Comment by testing22321
19 hours ago
It’s not just tariffs. They’re not homologated to the US market, so even if you were will to pay multiples more than people in Australia do, you can’t register one in the US.
19 hours ago
It’s not just tariffs. They’re not homologated to the US market, so even if you were will to pay multiples more than people in Australia do, you can’t register one in the US.
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.
The Ford thing is bizarre. My brother has an F-150 Lightning. It’s an amazing vehicle that they just couldn’t market in this gonzo social landscape.
He is literally the walking version of the stereotype of a rural cowboy type. He runs a small hobby farm, leases pasture to local farms. He works in financial management for a regional company and his wife is a procurement officer for a state government.
They produce most of their electricity with solar. Replaced some tractor use cases with oxen. They literally don’t pay to operate their daily drivers. (A lightning and a Volt now Bolt)
The lightning replaced their emergent generator when that reached its end of life.
He got into this stuff after doing the numbers for the company. It’s cheaper and better to operate. Last year they bought a dozen Silverado EV pickups for their field people. They work fine where they deployed them. The workers love them and the opex is better.
The self described rednecks hate it because the internet told them to. He almost removed the branding because he gets approached by people warning him about all of the terrible things that will happen.
Isn't part of it the dealer network as well? They've existed so long on service money, they were actively pushing people away from the Lightning because the service needs were so low and they wouldn't be making money off them.
2 replies →
It's the towing issue that compromised the Lightning too. Attach something to an EV to tow and you kill the range. A lot of people in this country buy a pickup to tow something with it occasionally.
1 reply →
> 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.
Is that a problem for Ford though? Basically nowhere outside of North America buys trucks like the F-150.
You see a few Ford Transit chassis cabs with a flatbed on the back in Europe but mostly enclosed Transit vans.
If North America is mostly only buying trucks from Ford and Ford can't sell an EV only truck, then has Ford given up on North America if EV is the present competitiveness need?
(Of course the related news was that in Europe Ford also moved to an agreement to rebadge Renault EVs instead of manufacture their own. Has Ford given up on Europe, too?)
The argument that tariffs could protect Ford to do the hard work at building more EV models seems proven wrong when Ford makes the short-term decision that it can kick the can down the road on supporting EV models until after the tariffs expire.
3 replies →
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.
I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Tariffs could be an important tool as part of a strategy to kickstart US manufacturing.
A big issue is education. In my region the state government is pushing hard to support semiconductor manufacturing. In addition to incentives for building facilities they funded education in community colleges to train up the workforce, did some similar stuff at the high school level and implemented incentives for supporting industry.
But… you get the army you have, not what you want. POTUS has the strategic insight of a cab driver and is surrounded by a wack pack of sycophantic C-team players. We’re hurting manufacturing because without a strategy you’re just driving margin enhancement for a few industries, and the grinding down of the economy will hurt most others.
We should look to the Chinese as a place to learn from rather than a faceless enemy. They achieved amazing results and made some mistakes and sought out to do some things that are kinda gross as well. But… they aligned policy, governance and incentives to move their country out of the sorry state it was in. DJI has like 20k PhDs working on drones. I doubt we have that many in the US.
I pretty much completely agree with you.
I'm not saying that Tariffs are necessarily bad or wrong. But they are a shape blade that is really easy to cut yourself with. Blanket tariffs are effectively putting a sword on a rope and wildly swinging it around in a crowd.
What you need is a surgeon to handle the tariffs.
This is the hard truth. Consumers choose on price. With a squeezed middle class nobody can afford to give a shit about patriotism or geopolitics.
Chinese automakers can give you a lot of car for 30k.
Can they? I can get a lot of car for that money if I buy something used that's just a few years old, and I'll have a fairly good idea how to get my car serviced and how much it will cost, and how much I'll be able to sell it for.
Even if we don't consider these things, here in the EU, very few Chinese models look like a steal.
Tariffs or not (PHEVs and ICE cars are not tariffed like EVs afaik), the consensus seems to be that Chinese cars at a given category, are built better, cost like 10-20% less, are well equipped, but generally drive worse and often have annoying usability issues
All things considered, they're certainly competitive depending on what you're looking for, but don't look likely to oust the existing competition.
And I don't get the West's obsession with BYD - imo they look weird, they either get the interior or exterior styling wrong (with the notable exception of the Seal U), and aren't really selling that well compared to other Chinese brands.
3 replies →
The US could have had a competitive manufacturing industry, but we traded it for cheap offshore labor.
That destruction has been ongoing since the 90s. We've hollowed out our ability to make things.
We basically focused on the exact wrong things which has put us in a pretty vulnerable geopolitical position. Rather than trying to bring resources into the US to aid manufacturing, we tried to bring finished goods into the US at a lower price.
China has done basically the opposite. They've focused on bring raw resources into china while centralizing manufacturing. That's what has turned them into the global powerhouse they are when it comes to producing everything.
For the US to turn this around, tariffs would have been in order, but they needed to be pretty focused and with internal plans on building out the industries we wanted to grow.
Doing tariffs first without building manufacturing was just dumb.
3 replies →
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.