For a case in point, consider that headlights that turn on and off automatically in response to darkness (or rain) are not a standard feature on many cars, yet they include a manual switch that costs more than a photosensor only because of the trim-level upgrades.
Cars could include a slot for a tablet but instead come with overpriced car stereos and infotainment systems that are always light years worse than the most amateurish apps on any mobile app store.
As should be very clear by now after the 2008 US auto industry bailouts and the 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, the US auto industry is heavily protected and faces virtually no competition, which is why a common sense vehicle like the one in the article sounds revolutionary, though I imagine BYD could deliver something a lot more impressive for $10K if allowed to compete in the US without tariffs.
I'm a huge fan of many car safety regulations, but this isn't one.
(Sign me up for car-hiding-in-blind-spot notification lights on side mirrors, though, those are great)
Let's say net X lives are saved each year because of automatic lights turning on.
Let's say net Y lives would be saved each year without automatic lights, via more effective detection of drunk drivers and stopping them before they kill someone.
Is X > Y? We don't know.
> Eliminatung DUI is not a matter of detection
There are a lot of avenues to decrease DUI, among which one is effective detection combined with enforcement.
Go to any small town watering hole at 2AM to see this in effect. The police have no legal obligation to prevent crime or enforce laws. None.
No switch at all, ignition on, headlights on, period.
Parents who sit in their idling cars for (fucking) ages while their cars are facing the tennis courts thus blinding the player on the other side of the court for however long it takes them to either turn their car off, drive off, or someone to tell them turn their fucking headlights off.
Before that I've not had to intervene at all, as far as I can remember.
There aren't that many courts where cars park facing them, but my home courts are one of them ;)
I'd still prefer to override both on/off though.
When the oncoming cars do not have headlights on I find it easier to give them just enough attention to see that they are behaving normally leaving more attention to devote to things other than oncoming cars.
Especially the cars with the projectors that bounce around.
If the us were not to fight back, the non subsidized industries would die, Chinese would stop subsidizing, rack up the price and competition would be too difficult to start again because of the monopoly on lithium and advance on technology.
It's been done thousands of times with other industries and countries.
Most recently Google, who had been giving Android for free when windows phone were licensed and Samsung tyzen cost money to develop, then forced manufacturer to accept outrageous terms to ship Google play service in their phone when all competition was already dead, is now under scrutiny for antitrust.
This support, totaling $10-12 billion from 2018-2022 plus in-kind benefits, mirrors the role of U.S. automakers’ $160-220 billion in public market raises and $50-100 billion in private capital, but with less financial risk for BYD due to state backing.
I think what people are missing is that EVs can be dramatically simpler to manufacture than internal combustion vehicles. This leverages manufacturing advantages and so with or without subsidies, China has big advantages due to its advancements in manufacturing tech.
Recall when China started making hoverboards for a fraction of the price of a Segway? Making EVs at scale required largely the same manufacturing pipeline.
It is the foresight of China’s industrial policy, not the amount of subsidy that has created the manufacturing powerhouse China has become.
US attempts are crude (sledgehammer) methods that leave the market far less free with mostly downside for everyone and no industrial policy goals, only domestic incumbents being protected from reality.
False
Japanese, Korean, and European brands already make a lot of vehicles to get around tariffs, although it makes sense for some sedans to be made abroad given American lack of interest in them (so economy of scales doesn’t work out), and sedans typically not being tariffed as harshly as trucks.
BYD could totally avoid the tariffs by making in the USA (well, they were planning a factory in Mexico, and tariffs on car parts will kill that if something doesn’t change). They already set up a bus factory in SoCal. My guess is that Chinese automakers are still hesitant about introducing their brands to Americans given politics (Volvo and Polestar are Chinese owned but I think the design is still mainly done in Sweden?).
Or concentrate on the 80% of the worldmarket that is not the USA
The closest this comes to is a Dacia spring. Which is not a great car. The dacia could not be made at US labor costs. 15k is an absurd price, Chinese companies can do it because they pay Chinese labor costs and have serious economies of scale. Unless you sell hundreds of thousands of these a year AND pay US workers like Chinese ones, 15k will not happen.
Huh? Out of the top 25 vehicles sold in the US in 2024, 16 of them are non-US automakers. Just because the US is actively blocking China from dumping heavily subsidized vehicles into the north american market, doesn't mean they "face no competition". Kia and Hyundai alone show that it's VERY possible to break into the US market if you have even a little bit of interest playing fair.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g60385784/bestselling-cars...
And yet, that applies to everyone, including US automakers, which is why Ford had to do unnatural things to import the transit from Europe.
They aren't protecting US automakers, they're trying to retain some semblance of manufacturing in the US, which I'm fully in support of.
Both because those are well-paying jobs and because it's a matter of national security.
Why should manufacturing jobs be well-paying? Human productivity has not kept up with business improvements at all. A contemporary robot can assemble car modules much faster than a robot from, say, the 60s. A human now works at the same speed as a human from the 60s.
"The US can't make anything" is an absurd delusion. We are the second most productive economy in the world.
> Both because those are well-paying jobs and because it's a matter of national security.
We are fully capable of meeting our defense needs already. If you really care about reinforcing our military-industrial capability the best way to do it is to arm Ukraine.
People say stuff like this. When you buy a $1 USB cable from AliExpress that probably took 25 seconds to manufacture, okay, that makes some sense, from that narrow point of view. But then the courier is going to spend like 3 minutes futzing with delivering it to you. Someone is paying something, no? You have an incomplete picture of costs, and hopefully your answer to the example conundrum isn't, "Delivery drivers are underpaid."
It's more complicated than features leading to a bill of materials and time in a factory.
It costs at least $15,000 to replace a roof in San Francisco, and maybe closer to $60,000. It costs basically nothing to manufacture roof tiles, and the whole thing can be done in a day. If you could answer the question why, and persuasively, you know, run for mayor.