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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I am a huge fan of defending domestic supply chains and manufacturing capacity, but not creating artificial barriers because domestic producers are lazy and have no will.

If legacy US auto and Tesla choose to not make cheap EVs, allow China to sell into the market (with strong right to repair and consumer protections around anything where these products could be used in an adversarial way, telemetry, data security, cloud dependency optional, etc). If these builders start delivering cost parity vehicles, implement tariffs accordingly to defend the domestic market from dumping (very common).

Worst case, we send all the battery packs off for shucking to use in stationary storage, or recycling by Redwood Materials. That’s US refined battery feedstock ore now. Regardless, we’ve got lots of combustion miles to replace with EV miles. We must move faster.

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> but not creating artificial barriers

If a product is artificially cheap then making it more expensive is removing an artificiality, not adding one.

"Artificial" is perspective, politics, and economics in this scenario. "The US allows VC backed firms to dump into markets below cost in an attempt at winner take all, but when another nation state does it, that is worse?" for example.

TLDR What are you optimizing for, what are the incentives, and what is the intent of various actors. The math is the easy part, imho.

VC expects a fair return, and they invest all over the world. When governments subsidize an industry their behaviours will be quite different.

What’s it called when a government maintains a near-zero interest rate for years allowing that same VC money to prop up otherwise unprofitable tech companies? That’s a subsidy right?

Unlike communists they don't pretend to benefit us when they print money for the top of the pyramid.

> when another nation state does it, that is worse?

When the industry in question is crucial to retaining domestic industrial capacity to counter that foreign nation’s hostile geopolitical agenda, yes it is worse!

Then the industry should take a fair shot at serving the low end market instead of hiding behind tariffs, no? Or are we going to wait around while legacy auto only sells $40k-$80k combustion pickup trucks and SUVs and Tesla doesn’t build a Model 2?

Protect markets for legitimate reasons, not out of domestic nepotism and laziness. BYD gets government support, US auto should get the same, but you actually have to show progress towards desired outcomes to justify cross border protectionism.

https://pca.st/episode/830546d3-e3d5-42c7-9fb9-9710fc1604ac?... (citation wrt China EV not dumping)

> should take a fair shot at serving the low end market instead of hiding behind tariffs, no?

That begs the question. They're only "hiding behind" tariffs if the price of Chinese manufacturing were fair in the first place but it's not. In this environment the Chinese manufacturers are economic aggressors and the Federal government is shielding local manufacturers from unfree competition.

A little google searching says BYD, for example, makes somewhere around $1250 in profit per vehicle. What do you mean by “artificially cheap”?

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