"We took zero action to compete and relied on protectionism and other forms of corruption to stay in business knowing that China was pulling ahead, we refused to plan for the future and harvested all the money for our owners instead and now we're fucked unless you bail us out! Not the owners, of course, who could afford to bail us out, they will continue siphoning money even though they're clearly incompetent, we need your taxes" ... How about no?
Capitalists sound strange when they are faced with actual competition. That's... kinda the whole point guys.
Maybe you should have kept up and innovated instead of just trying to stifle your competition and enshittify your products idiots.
But think of the short-term shareholder value! Have you no decency?
Compete or die
almost as if competition is what capitalism was always supposed to be about
No, thats what markets are about. Capitalism is about making money by stealing other people’s surplus labor value.
"We insisted on fossil fuels and now Chinese electric car companies are eating our lunch, boo hoo"
Cry more fat capitalists
That's capitalism.
¯\(ツ)/¯
Well that's capitalism. It's what you wanted right? Competition to keep you on your toes?
Looks like the invisible hand of the market favors what the people want more than what bosses think we can take.
China will soon, or prolly has already, be the number 1 country. US oligarchs are just focussed on getting richer instead of trying to advance humanity technologically.
A nation can enrich it's elites in the short term at the expense of its people, or it can invest in its people (education, commons, etc) at the expense of its elites.
The west, and especially my cesspool the US has made its choice.
China has been heavily building up its commons and infrastructure in the same 40 year span the US has let its commons and education fall into utter ruin in order to sell economically segregated education and gated communities for private profit.
The US is culturally indoctrinated to be hostile towards the very concept of society. Imagine resenting paying into universal healthcare because you don't want to accidentally pay for your countrymen's "bad decisions" like... Eating food.
I go on Rednote quite a bit. The US attitude towards China, just like non pure crony capitalism is "they are evil and from hell" for being a society. Their people, not their politicians, their people, are sweet, intelligent, and mostly treat Americans with an "are you guys OK? We've heard (true) horror stories."
Thats humanity. Why would I want my schaudenfreude and greed ruled cesspool to "win?" It's not about winning, it's about the wellbeing of ALL your people. If the US dominates the world culturally, all that would mean is that humanity stands for "fuck you I got mine" at which point I have no comradery with my species whatsoever.
Actual human worth/value is measured in empathy for one another, which makes the US destitude in what matters.
Good these are companies that fought the transition to EVs every step of the way. Toyota in particular. Which was ironic after releasing the Prius
Toyota is way too conservative. After nailing hybrid tech early on, it seems like they wasted the opportunity to put it on every vehicle they make which would have been such an amazing step forward, instead of treating it as a weird niche for so long.
Also that bz4x or whatever deserves a spot on the worst cars of all time list, just straight up ewaste.
How many of those companies spent literal billions of dollars on stock buybacks to inflate share market price over the last decade instead of investing in the people and facilities and products to remain competitive. Even if there is dumping I doubt it's anywhere near the combined spent on share price inflation buybacks & savings instead of investing in the workers and business, these companies enjoy unjustified tax breaks and subsidies from their governments as well.
This is a the economy being equated to wealth/investor class problem. Workers in and around cities want cheap affordable evs & charging infrastructure for renters, mechanics and parts producers want to build and work on affordable evs. People who own stocks expecting growth returns and executive compensation want to sell 10 cars a year for a trillion dollars each if they could.
Yeah, this is what bad leadership is. Lack of leadership really. China and the US both found themselves the manufacturers of the world.
China took the money and built an infrastructure. The US took the money and destroyed unions..
Maybe the workers at Toyota, Ford and Honda should take control of these plants. They would run it better without the capitalist leeches squeezing out every ounce of profits into their own pockets.
Then stop being greedy fuckers
I dunno how the Japanese and Koreans will do, but I 100% guarantee that the American companies will do absolutely nothing, whine about it to their child rapist in chief and then get a massive government bailout paid for by ordinary Americans.
Well I guess your high paid CEOs and executives really fucked up then, right? That's exactly what you were saying? Because everyone else saw this coming from miles away, and we have been clamoring for these kinds of cars for a long ass time, even small gas cars are hard to find now. So what are those guys paid such high salaries for if they are so completely dense...?
Don't charge $100,000 for a regular fucking vehicle?
Seriously, all the useless expensive shit they add to vehicles to make them unmaintainable data miners is why they're going to get slaughtered.
Give me an electric pickup with 4WD and crank up windows. Preferably no radio. I'd buy one of those Slates in a heartbeat if it were 4WD, as much as I hate Jeff Bezos.
I've been wanting Honda to make an affordable all-electric car for years. Based on how BYD is selling, I'm guessing I'm not the only one.
Instead they keep making bigger and bigger, gas-guzzling vehicles, with bells and whistles we don't need, saying that's what sells and they can't make an electric vehicle they're happy with.
Well, too bad. It seems I've bought my last Honda, sadly, because my next vehicle will not burn gasoline.
Okay, so you're getting out-competed in the market. Pay proper wages, invest in innovation instead of executive salaries, and take a slimmer profit margin to help your customers.
