get your perspective, but complete automation with as little human input as possible is exactly how you make cheap products.
And it could enable UBI if we had a government that gave a shit about people...
This has been reported on by multiple sources outside of the automotive industry about the rise of dark factories in China.
It's not a secret that China has heavily invested in automation in part due to the necessity thanks to unforeseen consequences of the one child policy. There's a very much lack of labor workers because the current generation are full of people who ultra emphasized education, even in rural areas, and this generation has no intention of working labor jobs. I don't think Western countries, especially America with their abysmal education and having the average citizen reading at a sixth grade level wouldn't be able to absorb that level of automation without tanking the economy unlike China's unique situation.
Now what I'm going to probably find interesting is what's going to happen when inevitably with the revocation of the one child policy and you see the next generation of young adults that may not have the same level of education since you now can't pump all your resources in the singular kid and how that's going to affect them. I do wonder how long this competitive advantage will last.
plus there are too many Chinese with stem jobs, engineering but couldnt find jobs because its too saturated already.
China will only have a less educated population if they follow the same stupid playbook as America, but that strategy has almost nothing to do with family sizes and has not caused birthrates to drastically increase. Population growth has slowed in every industrialized capitalist country, and many of those countries have not gutted their education system like America. There is no way a modernized economy like China's will see a population explosion without heavy government intervention, as that would go against the established global trend. The 1 child policy was a mistake, but only because the natural course of modern capitalist economies would've done the job for them.
America gutted education so the population would be easier to con and manipulate. The rich gave up on having a functional republican form of government, the very type of government that allowed America to modernize and become wealthy. That type of system provided motivation for Americans to support their own nation, convincing them that their liberal democracy was the superior system. Now China has done the same thing, earning the trust of its own people by improving their country's wealth and international prominence.
China's investment in automation is only another way to increase worker productivity, and as history has shown time and time again, that is never the real issue that undermines societies. Rising wealth inequality, centralization of power, mistreatment along ethnic and cultural groups can become problems for China in the future, but not automation. Anti intellectualism could fuck with China as it has in the past, but it won't be because people have more kids to invest in.
China rising in power is scary and could easily cause problems in the future, but right now it is in a very powerful position and it will not fall anytime soon. It's likely that countries across the globe will seek to emulate China's strategies in the same way that they emulated America post WWII. They won't be as dominant as America was, but they will likely be the most powerful player on the board.
The one child policy was revoked a decade ago.
You need to update your China bad talking points.
I see you have no reading comprehension skills.
Guess how old the children are from a policy that was ended 11 years ago.
Now, guess how old the people are who would be working in a car factory if it weren't automated.
Finally, take 30 seconds to really understand why your post was idiotic.
And yet, the birth rate has only declined further.
Single child families are still common even if it's not a law anymore.
Maybe you should have kept up and innovated instead of just trying to stifle your competition and enshittify your products idiots.
But think of the short-term shareholder value! Have you no decency?
I do not.
well, username checks out
This continues to baffle me. Europe, the US, and likely even Japan was never going to be able to win the race to the bottom on price. China understands its supply chain and mineral strengths and has optimized its entire production towards churning out good (or good enough) EVs at scale.
Still, the US could continue to wall China out of its market with massive tariffs while also promoting alternative cheaper vehicle options, a large portion of which should and could be EVs. But the US hasn't even done that... Domestic manufacturers have run screaming from EVs, seemingly ceding the entire field to China.
And continues to stubbornly refuse to.
This is a repeat of the '70s when fuel prices shot up, and people started buying fuel efficient Japanese cars.
The American manufacturers just continued making their land yachts and muscle cars until they came up with such innovations as the Ford Pinto or the AMC Gremlin...
And even those weren't as fuel efficient as the average Toyota or Honda or Datsun of the era.
Ford, GM and Stelantis are going to just keep pumping out SUVs as fast as they can with only the occational token EV that doesn't meet what the market demands.
Mustang drivers or pickup truck drivers aren't the ones most actively seeking an EV.
They need to come up with an EV that competes with a Corolla. Or one that is in the same ballpark as the BYD cars. Not on price alone - no North America based manufacturer can compete directly on price against a subsidizd Chinese company, but on the being a car part.
The Ford Pinto killed 38 people
Tesla has burned over 80 people to death.
And yet the "Pinto" is the punchline.
