Volkswagen seeks to counter rivals with budget EV model

That's way too expensive for an "affordable EV".

The BYD Seagull retails here in Uruguay for less than that and we tax cars at about 100%. On China it seems to go for 10-12k.

It's a proper, basic city car. 4 to 6 air bags, ~300km range (more than what this article's car indicates), all basic security features and standard gadgets out of a modern car.

Our EV infrastructure is not viable if you don't have a charger at work/home and yet these have sold like hot cakes.

Legacy carmakers are making increasingly worse ICE cars for the most part (btw does GM sell a C-segment hatchback on any market, anymore?) and their EVs are simply uncompetitive. What's it going to take for them to wake up to the fact they're going to have to stop fleecing their customers with crappy products? Bankruptcy?

It's too expensive for an affordable EV in half the world I am sure. The wealthier half of the world will never let Chinese auto makers in. China wants to do the same thing they've done with other manufacturing, use government subsidies, borderline slave labor, and artifically low currency to eat the market and kill everyone else's manufacturing capacity until they have the market entirely.

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.

Autoworker salaries have very little effect on the price of cars. The final assembly labor costs are a single digit percentage of the sale price. The corporate workers (myself included) are about the same again, despite being a much smaller percentage of the workforce.

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.

Every single expense in your P&L is ultimately salaries.

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.