Aww man, China is dumping to gain market share for EVs? That's crazy. If only car manufacturers had adapted to EVs sooner and researched more into better battery technologies, they might not be in this position. Get fucked. This whole, every car has to be super luxorious in America is getting ridiculous. I looked at a rav4 last year and the "features" they included in the base model was mental. I just want my car to go when I press the pedal. Brake. And a CD Player. I don't need half the shit they put in American market cars. Doesn't help that I have a large family that needs to travel far, frequently. So, my hands are tied with getting an SUV. I'd kill for a better train transit in America. Next car gets to be an EV though. Cause that's the sedan.
I would bet that Chinese auto manufacturers aren't taking 6 billion a month out of their company to pay shareholders in stock buybacks. Maybe reinvesting in the company to remain competitive is in fact, a good strategy.
Oh no my portfolio... Seriously, there's something called competition, it's been around for a long time. If Chinese companies continue pushing ahead while US companies remain complacent then that's just what will happen. These older car manufacturers have had DECADES to prepare for the newer battery tech to design and build good affordable BEVs, but they just didn't.
This is what happens when billionaires try to steal the future. Read about the General Motors EV1. Oil companies have fought against the development of EV charging infrastructure in the US.
automation across all levels of production
Maybe its true. Regardless, article sounds like anti-worker propaganda to me. China is gonna eat our lunch! Better take a pay cut, and be glad you're not laid off!
I cannot wait to see legacy auto disappear. It’s about time they failed. It’s fucking absurd that the most expensive piece of tech I own has a 15fps display with touch response rate measured in seconds, rather than milliseconds. They did this to themselves.
Legacy auto did nothing to compete with Tesla software, and they came out over a decade ago.
Oh, and they took the ‘10 bailouts and did fuckall with them. They didn’t take the bailouts and make a suddenly better product.
Cold Take:
Good. They don't deserve to survive. Demand will ensure industry bounceback and stability long term, at least nationally as new buniesses fill the void and labour recovers. Mind you, the US industry will probably never compete globally again having collectively chosen to just lag behind technological trends toward efficiency and sustainability to appease fossil fuel entanglements. These companies made the decisions they did not to adapt at a critical turning point and this is the result, and their current rhetoric is an artifact of decades of coddling by a lopsided nanny state spoon-feeding subsidies and bailouts to shitty investors and executives with garbage management practices at the expense of public services and infrastructure. There is no too big to fail, that's capitalist coping propped up by a corrupt and captured economy that THEY lobbied for.
In short, get fucked, and take your CEOs with you.
That’s the problem with disrupters, people are so involved with dismissing them that they don’t see what’s happening. For years it was all about cheap Chinese labour then turn around and discover that it’s really all about robotic factories and slick organisation. Throw in EVs and it’s the same but worse.
Herp my derp look who is mad about the "free market" now?
Don't come crawling to us for bailouts this time
they already are, it's why you see no Chinese evs in the USA, American car companies cant compete, so you get expensive cars as the tax on that
and that would be ok if the US car companies were frantically retooling before the tariffs ceased in a couple years but they aren't, they're just stalling and the C suite is kicking the can down the road until its someone else's problem. They're well as are through.
"Detroit Motor City". I.e subsidizing losses.
Of course you could apply protectionism, but that wouldn't be fair and would set a public precedent on the global markets.
But yeah, the petroleum lobby really managed to screw us sideways. All those anti EV, anti solar and anti wind campaigns.
It is perhaps the biggest, oldest, slowest moving and most fraudulent of bailouts in all of history.
We are just that stupid.
Good morning. You old style car companies (and it is not just the US ones, count the European companies in, too) slept through the last decades. They tried everything in the book to supress EVs, and still keep developing fossil fuel cars to be released in ten years.
And now they start to wake up, seeing that the world moved onwithout them, and they cry.
that he did not spot a single human worker on the supplier's floor.
I know that workers cost money to have but eveytime I read something like this I wonder if the corporations take into consideration the decrease in the number of people who may be able to purchase the product in the first place.
When you have an economy that isn’t capitalist, you can plan it…and extracting surplus value from workers isn’t necessary. You can automate your industries without destroying the quality of life of the people….in fact, you improve it because people can work less.
It really is that capitalism has exhausted its usefulness and ability to advance society. It is now socialism or barbarism.
This continues to baffle me. Europe, the US, and likely even Japan was never going to be able to win the race to the bottom on price. China understands its supply chain and mineral strengths and has optimized its entire production towards churning out good (or good enough) EVs at scale.
Still, the US could continue to wall China out of its market with massive tariffs while also promoting alternative cheaper vehicle options, a large portion of which should and could be EVs. But the US hasn't even done that... Domestic manufacturers have run screaming from EVs, seemingly ceding the entire field to China.
While Toyota and Honda at least have an acclaimed history in low cost and efficient vehicles, Ford is literally 1/3rd the the reason the US doesn't manufacture sedans anymore, with the other 2/3rds being GM and Chrysler.
I actually witnesses them layoff their entire sedan division in real time when they announced the end of the fusion. I'm pretty sure it was mostly liquidated by the time covid hit.
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