25k is still too fucking much.
8999 and we can start having a conversation, people can’t afford a 25k new car for gods sake.
8999 and we can start having a conversation, people can’t afford a 25k new car for gods sake.
- The battery and motor ecosystem is dominated by Chinese companies. These will happily build EU factories. Embrace and learn.
- Market size is not too much of the problem.The Chinese market is a lot larger, but not ten times.
Perhaps regulatory capture in the EU by large established players is a big part of the problem?
But on that note, chinese companies aren't building a 10k car profitably. Their OEMs have a dizzying array of subsidies and agreements that allow "market friendly price fixing" and protection from going bust. They are very smartly playing a long game that might end up making everyone better off, we'll see.
A EU or US OEM in the same position would just not be possible from the start. -An existing one IE VW or Ford could leverage massive chains to drive down MSRP, but the public nature of the companies won't allow that for too long. -A new OEM ie "slate trucks" has gone thru this, seeing MSRP jump by 1/3-1/2 simply because decision of the then ruling party changed rebate scenario, as well as global shipping rates skyrocketing.
Cannot this be said about anything? Choose a long enough finance and it's "cheap". Let's forget you'd be paying (at least in Europe) easily 1.6x the price of the car because of the small payments.
£313/mo is more expensive than the cheapest new car leases, but you wouldn't want to drive a car through London zone 1, and you'd have to pay £18/day in the congestion zone.
25k could be either side of that.
Just for the sake of illustration (I don't know current car loan interest rates, I'm not interested in ever getting a car at full price, and this is just about financing costs and not any of the other costs associated with car ownership): if you were to get e.g. an expensive Tesla for 100k and had a 5% loan, you'd pay 5k/year forever without ever paying off the capital.
Here in Germany, the BahnCard 100 costs €3199/year and that gets you nationwide use of all public transport and lets you take your bike with you and get seat reservations; or there's the Deutschland-Ticket which costs €756/year and gets you local public transport everywhere (no reservations, only the slow intercity trains not the express ones, no free take your bike with you etc).
If the car costs more than €756/year, and can do fine with local public transport, and you're one person not a family, at 5% interest the maximum price (of a free-to-run car, so let's assume it is an EV with PV on all surfaces) would be €15,120*, and that's if you own it literally forever.
Two people sharing a car, or a lower interest rate, the threshold goes up.
* OK, so I'm assuming there that the Deutschland-Ticket never gets more expensive, so that's "inflation + 5%", but this is all just as an illustration anyway.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-04/Final-TS...
Being interested in/annoyed at the price of new cars even as a second-hand car buyer is somewhat justified
That said, if the EU car industry falls over completely*, there's no longer a reason for protectionist trade rules, and the EU then gets the benefit of cheaper Chinese cars.
* Short-term, Trump's tariffs and the significance of the US as an export market to several major EU producers are bad; long-term, China's actually really good at this and out-competing all western production, US and EU. Just like the chicken and egg, which comes first of "governments stop protecting the industry because the industry is important" and "the industry stops being important because the government stopped protecting it" is… well, "stop assuming all eggs have to contain chickens": there's plenty of ways either could fail independently of the other, but when it fails, the mutual support goes with it and it stays down.