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US cities pay too much for buses

(www.bloomberg.com)
355 points pavel_lishin | 1 comments | 26 Sep 25 13:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mschuster91 ◴[26 Sep 25 14:23 UTC] No.45386830[source]▶
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.

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1. bikelang ◴[26 Sep 25 14:47 UTC] No.45387130[source]▶
> 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