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Cugel the Clever posted: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! Demographics came for Japan just as they will ultimately come for China, but Japan is still here and their companies still having an impact. Toyota still the biggest car maker in the world. Sony still owns Columbia Pictures. Far to go for a country that was once a maker of substandard junk.
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May 16, 2024 16:48
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Femtosecond posted:Far to go for a country that was once a maker of substandard junk. How does Vietnam sit on that spectrum Vietnam seems to have absorbed a lot of mid to high end manufacturing; canon, Nikon etc have all moved a lot of their manufacturing there. Vin has created car maker Vinfast and they're on track to build an electric car factory in North Carolina and their cars aren't complete garbage, apparently A lot of the manufacturing has moved from China to Vietnam, but when someone says "made in Vietnam" I don't see anyone holding their nose
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May 16, 2024 16:59
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Hadlock posted:A lot of the manufacturing has moved from China to Vietnam, but when someone says "made in Vietnam" I don't see anyone holding their nose My intuition on this is that most American consumers don't really have the headspace to have opinions on more than 2-3 other nations at a time. So if they're already your standard American bigot (anti-China, anti-Russia, anti-*waves vaguely at Southern America*), they're not gonna be remotely equipped to have an opinion on anywhere else.
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May 16, 2024 17:07
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Username/post combo on point today
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May 16, 2024 17:13
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Hadlock posted:their cars aren't complete garbage, apparently where did you hear this because its uhh not really grounded in reality
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May 16, 2024 17:15
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D-Pad posted:The Atlantic just did an article about all this: Femtosecond posted:Demographics came for Japan just as they will ultimately come for China, but Japan is still here and their companies still having an impact. Toyota still the biggest car maker in the world. Sony still owns Columbia Pictures. Far to go for a country that was once a maker of substandard junk. Japan got rich before it got old, China is trying to get rich while it's already old which is a much more difficult trick to pull off I want to link this article by Michael Pettis from last year where he lays out the extent to which China is overrepresented in global investment, the political reasons for that investment strategy, and the problems it's going to run into while trying to maintain the levels of growth that China has enjoyed over the past few decades. The key takeaway is just that China's growth strategy since the 80s is to push investment at the cost of consumption; that's paid off but in Pettis's view has hit its limit, and China now needs to shift to a more western-style, rich-country consumption-led growth strategy. There are political reasons why that's difficult for the CCP, and unfortunately they've really built their state to address a very different set of political challenges, which make it unlikely they'll be able to pull off the transition now. The problem this creates for the west, is that if China continues to chase investment-led growth without building the domestic consumption to absorb the products of that investment, it's going to have to keep dumping those products overseas, to the detriment of the west's own industrial policy. The usual long-run concern with dumping is that once the dumper wins enough market share to gain pricing power, they can exploit that to raise prices to monopoly levels; I actually think that might not be feasible for China given their political incentives, but that's the underlying concern for western policy makers.
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May 16, 2024 17:16
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:where did you hear this because its uhh not really grounded in reality Doug Demuro posted a video about the VF8 yesterday and scored it above it's Toyota competitor bz4x (near the end of the video) He discusses the 2023 problems and says they're largely fixed now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rET6cD7Y3-I I haven't personally sat in one but Doug is an industry veteran and he isn't completely unknowledgeable.
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May 16, 2024 17:21
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:My intuition on this is that most American consumers don't really have the headspace to have opinions on more than 2-3 other nations at a time. So if they're already your standard American bigot (anti-China, anti-Russia, anti-*waves vaguely at Southern America*), they're not gonna be remotely equipped to have an opinion on anywhere else. Hah! Vietnam is taking on a *ton* lately, at the last job we were moving there (and Philippines). But I just don't think they have the population to end up taking much of a bite out of china. "Nearshoring" to mexico is actually a thing, but when it's just sticking the crap into a box and slapping a label on it to do "final assembly", there isn't that much of an economic impact. It's just a tax that mexico is collecting in order to satisfy american protectionism.
