Volkswagen seeks to counter rivals with budget EV model

There's no way we let that happen to cars. China's average auto worker pay is $4.20 an hour. America's is 6x that. What you call fleecing customers we call paying workers a living wage.

We'd rather pay $25k for a cheap EV and have a thriving auto industry than pay $10k and have none. We'd happily choose paying more for cars over Latin America-style wealth inequality, though lately it seems as if we're going to manage both at the same time.

https://www.salaryexplorer.com/average-salary-wage-compariso...

Also, Chinese manufacturers will do the same as Japanese and Korean manufacturers before them: work around tariffs by building assembly plants in the US and Europe.

I’m happy for you that you can afford to plop $25K down for a car.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Motor_Vehicle_Safety_S...

The majority of costs are just the price of raw materials and manufacturing anything, whether in the US or abroad. What Chinese OEMs are doing isn't anything secret, it's just optimizing the other things to hit those price targets. Cutting out dealerships, better value engineering, lower executive/corporate salaries and benefits, cheaper electronics, limited features, vertical integration, and most importantly being willing to sell lower margin vehicles.

If it's not salaries in your P&L, then it's salaries in your supplier's P&L, or salaries your supplier's supplier's P&L.

It would be great if everyone could be wealthy enough to buy all their necessities and never worry about money, but that's a pipe dream.

Easily possible if we fix zoning laws, encourage building more homes, and reduce regulatory capture that prevents competition in industry.

Farming mfg out, puts those people out of a job, those out of a job can get lower pay or go on the dole -that comes out of all those "poorer people's" taxes. And, while we're at it, why not outsource poor people's labor overseas or even import cheap unskilled labor to undermine them?

No, you want to maintain a diversified, robust and self-sustaining economy that perpetuates wealth rather then siphon it overseas.

VW and Stellantis need to go bankrupt and their technical workers need help to transition to being part of industries that will strive in a low-carbon economy: public transports, bicycles, two-wheels EVs, etc. [0] As for the management of these companies, they can all bloody starve, frankly.

[0] https://ilnousfautunplan.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Indus..., Claude's summary in English: https://claude.ai/share/695d7c05-25e5-4295-aa09-2bdc8717f8ca

Someone would need to do a study to test if this were true. My guess is many of the safety feature are a net positive. It would be interesting to see the tradeoffs though.

It’s just much more scarce so the people who own the mines can charge more for it.

Gold is a very easy metal to work with. While iron into steel especially on a large scale isn’t trivial.

I doubt the cost of labor has a meaningful impact on the price of gold.

By contrast a tonne of steel requires about 2 tonnes of iron ore and 0.8 tonnes of coal and 0.1 tonnes of limestone, all bulk minerals dug out of the ground. Total world steel production was 1.9 billion tonnes in 2023.

Edit: well I’m kind of wrong: https://www.gold.org/goldhub/gold-focus/2024/05/higher-gold-...

Profit margins seem to be about 50-70% currently but historically it was closer to 30% (of course that’s still many times higher than for steel production)

I have never bought a new car.

That's literally the stated purpose of Trump's tariffs, though.

It's not about hurting the Chinese. That's a bonus in some cases, sure, but the stated purpose is to encourage US economic growth in the industrial sector.

If BYD starts building factories in the US to hire American workers and sell to American consumers, Trump would be bringing it up every time he saw a microphone.

All humans are hypocrites. We want manufacturing here, both for jobs and National security/economic resilience. But we also have our own budgets.

Australia and the UK have modest barriers to entry - especially in Australia a large part of the market is Chinese.

In the EU they are allowing Chinese imports because otherwise the Chinese would restrict the sale of German cars in China. So they are coming in though still a small percentage of the market in the EU/UK.

But it feels like we're reaching a point where we're trying to catch a falling knife, where every safety improvement is _obviously_ worth it, even as the easy gains have gone away. We've also (almost) completely ignored the safety of everyone outside of the vehicle in our arms race to protect occupants.

Apparently a great uncle of mine found gold on his family farm in Scotland, but it was never profitable to exploit so saw no benefit from it!

China's subsidized their EV market with tens of billions directly. On top of that, they subsidize critical components and materials. They also keep their currency artifically devalued.

An American comnpany could do everything BYD does and still not come remotely close on price.