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Gucci Loafers posted:Wait what? The Hilux is one of the best selling pickup trucks in the world, but isn't available in the US. Do you think people in like Nigeria are driving around in F150s?
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May 15, 2024 22:47
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Yeah the magic Google hole search term you're looking for is "chicken tax" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax Toyota, Honda etc also sell a tiny baby truck that you can import for ~$5000 due to it being 25 years old and various entities have been trying to bar them from being legally titled in the US for a rainbow of reasons, partly because they're very functional trucks so long as you don't need to go on the highway with them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_truck Finally, Toyota recently introduced a truck that slots on below the Hilux, specifically targeted at Urban areas in southeast Asia like Bangkok https://www.roadandtrack.com/reviews/a45752401/toyotas-10000-future-pickup-truck-is-basic-transportation-perfection/ Headline "Toyota’s $10,000 Future Pickup Truck Is Basic Transportation Perfection The IMV 0 makes a Corolla feel like a Bentley in comparison." This is a very deep rabbit hole
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May 15, 2024 22:58
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Sundae posted:Yeah I'd like to know this too. The F150 outsells the Tacoma by almost 400% unit count and the Tacoma is (supposedly? I'm not a truck guy) a slightly bigger/more-powerful Hilux. Add to the equation that a lot of truck purchases in the USA are driven by car-culture rather than need or utility, and I don't see how a legal Hilux dethrones the king of big rear end unnecessarily large American God-fearing trucks. a hilux is like half-to-two-thirds the cost of a tacoma and nearly as good. i'm not saying the f150 wouldn't put up a fight, but in the end it would lose, because the hilux just has economies of scale an order of magnitude better than anything an american manufacturer can achieve e: I can't really overstate how much the us auto market is shaped by regulation which protects it from innovation and real competition. there simply isn't a good light truck option in the us market, because the big three don't want to offer one and foreign makers can't, due to the chicken tax. if we could just get the good small trucks that japan and korea are already making for overseas markets, the market for giant trucks would dry up almost overnight - but it would take the big three with it and we'd be left with US equivalents of land rover and jaguar. hypnophant fucked around with this message at 01:30 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 01:20
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Bear in mind that a substantial fraction of the people buying F150s specifically want the biggest truck they can afford. They'd buy 350s if they could swing it. It's not about finding the right vehicle for their practical needs, because that vehicle would be a small sedan or a bicycle. It's about their emotional and social needs (specifically, the social need to be seen as part of an in-group that values big trucks).
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May 16, 2024 01:27
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Bear in mind that a substantial fraction of the people buying F150s specifically want the biggest truck they can afford. They'd buy 350s if they could swing it. It's not about finding the right vehicle for their practical needs, because that vehicle would be a small sedan or a bicycle. It's about their emotional and social needs (specifically, the social need to be seen as part of an in-group that values big trucks). I completely disagree with this. the f150 is the smallest truck of good-enough quality on the market. it also puts a ton of financial pressure on the consumers who buy it! pressure they would be happy to relieve by buying a cheap import that meets their perceived needs.