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May 16, 2024 17:22
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the busy forks is complete garbage and doug demuro is a hack
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May 16, 2024 17:25
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I'm skeptical about Vinfast as well but building a brand new factory in the US with multiple assembly lines isn't a small step, and the patent company (Vingroup) is no slouch
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May 16, 2024 17:52
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The korean brands were pretty bad in the early days too
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May 16, 2024 17:54
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Yeah to be clear I'm not saying that nobody can enter the market successfully, just that it's very difficult to do. It took the Koreans decades. It'll take anyone else at least a decade, maybe more, even with decent product. The company to do so successfully will not be Vinfast. Vinfast is making losses at a rate that would make Fisker blush. They lost 2 billion dollars in 2023. Five and a half million dollars a day. Last year Vuong said he wouldn't put more money in to the thing, and in April of this year he changed his mind and ponied up another billion dollars in addition to the whatever, 11 billion or so he's shoveled in to this particular hole in the ground. Resources aren't unlimited and I really don't see a path to profitability. edit: they're in the failing car company stage where they're just yoloing strategic plans out in the ether. Dump money in to a NA assembly facility. Pivot and say you'll focus on other markets and threaten to build a Indian assembly/CKD facility. Chase your tail in to whatever corner without a coherent plan because you have to grow sales by an order of magnitude to achieve profitability and that can't be done in the amount of runway you have KYOON GRIFFEY JR fucked around with this message at 18:03 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 18:00
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I hadn't looked too deeply into this but was curious about the state of the Vinfast us factory https://www.wral.com/story/vinfast-downsizes-planned-ev-factory-in-chatham-county-as-construction-hits-a-snag/21385386/ Currently it looks like they've cleared and leveled the pad for a factory, and they've put in somewhat recently a plan for a smaller (20-25%) factory to about ~0.75 million sq ft down from ~1.0m sq ft. They're waiting on approval from the county on the new factory plans The Austin TX Tesla giga factory is 10 million sq ft and their OG Fremont CA factory (purchased from Toyota, and later expanded) is 5 million sq ft The link above is less than one month old IIRC
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May 16, 2024 18:34
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D-Pad posted:
I have a sudden vision of the Chinese bikeshare mountains, but far worse. The saving grace will hopefully be that it's way more difficult to make a mountain of $5000 cars than $25 bikes, but oof all the same at that level of oversupply. 
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May 16, 2024 19:27
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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. the Japanese government for some reason has a big boner for hydrogen and has been pushing it as their green tech alternative to electric https://apnews.com/article/japan-energy-hydrogen-climate-carbon-emission-7f5552cc387d7ad395980bc9bd5a934c https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/hydrogen/a-half-decade-after-its-first-plan-japans-hydrogen-goals-remain-distant/?cf-view in other words, it's not specifically Toyota, although their lobbying is significant along with a whole host of other Japanese industrial interests; it's... hmm, how topical... government subsidy and a government plan focusing on personal transport rather than electrical generation that makes very little sense and is going to fail spectacularly the inevitable failure is due to unsolvable constraints dictated by physics, by the way; hydrogen is just about the least dense energy storage there is, it embrittles whatever you store it in, and the vast majority of it today is generated from fossil fuels. There is no reasonable pathway to carbon neutrality via hydrogen for storage or fuel in the next half century.
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May 16, 2024 19:41
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Going back real quick to the chicken tax — that doesn’t prevent smaller trucks from being made domestically (or in Mexico/Canada). Toyota and Honda both produce their trucks in America. There’s also a separate issue with kei trucks can’t go on the highway and have less payload capacity than a Ford Focus.
