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I seriously hope the next US administration stops bending over backwards to protect the big 3. If we want to address climate change, we're gonna low cost greentech and china is currently the king of that in evs, batteries and solar.

If we're really so concerned about 'supply chain' issues we could build up a strategic reserve of batteries and solar panels. If china wants to continue subsidizing their industry below costs of manufacture I see no reason why we shouldn't exploit their generosity to meet our climate goals as quickly as possible.

One of the 'good news' stories re: the recent datacenter buildout is that grid storage is now being more widely deployed, and that compliments the roll out of renewable energy.

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Talking about Chinese subsidies without mentioning US subsidies is almost enough to make me discount the rest of your comment.

Anyone who mentions China's subsides without mentioning the US's $2.5B+ in EV subsidies is mostly likely ignorant and bluffing, or intentionally misleading you.

And don't even get me started on how it took $80B in AIFP subsidies to keep our auto industry from just dying completely ~16 years ago.

This "China subsidizes EVs" BS needs to end. Everyone subsidizes. The only meaningful questions are how much and to what end.

China subsidized startups which generates additional industries.

If anything you are proving the US doesn't understand research or science behind producing electric vehicles and simply funding EVs directly instead of associated organizations.

Given the current climate theres no way to explain it without sounding like a crazy person.

Unfortunately the U.S. chooses to subsidize consumption as opposed to production.

This fits well with the corporate donor driven political system where the government puts no pressure on the corporations on their production side allowing them to outsource their production to the rest of the world and instead focuses on growing the American market and consumer demand for them.

Chinese EV subsidies are almost identical to American EV subsidies. They both subsidize consumption, in the form of rebates and tax credits for end consumers.

One of the largest recipients of Chinese EV subsidies is ... (drumroll) ... Tesla, an American company.

people overplay the china subsidies. a lot of the time it is private companies slashing their prices on their own accord as a loss leader to compete with local competitors. also people overlook the "VC subsidies" allowing a lot of startups to defy economic reality until IPO slaps everyone in the face.

Just look at the US national debt and budget deficit. It's actually America that is destroying the rest of the world with their unlimited credit card. How many countries can go so deeply into debt without lenders cutting them off?

Quite a few, to be honest. USA debt to GDP ratio is high but not catastrophically high.

Hear, Hear. We are seriously missing out over here in the US and continuing to be protectionist over the big 3 automakers is not going to improve our climate situation.

I consistently hear 2 main arguments against electric vehicles in the US. Range, and cost.

BYD & China is solving both. Range is important because we lack charging infrastructure still, and anyone who rents at an apartment complex, you are screwed and have to rely on public charging stations. Big batteries are important for these folks. People also still have range anxiety, so when a fuel efficient gas car will get ~400+ miles per full tank, only having more expensive cars with a ~250 mile range is a non starter for a lot of people in the US.

Cost is self explanatory. One of the better electric cars sold in the US, the Ioniq 6 STARTS at $38k, which is already more than a significant chunk of the population can afford - you're looking at close to an $800/month payment at current rates for entry level. BYD could sell in the US at around $20,000.

Not to say EV charging has been solved, it is still very much in progress, but 64% of Americans live within 2 miles of a public charging station. We should continue to use policy to encourage "EV ready" infra in residential and apartment settings, places of business, commercial/retail, government, etc, but lots of folks can be served today. The vast majority US housing stock is single family homes (attached and detached combined), and those can, in most cases, be upgraded to support a dedicated circuit for charging. And, to your point, you'll also want to mandate new apartment building build outs are EV charging ready for their tenants.

https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/23/electric-ve...

Key takeaways from the above:

> The number of EV charging stations has more than doubled since 2020. In December 2020, the Department of Energy reported that there were nearly 29,000 public charging stations nationwide. By February 2024, that number had increased to more than 61,000 stations. Over 95% of the American public now lives in a county that has at least one public EV charging station.

> EV charging stations are most accessible to residents of urban areas: 60% of urban residents live less than a mile from the nearest public EV charger, compared with 41% of those in the suburbs and just 17% of rural Americans.

Maps: https://supercharge.info/map | https://www.plugshare.com/ | https://afdc.energy.gov/stations#/find/nearest?country=US&fu...

