It seems like automakers would much rather sell fewer premium and luxury units at higher margins than sell more units of affordable cars at lower margins. I suppose I understand why, but it does leave a large consumer segment unserved. That seems like a good opportunity for a competitor to come in and serve the unserved market, but none of the big legacy car brands seem interested and new car companies don’t have access to the capital it would take to build the manufacturing capacity necessary to mass produce affordable vehicles.
Sounds like a great opportunity for foreign car companies, from, say, China, for instance, to come in and serve that under served lower end of the market. But then, tariffs.
Capitalism serves capital, not the needs of the people. And the free market of competition is just a convenient myth with which to distract people.
Large margins and small supply are a lot easier to deal with though, and mass production is very expensive to set up.
Honestly we need regulation in this space. Incentivize building a cheap car so the manufacturers will do it.
Honestly the gov is in a good place to do this. Spec out a vehicle and place an order for a could hundred thousand of the them for general purpose government worker transportation needs. Set a low cost target. Let them build it for normal people too.
There’s still lots of money to be made in the used car market. Make new cars expensive, then more people will lease. Then you have a constant stream of income and you can raise the prices on your used leased cars.
Used cars are also entering a bubble.
Abused, falling apart, shit boxes are selling for what a decent used car was 5 years ago, and decent used cars are the price of a new car 5 years ago, yet basically no one is earning enough to afford the difference.
More auto loans are underwater than ever before, and a lot of them are for used cars. Eventually something’s gonna have to give.
There’s a reason that Obama pushed so hard to bail out the auto industry during the financial crisis. If the car market fails, it means less able bodied Americans will be able to get to their jobs due to how our entire country is structured. If the Auto industry fails, America will slowly grind to a halt.
“It’s because of those EVs” says man driving $70,000 pickup as his daily driver
Yeah that was my first thought. How much is this influenced by 7 or 8 year loans on $70,000 trucks?
While that is clearlya problem behavior, has it really changed? The same people willing to put that much down on a luxury truck with a loan they can’t afford, would have done the same last year
A new RWD base Model 3 is 36,990
Unironically, to a degree. 40 years ago, you could buy an economy car from an American dealer that got 70 mpg. Now you can buy a car twice the size with an enormous block of lithium as its fuel tank.
What model? Best normal USDM car I can think of was the Civic/CRX which hit the 40s. I rented a 2025 civic and got 49mpg (NOT a hybrid), so we’re back to that, at least. Geo Metro was rated for the 50s and hypermilers did better, but keep in mind the EPA ratings took a nosedive with more accurate testing around 2005
I’m with you, best I know is 88 Jetta diesel at 48mpg (@40 years old)
My brother had an old Plymouth Horizon that made it to the mid-40s mpg, and there were only one or two cars better.
…. And it was made with aluminum foil. You didn’t want to be in an accident with those
Isn’t BYD a fraction of this cost, but we’re propping up stakeholder bonuses in Detroit?
This is such a tired argument. Literally the only remaining US automakers are GM, Ford, and Tesla. A vast majority of car sales in the US are foreign brands not domestic. BYD is being propped up just the same as what you’re claiming here, which is why no other automaker in the world outside of China is able to beat these Chinese prices, so how is this alternative better for anyone?
China is doing this in order to dominate the market wherever they’re allowed to enter, and are well equipped to undercut those local markets for as long as it takes to put everyone else out of business. They control a majority of the minerals needed for EVs so they get to set the external and internal price. They have lax safety and environmental regulations. They already control much of the world’s manufacturing capacity. They’re a massive country with a massive workforce.
Allowing them to dominate the world auto market in order to buy one or two cheap new cars (before prices shoot back up because monopoly) is going to be bad for everyone.
Respectfully, protectionism isn’t that much better. In terms of economic velocity (efficient use of money/value/resources), it would be better if we used the money in other industries.
- “The Chinese are competitive.” Yup, they are beating the global
- ”They own the materials.” Yup, good planning on their part
- ”They have lax safety.” Nope.
- ”Massive country & workforce.” And a bunch of Chinese manufacturing has reduced humans and/or are dark with no humans.
“Allowing them to sell superior products is bad.” Sure, for the stakeholders. Not for Americans. I’m already being screwed by capitalists all over the place. Let’s expedite capitalism’s demise, please.
They own the materials.” Yup, good planning on their part
To expand on this: while yes they have great natural resources here, the more important part is they developed those resources. This is just another consequence of poor planning from everyone else: it’s too expensive, let’s let China do it. There’s another ten years behind due to our own short sightedness
I’m not sure how you can call for the demise of capitalism while defending the worst parts of it here. This “economic velocity” is only good for the capitalists and what China is doing can only be described as capitalism.
The automotive industry employs millions of workers in the US at both domestic and foreign companies, and decimating that industry only to concentrate and centralize it somewhere else in the world is going to put those people out of work as well as creating a domino effect on the economy where all those dollars disappear from circulation. Capitalists will survive that but those workers won’t, nor will the places where those workers spend their money currently.
What you’re arguing for is essentially an entity like Walmart (China) moving into town and killing all its competitors by making it impossible to compete with them. We can see exactly how that scenario plays out in thousands of cities and towns across the US. Those “low prices” come at a steep cost for everyone involved except the capitalists running the business.
I have no issue with China selling cars here, but I do take issue with them rigging the game in their favor at our expense, which is why I support protection for the entire industry not just for US companies alone.