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May 16, 2024 19:42
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How does that contrast with petrol car companies at almost exactly a century ago. Seems like there was a cambrian explosion of innovation and diversity until the engineering of how to build reliable and cheap cars was finally settled upon. Morgan famously championed three wheeled sports cars to save weight and possibly aerodynamics Morgan & Bentley are/were small time manufacturing companies that somehow survived (actually Bentley was bought up by predatory rolls royce in bankruptcy) to the present day Random US example, Oakland car company was purchased by GM and later renamed Pontiac TL;DR is this electric cars' cambrian explosion period
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May 16, 2024 19:46
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Neon Belly posted:Going back real quick to the chicken tax — that doesn’t prevent smaller trucks from being made domestically (or in Mexico/Canada). Toyota and Honda both produce their trucks in America. The way I've read it is that the Hilux is actually a work truck designed for the explicit purpose of hauling things every day, and less focus on creature comfort The trucks Toyota sells in the US are designed to be used as trucks but also as commuter cars and family grocery getters Like Ford and GM I would imagine there's a lot more profit to be made selling "family cars" as trucks
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May 16, 2024 19:51
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Sundae posted:I have a sudden vision of the Chinese bikeshare mountains, but far worse. The saving grace will hopefully be that it's way more difficult to make a mountain of $5000 cars than $25 bikes, but oof all the same at that level of oversupply. They already have lots full of junked crap short range first gen EVs - that's just kind of the nature of a rapidly-evolving technology. The battery tech isn't worth doing much except scrap and salvage. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/
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May 16, 2024 19:53
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Hadlock posted:How does that contrast with petrol car companies at almost exactly a century ago I think one of the big differences today is that electric motors and batteries are relatively simple compared to combustion engines, and are more or less available off the shelf. Those hundreds of Chinese companies making EVs are probably using hardware from a few dozen core suppliers, and are basically just coach builders.
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May 16, 2024 19:53
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Hadlock posted:The way I've read it is that the Hilux is actually a work truck designed for the explicit purpose of hauling things every day, and less focus on creature comfort I've been in a hilux and they're fine. The trim is about what you get on purpose made fleet vehicles in the US. If you've ever been in a surplussed out US Forest Service truck it's very similar just as far as the general interior quality. if you've ever been in an American truck from the 80s or 90s it's pretty comparable. Which is to say they're also about what you'd see in entry level economy sedans in general. There's zero reason you couldn't make a modern S-10 with a trim somewhere in the middle ground between fleet vehicle and luxury car. It's just that if you're trying to sell someone a F250 for $60k+ you end up putting a luxury car interior in it.
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May 16, 2024 19:56
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Neon Belly posted:Going back real quick to the chicken tax — that doesn’t prevent smaller trucks from being made domestically (or in Mexico/Canada). Toyota and Honda both produce their trucks in America. you're right that it doesn't prevent it, but it does mean that you don't have to produce good ones or price them attractively because the foreign competition can't apply any meaningful pressure. the new ranger is only like $4k less than an f150, not enough of a savings to really make it attractive. The gas Maverick is probably the first serious attempt this century to make an american compact pickup; if it doesn't sell i'll rethink my views, but i also don't trust ford to put in the marketing effort just to cannibalize the f150 market hiluxes are fine, Cyrano is exactly right that they're an entry-level sedan on the inside. the legroom is a little tight for big americans but that's the price of having a useful bed and second row of seats
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May 16, 2024 20:06
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for all of you product planning brain geniuses: do you think that Toyota has evaluated producing the Hilux for the US market (and passing FMVSS etc), come up with the spectacular business cases that you all have, and decided not to because they don't like money or what
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May 16, 2024 20:12
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Hadlock posted:TL;DR is this electric cars' cambrian explosion period There's certainly a history in the past ~20 years of US companies trying weird EVs, especially trikes, and generally failing at them.
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May 16, 2024 20:21
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Hadlock posted:How does that contrast with petrol car companies at almost exactly a century ago. Seems like there was a cambrian explosion of innovation and diversity until the engineering of how to build reliable and cheap cars was finally settled upon. Morgan famously championed three wheeled sports cars to save weight and possibly aerodynamics KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:They already have lots full of junked crap short range first gen EVs - that's just kind of the nature of a rapidly-evolving technology. The battery tech isn't worth doing much except scrap and salvage. The problem with the cambrian explosion is this stuff. ^^^ Organic poo poo dies off, rots, goes back to nothing. Failed cars / over-production from failed companies sits there leaching poo poo into the environment for the next 100+ years (or catches fire, etc etc). I get that the tech is going to evolve and get better, but in the meantime, massive overproduction is going to leave a mountain of unmanageable waste behind. 