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May 16, 2024 01:31
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I think peeps ignore price discrepancies of 10, 20% for ideological and social reasons, but I don't think they ignore price discrepancies of 80, 95% for ideological and social reasons
bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 13:50 on May 21, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 01:31
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like dudes who have running classic rangers and s10s hang on to those things like their weight in gold. they're beloved. americans are fine with small trucks, but american makers can't make a profit on them so they keep them out with the chicken tax and don't offer a domestic version
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May 16, 2024 01:34
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Yeah a Hilux on the Toyota Japan website is ~USD$26,000 while a Tacoma starts at $33k and goes up from there. I bet Americans would be pretty excited about a $26k Tacoma! Relating to earlier discussion. I too also don't really understand how China is unfairly subsidizing its car producers while America isn't. Seems to me that the USA and Canada scrambling to throw money at car companies to produce electric cars here. What's the difference? Canada recently getting into billion dollar deals with Honda and Volkswagen to build electric cars. Illinois giving $800M to Rivian. Georgia giving Rivian 1.5B in subsidies to lure them into building a plant (currently paused). Is it just that the scale of what China is doing that much greater? And given the climate crisis, and incredibly toxic smoggy cities in China, is it not unreasonable for China to throw money at car producers to get them to create products that don't emit smog and CO2? The $30k Xiaomei SU7 looks insanely great at an unbelievable price. Let them sell it over here. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chinas-xiaomi-receives-over-100000-orders-begins-deliveries-its-first-ev-2024-04-03/ If America is concerned about data security there's a solution to that. Regulate that the servers and data have to stay within America. It's a solvable problem. I hope BYD gets its factory up and rolling in Mexico and starts shipping these cars in NA. We need more cheap EVs and competition. Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 01:44 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 01:41
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Femtosecond posted:Yeah a Hilux on the Toyota Japan website is ~USD$26,000 while a Tacoma starts at $33k and goes up from there. I bet Americans would be pretty excited about a $26k Tacoma! https://www.theatlantic.com/interna..._campaign=share (gift link) lots of good information in this article. the chinese government spends double what the us does on direct subsidies and also creates an extremely favorable environment for capital by suppressing wages and not having any form of environmental protection. my hot take as an economist is that if the chinese want to spend their government surplus shipping us below-cost EVs and solar panels, we should probably just let them and deal with the fallout when it comes, but it's a political problem to allow another china shock so we're going with the trade war
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May 16, 2024 01:51
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the historical vicious geopolitics reason why auto companies get protectionist breaks basically everywhere they have auto companies is military-industrial: you can make parts for a normal car, often you can make parts for tanks and armored vehicles. tanks can't go electric for the foreseeable future, so that's a thing. over the decades the actual military production has transferred to specialty military contractors, like chrysler defense getting sold to general dynamics and oshkosh taking over from lots of jeep stuff the obvious thing to switch over to protectionism that won't get done because the auto lobbyists are too good is drones, which have a much better argument in 2024 of being a military industry than they did even 2020. but military drones in countries that aren't desperate like ukraine are much more different from the consumer product than tanks are from gas cars, so that's a thing. the drones that would matter in taiwan, for example, are basically cruise missiles, loitering cruise missiles and full-size autonomous planes bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 02:06 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 01:51
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Feels like the West gave significant guidance that due to the danger of catastrophic climate change the future absolutely had to be a full and complete switch to EVs (ie. mandating all vehicles sold by 2035 are EVs) and in response established auto companies shrugged and whined about their lovely expensive EVs not selling. China recognized this, sharing the same concerns and goals of Western countries, and pushed its local car companies to do something earlier. Now the West is mad that China is capable of stepping into the void with product to sell. They should be mad at Ford/GM/etc for being garbage and mad at themselves for not treating climate change as an urgent problem.
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May 16, 2024 02:35
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the energy thing is far more dire for china because most of their entire gas supply gets imported through us-controlled waters. so that's a geopolitical factor that the us doesn't have
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May 16, 2024 02:37
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Femtosecond posted:Feels like the West gave significant guidance that due to the danger of catastrophic climate change the future absolutely had to be a full and complete switch to EVs (ie. mandating all vehicles sold by 2035 are EVs) and in response established auto companies shrugged and whined about their lovely expensive EVs not selling. "pushed" in this instance is a way to say "paid for". the PRC handed auto manufacturers huge amounts of money to, basically, do their jobs. that wouldn't really fly in a western democracy for a bunch of reasons, not all of which boil down to neoliberalism - like there's a very good leftist critique of the ccp's relationship to capital and labor you could make here anyway as i've said i think we should let the chinese pay for a big chunk of our green energy transition if they want to do that, even if that means the death of ford et al. ford doesn't even sell the car i like any more so gently caress 'em. no one in here is pushing back against that
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May 16, 2024 03:00
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BYD, chinese electrics, and Nio specificslly make excellent cars and I would buy one global subsidy be damned they are that much nicer than any american or japanese or european car Ive been inside in the last decade.
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May 16, 2024 03:04
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Barudak posted:BYD, chinese electrics, and Nio specificslly make excellent cars and I would buy one global subsidy be damned they are that much nicer than any american or japanese or european car Ive been inside in the last decade. This is actually kinda crazy that we're at a point where this is just an utterly non-controversial statement to make Only about 10 years ago even I was kinda on the fence about the whole thing being a house of cards about to fall over. If you peeked behind any of the facades it was more than likely just 100 dudes squatting in the dirt around a wheelbarrow. I guess even now you got guys like krugman who think that china is just shuffling deck chairs around and the real estate market coming down is going to precipitate a massive collapse. Any day now. And I dunno, bread lines or something. But meanwhile china has taken the lead in sector after sector. We still have management consulting I suppose. We'll always have that. And our lovely expensive homemade solar panels.
