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The $10k BYD Seagull EV is scaring the U.S. auto industry

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Re: The $10k BYD Seagull EV is scaring the U.S. auto industry

#91

Post by swatcoder »

WorldMaker wrote: post #82
boringg wrote: post #23

Everyone being like - we don't care about cars that small. It's the equivalent at looking at LLMs two years ago and being - it can't perform anything. It's an entry point and they will get bigger and better and more attractive - to the benefit of consumers upping the competition. Kia was written off when it first came to town. US domestics should be concerned - they wrote off Tesla as well.

Before Kia it was Honda and Toyota in the 80s/90s. Before that there was the 70s love affair with small Italian and British imports like Fiat and Mini. Before that was the 60s love affair with Volkswagen. It's a cycle that has happened so many times already in the US of imports filling small car niches (both niches that are small and large niches that include smaller cars) the domestic manufacturers ignore for too ma…

I'm not even a car person, and I can name 2-3 domestics attempts during each of those eras.

Nobody's ignoring anything. It's just a hard market for them to sustain because demand is reletively low here and margins are thin as part of the market's intense price sensitivity.

It's a good place for new/foreign manufacturers to gain brand awareness because niche demand persists but it's not profitable enough for any car maker really benefits to focus on here, where luxury/design/size all invite much bigger profits

Re: The $10k BYD Seagull EV is scaring the U.S. auto industry

#92

Post by DiggyJohnson »

belval wrote: post #36
ninetyninenine wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally in that article a man who has more stake in the game than you, Elon musk, says it’s an existential threat. This must mean Elon is completely delusional. There is no threat and no market for sub 10k cars because they’re too small for Americans. Elon musk needs a reality check.

Pretty sure if the article was titled "The $10k BYD Seagull EV is scaring Tesla" the person you are responding to wouldn't have commented, but the US auto industry is definitely not scared by small affordable cars seeing as that market is already dominated by South Korean and Japanese manufacturers in the US.

The difference is obvious. Current small Japanese and Korean cars compete directly with small American vehicles. They compete in the same classes and - by in large - follow the same product trends. A $10k or even $15k automobile would be in a class of its own in the American market.

Re: The $10k BYD Seagull EV is scaring the U.S. auto industry

#93

Post by DiggyJohnson »

nothercastle wrote: post #7

Nobody in the USA wants that market. There isn’t even an interest in under 25k cars. I don’t see any issues allowing these if local manufacturers aren’t even willing to make products at 2x the price

There's a massive difference in under $25k vehicles. Hence the $200 billion dollar used car market. A lot of these used car purchases might have been new vehicles if the product existed, but it doesn't.

Re: The $10k BYD Seagull EV is scaring the U.S. auto industry

#94

Post by DiggyJohnson »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #14
nothercastle wrote: post #7

Nobody in the USA wants that market. There isn’t even an interest in under 25k cars. I don’t see any issues allowing these if local manufacturers aren’t even willing to make products at 2x the price

> I don’t see any issues allowing these if local manufacturers aren’t even willing to make products at 2x the price Because how are GM and Ford supposed to pay UAW wages, return a profit, and make a car for If people have the option, they'll buy the $10k Seagull and not pay UAW wages... It's not like GM has a 60% margin on $25k cars...

What profitable vehicles is GM selling for less than $20k?

Re: The $10k BYD Seagull EV is scaring the U.S. auto industry

#95

Post by ProfessorLayton »

cityofdelusion wrote: post #79
devmor wrote: post #10

I hope so. The price of EVs in the US market is ludicrously overinflated. It's understandable for new startups like Rivian, Lucid and co, but in the case of existing auto manufacturers, early adopters are subsidizing the cost of redeveloping tooling that should have been easily covered by nearly a century of profit leeched away by shareholders. GM, Ford and Stellantis should have been able to produce a sub-$20k EV by…

Sub $20k is not realistic in 2024. Even barebones ICE cars without AC and with everything cheap plastic start higher and return no margin. The last car that was widely available below $20,000 was the manual, no-ac Honda civic from the widely panned post-housing bubble model generation. Mitsubishi also sold a widely panned barebones model, their Mirage, that sold poorly. Cheap cars with no margin is a suckers bet. The…

A Nissan Versa starts at $16,390 [1] and has AC and power windows in the base model.

$19,680 with a CVT upgrade.

