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355 points pavel_lishin | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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myrmidon ◴[] No.45386847[source]
I think this shows one of the downsides of trade barriers very well: You get stuck with undesirable industries (diesel bus manufacturing), binding capital and labor better used elsewhere (and you easily end up with underperforming, overpriced solutions, too).

But I'm curious how much this actually affects transport costs. If such a bus is used 12h/day, then even overpaying 100% for the vehicle should get outscaled by labor + maintenance pretty quickly, long before the vehicle is replaced...

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mrits ◴[] No.45386958[source]
What is wrong with diesel bus manufacturing? Just the exhaust pedestrians have to breath in? It seems near the bottom of the list for things we'd need to solve for carbon emissions.
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hx8 ◴[] No.45387049[source]
There is nothing wrong with diesel bus manufacturing, but if you were to generate a list of the 1000 most desirable products to manufacture I don't think diesel bus would be on the list. We have companies and manufacturing expertise tied up in building buses when they could be building {X}.
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bluGill ◴[] No.45387641[source]
A bus - because of the issues with shipping is something worth building not "too far" from where used. There is value in scale manufacturing so it won't be every city, but making buses for a different continent probably isn't right either.

Note that engineering can be done in one location for multiple factories.

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bombcar ◴[] No.45388989[source]
The cost to ship a bus anywhere in the world approaches the cost of shipping a container - $2 to 10k probably. A tiny fraction of the price.
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bluGill ◴[] No.45389568[source]
That is still a lot of money. There is only so much scale before you want a seperate factory anyway and shipping is a consideration then.
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1. myrmidon ◴[] No.45389907[source]
Sure, but if those $10k shipping costs get you labor at a quarter of the price, I don't think the financials ever become favorable for high-wage countries like the US (average salary in urban China is <$20k/year).

Even in much more highly automated industries you have a shift towards lower wage regions (see eastern europe automotive industry as an example) because you still need labor to build and maintain the factories at the very least.