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May 16, 2024 03:45
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hypnophant posted:"pushed" in this instance is a way to say "paid for". the PRC handed auto manufacturers huge amounts of money to, basically, do their jobs. that wouldn't really fly in a western democracy for a bunch of reasons, not all of which boil down to neoliberalism - like there's a very good leftist critique of the ccp's relationship to capital and labor you could make here Doesn't the US government give farmers tons of money to grow things like corn? How is that any different than the Chinese government giving money to auto manufacturers?
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May 16, 2024 03:50
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Baddog posted:This is actually kinda crazy that we're at a point where this is just an utterly non-controversial statement to make they are literally in talks to beggar the state to prop up real estate https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-considers-government-purchases-unsold-homes-bloomberg-news-reports-2024-05-15/ the scale of what it would take to deal with the overhang without price collapse would actually literally bankrupt the provinces, especially already indebted ones. tianjin, the worst-off wrt debt, has debt levels of 140% of the city-province gdp and, you know, no sovereign control of a currency to inflate to pay it off unlike the national government. and if the national government inflates things to pay it off, i already told you about the 1988-1989 inflation spike bloomberg has the figures https://archive.is/YhzNK byd is the non-fuckup. the national strategy alignment towards manufacturers and away from land is because they are the non-fuckups. bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 04:09 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 03:57
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bob dobbs is dead posted:
Any year now!
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May 16, 2024 04:10
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go buy gansu and tianjin real estate, if you're so sure about it. full price, natch (you aren't allowed to)
bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 04:14 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 04:11
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Boris Galerkin posted:Doesn't the US government give farmers tons of money to grow things like corn? How is that any different than the Chinese government giving money to auto manufacturers? I think I'm missing the economic competent here but I too have the same question. How is this any different than any government subsiding whatever product or service? What's the big deal with China EVs aside from it hurting other auto manufactures?
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May 16, 2024 04:17
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quantity, not quality. amounts. total amounts were about double the us's in dollar terms, and 7 rmb goes further than a dollar
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May 16, 2024 04:20
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Boris Galerkin posted:Doesn't the US government give farmers tons of money to grow things like corn? How is that any different than the Chinese government giving money to auto manufacturers? Having unnecessarily 20% more farmers than we need is a good thing; sending money to farmers is expensive but the alternative is that your population starves to death because you had 20% too few farmers and then half of them got shipped off to Growing corn for ethanol is dumb but it's something Yeah most farming is automated but you still need to know how to hook the harvester up to the power take off, when to plant, how to avoid soil compaction or whatever it is that keeps farmers up at night
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May 16, 2024 04:41
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Boris Galerkin posted:Doesn't the US government give farmers tons of money to grow things like corn? How is that any different than the Chinese government giving money to auto manufacturers? This point is debatable but I view ag subsidies as mostly in pursuit of price stability and a food system which is resilient to financial and production shocks (think weather), rather than being able to sell ag products overseas at below the production cost. That’s really the key point with dumping, which is what china has done with steel and is now trying to do with EVs: not just subsidizing a developing industry, but pumping so much money in that no one else can possibly compete, because you can drive the market price down below the manufacturing cost even of the most efficient producer. The US doesn’t do this; we’re subsidizing EVs, but not to the degree that car manufacturers can sell them below the total cost of manufacturing including the subsidies. It’s unsustainable since you know those subsidies can’t last forever and eventually you’re going to have to bite the bullet and deal with a huge price shock, hopefully before you’ve bankrupted your whole government paying for unprofitable subsidies. Side note: this is de facto what they were doing with real estate and why it’s such a shitshow right now and they have to pivot. From the Chinese point of view, at least you can sell excess vehicles overseas, even if you don’t make any money doing so from the whole-society accounting; a block of apartments in a ghost city is a pure deadweight loss.