I hate that Tesla has become the go-to brand when people think "electric vehicle".
Even though there aren't many options in North America, those options are better cars in so many ways.
This is the very same extreme capitalism that they have enjoyed, engineered, abused. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Or, rapidly change expectations for what they charge. They cannot have it both ways
Back in the 80s, American cars got really, really crappy, and that's when Honda, and Toyota, and later Hyundai, Daiwoo, and Kia were able to get market share. American car companies got their shit together, and started making cars that could compete again. So here we are a few decades later, in the same spot.
These scummy Capitalists get a taste of luxury, and they start getting lazy, while the Asians continue to crank away like they're in last place. In the past, the Capitalists finally wised up, and got back into the game, but the current crop are so breath-takingly ignorant, that I doubt they could even recognize that they're in trouble. If someone were to try to explain it to them, they'd probably just attack back.
The Japanese and Koreans will get their shit together. America won't.
"we've built a model based on charging an assload of money for features that barely work and China is making cheap cars that do the job better. Because, you know, the cheap bullshit we've been building. If you force us to compete again we'll lose!"
Okay, but have you considered that the Chinese Communist Party is ontologically evil? And therefore any amount of business (direct retail sale to consumers that sidesteps US rent-seekers) is in support of a genocidal regime of highly corrupt madmen who want to destroy liberty and justice across the entire planet?
We need to STOP CHINA NOW before they take over the damned world and ruin everything sweet and honest and pure that our glorious nation has created.
You got me in the first half. Ngl.
Weren't some auto companies bailed out before? Why wouldn't they expect the same thing again? Just get bailed out by the government again if things get bad enough.
They know they are in trouble but they think it’s because labor is lazy and needs more exploiting.
Part of getting Americas shit together is closing off immigration. The people doing this to us are mostly not American. It’s rich immigrants from various countries exploiting regular Americans. Thiel isn’t ours. Musk isn’t ours. Fucking murdoch… Why the fuck do they all move here? At some point it feels like an attack from other nations. From our own Allies. Who fucking needs enemies?
Immigration is the one of the primary economic engines in America, and it is a STUPID self-inflicted injury to close it off.
Those "immigrants" you mentioned aren't a problem because they're immigrants. They're a problem because A)They are Sociopathic Oligarchs, and B) Our elected officials have allowed them to exploit our labor and resources for their own benefit, at the expense of our own citizens.
We shouldn't cut off immigrants, who are coming here to contribute to America, we need to cut off Sociopathic Oligarchs who come here to abuse America. We need to make our government, and the wealthy, understand that we don't exist to serve them, they exist to serve the Citizens, and this nation. They are allowed to keep their profits, after paying for the privilege through significant taxes, through the pleasure of the Citizens.
They can buy whatever they need out of their own pockets. We shouldn't be giving their corporations tax breaks and loopholes, we shouldn't be buying them stadiums, giving them enormous government grants, etc.They can afford to pay their own way. Not one [now illegal] penny should be spent on Sociopathic Oligarch toys.
Our tax money is for our citizens, and if Oligarchs can't understand that, then they don't understand their responsibilities to the country that has made them wealthy, and their fortunes will be confiscated, their corporations nationalized and operated for the enrichment of the American people, and they will be imprisoned. Their families will be left destitute, to start over.
That's how you stop Sociopathic Oligarchs - by going after THEM, not some poor immigrant family that just wants to pick enough berries to buy food for the day.
I've been in the market for a decent Japanese EV for like 10 years now and still drive my 2004 toyota around. Sure China is dumping but Japan has been sleeping so hard it's hard to have any sympathy here.
From that I've heard, Japan has been betting on hybrid and hydrogen fuel instead of full electric.
I've been heavily considering an electric recently and was surprised by the severe lack of japanese EVs.
In fact, Mazda's new EVs are based on Changan Auto platforms.
Nissan leaf is the way to go.
sadly not available in my region
Nismo edition coming....
That legit looks cool
Are we supposed to feel bad about corporations ?
No.
See the last word. They want you to think of
your portfoliotHE eCoNoMy.They literally can't comprehend that you don't only think of their one true God: $$$
So what you're saying is you need Daddy Trump to bail you out with taxpayer dollars we don't have so you can not change anything to make vehicles nobody can afford?
Daddy Joe Biden dumped billions into battery plants.
