- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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Think U.S. car manufacturers did a couple billion of of stock buybacks over the last few years. If only they had invested that money back into the business to make better vehicles.
The world’s car makers struggled to compete with Japan back in the '70s, but I would argue that struggle gave people access to better vehicles.
Turned out the winning move was to make affordable cars that were fuel efficient to operate and people would rush to buy them.
Alternate headline: “The World’s Carmakers Have Become Too Fat And Bloated To Compete With China”.
This is my take too.
It’s not that America and Europe can’t compete. It’s that they’ve got their fat asses propped up on piles of misbegotten cash and are too fucking lazy and greedy to make a good product.
Who could have ever foreseen this result when we outsourced all of our manufacturing and skilled labour to China???
It’s almost like chasing thoughtless, short-term profit gains is a horrible idea.
We didn’t just outsource, and it wasn’t cheap. We went in and built the industries and trained the people to make it happen. Apple Tesla and others. We built the capacity for massively competing industries overseas.
Our design engineering is lacking too. I read not long ago how the president of Ford said how they tore down a Chinese EV and said “we got it all wrong.” I’m in the automotive manufacturing industry and we source some parts from China. The factories I work with are all IATF/ISO certified and they can make parts for 10x less AND not require a minimum production that would last me 5 years. And the comment about working around the tariff is absolutely true. One of our Chinese suppliers started building a plant in Thailand not long after the election. State of the art. less tariff. Quality parts. My first order is shipping this week.
Chinese industry knows how to manufacture at scale. With a hundred year head start, US auto manufacturing is still a joke.
Then don’t. Make cities walkable and invest in public transport.
I don’t about the china and Europe already have a lot public infrastructure such as trains and walkable cities. We are behind there too
In my experience, the best we can do is change the bus schedules so you have to walk further to a bus stop and wait longer for a bus that never arrives at the scheduled time…
This would be ideal.
I mean, from what I can see half of them aren’t even trying.
You mean China has a comparative advantage? Maybe the West should make more port instead.
Short term profit and doing compliance cars and half assed attempts with certain irrelevance in a decade or so, or choosing to forgo profit and really go for converting to EV.
Every board room figuring a golden parachute in 10 years sounds really good.
I’m partial to this explanation, what do you people think? I’m not an expert
Summary: Western car makers don’t make cars, they assemble cars from parts they buy. Their business is procurement and they don’t engineer the car from the ground up to meet a product vision. Rather, they’re trying to make something from the same old parts and suppliers of the internal combustion engine times.
It’s “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” but for cars
