So instead of healthcare or housing, you’d rather our tax dollars go to Ford and GM so that you can buy a cheap new car every year or two? At what point in history were new cars ever obtainable for most people? I make decent pay and even I have never owned a brand new car because buying used is a much better value.

You’re arguing for the Walmartification of the auto industry and all it’s workers, where locally made goods are replaced with a bunch of cheaply made goods from an overseas sweatshop and all the local businesses go under. This isn’t good for anyone but the Chinese government.

The profit margins are insane compared to sedans.

Domestic manufacturers almost entirely phased out small cars long ago before EVs were even significant because they can’t build them as well as companies like Hyundai, Toyota, and Honda. Even those companies have phased out tiny cars because nobody in the US was buying them.

Why don’t you buy a Chevy Bolt, or Nissan Leaf if you want a small, cheap EV?

You think European, Japanese, and South Korean automakers are American companies? That’s weird.

Do you really think BYD and other Chinese state-owned auto manufacturers have found some secret sauce that nobody else can figure out allowing them to somehow build a car cheaper than anyone else in the world, or do you think it’s more likely that the state is paying for them to have artificially low prices?

Furthermore, let’s imagine the rest of the world matches these subsidies, what is your end goal here? Are you wanting everyone in the US to dump their old car in a parking lot and go out and buy a new one every year like people used to do with smartphones? That’s not exactly good for the environment and is just consumerism on steroids.

Ford received a loan to use toward building new factories for EV production. In China, Ford would owned by the government and funded with taxpayer dollars directly.

Get a couple year old one then.

If you’re on a budget why would you be looking at brand new cars?

Yay for freedom

Or import European EVs that aren’t pre-approved. No Renault Twizy.

Your best option is voting for people who will build transit in your local elections

Fair. Mostly I bike, but my town is pretty small. Two friends have an electric smart car, so I’ve heard stories about them. I came across a couple that runs a delivery service (mostly food) using small EVs. I forget what model.

Very, very broadly, I’d say a lot of my concerns boil down to them convincing the broader industry as a whole that cutting costs and delivering a shit product is okay, so long as you’re doing it as a “technology company”

• Pushing out buggy, half-baked SW because “we’ll fix it with an OTA” and a recall has little to no direct financial impact, allowing for you to gamble lives on hopefully getting a SW update out before the bugs cause accidents or deaths, rather than spending the time/money to get it right from the start.

• Removing stuff like important, standard hard controls (buttons/stalks/etc) to make everything a touch control, purely for cost cutting, but acting like it’s because buttons are “old tech”

• Pushing that 100% BEV is the only current solution, rather than pushing for a far cheaper mass improvement of fuel economy and scaling BEVs as HEVs grow too, especially in developing markets.

• Using a proprietary charging standard for nearly a decade, solely as a sales tactic, and only cooperating with other OEMs once it allowed them to collect government subsidies

Those are just a few I can think of off the very top of my head, and the ones I’ve seen have the most impact on the broader industry. I can go into more detail on any of them as well.