Are you comparing building up new tech and capabilities for the future to keeping outdated, stagnant industries on life support? I mean, even pushing for tiny nuclear reactors in cars would be less crazy than doubling down on tech that we know, for a fact, is killing our planet.
But EV's don't make Billy Bob's dick hard.
While Toyota and Honda at least have an acclaimed history in low cost and efficient vehicles, Ford is literally 1/3rd the the reason the US doesn't manufacture sedans anymore, with the other 2/3rds being GM and Chrysler.
I actually witnesses them layoff their entire sedan division in real time when they announced the end of the fusion. I'm pretty sure it was mostly liquidated by the time covid hit.
Because trucks are made with safety loopholes and have higher profit margins, and Ford shit the bed with the Fusion, Festiva and Focus with a garbage transmission they knowingly sold for 7 years.
I'm still mad we lost sport sedans for this EPA bs.
Everything is a crossover or SUV to gg ez the emission laws because of the weight class.
Random 5 seater SUV will be producing more emissions than a WRX or Evo Lancer.
And SUV's are just treated as trucks. this is 100% correct.
and we ignore EV's because... we won't do the work to make EV's work, like charging infrastructure. It's all so painfully stupid and transparently to benefit the fossil fuel cartel
That’s the problem with disrupters, people are so involved with dismissing them that they don’t see what’s happening. For years it was all about cheap Chinese labour then turn around and discover that it’s really all about robotic factories and slick organisation. Throw in EVs and it’s the same but worse.
People always point out that China "isn't really a Communist country." And while they certainly are different from the days of Mao, they forget that, from the beginning, the goal was to treat the market economy as a means to an end. The CCP values market economics because it allowed China to quickly industrialize. They don't value capitalism for its own sake; they view it as a necessary evil.
Because of this, they're able to do the kind of long term industrial planning that is unthinkable in the US. And there's ultimately likely to be a lot less resistance to mass automation in China than in the US. If the state owns all the automated factories and distributes their goods fairly to all, why oppose automation? Automation is only a bad thing if it represents losing your livelihood, your method for keeping a roof over your head.
China doesn’t distribute automatically produced goods fairly.
Social services are quite limited in China compared to European countries for example.
Long term planning and strategic thinking is truly their strength. For decades they have stolen and copied to catch up. Western countries and businesses only saw the profit margins of this huge market and went in.
It worked pretty well for China overall. Nowadays they can make pretty much everything.
"We insisted on fossil fuels and now Chinese electric car companies are eating our lunch, boo hoo"
Cry more fat capitalists
"Beautiful, clean coal!"
"Detroit Motor City". I.e subsidizing losses.
Of course you could apply protectionism, but that wouldn't be fair and would set a public precedent on the global markets.
But yeah, the petroleum lobby really managed to screw us sideways. All those anti EV, anti solar and anti wind campaigns.
It is perhaps the biggest, oldest, slowest moving and most fraudulent of bailouts in all of history.
We are just that stupid.
'Murica!
Lmfao at the pro capitalism crybabies in this thread
Pick one.
The planned economy introduces artificial constraints in the system; the labor and fundraising for these corporations in China are... facilitated. Therefore those operating under an actual system of supply and demand will be disadvantaged.
Still, the theory would suggest that, yeah, buy their cheap cars. Let the corpos fail. Once China realizes that we've been sending them paper dollars based essentially on a scam economy, they will raise their prices back up. Then local production will be able to pick up again.
I don't think they meant that the free market is realistically superior or efficient, just that it "morally" is.
Herp my derp look who is mad about the "free market" now?
Don't come crawling to us for bailouts this time
they already are, it's why you see no Chinese evs in the USA, American car companies cant compete, so you get expensive cars as the tax on that
and that would be ok if the US car companies were frantically retooling before the tariffs ceased in a couple years but they aren't, they're just stalling and the C suite is kicking the can down the road until its someone else's problem. They're well as are through.
arnt they tariffed to hell during bidens term, they dint want china competing with thier evs, now people arnt buying it because its expensive.
Spirit Airlines is already looking for a bailout. They are the worst, most poorly managed airline in the biz, who deserves to go out of business. If they bail them out, they'll bail everybody out. He's going to have to, in order to artificially support the economy for as long as he possibly can before the inevitable collapse.
