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Once again ordinary people in the West are saved from affordable, low-pollution living, and Western companies are saved from having to compete.
That's catchy, but not entirely true.
China heavily subsidizes EV manufacturers (and production in general), plus they have cheaper environmental and labour standards... it's not like there's a fair market EU companies can compete in without some sort of handicap.
PS: Yes, "western" countries have been playing along with China's deliberate long term strategy with full awareness of where it would lead, but that's another story that is both much older and has a much broader scope than the EV industry.
You can't allow dumping-inducing subsidies without also allowing defensive tariffs, otherwise the richer and more authoritarian countries, which have greater capacity for subsidies and greater ability to concentrate them in specific sectors, will easily kill foreign competition and establish monopolies.
The marketplace brah is a place where, without regulations that maintain a degree of fairness, the rich kills the poor, competition dies off, and consumers are drained to their last cent.
Just think of it: competition is when different actors fight it off and it ends the moment one of the contenders wins.
If you want the fight to go on forever, you don't want an unregulated market.
...
then talk about subsidies or non capitalist country controlling the currency, markets, VCs, etc.
What does that even mean?
I did… that was the part about extracting value from a dying industry.
I feel like we would need to utterly destroy the working class to the point that cheap Chinese EVs would become expensive if we were to compete at the same level. I could be wrong, but how many of the chinese workers are driving brand new evs?
Western manufacturing tends to be much more automation heavy. Chinese manufactures don't bother with buying a $100k machine that can make a car part when they can just hire 10 guys at $10k/yr to make that same part with a $50 drill press and some hand files.
It's not that it all strictly balances out, but if we actually gave a shit we could potentially be cost competitive for a lot of price brackets, especially given the costs to move whole ass cars across the Pacific.
Bear in mind these sub $10k Chinese EVs are not something US consumers would really be interested in buying, they are basically tiny car shaped golf carts with extremely minimalist feature sets. Think 'no audio system at' all type interiors.
bruh https://www.statista.com/chart/31337/new-installations-of-industrial-robots-by-country/
Meaning that we would either have to increase tax rates or borrow more money? Wow, what a great solution.
Or not subsidize oil and gas to the tune of ~$20 billion/yr and corn at $2.2 billion/yr and redirect that towards EVs.
Yeah I find it a ridiculous parallel I recently saw an article that put a number on Chinese EV subsidies and it seemed extremely low compared to the barrels of money we've been giving the oil companies.
Last I checked US prints money like there's no tomorrow for shit like wars, but as soon as it comes to subsidizing something actually useful all of a sudden the concern trolling starts.
Hah. Volkswagen is in trouble right now because they fucked up the transition to electric cars completly. What do you think will happen now? That's right, we the (German) people will have to save them now, with our money. Basically the same shit as a subsidy, just later in the process. Kinda like what the Chinese do, just the really stupid way.
Oh, and of course, it will be everybody's fault but their own.
I wish they had an eGolf comparable to the Bolt and the Leaf.
And that's a bad thing? Any sensible government is going to subsidise renewable energy and electric vehicles. It makes both economic and environmental sense. Anyone not doing this is an idiot and a climate terrorist.
Subsidizing sales of EVs (ie. I pay for my neighbor's new EV because I want cleaner air) does make environmental sense.
Subsidizing production does not have the same positive environmental impact, mainly because factories in China pollute more than factories, say, in the EU (due to different environmental laws), but also because moving finished products from China to the "west" obviously pollutes more than moving just those components that would need to be sourced from China anyways (eg. batteries).
As for the "makes economic sense" part... IDK: I guess that mainly depend on your political stance.
Personally, I don't like that both sales and production subsidies have the effect of moving money from the poor to the rich, but other people may focus on different effects (eg. more production = more jobs) and support subsides.
In case you wonder: my take is that, instead of incentivizing adoption and production of EVs, one should disincentivize internal combustion vehicles by adding taxes to them (which, in a sense, aren't really taxes but just charging for the very real environmental costs society as a whole will have to pay for your shiny SUV).
You should really think twice before spewing judgements... and also avoid misusing words like "terrorist" because, when misused this way, it only conveys that you don't like someone, dulling your message instead of strengthening it.
I'm asking why the EU isn't subsudising their domestic EV industry and starting a competition in electric propulsion technology. That would benefit everyone, except maybe the oil lobby.
Why not both? And preferrably better subsidies for public transport / cycles / footpaths, etc.
If killing a handful of people is terrorism, what would you call trying to kill the entire human race (along with thousands of random other species)? 'Terrorist' is, if anything, too mild a word to describe such filth.
You cherry picked his argument and left out the rest where he states China's as cheaper standards of environmental "friendliness"
Because (1) lithium contamination is a much, much, smaller problem than climate change and (2) we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. Of course, if the EU is combining taxes on EV import with an equivalent investment in public transport or cycling / walking infrastructure, I wouldn't be complaining.
Can you explain to us what the problem with China subsidizing EV manufacturers is exactly? That's how China chooses to run their economy, and it's entirely their business. The whole argument for capitalist markets is that they're supposed to be more competitive last I checked. If that's not the case then maybe the west should reexamine its assumptions about how an economy should be run.
@yogthos @gomp It's the capitalist textbook example, to conquer a market by undercutting prices and to crush competition in that market that cannot compete - and to later increase prices when there is no more competition. You can see this all over the world, not only with China and EVs, but also for example with Uber and the taxi business or Europe with their food exports to poorer countries outside the EU.
China is already dominating lots of markets, and what you're describing isn't happening. For example, pretty much all solar panels are produced in China, and they're still dirt cheap today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) (it's not limited to EVs)
Dumping is when you sell things below cost to drive competition out and then jack up the price once you achieve a monopoly. What's happening here is that China simply produces things much cheaper than the Europeans. It's not limited to EVs.
They do this in an attempt to take over other markets.
If nothing else, they help get their brands into the world.
There's loads of chinese EVs driving around where I live now, so based on anecdotal evidence, it's working.
You mean just like every other country?
Is the US subsidising EVs? The EU? Anyone else?
Other than that, sure.
Yeah, US massively subsidizes Tesla, are you seriously so ignorant not to know that?
It is massively clownish though because as the barrier to entry goes up higher everyone will just switch to micromobility which is built mostly by the Chinese