2 miles is an awfully long way, and 36% of Americans are even further away. That’s 4 miles round trip. Presumably many of those charging stations aren’t that big and disallow you leaving your car overnight. The rest of the numbers are similarly bad.

Doesn’t appear to be a problem for EV sales. Is your closest gas station 2 miles away?

https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q4-2024-ev-sales/

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/trends-in...

>is your closest gas station 2 miles away?

No but it only takes 3 minutes to dump 45 litres of fuel into my car and that lasts about 3 weeks of driving.

Almost there.

https://insideevs.com/news/758625/byd-megawatt-charging-demo...

Battery swapping in 3 minutes...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=09VxbzB8x4M

Some of the new 1000v infrastructure has 10-80% charging occuring in 5 minutes.

These arguments are kind of like horse and cart owners stating that gasoline powered vehicles will.need to be able to get fuel and that's impractical. Its infrastructure and innovation that is still being built out, the that build out is now 10-12 years along for most first world nations.

It’s not insane to hope many cars will be able to go and charge themselves at 2am, when roads are quiet and chargers are free, a few years from now. Optimise over the entire system, schedule it, car ready for the morning.

This is going to be a long time coming. Owners of EVs overwhelmingly live in houses not apartments. No one is going to send their car off to pay many times their home rate per kWh when they could get a home L2 charger and charge it themselves. It would pay for itself in under a year.

My comment is not solving for people who would be better served by charging at home, because they don’t care about the distance to a charger. Waymo’s can already find their own way to a charger, so it’s not a huge stretch to imagine people innovating around this problem for owned cars.

Waymo might build a waymo specific solution, but the general case for the general population won't exist for a long time.

The demand isn't there. The group of people who buy EVs and don't have a home to charge at is too small. And that won't change until the economics of purchasing an EV fundamentally change.

I’m making very loose claims. Hope, it’s not an huge stretch, etc. My error bars are very wide, intentionally, because it’s hard to predict the next 5 years. Your position is a lot more brittle. If self driving works, cars can go fill themselves up. That can change demand, so the demand argument falls away. If taxi’s work and scale up, costs drop, so the economic issue falls away. For you to be right, no innovation must happen.

The point I’m primarily trying to make, repeatedly: distance to a charger is not some universal rule that prevents uptake. The least likely thing to be true is that the market stays the same. If it remains the same in the US for a few years, China will crush this market.

I disagree, you're missing a really important part. If self driving exists, then cars can drive themselves to the spot where the chargers are, which is necessary but not sufficient.

Either a human needs to be employed overnight plugging in and unplugging these cars ($$) or else every single charger that supports this needs to have new fancy robotic arms and some agreed-upon protocol that cars can use to request a charge.

Considering that so far the story of EV chargers in America has looked like "download my app!" people struggling and failing to get credit card readers reliably working, I have no faith that this would happen in a few years.

I’d considered it but assumed a person in one place is cheaper than many people wandering around to fill their own cars. Just bake it into the price. This is not an insurmountable problem compared to “require all buildings must be upgraded to power EV charging”. If I paid you a million dollars to figure it out I think you could make a plan in under a day.

The benefit is that you can power the cars when there is least demand on the grid, on the roads, on the need for the vehicles themselves, on the time of people who currently wait at chargers for their cars to charge. Fix one thing (and build upon the main innovation of cars driving themselves) and you unlock all this other waste. The charging location can even manage this by setting availability to align with staff, eg 5am to 11pm, or 24/7 if they want to hire up. You can even have roaming staff, eg wander between three locations and just switch the cars out.

It's certainly not an insurmountable problem, I just think we're in a local minimum that will prevent it from being a thing in, say, the next 5 years. I would agree with your other statement that China may well figure it out.

The current state of affairs in the US is that having a L2 charger at home and paying $E for 100kwh of electricity is massively less expensive than paying $E*5 for the car to go charge itself via some third party. This will not be a cheap service. The places where people tend to buy electric vehicles, generally coincide with high electricity prices and high labor costs. Maybe the high electricity costs can be somewhat offset by using off-peak power, but that's also off-peak generation due to solar panels, so who knows.

