Still will not spend a dime on some trash ass Ford/GM vehicle. Inferior quality, bad tech, and more expensive? I’ll stay manifesting for their collapse

America should focus on making better and more affordable batteries/EV instead of limiting others.

Maybe we should just make better cars instead of engaging in protectionism

lol good luck.

They are doing a fine job of limiting themselves.

Isn’t China already making most technology products we buy (phones, computers, TVs etc) ? Sounds like political nonsense.

US legacy automakers are 10-15 years behind, baring Chinese parts will only keep the US in the Stone Age car-wise.

It’s funny how they give American car manufacturers a $7500 leg up, and GM STILL can’t fucking deliver EVs

Just came back from SEA. Every other new car was a chinese EV. I saw maybe 3 teslas total.

Actually US aims to eliminate US dependence on China (and Russia, North Korea) for strategic minerals and technology.

As long as US industry is independent and can’t be shutdown by China trade restrictions such as China’s current restriction on graphite exports.

So America will exclude its manufacturers from buying the best tech? That sounds great for competitiveness.

Most battery tech is in Chinese hands, including the LFP batteries that make affordable EVs possible. The BYD Blade battery is already in the Tesla M3 highland and Y sold in Europe and other markets.

Honestly this is good. Tesla was already making 99% of their parts here in the US.

I don’t think this is even going to affect them. It will pull other US automakers back to producing parts in the US.

It’d be nice if the US could partner with China to produce a better EV with partnerships between companies, but that was never going to happen anyways. 🤷‍♂️

Hopefully this doesn’t have a big impact on imported lithium ion batteries.

Climate change is a global crisis. If China is going to help solve the problem, we should celebrate their efforts.

And if the US’s domestic auto sector can’t keep up, and American voters care about that, then subsidize them until they can, I guess.

Unless Europe and the US act together, China will control the entire production cycle for electric vehicles. China is the place where 90% of precursor materials are processed, it already has 75% of battery manufacturing, and because the batteries are so heavy, car manufacturing is likely to happen close to battery manufacturing. Most of this capacity has been developed in the last few years, and is being subsidized by the Chinese state in order to obtain a dominant position, to the extent that according to the FT half of battery production is currently sitting unused.

There are many people who are relaxed or even positive about the Chinese government being in this position of dominance, but this is the most powerful authoritarian government in the world, run by a single party and increasingly by a single person, they have enormous economic and technological power, and they are already running probably the most sophisticated surveillance state to have ever existed, with a direct impact on their citizens daily life.

Vehicles are already covered in cameras, they have OTA updates, they send data and images remotely, and they carry us around at speeds of 70mph or more. In twenty years they will likely be fully autonomous, with the ability to be controlled remotely. It is just not feasible or realistic to give the Chinese government, effectively the Chinese Communist Party, that kind of control of data, remote viewing, and even over life and death, within all our countries, and assume there will no consequences.

So much for free competition/ marketplace…

In the 70’s American auto manufacturers focused solely on large and luxury vehicles which allowed Japanese brands to bring in small and low cost vehicles; as a result those American brands lost market share and sales.

Today we have American auto manufacturers making large and luxury electric vehicles and neglecting small and low cost options; with very few cars for sale. Chinese brands are going to dominate that market and reduce domestic brand market share. They already have low cost vehicles being sold across the world and going to enter the American market sooner than later with no competition.

Yesterday I argued that it is wrong to label auto execs as stupid. The argument is basically that these are intelligent people with the resources to get a good picture of what is coming down the pipes. As little as we may like their moves, they are in fact acting in their and their company’s best interests.

A deeper critique is that demonizing, or stereotyping those executives blinds us to actual facts and trends and so renders our analysis useless.

Now we get to politicians. The current crop of politicians is mostly about feathering its own nests. The US house of representatives and senate have been corrupted and are now seen as a quick road to wealth and power. Since you can’t get elected without a massive war chest billionaires buy politicians by the simple expedient of funding the morally pliable.

The stupidity comes in when you look at the policies: compare and contrast to lead up to the Great Depression! That is one of the classic definitions of stupid, doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.

Are the results this time going to be the same? No. Why not? because the Great Depression happened in a bipolar world the US versus Europe. Today we have a multipolar world, with the US, EU, China, Russia being the major poles.

Only the US and EU are going down the rabbit hole this time, and the EU still has time to avoid falling in.

The rest of the world will have a moderately bad recession and the US economy will crash. The EU as stated can go either way.