ALL modern Republican administrations end in economic collapse, every one. Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2, Trump, all left office with an economy in shambles. Every Democrat has come into office with an Economic Stimulus Program that the Republicans always try to sabotage - Carter, Clinton, Obama, Biden.
Get ready for the great Trump Bail Out, followed by the Trump Depression. He likes having things named after him, let's oblige him. We should have named Covid after him - Trump Disease.
No, no. Build big beautiful F150, Tundras and other mastodonts running on dinosaur fuel. Fail to adapt, fail to exist.
It could hit my portfolio? What portfolio?
I'm assuming they mean those with 401k's or other managed retirement accounts.
Maybe pull yourselves up by your bootstraps. You know, the whole "meritocracy" thing.
Compete or die
almost as if competition is what capitalism was always supposed to be about
No, thats what markets are about. Capitalism is about making money by stealing other people’s surplus labor value.
No, that's what capitalism becomes when unregulated. Just as communism does the same when unregulated. The fact the US is on the literal same trajectory as Russia post USSR collapse is proof.
Open any Economics text book that defines what capitalism is, and by it's literal definition, OP is correct. Capitalism, at its core, is about using capital + labor to make better products with better materials to compete in a market of others doing the same where consumers ultimately choose which company they buy from; in turn controlling which company thrives or dies. Competition is literally a key component of capitalism. It's what most regulatory bodies were designed to protect (before they were captured). So without competition, we have something else that just looks like capitalism, but functions exactly like fascism.
I'm not defending capitalism by the way. I'm just pointing out what it is actually defined as versus what it has now become. I wouldn't say Russia is Communist anymore by any means, so calling what the US and others practice now "Capitalism" is likewise mistaking what their system was in place of what it has become.
Wikipedia disagrees with you. Markets are just one component of capitalism.
The very first line is exactly my definition:
“Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
Wikipedia fully agrees with me if you read the very next paragraph from your link you didn't quote, emphasis mine:
Yes I understand markets are one component of capitalism, I also understand that without them we don't have capitalism as like you've said that's a constituent component necessary for it to be defined as capitalism.
What market is there for Facebook? Google? X? Your ISP? Your government? Is it like 2 companies you have a choice between at most? Between Verizon or Quest? Between Facebook or MySpace? Between Democrat or Republican?
If there's extremely limited choices in your markets, you don't have markets. So you don't have capitalism.
If you don't have markets where things can compete for money based on their innovation, you get enshittification from the few companies who control everything. Which is very obviously where we are now.
In short, the enshittification of all things is because we no longer have competitive markets for consumers to use their money to buy what's best. In its place, instead we have a CRAPitalist system that clearly doesn't fit the definition of capitalism.
Which is my point. Which is why you cherry picked your answer from Wikipedia rather than reading more than the first paragraph.
So competitive markets are one part of a capitalist system, like I said… and capitalism is defined by using these markets to extract surplus labor value, like I said…
You're missing the point completely my dude. There are no competative markets anymore. So there is no capitalism anymore. Do you understand?
Without a competative market, the system that's extracting surplus value is NOT CAPITALISM.
Do you understand what the word "constituent" means?
It means, "a component that is part of a whole (noun) or something that's necessary to form a part of a larger structure (adjective)."
Competative markets are constituent components to Capitalism. Thats what the wipedia page you linked says right after you stopped quoting it. So without competative markets there is no "whole" there is no capitalism.
If you sit down in a theater to watch a movie, and the projector doesn't work, do you think you watched that movie? You bought a ticket for it. You sat down. But the constituent component of a projector broke, so all you saw was a black screen.
That is not a movie. Let alone watching one. But you would argue it is because you bought the ticket and sat down in the theater.
Capitalism's competative markets are likewise broken, so what people are now experiencing is NOT capitalism.
This is not a hard concept to understand.
Simple affordable vehicles if they want to keep the factories busy and and sell a lot of vehicles. Greatly reduce the massive trucks and SUVs. I don't know how many people need to tell them that before they finally listen.
That's capitalism.
¯\(ツ)/¯
Time for bailouts and layoffs!
That's US capitalism.
Maybe even another war!! We could just try to take those factories. We deserve them, as a treat.
You won't survive because you made your vehicles too big and expensive for the average consumer. I welcome China's BVD's as an option for the lower middle-class, the class which North American manufacturers have forgotten.
