> They over produce with suppressed wages, currency exchange rate, and government subsidies

I mean, so does Germany.

Technically, the USA only has the subsidies part since the IRA came to be but they also have tariffs so, not doing too bad distortion-wise.

At this point in time, pretty much everyone is already defending their industries. China is just playing its cards better than the others and with a head start when it comes to EV.

The US is complex antihero type.

While it definitely attacks threats and has perpetrated plenty of unjust deeds, it also is responsible for the food security of much of the world. It has lifted more people out of poverty than any other party. It has brought poor nations to the point of industrialization.

The US has been a far greater force for good in the world than evil.

The leadership changes frequently, so it's hard to point to any single responsible party. It's democratic, so its institutions are subject to scrutiny. The free press sheds light on corruption and rule breaking.

Despite changing immigration narratives, the US has been an early and strong proponent of multiculturalism and welcoming people.

With declining US hegemony, the world is likely to become a much more dangerous place. We'll see more economic strife, more war, higher costs, greater tensions.

The inevitable whataboutism.

Firstly it's not relevant to a discussion about China's behavior.

Yes the US under Trump has become increasingly authoritarian, but besides being not as oppressive as China, the US remains a democracy and there is a chance to vote bad people out of the White House and more importantly reverse the direction of the country.

Outside of EVs and more broadly China rates near the bottom for market freedom

https://gfmag.com/data/economic-freedom-by-country/

If the broader market is rigged, investors don’t rush in for just one segment.

Chinese stocks have historically done poorly due to poor governance and auditing failures.

Perhaps it’s Elon’s HN account!

Which on the one hand is great because through that China exports material wealth to the world.

At the same time production capacity outside of China has to compete with this "rigged" system, which is near impossible to do.

China has been performing debt swaps with local governments to clean up their balance sheets [1], so used as an example. Agree with all of your comment. People make the mistake that China plays by artificial US capital market rules around profit and debt; they do not. They optimize for physical world success, not line go up.

[1] Why China Is Hoping $1.6 Trillion Can Fix Its Hidden Debt Problem - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-16/china-eco... | https://archive.today/HsaHV - April 16th, 2025

They only jail the people that upset the regime.

> - The upcoming EREV (mostly electric extended range hybrid) F-150 truck? This is expected to have ~700 mile range, and of course no charging hassles. Its main advantage over the now defunct Lightning will be towing range.

Interesting question. Maybe this is the niche where existing auto makers can thrive though if China automakers have a blind spot to outdoors enthusiasts where range is more important.

The problem is that no one really needs or wants this outside of NA, Australia, maybe Russia and Africa? But there is a market.

Range anxiety and towing is a niche problem and companies will get rich selling the next Toyota Camry/VW Golf for the median consumer.

EREV is niche on niche and that's sort of where I expect the NA market to be going under the NA auto makers. We're going to have this protectionist wall where we have these bizarre (increasingly ICE dominated) market while the rest of the world moves on.

American car manufacturers don't play to their strengths e.g affordable sports cars - Chevy Corvette Stingray | Mustang GT how many are sold in foreign markets

the Bronco could make a killing in Africa but is it sold there NO. I understand here in the states the 4runner has no competition - yet ford wants to kill it using the Bronco. Why not use the Bronco to kill the land cruiser in markets where people default to a Land Cruiser / Fortuner and force Toyota to play defense.

E.g in Africa certain markets Ford started selling the Ford Ranger Raptor and they're making a killing - and actually starting to cause Toyota to compete and not bring their usual stale cars.

However Chinese have brought their A-game too - Tank 300, BYD Shark etc

> where is BYD at with FSD?

I'm not sure about BYD, but other car makers have FSD that works like Tesla's FSD, and in some cases it even outperforms it. Here is a test from a few months ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuDSz06BT2g

> - The Chevy Corvette Stingray? Say what you want, but the high end ICE sports cars have an appeal of their own…

The world is moving to EVs, ICE will mostly be collectors cars in 20 years in developed countries. As to Chinese sports cars Xiaomi SU7 Ultra: "June 2025, an unmodified SU7 Ultra (with a maximum 1,139 kW (1,527 hp; 1,549 PS) power) lapped the Nürburgring in a hair under 7 minutes, 5 seconds. It is not only faster than the fastest Tesla Model S Plaid and Porsche Taycan versions, but also faster than a Rimac Nevera, one of the most high-end and expensive electric sportscars."

U9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangwang_U9 is a supercar produced by BYD, fastest in the world.

"It achieved a maximum speed of 496.22 km/h (308.33 mph) at Germany’s ATP Automotive Testing Papenburg, making it the fastest car in the world and breaking the record previously held by the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ at 490.484 km/h (304.773 mph)"

Same car, called the Atto 1 in Australia and with the steering wheel on the other side and slightly better than base specs in Australia.

The point is the difficulty of the comparison. They are tariffed in the EU and NA to the point of near inviability so I don’t see that as a valid comparison. Outside the EU and NA they are Chinese made cars.

So basically you either compare current NA/EU Teslas to a hypothetical untariffed BYD (I don’t think this is fair) or you compare Chinese made Teslas to BYDs (which of course leads to similar prive perf ratios).

Byd Auto Motor, Inc. 1800 S Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA 90015 https://www.byd.international/city/los-angeles

Decades from now we're going to look at the oil patch lobbyists as the villains that killed countless jobs in NA and enabled China to take over whole industries.

You had some politicians like Justin Trudeau that tried to create a frame work that would guide and advantage capital toward investing in innovative green technology and future jobs, but then politicians saw the advantage in politicizing and opposing everything and they tore this all down.

Now China has continued to move ahead meanwhile NA remains at square one with increasingly backward technology, with no incentive to change.