This also relies on the innovation of "cars that can drive themselves to the charger", which has been 18 months away in Teslas for what, a decade now? And Teslas are now a tiny proportion of the EVs sold in the US. Something less expensive and better price-per-range like the Ioniq 5/6 or the Equinox EV don't even have the hardware to take advantage of a system like this if you could snap your fingers and make these overnight charging facilities exist.

I don't think the economics work in the 2020s. Someday, sure.

The chargers probably have 2/4 chargers working at any given time.

> 64% of Americans live within 2 miles of a public charging station.

If this includes AC chargers, leaving your car for 8 hours 2 miles away is an absolute pain.

If it doesn't, the question becomes are the chargers occupied? Are they operational?

Waiting at a gas station takes a minute, waiting at a charger takes 30.

I've been driving an EV for more than 5 years and pretending that charging isn't a significant hindrance to EV ownership is disingenuous. It's actually gotten worse because more EVs are on the road and the chargers haven't kept pace with the rising demand.

I’m lucky to be able to charge quickly at home.

I’m currently on a road trip and was leaving the car at a nearby charger which was walking distance from where I’m staying - I can’t imagine owning one where either this wasn’t available or there wasn’t a fast charger I could spend 10 minutes at.

The actual long distance drives were super easy thanks to Superchargers - 5-10 minute stops keep you driving for hours! It doesn’t feel disadvantaged compared to gas so long as the infrastructure is there.

> It's actually gotten worse because more EVs are on the road and the chargers haven't kept pace with the rising demand.

It is curious that this is the case. If chargers were profitable a couple of years ago, you would expect more chargers and more profit today.

I haven’t noticed much growth in chargers where I live but I have noticed more EVs on the road.

I think the difficulty is the installation process. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the challenge of getting that much run to convenient places isn't always that easy and, combined with the regulatory burdens likely involved in something providing that much power is scaring away potential installations.

You have to think a lot of the low hanging fruit locations are taken by now and, even if it's profitable, it doesn't make any profit while you're building it and I've seen a "coming soon" sign on top of what looked like a finished installation for more than a year at a mall near me.

And how many gas stations were there in 1930? We can build more charging stations, and they’re way more environmentally friendly that gas stations.

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/15/gas-stations-prices-closing

Byd recently came out saying the hyper competitive landscape and low prices needs to end soon. The Chinese government is propping up a lot of their auto industry right now. So some protectionism is needed if you don’t want one of the last bits of manufacturing strength to disappear in the US.

Genuine question, we have manufacturing strength in the US auto industry?

Even among Americans, American cars aren't considered that good. There's a massive reliability premium you pay for Honda and Toyota. Even cars with 100k miles on them (frustratingly as a buyer) keep their value. And they're manufactured in the US, inasmuch as any car can be said to be manufactured in a single location.

I've been searching around and I can't even find data about other countries importing our cars which to me would be the biggest signal of strength.

I own a Chevy Bolt EUV, made in the US. After 18 months driving it, I was happy enough with it that we leased a Chevy Equinox EV to replace my wife's gas car. The Equinox is made in Mexico, not the US but we've also been happy with it for 9 months so far.

We've owned Hondas (Odyssey) and Toyotas (Camry, Prius, Corolla). They've been great. We also changed the oil whenever the car's display said to and did whatever other servicing our independent mechanic advised. I suspect that a lot of cars would also be reliable if they were maintained.

Toyota is recalling 100,000 Tundra trucks because debris was left in the engine. https://www.haleytoyota.com/blog/the-2022-2023-toyota-tundra... There's no perfect vehicle although I'd say EVs get a lot closer when you can refill at home and do basically no maintenance except tire rotations and cabin air filters.

That perception is outdated. Many American cars are good now, especially EVs.

Teslas are great cars.

I've only been in BYDs in Mexican Ubers and I would not buy one, it felt cheap and plasticky and creaked.

I have a 2018 Model 3 and your description of BYD is exactly how I would describe my Tesla. It feels cheap and plasticky and it creaks. I also briefly had a Model 3 rental car that was newer than mine (but I don't know what year it was) and it also felt the same.

I had thought about throwing an exception for Tesla because they did manage to create cars that people outside the US want. So I guess that does count but I doubt they're what anyone thinks of when they think of American car makes.