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May 16, 2024 20:27
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the chicken tax thing is why their hilux would have to sell for something very close to what a midsize truck sells for, but with much lower profit margin that's like the whole point, it's a weirdly specific 25% tariff on light trucks the domestic makers had light trucks and stopped making them because midsize trucks were way more profitable: it cost something like 10% less to make a light truck than a midsize, but the midsize sells for 25%+ more another factor was that light trucks didn't get much better mileage, granted this was in the mid-1990s when the last ones were made but a ranger or s-10 even with the four-banger 2wd got like 26mpg and the midsize trucks got like 23. It wasn't enough to be a selling point on its own and it definitely wasn't enough to get the automakers over the fleet average MPG requirements but also also, if you made your truck big enough it didn't count toward fleet average MPG requirements, so just make shitloads of vehicles just over the 8500lb GVWR rating and they don't count at all, lol the F150 is under that, but the F250 is way over it, so the more automakers could push consumers toward the really chonky bois the more they could just artificially lower their fleet averages without spending anything e. oh and I forgot the hummer deduction; businesses can deduct a truck weighing over 6000lbs used for business at least half the time, which obliterates trucks under 6000lbs as countless contractors and fleets focus on vehicles over that number Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:31 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 20:27
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i think if they could import foreign-built hiluxes they'd make more money, but if they have to jump through the hoops and set up production in NA then they make more money doing what ford/gm/chevy do, at least in the short run. I also think toyota's previous experience entering the US market with cheaper, more competitive cars has given them justified concern about regulatory and political risk, deterring them from the obvious strategy of trying to sell their excellent, globally successful light truck with no direct competition in the US market. Maybe you're right and they've done the market studies and come to the opposite conclusion I have, that the hilux wouldn't sell for <reasons>. I've met enough truck people who lament the lack of a competent light truck in the hilux's class that I don't really believe it, but i'm not a marketing consultant. e: thanks leperflesh for reminding me about all the fuel efficiency perverse incentives lol hypnophant fucked around with this message at 20:35 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 20:32
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Toyota already builds trucks in the US. Why have they chosen to design trucks for the US market and not produce the Hilux here?
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May 16, 2024 20:51
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Toyota already builds trucks in the US. Why have they chosen to design trucks for the US market and not produce the Hilux here? Maybe I'm not explaining myself here but I have laid out the perverse economic disincentives for domestic manufacturers to produce an inexpensive light pickup truck, and those incentives are identical for a foreign mark making those vehicles here too. e. I googled for GVWR for a Hilux and found https://toyota.dreamhosters.com/pages/hilux/spec_2s.php. 2700kg is just under 6000lbs, so it's too light to be a writeoff for businesses. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:59 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 20:54
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Toyota already builds trucks in the US. Why have they chosen to design trucks for the US market and not produce the Hilux here? leperflesh and I both laid out cases for what we think the reasons might be, and obviously neither of us has insider knowledge on toyota decision making but if you think our speculations aren't plausible you could do a little more to explain why e: I also have doubts that the hilux can be profitably built in (north) america, in the same way that cheap tools, cheap furniture, cheap kitchen appliances etc can't. If you are going to pay american workers and american real estate costs, you need to price your products accordingly; that changes your product line strategy in a way that may make it non-viable to produce anything you can't charge a huge margin on. Like Ford, dumping their entire car line to focus on the trucks and SUVs that are their actual money maker hypnophant fucked around with this message at 21:12 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 20:59
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hypnophant posted:leperflesh and I both laid out cases for what we think the reasons might be, and obviously neither of us has insider knowledge on toyota decision making but if you think our speculations aren't plausible you could do a little more to explain why Its fundamentally because the market doesn't really exist despite how much people like to fantasize about it. Before the Tacoma, Toyota built the Hilux (Pickup) at NUMMI and Long Beach in the US to avoid the chicken tax. If that was such a successful strategy, why didn't it continue? Toyota started to differentiate the Tacoma specifically to address some shortcomings that made the Pickup/Hilux less competitive in the US market. Gen 1 of the Tacoma was pretty close to the Hilux, but the Tacoma was softer and more comfortable from the beginning because NA customers use their trucks for purposes other than work. Over time the Tacoma has diverged from because American customers demand bigger and more comfortable trucks. I don't think that's due to the chicken tax. Trucks are fundamentally used for different purposes by US customers than customers in other markets.