It's going to get really bad!

"Tesla got some subsidies" does not refute my argument. All carmakers get subsidies. BYD gets tons! And Tesla is selling plenty of cars in places without import barriers protecting them including China itself.

> Best path forward is to let in competition

To compete with China in the ”open market” now, Canada will need:

- 25 years of investments in infrastructure and education in STEM and manufacturing

- Targeted state subsidies of chosen branches, which will require

- transition to at least partially planned economy, which will require

- at least partially transitioning to some form of dictatorial governance

- increase population at least twofold (you need multiple multi-million metro areas to support large high-tech clusters)

- devaluate CAD about 2x and accept about the same drop in local purchasing power (which likely will happen anyway, but could be not that harsh and fast).

China at the moment has like 10x advantage in industry ober Canada, it’s impossible to compete. It’s like saying that your immune system must be able to handle bubonic plague, so let’s just inject the body with the pathogen and let it adapt without any external support. A noble idea, but you’ll likely die in the process.

The auto industry is a shockingly high percentage of the Canadian economy, somewhere around 10% of GDP. Direct auto manufacturing roles are themselves about 1% of jobs nationally. If we start counting everyone involved with the sector, it's >5% of people in Ontario. It's not a winning political move to make all of those people unemployed.

It does if it meant everyone else went out of business and became dependent then on China

The Chinese tax payer isn't voluntarily helping you though, it's China's forced resource extraction from its own citizens (wage and QoL suppression), to maintain a stranglehold on global manufacturing. Everybody (except your specific car purchase) would be better off if they used these resources domestically. Do you think they'll ever want payback? if not from you, then from the next generations.

Because over time when your own industries suffer and then become jobless, your country is less secure and wealthy.

Everyone's take on the 1980s has been perverted by an internet viewpoint written by a bunch of weeb fanboys projecting the state of the car market in 2006 onto 1985. The actual cores components of the cars themselves are basically within spitting distance for Japan vs Domestic. These were not high quality cars. They were all low quality cars. But Japan was making the king of low quality cars that people wanted. (And by 1990 all these early 1980s platforms from all makes were all comparatively trash).

In the late 1970s early 1980s if you tried to buy a compact american car it was like buying the burger at a fish restaurant or the vegetarian option at a steakhouse. It was there to check a box. It wasn't well thought out or a core product they gave a shit about and they were almost always last to get any innovations. You want power widows AND an automatic, sorry we'll have to special order that, we don't stock those on the lot.

In contrast, the Japanese gave a shit about those product lines. So someone making "In better times I'd be buying a bigger car from Chevy" money could go to them and get something configured how they wanted without being told no a bunch of times and the sales guy trying to get them into something bigger car didn't want like would happen at the Chevy dealer. Toyota or Honda or whoever literally didn't have those products to upsell you into. Yeah I guess they could sell you a landcruiser but people didn't buy SUVs then. That would be like trying to sell an Econoline to some rich woman who's shopping for a 3row Landrover.

At the end of the 1980s the domestics were basically back with their own new "modern" FWD platforms (e.g. Taurus) and new larger stuff (minivans, midsize SUVs) which made money hand over fist for 10yr or so. The Japanese were basically on the sidelines for all of this. Like yeah they had the 4Runner and Pathfinnder and Passport and stuff but no amount of 2020s fanboyism is gonna make those sales numbers any less of a joke. What the Japanese did do very well though was give a crap about their smaller cheaper offerings, Rav4s and CRVs and small and midsize sedans which the domestics neglected. So when the SUV craze came to an end with the high gas prices and bad economy of the mid-late 2000s they were there ready to be bought. And it's this great success from the mid 2000s that every idiot on the internet seems to want to project back into the 1980s when the 1980s were far different.

What you’re proposing is basically the EV subsidy, which got gutted because Americans got pissy about lifting a single finger to benefit anyone slightly more fortunate than themselves

Housing in the US is labor constrained. When I talk to GCs, subs, etc., they'll say that materials a bit more expensive, and labor is a bit more expensive; but what the complain about — and this can be for hours, if I get one going — is the complete lack of labor in all trades. This isn't a new problem; the "old hands" (GCs in the 60s and 70s) noted the labor drop out even 30+ years ago. The only saving grace we had was a strong trade force incoming population (immigrants); but, we've cut that off.

It wouldn't surprise me if our industry is also labor constrained? I know my brother had a machine shop to make aftermarket titanium parts for (motor)bikes, some cars, etc. He had a policy of nonstop looking for new machinists, even if he was fully staffed, because a machinist could just wander off at any time. With only 4 employees, he could find himself at at 25–50% loss of ship time in just a few days, at any time. It's not even like the machinists were getting more money. They'd just leave, because the new shop was 5m closer than his.

Fixing the labor pool issue is a decades long issue. More money in that pool won't fix things. I don't even know what's going on. Maybe I can just blame modern financialization for the issue? That seems easy, if wrong.

But, for sure, the complete lack of social safety net for labor can't be helping. Maybe if we guaranteed child care, 100% round-the-year safe spaces (we could use the fantastically expensive schools which are empty 75% of the time?), 3-free-meals-per-child, and free education through an associates degree? None of those are particularly expensive, even at the national scale.

Chinese party members reading this thread, please get into modular housing construction in a form that can be shipped to the USA and acceptable to the average person (so not mobile home/trailer park style stuff).

If you hit us with sucking funds from the housing market you will gut our economy even more, and there is zero support in the US to protect homebuilders right now when the two younger generations can't afford their product. If you offered a bad ass modular housing system that could quickly/cheaply build decent homes (current US Spec grade or higher) that might get really interesting.