Yeah. Spot on. And the Busy Forks not only has an awful name, not only has awful styling, but it is an extraordinarily bad EV by any measure. E-waste indeed

How will you know its electric if it doesn't look like shit otherwise?

Also that bz4x or whatever deserves a spot on the worst cars of all time list, just straight up ewaste.

What makes you say that? I don't really know much about cars, why is that one particularly bad?

I never owned one so I can't say this is true, but from what I read over the years, those early hybrids weren't great for performance/driving feel compared to other vehicles. They worked, they were efficient, but at the time turning all their cars into it probably wasn't a winning path.

Toyota is way too conservative.

Because unlike Tesla, they need to sell cars and make money.

To be fair to Honda or, here, Toyota…

Worth finding a clip if anyone isn’t familiar

TBH, Chinese cars are pretty shitty. Their EVs have thermal runaway at an incredibly higher rate. BYDs storage facility just went up because a car sitting there caught fire.

As far as price, yeah it's not competitive when they pay their workers 10% what Western countries do and give them a coffin apartment to stay in. Then steal the IP from other countries so they have nothing in R&D.

Here's their clone of a Taycan, which also finished dead last in reliability tests because people were burning alive in them and crashing because systems would go nuts causing crashes. You enjoy your Chinese EV you saved money on, just keep that shit a mile from my house or "crappy non Chinese car" https://autopostglobal.com/electric-future/article/51496/

Dumping is the natural end of overproduction or under consumption. It's also a tool to secure new markets. Capitalists employ it to get new customers and minimize losses. That's why Walmart exists in small towns and why previous season's stock goes on sale.

What we see here is a state capitalist entity participating in a global capitalist market using the tools available to them to secure new markets. There's more than one tool at play here too: the article talks of the advanced state of automaton as the differentiator with domestic producers. At the scale of automation described, even if not sold at a subsidized loss that's still gonna produce a cheaper product.

And yet here we are, in a capitalist society, and it's the current reality.

Wild.

I'm glad the US doesn't privatize gains and socialize loses.

That's all true and China needs to be actively worked against to prevent their market manipulation but we can't forget the reason American auto makers can't compete is because America has manipulated the the markets so much they are uncompetitive also not capitalism, now they are trying to reverse course 180 before china is unstoppable by letting in a bunch of cheap labor, a lost cause if you ask me America will never be a manufacturing center again but you don't need to beat China just create competition and they will fall eg stabilize and incentive Mexico to create manufacturing and hope the tech industrys in America remains a monopoly or we're SOL.

They did. The Honda e was the perfect tiny EV, except for its massive price tag and small-ish range. And of course, in classic Honda fashion, as a promising but flawed attempt didn't succeed immediately, they promptly abandoned the segment instead of capitalizing on acquired knowledge, battery technology advances and price drops. Given how successful the Renault 5 is, I'm pretty sure a 2nd gen e at half the price would have been a massive success.

Of course, being Honda, they changed their mind and came back with a significantly worse SUV.

Renault seem to offer quite a few these days that are fairly small.

nobody seems to be thinking about all electric small cars, or even normal width cars,

Hey ? There's dozens, if not hundreds of them, Chinese, European, Korean...

at least where I live

Oh. In the USA huh ? Damn, shame about your govt blocking them all. Maybe you'll change things up at the mid terms, good luck with it.

I honestly don't know. Probably BYD, based on how things are going...

Maybe the Honda Prologue, which I only just found out about. But I'll keep driving my gas guzzler Honda for a while, since ei don't drive it a lot so it will last a long time.

But really my point is that they've had a lot of chances to get ahead of this and they keep sticking to gas and hydrogen and not moving forward on electric.

It all went up oil subsidies..

Oh they likely are, just like the us does for their own auto industry. The free market part is simply a cheaper car that appeals to more people, it coming from China is the only thing really holding it back. Well and maybe the spying, but I don't know how bad these are on that front.

The CCP didn’t just subsidize cheap cars. They built out the manufacturing capacity to produce them at scale.

As China’s demographics shifted and long-term labor supply came into question, they leaned heavily into automation and industrial efficiency.

That’s the real reason these cars are so inexpensive. It’s not just lower prices, it’s a fundamentally different cost structure driven by scale, integration, and advanced manufacturing.

What’s unsettling competitors isn’t cheap cars themselves.

It’s the ability to consistently produce cars more cheaply than anyone else.

and people didn't buy them. did everyone buy a Bolt or Leaf last year????

Ford sold 823,000 F150s JUST LAST YEAR. Then the ponytail and birkenstock crowd blames the companies.

There is no such thing as total automation, there are always people keeping the machines in order. Even then, it's a skill issue on Toyota and Honda's part. Labor will reorganize like it always does, and it's not like any of these companies care more than they have to about labor.

The primary advantage China had was government subsidies prioritizing long term more than the private investors could. In theory the private investors could make most of the same decisions an industrial capitalist state can, but they are too self interested for that collective action. They don't care about helping any individual state, their money moves freely across the globe, and they are only in it for themselves.

It's a race to the bottom. But at this point, why even try to stop it?

All auto makers are heavily subsidized, US automakers most of all.