Comment by MetaWhirledPeas

1 day ago

> Nobody is offering this.

They are trying. Inflation keeps moving the bar. It's not like they want their cars to be expensive; the components and fabrication prices just are.

Used you can achieve sub-25k easily.

BYD could give us this tomorrow, at the cost of completely gutting and decimating domestic American manufacturers, who are unable to actually compete on price and performance for various reasons.

The problem is not inflation, it’s that America sucks at manufacturing low cost electric vehicles. BYD has demonstrated that tenfold

  • America sucks at manufacturing anything that involves paying a wage because countries like China can undercut them. Even if we could the Chinese govt would fund the undercutting like they are with BYD.

    • What, USA never subsidizes her essential industries?

      American labor is expensive but BYD owes its success to vertical integration more than cheap labor. They are moving into Europe to build there before long. Americans have an uninformed notion that China simply couldn’t have superior technology, they’re just cutting corners, dumping chemicals in the river etc (as if American companies would never)

      It might just be that china is better at building cars.

    • Why is it that America can manage to manufacture reasonably priced ICE vehicles though? I don’t think it’s a radically different labor skillset to manufacture an ICE vehicle vs an electric one

  • The U.S. could do this too with the same amount of subsidies the CCP poured into their EV industry I suspect

If they were actually trying, then a dozen or so budget-model cars - from the Hyundai Accent to the Toyota Yaris - would not have been discontinued in the U.S. in the past half-dozen years. And replaced, if at all, with much more expensive models.