Comment by ttul

>> This is just going to hurt US car manufacturers.

still don't understand why this is going to hurt US car manufacturers. Have the Japanese auto imports improved the US auto industry past 40+ years? Is Ford or GM more competitive? The US automakers thrive in large vehicle/truck segments, protected under the Chicken Tax past 60+ years, but they barely have any presence left in small, cheaper segments dominated by the Japanese and Koreans.

Just not convinced that allowing autos from another auto industry built on forced tech transfer, illegal (export/local content) subsidies, or otherwise benefited tremendously from the very same rent-seeking policies themselves past 15 years.

>> Rent seeking is industry suicide.

If it's as bad as you say it is, why encourage it? If not, perhaps we all should learn from it -- the US should be more protective and mercantile: high-tariffs, forced tech transfer, local sourcing, local production.

At a certain level it can lead otherwise competitive companies to rest on their laurels.

On another level, it would be game over without them. For example, US shipyards would simply stop existing without protection. There is no management strategy or measure they could implement that could compete with Asian shipyards.

> This is just going to hurt US car manufacturers. Tarriffs are rent seeking.

tarriffs are visible protective regulation, China protects its domestic markets through different type of regulations for decades.

I agree, and it's also worth pointing out the EV market has been artificially buoyed by the use of state-funded incentives to buy electric cars, and we know this because now that those incentives are ending, EV sales are cratering.

In a vacuum, I don't hate the idea of paying people to switch to EV's who can do it, but the problem is especially in America, those benefits are going not to working class people who really need new cars (and who's cars are the most environmentally problematic) but to solidly upper-middle class buyers of incredibly large and impractical EV's which are either sports cars or suburban panzers, that rip through tires and consume vast amounts of lithium for their enormous battery packs, and beat the shit out of our already deteriorating roads.

Additionally we're finding that EV's have a major, probably unsolvable issue: they age much, much faster than ICE vehicles in one particular area: the battery. EV's have the same problem as cellphones effectively; their cells deteriorate with use, and unlike used ICE vehicles for which parts are widely available and usually cheap, it's not even remotely economically feasible to repair this issue. Replacing a battery costs so much you might as well just replace the entire car.

BYD, Geely, ZeekR, Kia, Hyundai, Mini, MG see them all around, more than Teslas (inner city Melbourne).

Also noticing that a lot of the rideshare/taxis are going EV quickly. I'm guessing the much lower maintenance and service requirements are outweighing any "range" issues, plus the trade-in value is irrelevant with warranties covering the batteries etc.

I do like that BYD cars are opinionated which is a feature that is somewhat lacking in modern cars.

I wonder how long that will last. Mexican consumers are very price sensitive.

When I first moved to Spain, I was surprised beer was available in McDonalds, and that people commonly had beer with lunch. But not even here do we have beer available in car show rooms, that seems like the slightly wrong place for that, especially considering how strict Singapore seems from the outside.

The only reason to get a car in Singapore is to give the tired father an air-conditioned place outside the crammed apartment to go and have a nap :).

Tariffs are exactly the reason that situation is as it is.

BYD can outwait the adjustments of the US car industry to a new reality, in the same way that the Japanese did back in the 80s.

Last time, the US did it by screwing the union workers of the rust belt, while also giving up on passenger cars and moving to SUV/trucks, but this time it's a complete change in technology and the US (and Japan to an extent) is having trouble reorienting its manufacturing and supply chains to support the change.

If Ford can't sell an EV version of an F-150, then it has a real problem, because the rest of the world is not staying on ICE technology.

Artificial trade barriers don't last.

It is just tariffs.

The reason BYD is killing it is because they can offer their cars at a price point unavailable to the US. The reason for that price point is because China is producing some of the cheapest batteries in the world.

BYD cannot build their cars in the US because the core part they need to make them cheap is the batteries. CATL makes the batteries that BYD uses and they aren't going to setup shop in the US. A lot of what makes CATLs batteries cheap is because China has a raw materials trade pipeline that's now superior than what's available in the US.

All of this goes back to tariffs.

By putting insane tariffs on all imports the US has effectively isolated itself from the rest of the world. Manufacturing will defacto be more expensive in the US because a significant portion of any incoming raw resources will get an automatic 25% tax.

The US does have it's own raw resources, but they aren't fully developed. Prior to 2024, we were heavily reliant on imports for a lot of our manufacturing. Shaking up the entire market for stupid reasons has destroyed manufacturing in the US. It'll take decades to repair and rebuild.

The steep tariffs against china that Trump did in his first term against solar, steel, and batteries were maintained by Biden. In term 2 Trump ramped those up to 11.

It's 100% tariffs. So yes, it's of course tariffs. They’re not homologated because there's no point of selling something when half the price goes to import taxation

BYD isn’t developing an American model for multiple reasons, but the biggest one is likely tariffs.