The West’s fossil fuel and ICE car lobby made every effort to prevent the West from winning this.
The West barely tried to begin with
The West’s fossil fuel lobby made every effort to prevent the West from winning.
Greed and smugness?
The North American car companies went through this once in the 70s and 80s with Japanese companies. They clearly don’t fucking learn.
Pumping out nothing but garbage SUVs and trucks. Whoda thunk it?
This isn’t even close to being over, people have zero patience nowadays, it’s stock market syndrome. Everyone thinks in quarters now not years or decades, it’s stupid and short sighted.
With all the US companies stopping any EV research or development, it pretty much is. Time to queue another set of bailouts, that are totally not a subsidy.
Yes, I don’t have much faith in American companies either, close to none, but regardless it is just way too early for a headline like this. It’s just propaganda really.
Yes, the NA companies think in quarters. China thinks in decades. We don’t stand a chance.
Fine, NA is over, all in on South Korea then.
Deal. At least they sent their president to prison when he attempted a coup.
How the West Lost to China in the EV Race
Because of “Profits now! fuck long term. I won’t be here. I’ll have my paycheck collected”
The unions in the West aren’t exactly helping - not unlike when the Japanese automakers began importing to USA. The rattle in your (ill fitting) 1980s car door might be a beer bottle. Now, manufacturing and QA processes have improved, but the unions aren’t spearheading and championing reskilling to electric vehicles. I believe in unions, but I also am personally aware of how they can be abused to keep bad workers on the job.
Business leaders and the dealers do in fact own the responsibility for losing to EVs, though. The unions demand a fair wage, but the business leaders still want to have profit margins growing every quarter. Investment in R&D is seen as an unnecessary expense.
Slave labor driven by a capitalist dictatorship.
In the first minute, “It has nothing to do with cheap labor.”
Yeah, okay. At least you blast out the lies immediately so we know where you stand.
Every time they open a factory outside of China they’re found to be using slave labor. But I’m sure it’s different within China. Okay, buddy.
Agree. Slave labor driven by a capitalist dictatorship is what makes you keep focusing in ICE cars so you can keep your oil friends happy.
Why do you feel it so necessary to defend China and deflect. It’s well established that BYD uses slave labor.
I’m not defending China. I’m attacking the US. “A capitalist dictatorship that uses slave labor” is… the definition of the US right now.
I suppose we do buy a lot of Chinese products. Not BYD though. Ironically, it’s probably less true than ever thanks to that.
I would guess it is simple, we have big oil lobbies and China is a big oil importer.
It’s more down to domestic auto industries blocking imports of foreign EVs, which kneecaps competition and leads to complacency among domestic producers.
Yes, we are going into a “Second Malaise Era” of automotive companies for many of the same reasons. The fact that this is happening as car companies are switching to electric engines spells longterm disaster for the US automotive industry in a way the First Malaise Era did not however, they will be left too far behind to be competitively recoverable.
Letting in just a few Chinese EVs would do wonders to reinvigorate Detroit’s innovative engine. We’d see actual competence for once. But it’s easier to erect walls than actually do something useful.
I think the more destructive force is US business culture among the upper class is not actually concerned with reality but rather with imposing a set of beliefs on workers and the company they work for that are completely and utterly unconnected to reality.
US automotive executives will and have done this exact same thing over and over again, according to their theology treating their worker’s worse, micromanaging them and denying their ability to organize is the superior path forward, period, no matter what the evidence says. This is an axiomatic belief not one they arrived at through careful observation of what actually happens in real life or that they are willing to re-evaluate.
What we are seeing now is this same disastrously incompetent class of wealthy families’ useless Ivy League grads have become comfortable enough outright with endorsing MAGA that they have explicitly adopted fossil fuels into their theology of money, efficiency and market competitiveness be damned.
This endlessly confuses “non-political” people who lean fiscally conservative because they truly believe economics is a scientific method of understanding humans and their interactions rather than a religious belief system that caters to the ruling class and polices class hierarchy.