Oh I would for sure buy a BYD today if I were able. The ones I've ridden in have been really nice. I mean they are literally plastic but so is every car in the "economy" price range. I don't think their interiors were noticeably different than any other non-luxury car. I've been told that their higher end models don't have this problem.

Teslas have never been good “cars”. Their production quality is miserable.

They do have significant advantages on the software side of things. I’m not sure how that compares to Chinese companies however.

The hyper competitive landscape only exists within China.

However, the much higher prices these companies are selling their cars outside of China are still much lower than the prices American cars are available at.

Hopefully this will allow cheaper cars to get ~400mi of range but I doubt we'll ever see much more in mainstream cars. Batteries are simply too expensive and too heavy. Fuel tanks are cheap to build, but we still see no gasoline passenger cars with large tanks. The manufacturers sort of standardize around a "normal" capacity, and just want the one option to design, manufacture, crash test, etc.

Not only the climate situation, the economic situation. If the US protects the old tech for another decade it’ll never catch up. The US needs to move along the experience curve as fast as possible, build skills and volume and charging stations and suitable power grids and sources. I would much, much rather be China than the US in this fight right now.

> ~400+ miles per full tank

My car gets ~500 miles/800 km per tank. My wife's car, which has a more efficient engine and transmission and is also smaller, but with the same huge tank, gets ~600 miles/960 km per tank. I will have to stop for a bathroom somewhere along a route that long, but only once or twice. I used to have to stop three times for a ~900 mile/1500 km trip that I did a few times.

This is a problem with EV proponents who try to argue that "you'll stop every couple of hours for half an hour or so anyway, so charging isn't an issue". No, I won't. I'll drive 1000 miles with less than 45 minutes of downtime on the whole trip. I don't stop every two hours. Maybe 15 minutes every 4 hours, of which 10 is fueling and going to the bathroom and 5 is getting off and back on the highway.

That's not a slam against EV's, but let's acknowledge their weak points honestly.

I think the argument is not whether EVs will take an extra 65-80 min to go 1000 miles, it’s whether that matters to the average driver. Realistically for my family it doesn’t. I’m sure for some (predominately) solo drivers it does. But then there’s the question of how often you’re driving 1000 mile trips that an extra 1.5hrs max actually impacts anything real in your life…

I guess if you’re trying to follow an ICE car on a road trip then yeah it might be a weak point. If you’re already stopping every 200 miles then it’s no matter. For us, we enjoy travel days more with the built in stretch/bathroom breaks.

You can do 1000 miles in one day, but it is a really unpleasant trip. Doing it in two is so much nicer. Take a hotel one night. Have a really nice meal at a slow restaurant a couple of times. Visit a couple of roadside attractions.

Those are five long charging opportunities, which is two more than you need for a 1000 mile trip.

Ah, yes, that’s the ticket. Spend far more money and time than you would with an ICE to do your trip.

I get the concept, and I am not an EV hater. But let us not pretend that long-distance driving is an imaginary thing. I don’t stop - ever - for more than fifteen minutes, unless it’s to sleep.

I've done 1800 mile trips in 36 hours. Stopping for 20 minutes every three hours to charge, bathroom, and grab food would not have added significant time to the trip.

I've also done the same trip in 3 days, and in 5 days. The longer trips were far more pleasant, and were not slowed down at all by charging.

And when I charge up. Well you know I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be the one who charges overnight...

Overnight charging at hotels is awesome. 5 years ago if a hotel had EV chargers it was very likely one was available. Unfortunately, it's more common that they're all busy now.

I don’t drive that far often, but when I do, an extra 1.5 hr means getting a hotel instead of just pushing through to the destination.

Your wife / family (if applicable) will very much appreciate more frequent breaks.

Your 500 and 600 miles per fill-up is the kind of outlier that isn't much worth discussing. That kind of range can't be more than about 5-7% of US autos.

My car (Mazda3 hatch) gets 24 mpg, which is actually typical for US mid-sized cars.

I have a 3-5 minute gas station fill up every 260 miles or so, basically once a week. The Chinese MG4 does 435 miles on a charge, 95% of which I could charge at home, the remaining 5% of my miles are my twice a year road trips @ ~400 mi (to LA) and ~800 mi (to Seattle).

