I think that this inability to compete stems from a cultural aversion to reinvestment among those in the business world.

If these cars are making them those tiny or even negative margins at these prices that look like mortgages, they would benefit from evaluating themselves from top to bottom:

• Would our costs diminish over time if we invested in our build infrastructure more?
• Are we including features, amenities, and adornments that negatively impacting margins, affordability, and overall sales volume?
• Do we have institutional inefficiencies from previous mergers and acquisitions that we have never completed and reorganized even decades after they were complete?
• Are we as competitive on quality, safety, and other influential metrics as we could be?
• Are we innovating in ways people are influenced by?
• Is our executive pay reasonable for the value they bring to our company?
• Are our advertising, secondary business units, and other costly programs generating the return on the investments that we hoped for?

I believe that companies that grow to the size and influence that these have, they uniformly develop pathological behaviors and methods centered around maximizing value extraction from the business entity and dictating terms to the market they "serve". Soul-searching questions like those above, and really any sentiment toward genuine investment and betterment at all become foreign, radical, and distasteful to them and their supporters. They then shuffle along for potentially decades after they have essentially died, persisting on critical mass alone until the market is finally disrupted enough where that alone can't save them. BYD may be heavily subsidized, but they're also comparatively new and young, able to innovate and respond to market demands, fundamental practices their older monopolistic competitors have long ago lost interest in doing.