What is less excusable to me is the concerted attempt to prevent Chinese car companies from building their own plants on US soil, like many other foreign automakers do. Even the proposed BYD plant in Mexico has them freaking out and I wouldn’t put it past the US to use terror attacks to prevent that plant from getting up and running. To me that indicates this is less about protecting jobs than it is about protecting industry profits.

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fuck the tariff. US automakers obliterated themselves and are trying to make it a global suicide pact.

they turned into banks pushing financial products, cannibalized their domestic production capacity and undermined the social reproduction of their own labor force. they hollowed out their product value and, despite the relative power of organized labor in the UAW compared to like… everybody but cops, they gutted their workers too. i’m not going to let the crisis of US automaker capital formations be reframed as an attempt to protect american autoworkers or anyone in the working class. there might be an argument if 100% of these tariff revenues were going to renewable transportation infrastructure, but i would still call that regressive and perverse.

i understand the logic behind the UAW supporting the tariff and wouldn’t tell them not to, but it can barely even be considered a near term solution unless their contracts start pushing for

• significant worker power on the boards, like >50%
• ultimately licensing / adopting tech for renewables into production.

it’s pretty clear the capitalists have never given a fuck about long term viability of any of these organizations, so of course the only way they’ll make a good decision is if they are shoved to the side by the people investing their time and hoping for a future.

i don’t think a typical production worker gives a shit about who signs the check or who invented the technology, if the wage is right, the checks clear, and the work is safe. plants could be cranking out windmill dynamos, tidal turbines, solar panels, battery tech, grid connected vehicles, or cheap EVs. that is what is gonna do for us all.

The existing tariffs were already prohibitively expensive for Chinese automakers. The new ones won’t change much. The old automakers will still get their lunch eaten in every country but this one and the US’s military and legacy automobiles will continue to kill the ecosphere as before.

I was hoping to get a cheap Chinese EV when I next need a car. Now that will cost twice as much thanks to nationalist sinophobia.

China is in a fine position either way, though. They will fully replace any demand for American cars in the vast majority of the world. And the US will just be offloading these costs to their workers, raising the price of hiring an American by the amount their cars are overpriced, making it even harder for the US to compete.

This seems like it would be setting off terrible, terrible signals to the investor class too.

For American manufacturers, even if they have a somewhat higher labour cost structure, they should have a few “home field advantages” to make it at least initially competitive:

• They should understand their customers better than the foreign devils-- have the Chinese manufacturers even DRIVEN anything with more horsepower than a freight locomotive and a carbon footprint two-thirds that of the entire city of Chongqing? How would they possibly understand what Americans want?

• Some aspects of their cost structure might be more amenable; they aren’t schlepping supplies and vehicles across entire oceans, they have established dealer and service networks, they’ve already paid the right bribes to various regulators.

If they can’t at least compete in that scenario, then basically all you have is a firm that lives as a protected novelty, subject to the whims of government subsidy and trade policy. That feels like telling an institutional investor “Go and buy stock in a tourist heritage railway, that’s a vital growth business right there!”

On a high level, we can assume this is going to be a repeat of the 1970s with Japanese imports: Detroit continues to do what Detroit does while haemmoraging market share, eventually they have a series of come-to-Jesus moments where they make the electric K-car (or just start selling BYDs under license in the Geo style) to try to reposition themselves, but eventually the size of the market meant that “foreign” cars ended up being made domestically anyway. The smart play would be to jump to the end of the board: which state wants to be the first to get a Chinese EV plant running and generating local jobs and tax revenue?

Automotive tariffs have robbed the US of so many awesome vehicles.

It sucks. There’s a solar panel tariff coming too.

It’d be one thing if we could actually build anything in this dumb country, then maybe it could be justified. Or if these were even nationalized enterprises where we could guarantee fair wages and that the money actually gets spent on the desired objective. But any state subsidies here just immediately get hoovered up by capitalists.

We don’t have the brains, or the facilities, plain and simple. Our failed education system has churned out a population of proudly ignorant buffoons.

I have never bought an American car and I never will

USA: We want you to embrace capitalism you God damn commie bastards!

China: Ok here’s a load of cars we’d like to sell you.

USA: No not like that!

Also all this nonsense about undercutting due to state subsidy. That’s exactly what the USA has been doing for years. However in China that money actually makes things cheaper. Rather than helping make profit for share holders.

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If America was doing it because we were investing in our own EV production, then I would be fine with it, but we’re not doing that. We’re doubling down on gas guzzling monstrosities that can run over half a dozen children that the driver is physically unable to see, so I’m against it.

I don’t think anyone here believes that EVs will solve the world’s problems. But the government believes that, or rather they promote that belief, and yet they refuse to even manifest that belief because they make inferior products designed by a toddler

Are you trying to argue in favor of pro-American chauvinistic protectionism and fueling a cold war trade war?