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.

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.

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.