How come this price hike hasn't happened with solar panels, inverters, telecom equipment, batteries etc. It's been a while that such industries in europe have become obsolete
Really this is conspiracy level thinking. It's not like there's no car industry in the EU, it's just that it's grown in the low-COL areas like Slovakia and not in high-COL areas like Germany. Chinese imports and local manufacture should be able to compete in the "free market". It's just that that term has been heavily debased by idiots misusing it, like everything else.
I live in Germany and am sure as hell that I will never be driving a $30k electric pickup here. They'll make sure nothing like this ever becomes legal to import or drive on German roads until after there's a German car brand on it, and it costs 10x that while being identical, just to subsidize lots of local jobs that are low-wage, high-tax, and taking away manpower from other sectors/fields where it's more needed.
That sounds similar to the lamentations of American buyers who want Japanese kei trucks. It’s protectionism all the way down I guess. Though I see tons of US pickup trucks in the Netherlands, and have seen even lifted ones in Germany too for that matter.
Lamenting the difficulty of registering kei trucks is kind of rich coming from the patron saint of "the roads are horribly dangerous and we need to do everything to safen them up and drivers can bear whatever that costs"
Protectionism when I don't like it, public safety when I do I guess.
In any case, they're pretty easy to register if you don't lick the boot. Whatever state you're in typically isn't gonna come after you for tax evasion for an object they aren't in the business of taxing if you catch my drift.
According to ChatGPT the labor cost per vehicle is more than twice as high in the US versus China. $1,341/vehicle vs $585/vehicle https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a292f0205ec819182b54e48ce9702a3
For vehicles in the $20-$100k price range? That feels too trivial to make a difference, is it correct or just a number chatgpt invented?
China, being a superpower, has a vested interest in bringing other superpowers down a peg as well as increasing other countries' dependence on China. Their state has a serious incentive to ship out cheap cars to destroy the automotive industry in the US and the EU for example. When that happens they can double the price on all their vehicles and you can't restart your car factories to compete with them again until ye…
How come this price hike hasn't happened with solar panels, inverters, telecom equipment, batteries etc. It's been a while that such industries in europe have become obsolete
For telecom, at least, governments have legislated against Huawei equipment, Nokia is going strong from a European side
China, being a superpower, has a vested interest in bringing other superpowers down a peg as well as increasing other countries' dependence on China. Their state has a serious incentive to ship out cheap cars to destroy the automotive industry in the US and the EU for example. When that happens they can double the price on all their vehicles and you can't restart your car factories to compete with them again until ye…
This is somewhere where sensible tariffs actually do make sense. Set the tariffs to offset any government subsidies or environmental regulatory costs. If the cars are actually better, let people buy them, make domestic manufacturers compete. Just don't allow dumping.
Complete protectionism doesn't work because it makes your own manufacturers non-competitive on the global stage.
I live in Germany and am sure as hell that I will never be driving a $30k electric pickup here. They'll make sure nothing like this ever becomes legal to import or drive on German roads until after there's a German car brand on it, and it costs 10x that while being identical, just to subsidize lots of local jobs that are low-wage, high-tax, and taking away manpower from other sectors/fields where it's more needed.
vw offers a electro pickup for 36k excluding tax (43k EUR with tax, ). https://www.volkswagen-nutzfahrzeuge.de/de/modelle/transport... Its less than 10x
I mean, you can see how a kastenwagen nutzfahrzeug is a very different vehicle from a consumer mid-size pickup, right?
Sure, technically some would call the vehicle you linked a pickup, and technically German law still identifies the consumer pickup truck as a nutzfahrzeug instead of a PKW, but it doesn’t feel like you’re making a best effort to meet GP in the middle.
China, being a superpower, has a vested interest in bringing other superpowers down a peg as well as increasing other countries' dependence on China. Their state has a serious incentive to ship out cheap cars to destroy the automotive industry in the US and the EU for example. When that happens they can double the price on all their vehicles and you can't restart your car factories to compete with them again until ye…
the ironic factor is - this is how vw itself started, as did mitsubishi etc
vw offers a electro pickup for 36k excluding tax (43k EUR with tax, ). https://www.volkswagen-nutzfahrzeuge.de/de/modelle/transport... Its less than 10x
I mean, you can see how a kastenwagen nutzfahrzeug is a very different vehicle from a consumer mid-size pickup, right? Sure, technically some would call the vehicle you linked a pickup, and technically German law still identifies the consumer pickup truck as a nutzfahrzeug instead of a PKW, but it doesn’t feel like you’re making a best effort to meet GP in the middle.
The distinction gets at something interesting though, and it's a weird intermingling of culture and politics. I think a truck as owned by a consumer, and as an American would understand the word, is, at least in part, a lifestyle statement derived from maybe overprovisioning on the horsepower. Such a lifestyle statement in Germany seems to be perfectly socially acceptable when it ties in with luxury and doing your "civic duty" by buying German, but it clearly ruffles feathers and meets with political headwind when it ties in with the culture and financial constraint of the "commoner".