this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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[Dormant] Electric Vehicles
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"American companies are scared of the open market when it works against them, yet refuse to make better products"
There is a good reason why American companies are scared. It almost never works out for them. Sony vs Zenith TVs is a great example about how a foreign company improved on a technology (color tv) and made zenith look like a stingy dinosaur overnight. Instead of selling color TV's zenith just doubled down and sold cheaper shittier TV's. By the time color was standard, their reputation was ruined and no one wanted a Zenith when Sony was the best. Sony however wouldn't have been able to get into the market without help from zenith in the first place.
They should stop choosing the "double down on making products shittier part".
You could've been telling the story of the 80s automotive industry. Or really any American manufacturer.
And part of the reason why I am not on speaking terms with our regional sales teams. I gave up trying to explain what integrity and continuous improvement is.
True
The issue was that Chinese EVs are ahead of Western EVs due to aggressive subsidy and investment by the Chinese government to get ahead. So the market has been distorted which is what was "scary" according to the quite in the article that spawned the headline.
Having said that, I'm not sure I believe that Chinese EVs will be better quality. They may be cheaper and they may even have technically advanced but from experience of other Chinese products, quality is not a word I'd associate with them.
The US government can do the same, and they do bailouts for companies often too. Isn't that also meddling in the free market? Why didn't the US government incentivize EV then?
Pretty sure that’s a core part of Tesla’s growth model.
One of the ways they have are through CAFE credits - incentives for higher fuel efficiency and electric vehicles, since at least 2012. However the credits are tradeable, so legacy manufacturers instead bought credits from Tesla, and other EV manufacturers
BYD is so ahead because they were making batteries for a long time before going into ev business. Also I would not say tesla quality is high either
Look into Harley Davidson, they should have gone bankrupt multiple times but were saved by high tarrifs placed on imported bikes.
Harleys are so ridiculously overpriced it's hard to believe tariffs on the competition would make any difference
I definitely wouldn't waste my money on one, much better bang for buck out there.
yes. similar to a lot of western products.
I agree with you. China is manufacturing cheap products because that's what (a lot of) consumers want as well. They also make expensive quality products, too. I have friends who like to rag on Made In China products but they love the quality of their iPhones which are just Designed in California.
What do you do when you need something fixed? Can parts be had?
Americans aren't going to care about quality that much if their monthly payment is only $200. As long as a Chinese EV is reliable long enough to make it's total cost of ownership much lower than American EVs or ICEs they will line up to buy them.
The American market has been desperate for a cheap and reliable car, a role Japanese automakers used to fill, and both US and Japanese makers know it.
i wanna Datsun
American cars have their own subsidies as well. I mean the government bailed them out of dying several years ago.
We shouldn't have bailed them out. We should have bought a public controlling interest in them.
I don’t know about other countries but US has both pretty strong incentives and protectionist barriers. However they’re meant to be temporary. This is legacy automaker’s chance. A few years for the government to help them transition, but they need to be willing to come out of the closet. They’re throwing that opportunity away
If anything, American companies have a massive resistance to change. Change has a risk and a price, and they’re determined to stick with what works. Like the movie industry…why make brave and risky moves to make a unique movie when you can retread old ones or wring every penny out of a franchise?
Anyway, the US auto industry has a long history of institutionalized exceptionalism, I can’t find it right now but there’s a quote from one automaker that, when confronted with a suggestion that change is needed, the response is essentially “you’ll buy what we tell you you’re going to buy”. IOW they dictate what the consumer wants and gets. And maybe they’re gambling on more protections against Chinese companies so they don’t have to change and can maintain their control. Incentives just seem to be soaked up and disappear. They jack up the prices to the consumer so there’s no real help, like Tesla raised their price to match buying incentives offered by the government to consumers. Straight up greed.
short sighted greed. That behavior makes sense only if you’re focused on the short term and don’t care about the future of your company
Time and again the quarterly report has taken precedence over the long-term wellbeing of a company. Think of the value for the shareholders.
American Cars look like relics from the last century when compared to Chinese design and capabilities, that is why the American car companies do not want Chinese brands in their market because there is no way they can compete with them.
Chinese brands just arrived in Mexico and it has been a massacre for american and European brands, a lot of car dealers have been closing lately and you can see in the streets that most new cars are Chinese. The Chinese dealers have impeccable service and the architecture is impressive. Prices are 1/3 of the European cars and 1/2 of the American Cars. The only ones that might be able to compete are japanese and Korean car companies.
Every country does this that is a red herring. Does your country have public schools that produce people who work in the automotive sector? Congrats you live in a country that has an agressive subsidy and investment in the automotive sector.
Cheap labour under a command economy is hard to beat, I'll grant you that. But the best counter to that is to focus on high quality construction, like Toyota does, for example
People were saying the same thing on quality about Japanese car when they first arrived on the market.
so what? the us subsidies stuff all the time too.