Comment by wakawaka28 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wakawaka28 | Hacker News Reader

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>The policy choice to stop subsidizing EVs while, simultaneously halting their adoption from overseas, was intended to deliberately hurt the industry as a whole.

Chinese EVs are a Trojan horse. Even if they weren't, we cannot compete with the Chinese on cost and probably can't trust their quality standards.

>I mean, for fucks sake, MOST of the corn grown in this country is just so we can turn it into gas. Do a deep dive on that.

I know that. Ethanol somehow reduces certain kinds of supposedly harmful emissions, and it gives farmers someone to sell their corn to. We need to support farmers because a market spread too thin on farming means people would starve. If we had crop issues, rest assured that they would probably stop using ethanol until things got back to normal.

>If we left the market alone, we would've abandoned gasoline cars a long time ago.

We had EV cars a hundred years ago and abandoned them. Petrol works better. People could be encouraged to use electric trains or something but it turns out that city life is not practical or desirable for everyone.

>They get every special treatment, bailout, and subsidy in the book. Down to even the streets. 25 trillion on interstates alone.

Every country prizes its auto industry (if it has one) because it is related to nearly every other production capability. Building all the shit the military needs from scratch down to the raw material supply chain is not something that can be done in a hurry. Also, I don't know if you knew, but the interstates are used for rapid shipping and military movement. Trains still exist but they can't compete with trucks on highways for most things.

> we cannot compete with the Chinese on cost and probably can't trust their quality standards.

This already played out with Japanese cars and it turned out it was the quality rather than the cost that was hard to compete with. I'm going to bet that EVs from Asia will be better built than anything made in the US or Europe before too long (if not already). They'll manufacture at scale and work out the kinks.

Western companies should have been doing this. I feel that Tesla tried and never really got there. Protectionism alone won't make it happen.

You're oversimplifying (to be fair, so did I). There is usually a cost/quality tradeoff. In the long run I think every major country could figure out how to make things with any given level of quality, and have certain costs in the same ballpark. But our labor costs are higher than nearly any other country. Chinese labor is currently very cheap.

>Western companies should have been doing this. I feel that Tesla tried and never really got there. Protectionism alone won't make it happen.

Just because some people online claim they want $10k EVs doesn't mean they would buy them. It also doesn't mean that we could make them for that price, at any level of effort. We pay auto workers WAY more than the Chinese pay theirs.

Protectionism is why we have not already been flooded with crappy cars from overseas. We do not allow garbage vehicles to be imported. Neither do other countries. Of course, forcing people to buy cars at higher prices or different quality points inhibits domestic innovation. But if the industry dies because of ideological purity, we would be worse off as a nation than we would be driving cars that cost slightly more or lack certain features.

> some people online claim they want $10k EVs

I wasn't really thinking about cost, but quality, when I made the comment about what we should be doing. Quality at scale with better processes and automation. I think history shows its the scale that matters. Once you have scale you can improve quality across everything.

> Protectionism is why we have not already been flooded with crappy cars from overseas.

I don't live in the US, but another Western country, one that doesn't protect the car market because we have no car manufacturing here at all. I'm not seeing a flood of crappy cars. The Chinese EVs seem very good on price and (so far, new models take time to reveal problems and serviceability) quality. Regulatory protectionism is a good thing, but I'm also not convinced that folks in China would be happy with crappy cars either.

>Quality at scale with better processes and automation. I think history shows its the scale that matters. Once you have scale you can improve quality across everything.

I agree but I don't think it is possible to maintain an advantage in process or scale permanently in general. If you expect other countries to never figure it out, you're wrong. But there can be a situation where higher local costs in some areas are offset somehow by transport costs or strategic subsidies for domestic production.

>Regulatory protectionism is a good thing, but I'm also not convinced that folks in China would be happy with crappy cars either.

China has many protectionist policies, some of which they have leveraged to steal technology from foreign competitors. The Chinese people are not very happy with their vehicle options, but they do not have the option to buy foreign either for the most part. To give you an idea how unhinged it can be in China, I've heard of campaigns to force everyone to discard perfectly good appliances and scooters to stimulate their economy and eat up excess product. It's a bad move but that's how they roll.

Foreign cars cannot be imported en masse to China, and even the cheapest Western-made cars are more expensive than the average Chinese buyer wants to pay. The cheapest new car on the US market is about $25k I think, and the average is closer to $40k.

>I don't live in the US, but another Western country, one that doesn't protect the car market because we have no car manufacturing here at all. I'm not seeing a flood of crappy cars.

I think you'd be better off buying cars from neighboring countries. Anyway, I think every country that can support car manufacturing should do so for strategic reasons. What I was referring to is US-specific rules about what kinds of cars can be imported. Imported cars are usually the more luxurious models due to the rules. The rules as I understand them involve listing out features that each model has. Bare bones and low-quality cars are rejected even if they could be useful to someone, because this strikes a balance between letting people buy what they want and supporting local industry.

>The Chinese EVs seem very good on price and (so far, new models take time to reveal problems and serviceability) quality.

They are cheap but low-quality and no doubt infused with Chinese spy/sabotage tech. I'm sure that they can eventually improve on quality, but ultimately countries in the West that produce cars now need to guard their own industries against insurmountable foreign competition. Nobody can beat the Chinese on price, generally. Their government will eat a loss to put competition out of business, because they want to take over the world. So the best we can do is act accordingly.

> We need to support farmers because a market spread too thin on farming means people would starve.

People would not starve if we stopped the ethanol mandate. In fact, corn prices would fall because the government would no longer force ethanol to be mixed with oil. Less demand would decrease the price.

I'm obviously talking about maintaining spare production capacity. Far worse things than higher prices would happen if we actually had crops fail. If the government stopped requiring ethanol, there would be fewer farmers (although a few might convert to other crops, some land is not suitable for many different crops).

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