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May 16, 2024 05:00
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if someone gets $750k or whatever to a country to buy real estate, that's effectively exporting real estate, in the same way in that if someone gets $10k to a country to go do tourism and eat hot-dogs or whatever that's exporting tourism. it's just that foreigners don't want any of this poo poo and are quite limited in doing investment real estate
bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 05:07 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 05:03
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bob dobbs is dead posted:go buy gansu and tianjin real estate, if you're so sure about it. full price, natch mmmm, going house hunting over there was an experience, not doing that again soon. And the leasehold-type arrangement doesn't inspire confidence, even though everyone seems 100% that it will just be renewed. You don't actually own any share of the land, just a small concrete box in the sky. I'm not saying their *real estate* market isn't in trouble. I just don't see that temporarily overbuilding there is going to precipitate a total economic collapse, the one that at least business journalists have been predicting and salivating over forever. And putting aside the "how can they keep this up??" conundrum, it's undeniable that they've taken the lead in all sorts of areas, and not just walking up the manufacturing ladder to automobiles now. I believe the export ban on chips is ineffective and in any case too late. Anyways, if their government buys up a bunch of houses to prop up the price, you can bet they will condemn and raze the oldest areas (more of the oldest areas), and everyone will shift around and up. Criticism of chinese government policies just always seems a bit xenophobic to me, because people have this blind spot when western governments do plenty of the same thing. Cash for clunkers for example? Or the big example - our defense industry workfare programs, where the end goods aren't even productive. I guess arguably we enforce our trade wars with them, but mostly it seems like we just leave big huge piles of the product in places like iraq and afghanistan.
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May 16, 2024 05:09
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bob dobbs is dead posted:if someone imports $750k or whatever to a country to buy real estate, that's effectively exporting real estate, in the same way in that if someone imports $10k to a country to go do tourism and eat hot-dogs or whatever that's exporting tourism. it's just that foreigners don't want any of this poo poo and are quite limited in doing investment real estate In trade terms those are both considered non-tradeables. The real estate investing falls under foreign direct investment, tourism can be considered a type of trade for accounting purposes but the hot dogs are definitely a non-tradeable. The point is that I, a new yorker, don’t give a poo poo if there’s a glut of housing in tianjin, since I can’t buy a tianjin condo and live in it the way I could theoretically buy a byd car, so we need a different category for those.
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May 16, 2024 05:09
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Baddog posted:mmmm, going house hunting over there was an experience, not doing that again soon. And the leasehold-type arrangement doesn't inspire confidence, even though everyone seems 100% that it will just be renewed. You don't actually own any share of the land, just a small concrete box in the sky. my reading of economic history is that mass land investment is a magic recipe for economic failure, because land rents are rents. neo-neo-georgist, i guess. lots of failure to spread about
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May 16, 2024 05:22
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how much of "China spending so much" and "China making so many cars" is just an outcome from China being a very large country?
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May 16, 2024 05:41
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Baddog posted:This is actually kinda crazy that we're at a point where this is just an utterly non-controversial statement to make It's like how folks were probably talking about Japan in the late 70s early 80s. Whipping from "cheap japanese junk" to "welp they eclipsed us!" in an instant.
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May 16, 2024 05:44
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and then land hosed them, yeah
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May 16, 2024 05:46
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Baddog posted:mmmm, going house hunting over there was an experience, not doing that again soon. And the leasehold-type arrangement doesn't inspire confidence, even though everyone seems 100% that it will just be renewed. You don't actually own any share of the land, just a small concrete box in the sky. Part of the issue is just China Big. It's 1500 million people, compared to the USs 350 million people. You can have 150 Million Chinese people taking part in a first-world economy leading the way in a bunch of fields (which is roughly what is happening) and still have a pretty bad overall economy because of the drag of the other 9/10ths of the country not being as productive or having jobs building pointless buildings which then fail. China is trying to expand the amount of people employed doing "productive" labour like building EVs, and limiting growth of "unproductive" labour like online tutoring cram schools or gacha games getting kids addicted to gambling or building unproductive houses. Problem is as already established the chinese household doesn't consume enough for this, so exports it is. I would say that agricultural subsidies can absolutely lead to overseas dumping in the same way that EV subsidies are doing now, it's something African countries have been annoyed about for awhile - cheaper to import US grain than buy local, hence limits investment in local agriculture and building of local capital stocks. The difference is that they mostly suck it up anyways, because they have no influence and also the alternative is more expensive food, which looses you popular support pretty quick.