The MG4 makes LA without a stop and Seattle with 1 stop.

That's a once a year stop for ~30 minute in the EV compared to 3-4 hours a year sitting at smelly gas stations for my Mazda ICE.

I would certainly trade never having to ever take my car into a gas station, ever again, for one brief stop once a year on my leisurely road trip if I had the cash to buy a great EV.

I hear you, and your concern is real for your context.

But to be fair, not every product has to perfectly fit every context. To be successful a product can fill a small niche, or it can appeal to a large market- it doesn't have to satisfy every use case.

So you're right - driving 1000 miles with no downtime is not an EV strength. But the percentage of the market doing that is tiny. Conversely the proportion of people who live in a house (home charging) and drive < 100 miles a day, is huge.

Even for those doing a "once a year road trip" - well, hire cars exist.

So I completely agree that an EV is not useful to you. I would suggest though that a product can be massively successful, while at the same time appealing to a subset of the market. And appealing to a subset does not limit validity or indeed profitability.

Lipstick seems to be a successful product, despite only appealing to something less than 50% of the market.

I'd like to see the stats on how many people regularly drive 500+ miles in a day.

I'm American, so grew up in car culture, but I've never driven more than 200 - 300 miles in a day.

Why not? -200 miles each way is in the realm of day trips unless you’re driving very congested corridors. I drove 400+ miles each way last Christmas with two overnights in between. I did the same distance a month or two ago and again last week, though I did stay for about a week each time.

I do it about once a month.

That sounds like you have a more efficient car than many of us. When I switched to an EV I actually got a range upgrade due to having a really inefficient ICE vehicle. Regardless, most of us aren't spending our days doing multi hundred mile drives. We shouldn't be optimizing for that scenario.

It’s not especially efficient. It just has a huge fuel tank. It’s like 23 gallons (~85 L).

You’re an outlier. Most people don’t do long road trips often, and when they do they don’t care to drive 1000 miles with minimal stops, and their gas cars don’t have that much range in a tank of fuel.

Yes, EVs do slow down long road trips a bit. But it’s really not much of a difference. I just did 3000 miles in 10 days in one.

Agreed but this car would solve that for just $25,000 if we didn’t have 100% tariffs on Chinese vehicles. 1,200 mile range, can charge 800 miles in 12 minutes.

If our 350 mile vehicle could actually do 350 it would be fine but the reality is that it can barely do 200 ish

I am 100% road warrior like you describe. I'll do a coast-to-coast in 29ish hours of driving.

I recently moved to an EV for my road-tripper vehicle. Yes, I need to stop and recharge every 4-5 hours for 20-40mn.

I find that I like it. A stretch, a coffee, snacks and replenishment. My favorite chargers are at a supermarket and a cafe' nearby.

I agree the pro-EV types try to whitewash this a lot, and I agree it is dishonest.

...but I find that I am okay with the cross-country EV reality anyway.

$0.02

Thank you. Simply acknowledging that it is a tradeoff instead of saying "but nobody does that" is refreshing.

Now do Germany.

> If china wants to continue subsidizing their industry below costs of manufacture I see no reason why we shouldn't exploit their generosity to meet our climate goals as quickly as possible.

Are they even doing that? A few billion dollars a year is meaningful but it's not dumping for an industry this big.

Anyone who mentions China's subsides without mentioning the US's $2.5B - $3.0B in subsidies for EVs is ignorant and bluffing, or intentionally misleading you.

It depends on what they're worried about. A subsidy tied to car purchase is mostly irrelevant to an accusation of artificially cheap exports, because those subsidies don't apply to exports. Unless they're crazily large amounts or other manipulation is happening, they mostly just help the company scale faster and the export prices are legitimate.

It's still incredible how many people STILL equate "Made in China" with low quality. These folks are stuck in the 90s. China builds things to spec. If you want low quality they'll give you that. But require high quality, they can do that too. You just need to pay for it.

As someone who works in US manufacturing, the situation is much more dire and I think the "low quality / high quality" back-and-forth is burying the lede.