Picking up our bat and ball and stomping off home is a worse alternative. At school next week everyone will be talking about the great game that we completely missed from our own stubborn pride.
Allowing Chinese companies to dominate the world auto market so our legacy manufacturers can eke a few more years profit from obsolete technology isn’t going to help anyone. After those couple years, our legacy companies will be that much farther behind, unable to compete in a market dominated by those who were not afraid to compete
Its not “picking up our bat and ball and stomping off,” it’s recognizing that this new “team” is full of ringers who take no issue with cheating to win, who will pay referees to give them favorable calls, and who will only put on a good show for the crowd for as long as it takes to secure 1st place. This team also happens to control the supply of bats and balls and ensures that they get the best of the best at no cost while other teams are getting second rate bats and balls at sky-high prices. Those people talking about “how great the game was” don’t see or understand any of this, so their opinions should be disregarded. They didn’t witness a real competition, they witnessed something akin to a Harlem Globe Trotters or a WWE match.
You’re still framing this as if it’s about protecting our companies, but this is protecting our market, our jobs, and our agency as a nation. US companies only make up a small part of all this.
Furthermore, if you look at the situation in China with EVs, they have entire graveyards of practically new EVs rotting away because they’re turning the automotive market into yet another segment of cheap, disposable products, which is not only terrible for consumers but also for the environment.
Are you really that desperate to buy a brand new car every year like its the latest iPhone that you’d upend the entire world market and put millions and millions of people out of work not just in the US but in the rest of Asia, Europe, Canada, and Mexico? Do you really think they’ll continue the massive subsidies driving their prices so low once all the competition is gone? To get a little conspiratorial, with the design of modern EVs being entirely software controlled with wireless links back to the “mothership”, are you willing to hand over control of the nations’ entire fleet of vehicles to a single government entity that has demonstrated time and time again that they’re willing to use whatever force necessary to maintain complete control and keep everyone in line?
No i think china decided to invest in manufacturing of future cars. They planned years ahead, developing rare earths and batteries. Then they encouraged new vehicle manufacturing, supported them, pushed them, invested in them, things that all countries do to build a priority industry. Sure there’s some inefficiencies, they wasted some of their money. But they dominate rare earths, dominate batteries, and are on their way to dominate EV manufacturing.
I’m all for some amount of protectionism, some amount of investment, planning on related technologies. We need to fight on equal ground. US economy took huge profits, huge pay, huge benefits from legacy car manufacturing and its important to support that 8n future manufacturing, to try to keep reaping the benefits.
But after doing a lot of research on batteries, we failed to develop manufacturing. After finding huge rare earths resources, we failed to develop those. We finally seemed to get our act together with incentives to develop new technology vehicles, to establish a large and growing market, to develop related technologies here, and to push legacy manufacturers to make the transition, and just threw it all away. It’s great for shareholders that legacy manufacturers will make sizeable profits on obsolete technology for a couple more years, but this is yet another case of throwing away any advantage we had, of pushing manufacturing more offshore.
Yes, I’m afraid that in a couple years when legacy manufacturers decide to get serious about new technology vehicles, they will be too far behind to succeed. They will be buggy whip manufacturers unable to build viable products for the automobile age, unable to compete where there will be a new set of established dominant manufacturers. China is not to blame for our failure, we are
And American car/vehicle manufacturers are crying over low sales.
Stupid
I was going to make a comment about cheap Chinese cars, but then I checked the BYD price list, and the Dolphin is the only car they’re offering for less than $50k. The rest are a pretty even distribution between 50 and 100k pre-add-on fees and taxes and trims.
BYD tends to be higher end (although the Seagull comes in around $11k). If you want a cheaper compact, try a Geely Xing Yuan or Chery Arrizo ($8k-13k range). For a sportier economy car, there’s the Xiaomi SU7 ($30k).
The big catches with these cars is that they’re far smaller than their American equivalents.
The bigger catches with most of the smaller cars is that they wouldn’t pass an NHTSA inspection. Of course, if big cars didn’t exist, they might — but there’s lots of commercial vehicles on the roads that aren’t SUVs or pickup trucks that still might collide with a lightweight vehicle.
Inflation: how does it work?
Not only that, there’s just so many huge vehicles full of tech. Not enough people want basic simple transportation anymore, or at least there aren’t enough models to choose from.
WTYP had a great episode on the end of the small American car, with the failure of the Ford Pinto.
The American auto industry basically doesn’t make small cars anymore. So much of the modern car price is just the volume of car you’re required to purchase.
I say this with all my heart. /c/fuckcars.
But Trump said only beef was expensive anymore, did he lie to me?
Hopefully it’s a temporary blip from EV incentives going away. We needed those incentives to smooth out the transition while EVs are still expensive, but with them being cancelled anyone on the fence had to consider buying in september.
Now we’ll transition slower and more painfully. We’ll continue pushing climate change, to our own detriment. Legacy manufacturers are already pulling back from EVs to maximize short term profit at the cost of viability on the global market. More people will be stuck for decades with obsolete technology and higher operating cost. We always seem to like doing things the hard way
Maybe if they stopped putting a CPU in every car they wouldn’t cost so much and have less problems. Can I get roll down windows and a bare bones car for $15k new ? Make it modular or easily repairable or something so ppl can keep replacing parts on it and it can last indefinitely or something??
If people who can’t afford them stopped paying for new cars and just bought cars they can afford and everyone agreed to never pay dealer markups, car companies wouldn’t be so brazenly pushing prices higher.
