• supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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    6 months ago

    American car companies honestly deserve to get obliterated here, sorry it is capitalism shrugs.

    If you make shitty cars that are totally out of sync with what the world needs and that makes you massively lose against a country that is willing to actually make practical EVs… then your company deserves to go out of business.

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      All of these comments about CCP subsidies and flooding the market with cheap goods are hilarious, considering fossil fuels have received several trillion (with a capital T) in subsidies every year for generations, and the fact that most of the products you buy are already manufactured in China.

      If we didn’t want this to happen our governments should have invested in clean tech R&D and industries decades ago, and prevented “globalization” from offshoring everything to China. This is our governments and corporations fault… They’ve already had their cake, now they want to eat it too.

      • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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        6 months ago

        All of these comments about CCP subsidies and flooding the market with cheap goods are hilarious, considering fossil fuels have received several trillion (with a capital T) in subsidies every year for generations, and the fact that most of the products you buy are already manufactured in China.

        Great point especially because the biggest way the US has subsidized fossil fuels isn’t even the trillions of dollars, it is the subsidization of fossil fuels through the foreclosure of young people’s future and every single generation after that running for thousands of years out into the indefinite future.

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      The last time this happened it was Japanese cars, and the US auto industry failed and got bailed out. I expect that to happen again with Chinese EVs.

      The ability to make cars involves a lot of skills that can have military applications. There’s a reason car factories were converted to build basically everything in WWII, and the US won’t give up that ability for national security reasons. So our auto industry can’t fail, and will be propped up by the government.

      • OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        Absolutely they’ll get bailed out. They know they’re “too big to fail” and will make stupid short term decisions based on the fact that they won’t have to deal with their own nonsense further down the road.

        • DdCno1@kbin.social
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          6 months ago

          I have to wonder if people are serious with these absurd suggestions or what on Earth you are trying to achieve by writing this. This is about as realistic at demanding that America should build a second moon entirely out of cheese.

          • jonne@infosec.pub
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            6 months ago

            Yeah, it’s so much better to just write checks to failing companies. Obama bailed out GM without any preconditions.

            What if instead the government took the equivalent amount of ownership and put them on the path to building EVs? GM could’ve been Tesla without the Musk issue. And the public shares could’ve either been kept by the government, sold on the market later on or turned over to the workers so they could have someone on the board.

            None of this is an outlandish phantasy, other countries did similar.

              • jonne@infosec.pub
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                6 months ago

                Free market is when the government writes blank checks to fix market failures.

            • BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              What if instead the government took the equivalent amount of ownership and put them on the path to building EVs? GM could’ve been Tesla without the Musk issue.

              In 2009, $/kwh prices were astronomical. There is a reason the Model 3 didn’t exist until 2017. Trying to make that car back in 2009 would have been a catastrophically awful idea.

              You guys have to stop with these suicidal ideas.

              • jonne@infosec.pub
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                6 months ago

                The Tesla roadster was released in 2008, and electricity has always been cheaper than the equivalent in petrol.

                • DdCno1@kbin.social
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                  6 months ago

                  This user meant the price per kWh of battery capacity. The Tesla Roadster was little more than an expensive proof of concept that was vastly inferior compared to the Lotus Elise it was based on.

                  • jonne@infosec.pub
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                    6 months ago

                    And then the Model S came out, and while expensive was still a decent all round car. And I’m sure GM could’ve made it cheaper/better if they went that route.

                    I think you’re suggesting that I’m proposing that GM would have needed to stop building ICE cars and switching to electric overnight, instead of transitioning as technology and economics allowed instead of what they did now, which was ignore the whole thing until Tesla got successful and playing catch up, first to Tesla, now to BYD.

                • BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  The US government forcing GM to make a $100,000 luxury EV in 2008/9 would have been so laughably bad I can’t put it into words. And yes, the $/kwh of batteries was terrible then, why do you think EVs were so damn expensive in 2009?

          • BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Yeah, that suggestion is hysterically nonviable for a plethora of reasons. Even joking about that would eviscerate the average politician. Not even just the average American politician, the average European politician would get wrecked for such a nonviable idea.

          • AA5B@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            What kind of cheese? Are private citizens allowed to go there and fill our pockets? Or is it government cheese and we wouldn’t want to

    • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      I just worry that, as always, we the customers will bear brunt of this. Cheap EVs flooding the market is what American car companies deserve but if it’s all garbage wish . Com versions of Teslas then American consumers don’t deserve to have yet another disposable commodity forced on them. If the course of action follows we’ll have shit overpriced EVs and almost no real selection.

      • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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        6 months ago

        Cheap EVs flooding the market is what American car companies deserve but if it’s all garbage wish . Com versions of Teslas then American consumers don’t deserve to have yet another disposable commodity forced on them.

        China doesn’t make crap, that is very very outdated perspective on Chinese goods. Chinese corporations isn’t necessarily in the business of ensuring quality control all the way up the production chain, but more luxurious brands still make all their shit in China too, they just (sometimes) add an additional layer of quality control on top of the Chinese method of industrial production.

        I am sure there are absolutely shit Chinese EVs, but I am absolutely sure that there are also extremely nice affordable economy Chinese EVs, because China is a massive country and has countless different industrial production chains. It is simply a matter of doing the work to figure out which ones are producing quality EVs and which ones aren’t, same as buying any other product directly from China instead of having a western brand do the work of finding the quality products being produced in China for you and relabeling it with their brand.