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‘Seismic shift’: driving unaffordable for many in US amid push toward SUVs
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Most of those Chinese cars wouldn't meet US safety regs. Getting them up to that level would put them closer to cost parity.
They sell them in the EU, which has stricter safety regulations. If they set out to do it, they'll flood the market and get the traditional manufacturers in trouble.
Wow, I didn't realize there were Chinese cars on the European market. Are the cars being received well? Are there major issues with them and if there are major issues, does price still make them worth it?
They’re surprisingly good, particularly BYD cars, in my experience.
Americans’ vehicles tend to be huge, wildly inefficient for their daily usage, and they throw off externalities like pedestrian and cyclist risks, road damage, and support for countries who use our gas spending to make the world less liberal.
VW, Honda, Toyota, and Datsun capitalized on American vehicle bloat to build massive, multinational companies with products in every segment. The Chinese are going to ruin our domestic manufacturers, once they decide to build bridgehead plants here.
Today, I’m driving an Acura that is made in Marysville, Ohio. Not assembled; it is substantively made here in the States. And, the chain reaction that led to Honda, a Japanese company, exporting profits made from American productivity in 2024, started with the Big Three making massively bloated, inefficient, expensive, poorly designed cars, leaving a gap in the market that foreign companies exploited with right-sized, efficient, affordable, reliable vehicles, starting in the ‘60s and exploding with the ‘73 oil crisis.
I don’t have time to find a link, but there have been studies that demonstrate that the exact choices being made by American manufacturers today—to not fully serve the bottom of the market—sow the seeds of their own future declines in the middle and upper markets.
I truly feel car manufacturers are doing everything in their power to make sure that I personally regret every car decision I make. I hope a new comer starts at a low price point and eventually takes their higher margin stuff as well.
EU allows all sorts of stuff that isn't allowed in the US. Believe it or not, US safety regs are generally higher than the EU (for passengers, anyway). The Ariel Atom, for example, needs some hoop jumping to make it US street legal, but can be driven without issue much of the EU.
Not really, the big problem is tariffs. You have to do at least final assembly in the US to avoid that.
My biggest worry is that once/if the Chinese make cars "good enough for the US market", all car companies lobby for worse consumer protections since those regulations no longer keep new competitors out of the market.
I'd be OK with it, but with some caveats. Many US safety regs (and some pollution regs, as well) push things towards larger vehicles in indirect ways. Japanese Kei cars can be perfectly good for city use--not for US highways, but a lot of driving doesn't need to go there--but they would never pass US safety regs. And you don't need to get much bigger than a Kei to have something that works for US highways. Big is only safer for passengers, not for people outside the vehicle.
So if it comes in the context of also getting smaller cars on the road, that would be fine.
While I agree with you, big cars are like lawyers. You keep big cars around to protect you from other big cars.