Won't somebody PLEASE think of the shareholders‽
yes I do think of the shareholders.. in a dream.. also involving woodchippers and guillotines
Indeed, those are short term folks who basically destroy companies.
China will soon, or prolly has already, be the number 1 country. US oligarchs are just focussed on getting richer instead of trying to advance humanity technologically.
A nation can enrich it's elites in the short term at the expense of its people, or it can invest in its people (education, commons, etc) at the expense of its elites.
The west, and especially my cesspool the US has made its choice.
China has been heavily building up its commons and infrastructure in the same 40 year span the US has let its commons and education fall into utter ruin in order to sell economically segregated education and gated communities for private profit.
The US is culturally indoctrinated to be hostile towards the very concept of society. Imagine resenting paying into universal healthcare because you don't want to accidentally pay for your countrymen's "bad decisions" like... Eating food.
I go on Rednote quite a bit. The US attitude towards China, just like non pure crony capitalism is "they are evil and from hell" for being a society. Their people, not their politicians, their people, are sweet, intelligent, and mostly treat Americans with an "are you guys OK? We've heard (true) horror stories."
Thats humanity. Why would I want my schaudenfreude and greed ruled cesspool to "win?" It's not about winning, it's about the wellbeing of ALL your people. If the US dominates the world culturally, all that would mean is that humanity stands for "fuck you I got mine" at which point I have no comradery with my species whatsoever.
Actual human worth/value is measured in empathy for one another, which makes the US destitude in what matters.
well said. i had the exact same thought yesterday.
China’s “investment in its people” comes with authoritarian control, surveillance, suppressed wages, restricted speech, and limited political rights. Framing it as simply generous is incomplete.
I dunno how the Japanese and Koreans will do, but I 100% guarantee that the American companies will do absolutely nothing, whine about it to their child rapist in chief and then get a massive government bailout paid for by ordinary Americans.
They're equally freaked out, as they've been lashed to the same Wall Street piloted sinking ship as the rest of the US periphery. If you check out the politics in Japan and Korea over the last fifteen years, its been on a reactionary bent of increasing domestic militarization amid a continuous "Why aren't our naturally superior native peoples making more babies?!" eugenics freak-out.
You can throw in The Philippines, Taiwan, India, and Australia while you're at it. None of these countries seem to have a serious long term plan for their economic futures. Everything revolves around "containment" of the Chinese super-economy, even as individual plutocrats demand carve outs for their own supply lines and revenue streams.
In the US they'll just keep banning Chinese cars, not sure how that'll pan out elsewhere though since other countries have started or had existing import agreements.
Oh no my portfolio... Seriously, there's something called competition, it's been around for a long time. If Chinese companies continue pushing ahead while US companies remain complacent then that's just what will happen. These older car manufacturers have had DECADES to prepare for the newer battery tech to design and build good affordable BEVs, but they just didn't.
This is what happens when billionaires try to steal the future. Read about the General Motors EV1. Oil companies have fought against the development of EV charging infrastructure in the US.
It's not about EV vs ICE, it's about automation in production, which really is important, if you like to talk about billionaires stealing the future, then from Marx to, eh, Norbert Wiener many people wrote that eventually heavy industries won't need low qualification labor anymore, and where the society turns at that point is a political problem.
It's those conceptually capital "means of production" right here. Or you can look at TSMC, though. Or Windows, or Linux, or Firefox. All capital things.
But yes, those who can't make the transition are at a disadvantage. Unless the gap is reduced in some way, it's political again.
Anyway, those unfit dying have been a thing for a long time.
I would bet that Chinese auto manufacturers aren't taking 6 billion a month out of their company to pay shareholders in stock buybacks. Maybe reinvesting in the company to remain competitive is in fact, a good strategy.
Stock buybacks sound like the kind of shit you'd be publicly hanged for in China.
Not my portfolio!
GOOD.
Maybe the workers at Toyota, Ford and Honda should take control of these plants. They would run it better without the capitalist leeches squeezing out every ounce of profits into their own pockets.
They will be fine, the USA will just bail them out again and again
The USA has not been a leader in production of goods for a very long time, since the 70s for some industries. They have survived by having massive amounts of buying power.
The us is now running out of that power since about 2015. They will soon not have the option of bailing out companies.
