Quote from: Tesla on May 12, 2024, 18:30:57We need more options for consumers. Plenty of US car companies made outlandish profits in China for the past 40 years but now that China have capable auto makers you shut the door out of fear. How capitalistic and unfair.
To be fair, it was a "give and take". US automakers made a lot of profit in China, but China required the US automakers to form joint ventures with Chinese companies and hand over all their technology to the Chinese companies. And since it is a joint venture, they made half the profit as well
Quote from: RAZAK ABBAS on May 12, 2024, 21:46:39We have a problem here. How do you expect people making minimum wage of $15 or $20 per hour to buy cars made by people making over $40 per hour? It's difficult. I bet the Chinese auto manufacturers aren't paying their workers over $10 per hour.And so, with their government subsidies coupled with low wages, they could sell their EV cars cheaply and still make profits. Then, why the European and American manufacturers couldn't find a way to tackle this short of slapping massive tariffs on Chinese cars.This could be stifling the free flow of world trade. The poor consumers pay and American and their European counterparts continue with their merry old and tired bad ways.
That isn't really an issue, workers make up a small % of the cost of a car. And people on minimum wage are likely buying used cars anyways, not new
In the end, car manufacturing is about mass production at scale. You have to build a platform which costs a billion dollars, then build cars on top that platform, build supply chain, build factory tooling. Which means you need to produce a lot of cars on the same platform to reduce the fixed cost per car,
To date, other than the Chinese and Tesla, not a single automaker is producing even 100k EVs, and some of these have 2-3 platforms
And that is really the big issue, many of the established automakers just did a lot of talking but nothing to back up their talk. None of them put any serious effort to scaling EVs, they just kept them around to claim they did while focusing on their ICE cars. They didn't want EVs to be too successful
As for China, they had little established automakers to begin with and gladly jumped all in during the gap