Tariffs will be needed by countries that refuse to create state backed companies but which also want an automotive industry and a manufacturing base that can make weapons of war.
So, tariffs won't solve anything. Which is why despite the Jones Act, China builds 200x more ships that the US.
Or, hasn't Tesla received billions in government assistance? what about the major automakers that'd have crumbled around 2008 if not for the US gov. pouring rivers of cash into them?
So, protectionism is only a band-aid: it doesn't change the fact that American businesses have developed a short-termist culture that only cares for the next quarter.
At the same time that Intel was allowing product quality to degrade, Nvidia, a 30 year old company, was continuing to innovate.
The not-so-big management secret is that even if Musk took your advice and sandbagged his timelines, then the timelines still wouldn't be met. However it would move the actual time of completion further to the right! By using best-case predictions, things are actually getting done sooner. Call it the Applied Parkinson's Law.
A lot of these are promises, and most of the timelines are not "best case", they were clearly not going to happen.
Even if it somehow gets things done faster, lying to your customers is not acceptable.
It's a company worth unthinkable amounts of money. Most people would have less patience with a guy running a Patreon in his spare time who had claimed for years his supporters would have a product soon, let alone an organisation swimming in funding (Twitter debacle aside).
People in China have a work ethic, capability, and intelligence that can eclipse the US.
1 The feds told American car makers that they would release the tarrifs if they didn't release an electric car under $xx,xxx (15k? 20k?) in the next x years, or if
2. they made the tarrifs naturally diminish over time (from 10k to 9k to 8k) to give American companies a runway but slowly pressure them to improve their offerings.
I'm far from a policy expert here. I just wish we could put some price pressure on them without entirely ceding the industry.
They can simply maintain these tariffs till forever, effectively doubling the price of any car out of China. The US population is essentially a captive audience.
Also, judging by America's antagonistic politics, any Party that opens the market to Chinese cars would be branded traitors & enemies of the working man and they'd likely do poorly in state and national elections.
Which countries are those? All western car manufacturers are backed by the state as far as I'm aware.
As far as I can tell, this is entirely incorrect when it comes to European car companies. In the US, beside bailing out GM in the 2008 crash, they do give government loans to some car companies. But I don't agree that giving loans that equates to being "backed by the state".
Do you think the German state of Lower Saxony would hurt its 20% shares of Volkswagen?
Or what about the exemptions for power costs for high usage companies?
Maybe not car manufacturer specific but still a kind of subsidy.
Every country does more or less obvious.
And Tesla isn't? https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...
GM, Ford, and Chrysler (now Stellantis or whatever they call themselves) could easily be described as the same with all the subsidies and trade protection they get.
For example, aero headlights were not legal in the US for ages until Ford wanted to use them in the upcoming Taurus. European and Japanese companies had to use US-specific headlights, usually sealed beam units.
This nonsense still goes on today. Why do you think CCS has a unique-to-US charge connector? To make things more expensive for foreign car companies.
Then we have the insane "must be built here" restrictions...
That amounts to $1k per vehicle, so China subsidies are an order of magnitude smaller than US or EU subsidies.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/12/china-gave-byd-an-incredible-...
USA and EU should be doing the same.
Their partner Panasonic is a keiretsu and I think has gotten billions in EV battery related subsidies overall.
BYD I think is similar order of magnitude to the two partners combined.
The purpose of an economy is not to increase shareholder value when the majority of the shares are held by .1% of the population.
Car factories have used robots to make cars for decades now. The cars should have become cheaper with time, not several times more expensive. And if the factors making cars unaffordable for the average citizen is beyond the carmakers control, then those factors should be adressed. But tariffs sure won't make cars cheaper.
Tesla has basically been the only domestic automaker taking risks and aggressively pursuing manufacturing efficiencies.
There are all sorts of unacceptable national security tradeoffs that come with allowing domestic industrial capacity to diminish and China to own more of the automotive supply chain, but the industry is also going to be less competitive long term, and consumers are going to have fewer discretionary dollars.
Sometimes too aggressive which may come back and hunt them.
For example, multiple companies are doing full body casting but Tesla moved very fast and ended up selling cars that now have cracks in them. There is a reason it took others longer time to introduce this in their factories...
https://www.thedrive.com/news/tesla-model-y-owner-finds-scar...
The situation is much worse for Chinese manufacturers. Some of these cars are death traps.
But no, we have to buy overpriced pieces of shit because God forbid we touch one hair of the "free" market
Except for the subsidies, no bid government contracts, tax breaks, loan gaurantees and eventually piles of cash for when they blow through all of the above and run out of money.
Unlike those backwards communists we are proud free market capitalists.
Both have given up on some parts of ideology in the face of the real world.