Also true
I genuinely think there will be a few major auto manufacturers who don't survive the EV transition. Either they will go bankrupt altogether, or be bought out by other, more competent manufacturers.
That's been going on for a while already. Stellantis was founded only a few years ago and they already have a ton of different brands in their pockets. Obviously PSA and FCA already had a ton of those brands before merging, but similar merges have been happening for decades, for example GM has been gathering different brands since 1920s.
That's exactly China's goal. Put everyone else out of business and then leverage the hell out of their position as the only automaker left standing in the world like the Walmart or Amazon of cars.
Why would anyone want to buy out Stellantis? Or GM?
What is worth salvaging?
Stellantis in particular has some brands that deserve a decent vehicle to put their badge on.
Gm to a lesser extent.
Why don't you try, I don't know, making a better and more affordable product?
Of course I'm not invested in individual transportation companies. Even less with the ones refusing to set on EVs.
I don't want cars to survive.
Skill issue
They should learn how to vibe-code
MFW the communists beat the capitalists at their own game
To be fair, China isn't very good at communism and the US isn't very good at capitalism.
China has way too many billionaires. And the US isn't a well regulated, free market.
Who are the communists supposed to be in this scenario?
Cold Take:
Good. They don't deserve to survive. Demand will ensure industry bounceback and stability long term, at least nationally as new buniesses fill the void and labour recovers. Mind you, the US industry will probably never compete globally again having collectively chosen to just lag behind technological trends toward efficiency and sustainability to appease fossil fuel entanglements. These companies made the decisions they did not to adapt at a critical turning point and this is the result, and their current rhetoric is an artifact of decades of coddling by a lopsided nanny state spoon-feeding subsidies and bailouts to shitty investors and executives with garbage management practices at the expense of public services and infrastructure. There is no too big to fail, that's capitalist coping propped up by a corrupt and captured economy that THEY lobbied for.
In short, get fucked, and take your CEOs with you.
This depends on the strategy. If China lowered the prices and waited for the US car makers to go bust, they could then raise the prices as high as they want. US manufacturers would eventually continue production, but things would need to be automated for them to be competitive.
Personally, I think they should allow China to sell small cars in the United States. It's a product that isn't currently sold on our market.
I completely agree, and frankly I think most working class people would welcome the access regardless of where the manufacturing is being done, because the need of transportation isn't going away. In an actual free market Chinese EVs simply would be adopted due to the compltete lack of a comparable product with reasonable pricing, or alternatives, which is part of why you're seeing the market shifting in Canada, not that it's an actual free market either but it is being helped by a response to aggressive US imperialism. The US market is artifically 'free' and constantly manipulated, so I'd think it's more likely administrators will cling to the albatross of legacy manufacturing and prop it up to the detriment of the economy and general quality of life for the working class to appease fossil fuel interests. This is what extreme isolationism gets you I guess; The big auto manufacturers bought in to the regime selling tarrifs as some kind of cheat code to their industry dominance extending eternally, which to me suggests their leaders and inverstors are desperate or delusional. I'd like to see more of a move toward mass transport systems investment and infrastructure personally, but the required shift in ideology in the political and governing space is definitely not there right now. Change can come fast, but hope is also scarce in this current staus quo.
Chevy isn't mentioned because they figured out how to make the Bolt.
The bolt wasn't a profitable car. They used it to learn and get to the profitable vehicles they are making today.
They're making profitable EVs? This is Chevrolet you're talking right? I said the bolt was good not profitable. Profitable is high margin garbage sold to morons, literally Tesla. And I'm not so much as riding in one of those piles of shit.
I believe the newer models are profitable yes, although not highly. And they still haven't covered the cost of all the R&D, but selling a vehicle profitably, is the first step to that.
And yes, for what it was, the Bolt was good, its main drawback being the lack of high speed charging, but for a lot of people that was fine.
Q2 2025: 33 sold in US, 4 in Canada.
Lemmy is weird, everyone says they want EVs, but when they were available, no one bought them.
Bolt was here, small efficient EV, but nah, they sold 33 in 2025. Ford F150 sold 828,000.
bUt wHy dOeSnT FoRd mAkE aN eV?
Again, you are quoting sales of a car that was discontinued 2 years before your sales numbers.
In 2023, the year the Bolt was discontinued, they sold 23,000 Bolts. Yes, that's far fewer than F150 numbers, but it is more than all EVs sold in the US by Audi and BMW combined in 2023. It sold more than any other EV besides Tesla.