It's not just that China has reached some kind of quality parity with North America. There are now significant market segments that the US functionally cannot manufacture because we completely ceded the institutional knowledge and infrastructure in favor of financialization and outsourcing of the US economy.

My specific area of expertise is robotic / computer controlled manufacturing equipment and a lot of the components (high precision servos, sensors and other motion components) are functionally impossible to source domestically. There are still some boutique manufacturers making things in low efficiency / low volume in the USA but touring the manufacturing campuses of Chinese suppliers has been shocking in the last five years. The sheer scale of efficient, automated assembly they are capable of operating at makes a big-three automotive assembly line look like a dirt-floored shack with men knocking things together with rocks.

They are laser focused on lights-out manufacturing at extreme volume in ways I have never seen in the US. Entire production lines of high complexity electronics that are completely vertically integrated (everything from the injection molding for the plastic enclosure to the PCB manufactured on one campus) with human hands touching them for the first time as they leave the automated quality control line to be boxed up.

I don't think American people fully comprehend the brain and skill drain that has already taken place.

Agreed. Maybe you’ve seen this, but Destin Sandlin’s recent video on this topic does a good job of demonstrating the institutional knowledge gap [0].

He also was a guest on the Search Engine podcast to discuss the same topic earlier this year [1]. I enjoyed this more than the video.

I think there’s some nuance and slight nationalism to take with a grain of salt, but the point is extremely well demonstrated.

[0] https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=2jaYQZEinXsJBk2L

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/search-engine/id161425...

Thank you for this, I just watched. Very enlightening.

Do you think this can be reversed and brought back in one generation? Two? Three?

Assume a generation to be about 21 years (birth to high school + trade training).

Our business leaders since the 1980s failed to quantify the cost of a possible revamp, and I wonder what the true cost will end up being.

I’ve seen some of the Great Lake cities and towns that are in sad shape; but I was too young (and being immigrants, also too poor) to tour those areas in any depth in the Reagan/Carter days so I can only imagine what they were like back then.

Also, the only way to make your companies competitive is by having them face competition, not by protecting them by artificial and anti consumer duties.

> If we want to address climate change

At least 40% of Americans do not give a crap about addressing climate change. Many Americans see EVs as a waste of time and a direct attack on the US.

If you are willing to take the risk that if China invades Taiwan your car will no longer work or be serviceable.

I highly doubt that would happen. Why would China want to destroy their reputation as the world's manufacturer?

Because someone takes power who is more concerned with image than economic long term success. See the US for a recent example of a country abdicating its strong economic position for no reason beyond the leaders' ego.

Because ideology is a hell of a drug. Xi is a true believer.

With that logic, capitalism and "democracy" are ideologies too. The US is the same, just different.

robot arm movements

*all beliefs are the same*

> If we want to address climate change

Given our recent election results, it seems to me that we don't want to.

> […] I see no reason why we shouldn't exploit their generosity to meet our climate goals as quickly as possible.

Because your own industrial base atrophies is one reason:

> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.

> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now

That's (partly) what did-in Japan and Germany in during WW2: they couldn't produce enough to actually run a war. Even the just the UK was out-producing Germany in many measures (e.g., aircraft).

The Big 3 completely retooled for war in very short order. If things go hot again you want factory capacity available for retooling to be possible.

A society just has to be willing to pay for that capacity instead of deciding that they want the cheapest widget made somewhere else.

Given the use of drones in Russia-Ukraine, what is the drone-making capacity of the US versus some other countries?

Few place climate change as more important than national security. Won’t happen.

The DoD has been saying for at least a decade that climate change as an interesting threat to national security.

GM has the Bolt, Blazer, Siverado, and Hummer EV's. I think they're genuinely trying to make EV's work. Ford and Stellantis on the other hand...

Ford has ambitious plans. It's still vapor ware, but promising. https://www.axios.com/2025/06/18/ford-china-ev

Stellantis sells a good number of EVs in Europe, but almost entirely in form factors that won't sell in North America. Perhaps this expertise and experience will be useful.

I hope domestic manufacturers survive the "protection" Trump is giving them, but the protection may prove fatal.

They cancelled the Bolt in 2023.

