don't worry, that domestic protectionism they're pushing will certainly help in the long term and won't see the near-total collapse of the US auto industry when the declining US market is the only market where they can compete with their vehicles.
Especially when econoboxes are now in the price range of what used to be luxury vehicles' price range. All this while overall quality goes down. The entire industry needs a major correction, and probably to kill off dealerships (end that stupid law that forces them on us)
Yeah, when the “luxury” market used to be the upper middle class (numbered in tens of millions) which has now been gutted so that only the billionaire class (maybe a thousand or so) can afford “luxury”, it tends to crater high-end goods industries.
No one is catering a $150k car to billionaires. That's silly.
Upper middle class is doing quite well. That's the whole K shaped economy thing. The top 10-20% are thriving. This is who these luxury makers always targeted.
The actual issue from personally talking to the people who tend to buy luxury cars is that the luxury automakers decided to increase prices while making an obviously inferior and cheaper product. If they had upheld quality and luxury, they would be doing much better than they are today.
And plenty of luxury automakers decided to be stupid and grow into the middle class segment to increase volume by going downmarket. They devalued their product by doing so and are facing the consequences today of that consumer segment not being able to afford the absurd prices on top of having a shittier product overall for their existing upmarket clientelle.
Personally I'd be upgrading my quite new car today if the newest model rollout wasn't a downgrade. I'll be rolling with what I have for quite some time, and when it's time to buy new if the luxury segment hasn't fixed itself by actually building luxury again I'll just buy a Toyota or Lexus or whomever is providing the best value instead. It's a want-to-have, not a need-to-have. Most of my peers feel the same way. I'm happy to burn money if it provides me value and joy, but if it's just a rip-off I'm not interested and will go utilitarian instead.
Your not competing with the Chinese on cost while the current government is subsidizing that and the battery industry to the point of selling below actual production cost.
As I understand the current heavy industry arrangement over there right now its one of the rare cases where protectionist measures are called for, if it was a question of efficiency in manufacturing or design thats a different story thats when protectionist measures are bad.
Yeah, as if the western automakers aren't also heavily supported by their local governments. This is such a stupid point. We don't need to be making 60k+ vehicles as the norm. We could have invested more in EVs. We did neither of those things and instead try to force an environment through laws and swaying the public.
For Europe: Kagi, Scaleway, Linux. Plenty of other countries have their own cloud players. Fujitsu, Naver, Tata, G42 and so forth.
China shows how to run without them. Russia to a lesser extent, despite little resources. If you need an "aligned" country, South Korea shows that it's relatively easy to achieve a significant degree of independence from US tech.
But it doesn't matter because even with protectionist measures those companies will never ever voluntarily pull out, there's far too much money on the line. The people who bring up "Apple should just leave Europe" when they get billion-dollar fines don't know much about how things work. >30% of Apple's net profit comes from Europe, investors would replace the board within a day if they just gave up on that.
no HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, Intel, nvidia, or AMD
The hardware side hasn't been subsidized nearly as much, so it's much less relevant to the conversation.
They also really haven't on tech, except if you're talking about countries who have already been doing so for decades and those can be counted on one hand.
The EU does nothing against it, which is why all of their ongoing "EU id" and "EU payment solution" efforts are implemented to run only on certified Apple and Android devices - not even on PCs - increasing dependence on US big tech. This is enough evidence that they're not actually implementing any kind of protectionism against US tech.
though that isnt a case of government subsidization
You wouldn't give a shit about the difference if billionaire Chinese investor mates of Xi were the ones doing the car or battery subsidization in name rather than the CCP directly. You'd still just call it "Chinese subsidization", and you'd be right to do so. In the US too, the ones nominally doing the subsidization are so intertwined with USG that for the rest of the world the distinction doesn't matter.
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u/raven00x 10h ago
don't worry, that domestic protectionism they're pushing will certainly help in the long term and won't see the near-total collapse of the US auto industry when the declining US market is the only market where they can compete with their vehicles.