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hunterpayneyesterday at 11:10 PM4 repliesview on HN

No, its because the Chinese subsidize the costs of those cars. Say I live in a country that will pay me $50k to build a car. It costs me say, $55K to build the car which I now sell for $60K. How you do you, in a country that pays you nothing to build cars, compete? This is an extreme example but its what is happening here (just will different and smaller numbers).


Replies

adrian_btoday at 12:37 AM

Every time when any competitive Chinese product is discussed, there are claims that it is competitive because it is subsidized.

Perhaps many of these claims are true, but at least in USA I also see huge amounts of subsidies for a lot of products, which are never compared with the Chinese subsidies.

I have never heard about any significant investment in some factory in the USA, which was not conditioned by very large reductions in taxes for that company. I do not see any difference between this and any subsidies that China might have.

Even if there might exist some kind of subsidizing system for electric vehicles in China, there is no doubt that there exists healthy competition between many Chinese companies, so they continuously innovate in EVs, while much less efforts in this direction can be seen in countries like USA, who claim to be scared by the Chinese "unfair" competition, but they seem to do very little or nothing to reduce their technical inferiority.

testing22321today at 1:09 AM

GM and Chrysler were given 85 BILLION dollars that has never been repaid (never will) despite them paying their CEOs tens of millions per year, doing stock buy backs.

At least the Chinese got good cars from subsidizing their auto makers. Americans just got ripped off.

dalyonstoday at 4:12 AM

you need to update your talking points. China no longer subsidizes their cars produced today to any meaningful level.

cataphracttoday at 1:14 AM

Then the US should have done like the EU and apply anti-subsidy countermeasures -- and show before impartial WTO arbitrators the adequacy of the mesures.

But of course the US (or Canada) can't justify their 100% duty in those terms, so they don't even try.