It’s nuts how the phrase “Kodak moment” has changed.

There’s no reason to be protective over the auto industry. The years where auto plants could transition to weapons fabrication are over; the manufacturing process has become specialized to chase efficiency. If anything, it’s justice should American car brands go out of business, because they were subsidized and propped up time and time again and stole the money given to them to afford innovation. Most recently in 2010, when American cars lost in the marketplace because they didn’t match hybrid efficiency, they simply did not meet or exceed their competition. Instead, they sat on their asses, took the bailouts, and the Japanese sold better cars. Now, Japanese cars are losing to Chinese cars, while still maintaining superiority over American cars.

Anecdotally, the newest gen Ford Bronco, Explorer, and F150 ICE cars are terrible. I got to daily drive all of them while my Lightning was in the shop for repairs because they couldn’t loan an EV. Those cars were noisy, slow, awfully designed interiors, inefficient, and just plain cost more than the competition.

Can you give me that legitimate reason beyond hurting poor Ford Chevy and GM's pockets?

The oil lobby has been actively encouraging this for decades. Automakers are lock step with the oil lobby. This is so people have to stay reliant on petrol.

There's no EV infrastructure here where I live. The amount of scam solar is like 10:1 here as well.

I wish he would just sell it and let it actually become a worthwhile company. If he would just fuck himself out of the equation I think Tesla would be a lot better.

It is known as the Nazi car brand now which is wild when Volkswagen still exists.

And the oil industry. Also, nobody wanted to spend the money to build EV infrastructure.

It sure as hell isn't time to ride the bus or build a train. So I guess we're doing your thing.

Especially without the tax credits to subsidize the cost.

Too bad the US doesn't have access to cheaper non-US made EVs.

The US is struggling to sell new cars and EV's make up only 10% of new cars sold.

I would love to buy an EV but a brand new car is too expensive and there’s not much in the way of reasonably priced, used EVs available so I’m currently sticking with the internal combustion engine.

One of the main reason a country's government will subsidize or otherwise encourage green energy and EV adoption is as a geopolitical strategy to reduce dependence on oil, due to the fact that most oil-producing nations are deeply unstable for one reason or another. The USA's problem is that it is one of those deeply unstable oil-producing nations, and so it wants to keep the renewables market suppressed and the oil and oil derivatives market boosted.

Here in Ireland we don't have one jot of domestic oil production, so renewables are seen as a way to not be held hostage by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (and idiotically unnecessary wars in the Middle East, and idiotically random tariff wars) because we do have our own water, wind and sunshine. America doesn't have that natural incentive to the same extent that we do.

There just aren't that many domestic automakers actually attempting the market the way China is.

I don't want to nor think we should try to compete with a country that employs slave labour.

Exploitative labour practices in China may have paid dividends for us westerners, but I don't want to work the way they work.

They deserve to be left out of the conversation. Nazi cunts

Here they are:

Even Tesla, which saw its European sales skyrocket in the early months of this year, has watched its U.S. presence dwindle. (The backlash to Musk’s politics didn’t help.)

Being a footnote of failure among ineffective US policy and the big 3 setting themselves up for international disaster feels appropriate.

I guess nazis need their EVs too

Last i heard they identified themselves as a robotics company so

Still doesn't help with the fact that not a single person outside the US will buy a Tesla or a Ford.

Sooner or later Americans will stumble onto TikToks and see how cool BYDs or Beijings are, and they'll wonder why their Chevrolet is a piece of shit.

The iron curtain only gets you so far when the internet exists. And when a government is too incompetent to even try to censor it.

Think of it like Kodak with digital cameras. Even knowing the market is being disrupted, even having the technology, there is never a short term reason for self disruption. If the company can’t consider the longer term while a market is being disrupted, they will not survive. Of course selling a couple thousand EVs is not going to earn back the cost of entirely new factories and supply chains after two years. Duh. Of course it’s easier to sell hundreds of thousands of legacy vehicles built in legacy factories that are already paid for using supply chains that already exist. But one of those approaches is on a decline to the grave while the other is a paradigm shift for the entire global industry

Doesn’t help the US is so anti-competitive, so protectionist, so many policies favoring excessively large inefficient vehicles. By the time we emerge from this smog of political chaos, legacy American car companies will no longer be able to survive independently nor compete globally.

But the car companies certainly lay deserve a lot of blame- across the entire car market preferring to sell fewer more expensive vehicles, rather than more vehicle that are more affordable.