But yeah, keep using the Bolt as an example for why cheap EVs don't sell.
Who knows if I would have bought one, I was never able to find one at a dealership to even look at.
Not sure what your point is, all of us 33 Lemmy users bought one!
That's less to do with the car and more infrastructure. It's a good cheap car but people who need cheap cars in the US and Canada can't charge them easily. Teslas and ford lightning on the other hand are all purchased by people with houses where they can charge an EV
I bought an EV but yeah I'm an outlier and even I didn't want it I just wanted to use my bike but owning a vehicle is written into my employment contract
Nooo don't let the Chinese subvention a total transition to clean energy!!1!!! 💀💀💀
Bullshit. They will survive. Albeit under some “rearranging” down at corporate. Brand loyalty does have a crossover effect despite all indications of an entirely different product. Seriously. People will purchase just because of name brand loyalty alone. Maybe all these auto producers will be absorbed into a global manufacturing mega company that will spit out absolutely crap products until it is distilled down to what the people truly demand. (Lol) And what the global futures have in mind for all of us.
Got to used to not having to compete
Then stop being greedy fuckers
I know that workers cost money to have but eveytime I read something like this I wonder if the corporations take into consideration the decrease in the number of people who may be able to purchase the product in the first place.
I have had this same thought and I feel like I’ve come to a realization. If companies can cater to the desires of the top 10% or so, they can make more money. Why sell 200 $5 objects when I can cater to the affluent and sell 6 $250 objects.
I see this constantly with Automobiles and construction. Auto manufacturers do not make the cheap baseline cars for the most part Because they’ve realized they can make more money manufacturing the fancier vehicles /trim levels with higher margins.
Same thing with new buildings; affordable housing is not what is being built. You only see fancier, expensive construction, with higher margins, being constructed.
When you have an economy that isn’t capitalist, you can plan it…and extracting surplus value from workers isn’t necessary. You can automate your industries without destroying the quality of life of the people….in fact, you improve it because people can work less.
It really is that capitalism has exhausted its usefulness and ability to advance society. It is now socialism or barbarism.
Legacy car makers have become complacent. They wouldn't survive doing the same thing they have been doing. They will adapt or die, competition is good.
Well than they need to make better, more competitive products, lol. More competitors might be bad for the billionaires, but it will be great for consumers. As a Canadian, I'm tired of the price fixing monopolies we have here. Open up the market for the consumers, and we will decide! Fuck the rich!!
I cannot wait to see legacy auto disappear. It’s about time they failed. It’s fucking absurd that the most expensive piece of tech I own has a 15fps display with touch response rate measured in seconds, rather than milliseconds. They did this to themselves.
Legacy auto did nothing to compete with Tesla software, and they came out over a decade ago.
Oh, and they took the ‘10 bailouts and did fuckall with them. They didn’t take the bailouts and make a suddenly better product.
I just rented a car while on vacation and they gave me a perfectly fine Nissan Qashqai, except there was a problem with the car so I could not use it. The rental agency only had one car left, a BYD Seal hybrid.
What a fun car to drive. Had a lot of power, great handling, cameras and sensors everywhere for navigating tight spots, and since I was driving on the wrong side of the road, those came in handy.
I am sure that driving a brand new RAV-4 would be a similar experience, but after I was done with that car I searched its price range and competition, and the #1 car was in fact the Toyota Rav 4, and the comparison had that car out ahead due to resale value and initial quality, with the BYD Seal leading on price point, standard features, and battery range (which was significantly higher) among other categories.
I have a feeling that resale value and initial quality might be a shifting category, as well. Really impressed by that car.
But I thought super capitalism would allow markets to self regulate, motivate competition, and weed out low performer. Isn't that a good thing anymore?
Also, I'm laughing at "unless things change, we will not survive". That might be the change happening, buddy.
Honda and Toyota have been EV technology laggards all along, even behind us automakers
Is everyone going to import the dregs of their technology to the us, to eke out a few more quarters of profitability before becoming irrelevant?
I would absolutely love to have a Toyota Tacoma hybrid to replace my v6 Tacoma but I'm not going to spend $90k + to buy with old tech when the BYD one is looking to be $40k and will have the latest battery tech.