...and later announced it would be coming back but on the new battery platform they were using for their other new EVs. It's supposed to go into production later this year.

I mean, at this pace, this isn't even green tech. Electric cars are just better and within two years will have better range. We are risking being totally left behind because they want to keep burning gasoline for Texas.

The big 3 are not the ones asking for this. It actively hurts them. They aren’t delusional, they NEED government support to compete globally against Chinese EVs. Every big 3 CEO to a T has made it clear they know it’s if, not when ICE sales become a rounding error on their books.

Point your gun where it belongs which is the oil industry and its lobbyists.

> Point your gun where it belongs which is the oil industry and its lobbyists.

They are indeed the enemy. They've managed to convince a large swath of the population to hate everything that is not fossil-fueled.

Why can't we have better marketing for different types of people.

Example: God made the sun and the sky. That's where heaven is. Fossil fuels come from under the earth. Something else really bad is down there too. I don't want to spell it out, but it's the opposite of heaven.

Or for the "independent, lion-not-sheep" types: I don't depend on big companies. My energy comes from up above. You can't take the sky from me. etc.

Nice one! I've actually used this is meat space conversation while traveling the southeast US.

When I'm in public conversation, say in a coffee shop, restaurant, or crowded park, and I know I'm in a place with a lot of "christians" around me, I'll say things very much like you describe:

"Don't you know? Oil comes up from hell! It's made by the devil!"

"Sunlight is falling down from heaven, it's a gift directly from god."

"But for some reason, so many christians are against solar power, and want to burn more oil."

Then I'll wrap up with a little apocalypse evangelism:

"The bible says that in the end times, most christians will start to follow false prophets, and they're all going to go to hell!"

I doubt it has much lasting effect, but I do see a few heads turn, with questioning, worried looks on their faces.

You're the first other person I've seen mention this as a means of "converting the sinners".

A key problem is that anger, hate, and fear are more powerful motivators than hope and optimism. That fact has been leveraged to weaponize those emotions to a degree that inspires awe at it's success.

Freedom to power your home without paying "the man" should be compelling to all who could use it. Texas is ironically a prime state for renewable energy and the dollars generated from it have convinced some, but many still reject it as "wokeness".

It boggles the mind.

> meet our climate goals as quickly as possible

heheh

The climate thing itself is a giant oligarchy influenced manipulative game play. This nation is built on capital. Capital by its nature looks to dominate humanity and freewill.

The treacherous twists to turn a noble pursuit into a way for developed nations to continue dominate developing nations is beyond the space of this comment, but you can see that clearly over the history: Caesar Hitler Mao Trump Xi etc.

We people have truly never been able to wield the power ourselves.

They already doing that for decades, the problem is that move making china rich. Which is US don't want

The US has no ability to stop China from becoming wealthy, they already have the will and political leadership to build high tech for a global market. At this point, it's just angry old people sticking brooms in their own bike wheels at speed.

How we made it: will China be the first electrostate? - https://www.ft.com/content/e1a232c7-52a0-44dd-a13b-c4af54e74... | https://archive.today/OSFYo

They sure has, problem is people also like cheap goods

> If china wants to continue subsidizing their industry below costs of manufacture I see no reason why we shouldn't exploit their generosity

Because the unfair advantage distorts the market leading to a potentially otherwise noncompetitive product destroying the competition at which point they can (and will) jack up prices, so not only do you get more expensive vehicles, but you've also destroyed an entire industry and several adjacent industries at the same time.

It's not like you can't just snap your fingers and re-establish a vehicle manufacturing supply chain once it disappears.

I get people just want cheap vehicles, but the short-term benefit simply isn't worth it.

And US subsides are of course totally okay and not unfair at all? The US does the same thing while it cries and points fingers. The same in the EU.

Non-discriminatory subsidies are, in fact, ok.

Purchase discounts for EVs in the US, for instance, didn't discriminate based on manufacturer. You could buy a foreign made EV and you still get the discount.

Discriminatory subsidies, like for instance, funneling billions of dollars per year into Chinese-owned manufacturers of EVs, parts and even even shippers, is not ok.

The US has, of course, been accused of discriminatory subsidies as well and countries have retaliated, correctly, with increased tariffs to offset the unfair advantage.

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