It means they don’t have to innovate. Heck they have gone backwards from 2016-2020 and 2024 now as regulations eased so no incentive to innovate to make short term gains and metrics. Talk to people outside the USA and they will say US cars might as well be forgotten.
It's the devil's deal isnt it? Short term gain for long term pain. Chinese older generations signed a deal bad for them but good for the childrens, Westerns signed the opposite. And no you cant back out, your old mans already took the money, now it's your turn to return the promised amounts
Chinese cars are messing up the European auto market and European automakers. Europe needs to have a stronger stance but like normal, Europe pretty much says “pwease don’t take advantage of our markets!”
In theory, more competition leads to better prices and better deals for consumers. In reality, it’s going to squeeze every non Chinese automaker. On a long enough timeline where we allow Chinese companies to take over, this will be bad for consumers.
The Chinese government supports all of these auto companies with major subsidies and controls a lot of the technology. They steal IP with reckless abandon.
In the short term, it will increase competition and drive down prices. In the long run, it will reduce the competitors and increase prices.
One thing I think this thread is showing is that the question is becoming bigger than simply "Chinese cars are cheap because Chinese workers are cheap."
Wages and subsidies matter. But Chinese manufacturers are increasingly moving production outside China, which gives us a chance to test that explanation in the real world.
Brazil is a particularly interesting example.
For decades, the market was dominated by established American, European, Japanese and Korean manufacturers with local factories, suppliers, dealerships and huge brand recognition. Chevrolet was enormously strong, and the Onix spent years as the country's best-selling car.
Now the structure is changing.
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 partnership and investing together in Brazil.
And it gets stranger than simply "Chinese companies versus legacy automakers."
GM itself is assembling Chinese-developed Chevrolet EVs in Brazil. The Spark EUV and Captiva EV are being assembled in Ceará using products originating from GM's Chinese ecosystem with SAIC and Wuling.
Toyota has a 50/50 EV R&D joint venture with BYD. Nissan has a long industrial relationship with Dongfeng in China. Renault is partnering with Geely.
So the borders between "Chinese" and "traditional" manufacturers are becoming increasingly blurry.
Europe may become an even better test. Chinese manufacturers are actively looking for existing European factories rather than simply exporting everything from China. BYD says that, longer term, it expects to need three vehicle assembly plants and a battery plant in Europe.
That is why I don't think the wage argument settles this.
If BYD builds cars with Brazilian or European workers and most of its price advantage disappears, then labor costs, subsidies and producing in China were obviously doing a huge amount of the work.
But if a substantial advantage remains, we have to ask what else explains it: battery costs, vertical integration, platform design, automation, supplier organization, scale, development cycles, margins, or some combination of them.
And this is where I come back to Detroit.
The US doesn't have to allow unlimited Chinese imports to test this.
Require local production. Require American wages. Require US safety and environmental standards. Apply trade safeguards.
Then let the products compete.
Protection can give an industry time to adjust. But the important question is what Detroit does with that time.
Because Chinese manufacturers aren't standing still outside the US. They're localizing production, buying or reusing factories, forming partnerships with established manufacturers and becoming part of the same global supply chains that legacy automakers use.
Brazil is already experiencing that transition. Europe increasingly is too. Renault and Geely, for example, just announced another €319 million investment in their Brazilian partnership.
If an American-built Chinese EV eventually costs roughly the same as an American-built competitor, we'll have learned something important about the original Chinese cost advantage.
But if it can still compete aggressively on price and equipment while paying American production costs, then keeping the imported version out didn't solve Detroit's underlying competitiveness problem.
It just postponed the test.
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.
Long term protectionism is bad for US manufacturer's competitiveness. They're global businesses that cannot survive on US sales alone. That means they need to compete globally. The domestic challenges to PHEVs and BEVs is consumer attitude and a dealer-oriented distribution channel that is dependent on costly, non-warranty repair services.