> 3. European carmakers are by nature export oriented

Chinese cars are selling less in China (20% less this year IIRC) so that is the reason why they must sell abroad. Not that they are not good.

The reason this is happening is because we are deferent to Wall Street. It's impossible for extremely high returns on capital to coexist with a robust and growing manufacturing sector.

Wall Street can and does demand that companies pay them dividends instead of investing in capacity. What you need is a willingness to accept lower returns on capital and higher savings rates. China makes those things happen, and that's why its manufacturing sector is able to grow the way that it does.

American technology and European technology are, of course, top-notch. What's different is the required return on capital and the labor market. Both of those are primarily dictated by industrial policies of the respective governments.

> It's not just about profit. Sometimes it's really about market share.

No it's never just about market share. Market share and accumulating it would just be a means to an end of either eventually making a profit, or squeezing out competitors to raise prices later. At the end of the day you'd 100% of the time rather be Apple (it's objectively irrational to suggest otherwise) than another player in this space.

Besides the American market which is where the profits are is also the second largest market by volume. In China the car companies are struggling to make money because of state subsidies, aggressive pricing, and very intense competition. Those companies that are looking to survive are looking to global markets (primarily the EU and US) so that they can actually survive and make money. As they increasingly get shut out of these two markets China is in for a consolidation of automakers which will result in a lot of lost jobs and companies going bankrupt. China's internal auto market was down 22% YoY for example [1].

> You live under a rock it you don't see the earthquake that Chinese automakers are.

Please stop writing things like this as it's a violation of site guidelines.

> European carmakers are by nature export oriented and they oppose tariffs on Chinese cars, especially German carmakers.

That's false. You can do a cursory Google search for the latest here but in general the EU is taking action, led by Germany, to introduce tariffs or other market restrictions to slow the import of Chinese cars. Germany has been shedding 10s of thousands of jobs in the automotive and machinery sector.

> Reality is that neither European nor US carmakers (and many other technological sectors) can't keep the pace with Asians, whether it's making ships, steel, chips, tvs, or cars. We just don't.

This is also false. There's nothing special about "Asians" that enable them to make things. Countries like China by virtue of their incredibly deep labor pool enabled them to scale up mass manufacturing, but in the United States for example we can compete (and the Chinese are doing this too) with robotics and other automation tools. Most of our alleged inability to manufacture these products just stems from decades of industrial policy assuming that China in particular would be a welcoming and liberalizing partner but that assumption turned out to be false.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/everyone-loves-chinese-ca...

[2] I want to be clear here. While I detest the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party and all communist ideology, I'm not trying to suggest that China's auto market or manufacturers suck, or don't make great cars, or whatever. My point of view is that the arguments put forth about Chinese dominance seem incorrect to me as stated and I'm in principle arguing against the arguments because they're in my view bad, not because of anything to do with the Chinese.