Road House

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i wouldnt mind the tax if we actually got usable things to keep people off the road. I hate the other drivers.

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There is another part of this discussion that makes the whole “Chinese auto industry vs American auto industry” framing much less clean than it sounds. Tesla itself is a good example. Tesla is American, but its battery supply chain has never been purely American. Panasonic was crucial to Tesla’s early scale, and Tesla later diversified its battery sourcing to companies including LG Energy Solution and CATL. So even the most successful American pure-EV manufacturer was built around a global, heavily Asian battery supply chain. Brazil makes this even more interesting because we are watching several versions of this industrial integration happen at the same time. BYD took over Ford’s former industrial complex in Camaçari and is progressively localizing production. GWM took over Mercedes-Benz’s former factory in Iracemápolis. Renault and Geely are expanding their industrial relationship in Brazil. GM itself is now assembling Chinese-developed Chevrolet EVs in Ceará. The Spark EUV and Captiva EV come from GM’s Chinese industrial ecosystem with SAIC and Wuling and are being assembled locally. Toyota and BYD have a 50/50 EV R&D joint venture. Nissan has had a major industrial relationship with Dongfeng in China for decades. At some point, asking whether a technology is simply “Chinese” or “Western” stops having an easy answer. And Brazil gives us another interesting experiment: range. If you look only at Brazilian homologation figures, some EVs can look surprisingly short-legged. Cars with batteries in the 50-60 kWh range can receive official Inmetro/PBEV range figures around 300 km. But the Brazilian number is deliberately conservative. Inmetro does not simply publish the raw laboratory result. Adjustment factors are applied to produce a more conservative real-world reference. The problem is that a lot of automotive discussion here then treats that number almost as the maximum distance the EV can realistically travel. Owner experience often looks very different. We now have EV owners driving these cars across Brazil, including mountainous areas and routes that climb from the coast onto the plateau. There are owners and independent tests substantially exceeding the official Inmetro range, and under favorable conditions some results get much closer to WLTP. Larger-battery EVs can exceed 400 km in real use even when their Brazilian homologated number looks much less impressive. Obviously that does not mean WLTP is guaranteed real-world range. Drive at 120 km/h, climb continuously, add headwind, temperature changes or heavy HVAC use and consumption changes dramatically. But this exposes an interesting asymmetry in how cars are discussed here. When a small 1.0-liter ICE car achieves an exceptionally good km/l result, automotive enthusiasts and media are perfectly happy to show what the car can achieve under favorable real-world conditions. With EVs, I often see the opposite. The conservative Inmetro figure gets repeated as the defining range of the vehicle, while owner consumption and independent road results receive much less attention. A much better way to discuss EV range is to show the homologation numbers and then show actual energy consumption. If an EV does 12, 15, 18 or 22 kWh/100 km, anyone can understand what a 40, 60 or 90 kWh battery means under different conditions. That's much more informative than saying “this is a 300 km car” because one homologation system printed 300 km on the label. And all of this comes back to the original Detroit question. Brazil is becoming a useful real-world laboratory because Chinese manufacturers are no longer simply shipping Chinese-built cars here. They are buying former Western factories, hiring Brazilian workers and progressively localizing production. At the same time, established American, European and Japanese manufacturers are increasingly using Chinese partners, platforms, batteries, engineering or complete vehicles. Europe is moving in a similar direction as Chinese manufacturers localize more production there. That gives us an opportunity to separate two things that are constantly mixed together in this discussion. If Chinese manufacturers lose most of their price advantage when they manufacture in Brazil, Europe or eventually the US with local workers, then Chinese wages, subsidies and domestic production conditions were clearly doing much of the work. But if a substantial advantage survives localization, then wages cannot be the entire explanation. Battery costs, vertical integration, EV-specific platforms, supplier organization, procurement, manufacturing scale, automation, development cycles and margins all have to enter the discussion. That's why I would actually find an American-built Chinese EV much more interesting than another imported Chinese EV. Require American production. American wages. American safety and environmental standards. Apply the same rules to everyone. Then compare the products. If an American-built BYD ends up costing roughly the same as an equivalent American-built GM or Ford, we learn something important about where the original Chinese cost advantage came from. But if it can still compete aggressively on price, equipment and efficiency while paying American production costs, then tariffs didn't answer the underlying competitiveness question. They only delayed the experiment.

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Recently heard in an interview that China has more automotive production capacity than total world demand for vehicles, and that they are continuing to bring new production online. They have very focused industrial policy and a ton of direct government support for manufacturers. It seems like running other countries' car industries out of business might be a goal that the Chinese government are putting real resources behind. That's on top of real advantages in manufacturing that have been compounding for decades as western countries outsourced all of their manufacturing to China. They might well be winning this competition even if their government wasn't putting its finger on the scale. American car manufacturing, like all the other major industries, is just run to make the capital class as much money as possible. Most of it was outsourced a long time ago to make these people more money. There's no long term strategy there. American leadership keeps Chinese competition out, and bails out US car companies when they screw up, because they realize that losing all advanced / vehicle manufacturing puts the US in a very weak position, but beyond that we don't have the sort of focused industrial policy and ability to pursue long term goals that the Chinese system has. It feels like a reflection of our different political and economic systems more than it's about these specific manufacturers getting soft. Government support and protection for US car companies can feel odious because it ultimately just lines the pockets of rich people and kicks the can down the road. It sucks for US consumers in the short term that we cant buy cheap EVs, most of us are poor and getting poorer. I think you can make a case that in the long term this kind of protection of US industries makes some sort of sense.

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I just see a bear on the side of the road twerking for money

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I wish more people understood the way Elons mind and vision and goals were built. I don’t think he thinks too highly of himself let alone to think he is God. Do you understand that doesn’t stop him from trying to change the human limit of how a mortal can bend the powers of God? When I was a kid before road trips my mom had us pray for safe travels. Today Elon and team provide safe travels. Watching the man speak when could not before through neuralink. Our founding fathers believe some rights are God given, freedom of speech is something has does his best to give (at great personal expense). More people should aim higher themselves vs aiming their bows higher at him. Follow him, don’t tear him down. Be better than him if you can.

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Warsh really couldve hike a full percent and put the ball in trumps court to finish this war up so we can get back on track to pre-iran oil prices but no we just kick cans down the road around here. Imagine if the war finally ended and we got oil back online at full capactiy and that 1% rate cut

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idk, they reportted, they beat, but they still managed to go down on the road. idk what was the plan from my point of view

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for ONDS? yeah definitely. it's clearer than ever the powers that be are playing kingmaker with ONDS. the industry/government/israeli connections. US's entire playbook is built on having the strongest stick and as shown in ukraine/Iran drones clearly threaten conventional force. ONDS clearly being setup as leader in the field, probably replace alot of boomer MIC companies down the road as drones make so much shit obsolete

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Too bad the current administration is fully against electric vehicles. If someone came out tomorrow with a coal powered truck, Trump would ban all other cars on the road in a heartbeat.

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