[1] https://www.nissanusa.com/vehicles/cars/versa-sedan.html

Re: The $10k BYD Seagull EV is scaring the U.S. auto industry

#96

Post by michaelmrose »

iambateman wrote: post #39

"The Chinese government wants to wipe out American automakers by introducing competitively priced cars" is a PR scare tactic. It's exactly what I would say if I were a PR person trying to figure out how to protect my company's interests. Cars are imported from all over the world, and so long as they meet American safety standards, I think they should be. Also if I could buy a safe, new EV for $10,000, no matter how s…

Historically cheap Chinese cars have done VERY poorly in crash tests. for 10K its probably a piece of plastic which folds killing the user in every crash over 35 mph.

It's hard to dig up exact figures. It looks like China has around 500M drivers averaging 10,000 vehicle miles each and annual traffic fatalities of 250,000.

This suggests the death rate per billion vehicle miles is about 13 in the US and about 50 in China.

https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202212/08/cont...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... note death rate is herein per billion vehicle km which I have converted to miles

https://gitnux.org/average-annual-mileage/

Re: The $10k BYD Seagull EV is scaring the U.S. auto industry

#97

Post by drivingmenuts »

boringg wrote: post #23

Everyone being like - we don't care about cars that small. It's the equivalent at looking at LLMs two years ago and being - it can't perform anything. It's an entry point and they will get bigger and better and more attractive - to the benefit of consumers upping the competition. Kia was written off when it first came to town. US domestics should be concerned - they wrote off Tesla as well.

It's an import - the car companies will get the government to stack enough tariffs and fees to push the price up higher, because they know they can't compete without that.

Re: The $10k BYD Seagull EV is scaring the U.S. auto industry

#98

Post by boringg »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #41
boringg wrote: post #23

Everyone being like - we don't care about cars that small. It's the equivalent at looking at LLMs two years ago and being - it can't perform anything. It's an entry point and they will get bigger and better and more attractive - to the benefit of consumers upping the competition. Kia was written off when it first came to town. US domestics should be concerned - they wrote off Tesla as well.

> Kia was written off when it first came to town. Hyundai/Kia were smart in that they introduced their cars with really long warranties to dispel quality concerns. However, they lost a lot of credibility recently with their cars being famous for being easy to steal via YouTube tutorials and tiktok challenges.

My point is that they managed a way into the market and held market share with considerable doubt against them.

Re: The $10k BYD Seagull EV is scaring the U.S. auto industry

#99

Post by boringg »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #58
boringg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US protectionism would like a word with you.

Chinese protectionism would also like a word. Remember these tariffs were originally setup between the US and China in 2006 to protect China's car market, not the USA's. See https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/dswenson/ChinaCarPa... > Here, the bilateral agreement noted the expectation that by 2006 China’s import tariff on assembled cars was to be reduced from its pre WTO level of 80% or 100% to 25%, while the d…

I'm not saying anything about the Chinese protections merely the US protections.

Re: The $10k BYD Seagull EV is scaring the U.S. auto industry

#100

Post by WorldMaker »

swatcoder wrote: post #91
WorldMaker wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before Kia it was Honda and Toyota in the 80s/90s. Before that there was the 70s love affair with small Italian and British imports like Fiat and Mini. Before that was the 60s love affair with Volkswagen. It's a cycle that has happened so many times already in the US of imports filling small car niches (both niches that are small and large niches that include smaller cars) the domestic manufacturers ignore for too ma…

I'm not even a car person, and I can name 2-3 domestics attempts during each of those eras. Nobody's ignoring anything. It's just a hard market for them to sustain because demand is reletively low here and margins are thin as part of the market's intense price sensitivity. It's a good place for new/foreign manufacturers to gain brand awareness because niche demand persists but it's not profitable enough for any car m…

I agree that it is a habit of high margin profit chasing. It also says a lot that almost every time the imports become "domesticated" they seem to move into the same problematic high margin areas. Honda US and Nissan US are huge truck companies today. Kia US is mostly a luxury SUV company.

However, I disagree that it is a sustainability problem because I think it is a "fashion trend" problem and companies aren't good at predicting trends (especially not ones on the scale of decades in current US corporate culture), and are just sticking to bad habits (that unfortunately are profit rewarded enough that they don't feel enough relentless "quarterly" pressure to challenge those bad habits).

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