alt Hacker NewsYeah there was never any competing with china, our industry just relies on our market using different values to purchase a car.
It’s tough to convince most price-inelastic people they shouldn’t buy a car that is 1/2 price, even if it has fewer features.
Edit: to be clear I meant that the US did not compete, not that they could not compete
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The expensive cars sell well in the us - customers are not that price inelastic. Those who are prefer a used car with all the high priced features of 5 years ago to a new car with no options
> Yeah thee was never any competing with china, our industry just relies on our market using different values to purchase a car.
This is patently false. The US could have competed with China if it had maintained investments spinning up battery manufacturing and downstream systems to build EVs at scale, while subsidizing EVs (fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year [1]) and increasing taxes on combustion mobility. The US picked legacy automaker profits and fossil fuel interests instead, simply out of lack of will and short term optimization over long term success.
China is building under the same rules of physics as everyone else. You can choose not to, but that is a choice.
(I believe in climate change, so I am thrilled China is going to steamroll fossil fuel incumbents out of self interest [2] [3], regardless of negative second order effects; every 24 months of Chinese EV production destroys 1M barrels/day of global oil consumption at current production rates, as of this comment)
[1] https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
[2] https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
I remember how popular the Yugo was, and then the Geo metro. Nobody wants good cars, they want cheap transportation.