Lol. Lmao, even. Let them come
I'm curious what exactly this means. . . Are they taking raw materials in one door and finished cars out the other? Because that seems unlikely, would be impressive tho.
China's robotics/automation is next level. They have gigapresses to form the car body in one step.
The bigger question is if we can't manufacture shoes in the west, why not just design cars instead of making them as well?
I would buy a BYD tomorrow...shame they're not for sale here...
i have a BYD jer in Australia but there's now so much chance. I'd like a Xaiomi YU7 but they're not in Australia (RHD country) ... yet.
Maybe the US needs to take a play out of China's book - require >50% ownership stake of any Chinese company doing business in the US and allow American companies to just take that technology and roll with it.
Stop blocking progress or these companies will die.
The market can remain irrational far longer than the economy can remain solvent.
ok
Luckily, I don't have a car.
I also take the loser cruiser
Aw, Capitalism not working out for you car manufacturers? Awww, that’s too bad.
Not my portfolio!
We bought a Honda Pilot in 2011. It was a beast with enough room to take a family of four and a full set of luggage on a road trip vacation. I went to replace it in 2018 and the new pilot was basically a largeish car. no towing, no third row seating, no storage.
it's 2026 and to replace it now, you'd need to buy something closer to the price of a small house.
Are you sure you didn't get mixed up somewhere? The Pilot has never had less than three rows of seating and rated towing capacity is up a smidge in the generations since 2011. (not that it would be the first choice for the frequent tower.)
Yeah it sounds like he went to replace a Honda pilot with a CR-V. Maybe a Passport? It's insane to think of somebody calling that a large car though.
No idea, I'm obv wrong about just about everything. It felt smaller and seemed like it had less room in the seats, but looking it up, it's the same or larger except the reduced cargo space due to the shape of the rear. The one we drove had no towing package on it. Our 2011 is a GT so it had that by default, we probably drove the base or the ex model.
Idk man that just sounds like the market capitalism that these captains of industry purportedly love so much
I dunno, I just feel like there might be some catch to this coming from.the country that can't even copy a modern fighter jet to save their lives.
So the US will be very limited in their options for EV's in the future. The bastion of freedom and choice is strangled by monopolies. It becomes more realistic every day that this will the Chinese century and the fall of faux Christian empire (at least that how they see themselves).
also very expensive too.
So the thing you identified that need to change is to run to your governments?
If you watch Zac Rios on YouTube, idk why anyone would buy a new American car - they are garbage
I mean, they'll survive on brand name alone. I personally wouldn't buy a Chinese EV, they're too new to the market and I don't know how well they last. I know that Toyotas and Hondas last well (if you buy the correct model)
Kinda think thats chinas plan
With EPA and other laws it's basically impossible to make a cheap, "no cpu" car these days. It's why everything is an SUV cuz apparently there are different rules for SUVs. Backup cameras are mandatory now. You car HAS to be a cpu on wheels.
I doubt the government will roll back any of those laws. Vehicle prices will only get higher, continuing to price people out. Which is horrible when you built your entire country around the premise of everyone owning a car.
Some people argue the sweet spot for analog cars is ~2006, but fee of those are still on the road. Others say 2016-2018 due to having a back-up camera on most models, but usually no sim cards.
Most things pase post plague are non-starters for privacy and data collection concerns.
I think 2013 is when they made tire pressure monitoring mandatory, seems like a good year to me
How many bailouts has Ford gotten? The US would be full electric with Tesla, and Tesla wouldn't have been in a spot to be bought by elon if we stopped bailing out shit companies.
It's amusing you picked ford given that they are the one that didn't get bailed out last time around.
I suppose we have different views on 5.9 billion dollar loans from the Department of Energy.
Which were paid back unlike the bailouts GM, Dodge got.
I wonder how much of the US problems stemmed from unionized labor pushing against extreme automation (dark factory).
There's no doubt companies got complacent but I imagine foreign manufacturers are abliged contractually bound to employee American folks in their plants.
What is a union supposed to do when your entire industry is in a "adopt (by accepting automation) or die" situation?
I'm all for worker protection and rights but how else do you compete in this landscape?
The unions' original demand was worker ownership, which actually fixes the problem. This is the compromise that the original owning class suggested, it's not the unions' fault that it was a fuckup.
Most automaker plants in southern states in the us are not unionized. That was the whole point: third world salaries in one of the largest markets