On: Ford EV Customers to Gain Access to 12,000 Tesla S...

[mschuster91]

Wait until the Chinese manufacturers (BYD and friends) catch up - they've been growing immensely over the last few years, and in contrast to Tesla or the legacy auto makers, they all have the limitless coffers of the CCP to back their expansion.

Personally I'd be happier if Chinese products artificially subsidized by CCP government funds be slapped with heavy tariffs to counteract that, but I don't believe that it will happen.

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/629273/byd-plugin-car-sales-decem...

[Spivak → mschuster91]

Punishing Chinese companies for being government subsidized feels wrong on a lot of levels, the first of which being we subsidize the shit out of our own domestic industry and two because it presumes that the american way of organizing an economy is the only valid one.

[mschuster91 → Spivak]

There's rules on how to do subsidies and an international organization supposed to safeguard these, the WTO.

China is violating these rules on a scale that puts the US and Europe combined to shame, the absurd thing is that it's the US who is currently blocking WTO appointments.

[machiaweliczny → Spivak]

It's not wrong if they are abusing human rights/dignity to get there or eating up environmental costs. You might not want to compete with that and tarrifs seem fine in that scenario.

[Spivak → machiaweliczny]

That I 100% agree with and I wish we were more aggressive about not trading with countries that abuse their workers.

[dotnet00 → Spivak]

Seems reasonable enough to not want to allow companies subsidized and essentially controlled by an adversary to potentially take out domestic industry.

After all, unlike in democratic nations, China doesn't have to worry about how heavily subsidizing certain companies will be perceived, and Western nations have already seen how bad of a mistake building a strong reliance on a single nation ended up being for the reliability of their supply chains.

[93po → dotnet00]

> adversary

The American government is a bigger adversary to the American people than the Chinese government

[klooney → Spivak]

All auto manufacturers are heavily government subsidized, all over the world, for whatever that's worth.

[jsight → mschuster91]

Not sure why you've been downvoted. The Chinese automakers are building great vehicles and growing very quickly.

For the US, they will need to sort out US production to get around protectionist trade policy, but that seems likely in the long run.

[Tagbert → jsight]

While there are some US policies that make it hard for a new manufacturer to setup in the US, it is nothing like the level of protectionism in China. In China the only way to setup a company is if you partner with a Chinese company who owns half of the entity and has full access to everything your company does. That is a pretty stiff block to meet.