Comment by mkozlows
4 days ago
Keep in mind that the US auto industry is also very much a Canadian one. A lot of Big Three stuff happens across the border in Ontario.
But all the policy support that would have let North American automakers build up a competitive position with China is gone, so this is more about just acknowledging reality now.
> Keep in mind that the US auto industry is also very much a Canadian one.
As someone who's worked in the auto industry (in Canada) I have to 'hard disagree.' The big three have proven time and time again that we (Canadians) are second-class citizens when it comes to how they operate the facilities built here. Even before any of this nonsensical tariff nonsense, billions in government money has been given to the likes of Stellantis and GM over the years in an effort to keep jobs in Canada, with them putting in the bare-minimum effort to satisfy people in the short-term and thanking us by continuing their movement of production out of the country. Instead of trying to talk the president down from his pointlessly harmful tariffs, or doing what Toyota/Honda have done in pivoting to building worldwide models beside the domestic ones, the big three are gleefully taking the opportunity to expedite the closure or downsizing of facilities here.
Outside of the chuds who 'need' a pickup truck to satisfy their fragile ego, sales of "American" vehicles are starting to drop, with buyers choosing domestically-produced where possible (like the Toyota Rav4, Lexus NX/RX, or Honda Civic/CR-V).[0]
[0]: https://ca.investing.com/news/economy-news/market-share-of-u...
> billions in government money has been given to the likes of Stellantis and GM over the years in an effort to keep jobs in Canada, with them putting in the bare-minimum effort
You could replace "Canada" with the "United States" and it's equally true. They aren't treating you any different than us.
Just drive around Detroit to see what the big three do to domestic industry. It's sad.
1 reply →
Hey now, I bought a Mexican-made pickup.
Me too.
I think that was true up until last year. Clearly the new administration wants nothing to do with Canada except extract.
Yeah there was never any competing with china, our industry just relies on our market using different values to purchase a car.
It’s tough to convince most price-inelastic people they shouldn’t buy a car that is 1/2 price, even if it has fewer features.
Edit: to be clear I meant that the US did not compete, not that they could not compete
> Yeah thee was never any competing with china, our industry just relies on our market using different values to purchase a car.
This is patently false. The US could have competed with China if it had maintained investments spinning up battery manufacturing and downstream systems to build EVs at scale, while subsidizing EVs (fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year [1]) and increasing taxes on combustion mobility. The US picked legacy automaker profits and fossil fuel interests instead, simply out of lack of will and short term optimization over long term success.
China is building under the same rules of physics as everyone else. You can choose not to, but that is a choice.
(I believe in climate change, so I am thrilled China is going to steamroll fossil fuel incumbents out of self interest [2] [3], regardless of negative second order effects; every 24 months of Chinese EV production destroys 1M barrels/day of global oil consumption at current production rates, as of this comment)
[1] https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
[2] https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
Chinese autoworker makes what, 5k USD a year? Vs 50k+ for union autoworker in the US? How can you win that battle?
6 replies →
I've always gotten the impression that China is becoming a technological manufacturing powerhouse because of massive investment by the Chinese government, whereas America is falling behind because the government giving grants to corporations is incredibly unpopular because of the belief that the investment is just going to get pocketed by the CEO and board of directors and spent on stock buybacks rather than the development the people and the government wanted to see.
Even if the money is spent properly, it's still highly criticized. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people complain that Tesla was only successful because of massive government grants.
Am I off base here?
4 replies →
The offset is not positive when you factor in the externalities that go into escalating Chinese EV production.
4 replies →
This is a bad argument because you're assuming that the US needs to compete with China on EVs or that not competing results in somehow "losing". A car is a car, at the end of the day. Frankly, the best car is no car, but I'll leave that for some other discussion around transit.
China has gone all-in on EVs because over the years they smartly built up the world's best rare earth refining capabilities and immense manufacturing prowess while the United States has undoubtedly secured the global oil supply (remember tanks and fighter jets to fight wars aren't running on batteries) which, even amongst the doomiest of doomers will last quite a while.
China was never going to be an oil-producing powerhouse, but it did have the ability to leverage alternative energy sources so that it wasn't quite as beholden to the petrodollar institution, so that is what they did. And of course running cars on batteries and doing so at a very cheap cost makes sense there.
Meanwhile, the US can obviously produce good cars at a good enough price and with cheap oil for the foreseeable future it's hard to argue in favor of EVs as a national policy. What, we're going to switch to EVs? Who is going to build them? Tesla? We don't have access to the rare earth refining capabilities to meet demand. It's just physics. And if China is using less oil, that means more for the United States and others.
As you said, China has taken these actions out of self interest, but the self interest isn't "clean environment" or anything like that, it's just down to being not as reliant on the US for energy. Though that's a nice benefit. I do own an EV and I think the driving experience is superior but geopolitically things seem to be trending in a different direction.
6 replies →
I remember how popular the Yugo was, and then the Geo metro. Nobody wants good cars, they want cheap transportation.
The expensive cars sell well in the us - customers are not that price inelastic. Those who are prefer a used car with all the high priced features of 5 years ago to a new car with no options
Agreed, that’s exactly what i did. But I wonder how much of that culture is because the new cheap Chinese cars aren’t here.
If all you have in town is a target, that’s where people will shop. If you open up a goodwill there might be some handwringing and “I would never” rhetoric. But many people will go to the goodwill even if they don’t admit it.
5 replies →
It was. Then the U.S. turned into whatever the hell you call all that.
Now we have U.S. automakers who are derefential to the current regime's leader and are pulling out. The Federal and Ontario government both tried to somehow make them happy, but you can't make that kind of monster happy. So it's time to move on.
Big auto style auto manufacturing, with American-style union relations and a messy web of parts suppliers was never going to be globally competitive. GM and Ford deserve to go bankrupt with their current backwards practices.
> the US auto industry is also very much a Canadian one
Trump's message is loud and clear. The Canadian Prime Minister has said, "the past relationship with the US is over."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y41z4351qo
The US President: "US does not need cars made in Canada; free trade deal is irrelevant"
US Ambassador: "US does not need Canada":