US cities pay too much for buses

A lot of fluff (although I do appreciate the hard numbers and reasons - thirteen shades of grey for flooring is utterly ridiculous) for essentially these two points:

- low lot size combined with a lot of customization demands leads to high per-unit costs

- "Buy American" is expensive. D'uh. Unfortunately the article doesn't dig down deeper into why BYD and other Chinese manufacturers are cheaper - 996 style slave labor production, a lack of environmental protection laws and, most notably, a lot of state/regional subsidies artificially dumping prices below sustainability not just against American companies but against other Chinese companies.

> 996 style slave labor production, a lack of environmental protection laws and, most notably, a lot of state/regional subsidies artificially dumping prices below sustainability not just against American companies but against other Chinese companies.

Silicon Valley CEOs saw this and thought it should be their playbook. So hell, maybe made in America will eventually get cheaper as this innovative economic and social system sees adoption by brave pioneers.

More likely that the companies that institute this will hemorrhage talent that is offered a better deal by competitors. 996 works because the supply of Engineers is quite high in China.

Not calling you out on BYD, but a lack of competition in the U.S. means we'll never know what the price for "Buy American" could be.

To your point though, even at a much higher price, the "Buy American" is putting that money back into the U.S. economy (we hope).

> More likely that the companies that institute this will hemorrhage talent that is offered a better deal by competitors.

Won't work when the market colludes. And Silicon Valley Big Tech already got caught in such a cartel - see [1], debated back then in [2].

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168214

I think labor cost alone is most plausible, especially combined with higher quantities. Average yearly salary in urban China is <$20k.

Getting parity with subsidies, worker/environmental protection and regulation overhead would not even come close to make the US price-competitive for labor intensive work like this right now, IMO.

Transit agencies (at least the big ones) normally do their maintenance and repair in-house. So they will want to buy one make/model of bus as much as possible so that they don't have to train mechanics on many different manufacturer's products and stock parts for many different models. Once those decisions are made, any competitors will have that weighing against them. That will tend to reduce the number of viable competitors.

Same with municipal vehicles, most towns will buy all Ford or all Chevrolet and as few different models as possible.

Economy of scale is basically all of it, honestly. The lede is that Denver pays ~60% more than Singapore[1] per bus. Because Singapore ordered 24x as many buses.

[1] There's an even worse number for Cincinatti.

Chinese manufacturers use more advanced processes, not just cheap labor. For instance they built a mushroom factory in Shanghai where they only touch the mushrooms with a forklift -- contrast that to the "big" indoor mushroom farms in Pennsylvania that make those Agaricus white button mushrooms where somebody has to cut each mushroom with a knife. They just opened one in Texas.

BYD constructs cars with radically different methods than Western manufacturers, who can close much of the gap when they catch up in technique

https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1mnel0i/f...

> the article doesn't dig down deeper into why BYD and other Chinese manufacturers are cheaper - 996 style slave labor production, a lack of environmental protection laws and, most notably, a lot of state/regional subsidies artificially dumping prices below sustainability

I’m not sure that this is accurate. My understanding is that BYD invested heavily into automation. Their factories have few human employees left. They do almost all their automation robotics design and manufacturing in house to boot. That’s a huge advantage

I'm just saying that the "China cheaper because dirty, bad quality copycat products" is in my view mostly an incorrect excuse; cheap labor and (sometimes) larger scale are (for now!) Chinese advantages that people love to ignore.

Being price-competitive with Chinese production then means either driving down local wages or inflating product costs, and there is absolutely no way around this (until you have heavy industry that literally builds itself).

Sure, but a bus lasts 12 years in service (depending on use slightly different, but 12 is a reasonable number for discussion). You should be buying them on a longer contract to deliver 1/12 of your total fleet every year for several years. This means that you only need to ask what to train the mechanics on at the end of the contract and in turns there are not that many different buses you need to train on. Keeping the same manufacture does reduce training costs some, but it isn't like every bus is different.

Even ignoring the above, all but the smallest agencies can dedicate mechanics to each make. A mechanic can maintain so many buses per year - lets say 10 for discussion (I have no idea what the real number is), so if you have 100 buses you need 10 mechanics. if you have 4 trained on brand A, 4 on brand B, and 2 on both you are fine.

I don't believe labor is that much of the cost of a bus, unless you are talking about the "labor" of investors and high level administrators. Ive worked in many many different manufacturing jobs, and labor of building things has always been the lowest cost of concern despite managers trying to harp on about it. Labor costs are the easiest to control, which is why they get the most attention, but material procurement, administrative bloat and bureaucracy, and marketing or bribes always top the scale above the workers actually producing what is being sold.

First: I'm not blaming US workers for being unreasonably expensive.

But those higher wage levels are not just affecting a products core-labor working at the assembly line-- you'll have project managers, sales, purchasing, contractors, even the construction workers building your factories: All of them are affected by this (and those people exist in China, too!). I would assume that the total sales price of a bus contains a larger fraction proportional with hourly wages than you might expect at first glance.