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May 16, 2024 05:50
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Femtosecond posted:It's like how folks were probably talking about Japan in the late 70s early 80s. Mmm, yes, Japan, a country whose economy is well known to have eclipsed that of the United States since the 1980s. Last time I checked in circa 1990, their trajectory was indeed indomitable!
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May 16, 2024 05:57
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It's a good thing that cars are an optional luxury that people don't need to live and work, so it doesn't matter if there's literally no affordable options for ones people need to switch to to slow down environmental catastrophe. There's no reason to make cheap electric cars other than a perfidious Oriental trick.
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May 16, 2024 13:35
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if it was a matter of racism, they would have kicked hyundai out too (toyota is a laggard at ev's for completely separate reasons)
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May 16, 2024 14:24
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bob dobbs is dead posted:if it was a matter of racism, they would have kicked hyundai out too I don't know what series of logical decisions culminated in the mirai but I get sad when I think of what they could have produced electrically if they hadn't had that boondoggle Prius Primes are still impossible to find though
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May 16, 2024 14:32
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almost certainly internal political calculations, because the engine group has grand political power in nearly all auto companies and true total shift to ev's would entail firing substantively most of them. which is prolly gonna happen now "most external things happen due to internal political calculations" is obviously true for governments of democratic countries and peeps never seem to actually apply it to more autocratic organizational forms like corporations and dictatorships, but it applies there too, just with shittier legitimacy
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May 16, 2024 15:04
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I just assumed they cashed in on a couple quarters of Hyrbid sales in exchange for being on their back foot. Just because they're Toyota doesn't mean they don't have terminal corporate brain.
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May 16, 2024 15:28
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Lockback posted:I just assumed they cashed in on a couple quarters of Hyrbid sales in exchange for being on their back foot. Just because they're Toyota doesn't mean they don't have terminal corporate brain. It's more "why did they make a big investment into hydrogen cars when everyone else was going EV". And yeah, the rumors I've heard basically boil down to "they weren't willing to abandon engines". Whether that's because they perceived their engine expertise as being a major competitive advantage, or if it was because of internal politics, or if they thought that battery tech wouldn't be able to mature fast enough to be compelling, I don't know.
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May 16, 2024 15:53
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:It's more "why did they make a big investment into hydrogen cars when everyone else was going EV". And yeah, the rumors I've heard basically boil down to "they weren't willing to abandon engines". Whether that's because they perceived their engine expertise as being a major competitive advantage, or if it was because of internal politics, or if they thought that battery tech wouldn't be able to mature fast enough to be compelling, I don't know. Probably the same reason the same management was suppressing electric car technology for decades; they don't want to sell those products. Pretty meaningful the only electric cars that got actually advertised were a billionaire failson's vanity projects.
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May 16, 2024 16:31
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The Atlantic just did an article about all this: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/05/china-tariffs-electric-vehicles-trade-war/678385/ It's not a particularly good article, but there are some interesting tidbits in there: quote:Biden targeted EVs for a reason. Beijing’s leaders wanted to dominate that industry and threw the weight of the state behind Chinese companies. The program was undeniably successful. China is at the forefront of the EV industry, while the United States, with the exception of Tesla, has barely gotten out of the parking lot. But electrical automotive is also a sector in which China’s government has played such a heavy role, and created so much manufacturing capacity, that other governments believe their own industries are at risk. They mention similar overproduction in Solar and other industries. The point being that with protectionism on the rise, the EU is about to put tariffs on Chinese EVs for example, China is going to be in a situation where it has huge amounts of excess capacity with the intention to sell the overage overseas but increasingly will be unable to due to the rest of the world taking action with tariffs and other policies to protect their own industries. quote:
I think the point that China's whole economic system is geared towards industrial policy kind of gets at the heart of the matter. We've only just seen America start putting their own foot on the industrial scale in a similar way with the build back better bill and others. Personally I think strong industrial policy is needed here in several areas for various reasons and it looks like at least some of the people in power are moving in that direction. Things like infrastructure building for the electric grid, basic defense industry for things like artillery shells, etc.
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May 16, 2024 16:44
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