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May 16, 2024 21:24
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...because both we and the manufacturers are disincentivized, and you're still ignoring both the fuel standards and the tax writeoff issues "what us consumers demand" is not an independent variable americans didn't want a cheap-interior light small pickup, if it cost almost as much as a nicer-interior heavier medium pickup that they could take a tax writeoff on, and toyota didn't want a truck too light that it'd count against its fleet fuel efficiency requirements selling in any significant numbers economics is the dismal science in part because we don't get to rewind and run a control against the experiment, so we can't actually know what happens to sales of light small trucks in the US in an alternate history where heavier vehicles aren't exempt from fuel efficiency standards and businesses don't get a tax writeoff for anything over 6000 pounds but not anything under that and domestic manufacturers have to compete with cars made in mexico or canada or japan without a 25% tariff added to them I'm always incredibly skeptical of "americans don't want" just-so stories when they're impossible to divorce from the heavy-handed policies that drive what americans are incentivized or disincentivized to buy
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May 16, 2024 21:34
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Re: Hilux Looks like BYD is launching a hybrid competitor to the Hilux in Mexico https://insideevs.com/news/719677/byd-shark-phev-will-it-come-to-us/ Interesting to see that it doesn't seem terribly differently priced than the competition. quote:BYD will offer the Shark in two variants in Mexico, GL and GS. The GL starts at 899,980 Mexican pesos (about $53,432) whereas the GS costs about 969,800 pesos ($57,577), according to the exchange rates at the time of publication.
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May 16, 2024 21:34
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Leperflesh posted:...because both we and the manufacturers are disincentivized, and you're still ignoring both the fuel standards and the tax writeoff issues The tax incentives don't really hit quarter tons, as you yourself indicated. CAFE has definitely driven a push to larger footprint vehicles, no argument there. I agree with you that it is impossible to divorce customer taste from incentives, but I think that it is also hazardous to claim that customer taste is driven entirely by incentives. The average American buyer of a pick-up truck has a very different profile and set of use cases versus the average Australian buyer of a Hilux. There are so, so many instances of "if only company X brought vehicle Y to the US I would totally buy one!" and then they... don't. Everyone loves the Honda Fit so much that it sold like 60k units in its best year. "I know truck guys and they would buy..." is super, super divorced from actual customer behavior. Anyway this is getting ragingly off topic
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May 16, 2024 21:40
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americans "do not want" an electric car, they said of the EV-1 and its predecessors, nor are they "willing to buy" a hybrid, they said of the goofy looking predecessors of the honda insight and toyota prius it turns out americans will buy the everloving poo poo out of a new twist on a repeatedly failed product if it looks good, is reliable, and has a good price tag on it the prices on used 1990s light trucks in the US are insane https://www.ebay.com/sch/13488/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=chevy+s10 e. there are issues with "americans don't want a hatchback" too, but that also brings in the whole concept of the "city car" and why US cities are different too like I agree that there are differences in americans' wants for vehicles, absolutely, but fleet purchases constitute an enormous part of the demand for pickup trucks and fleet buyers don't give a poo poo about comfort and amenities, they're responding to tax incentives. And I think the biggest issue really is that a manufacturer is insane to build even 20k of a light pickup in a factory in the US that could build a higher-margin truck, you can't tell from a sales figure alone whether a manufacturer sold all the trucks they built and didn't want to build more, or if they tried to sell more and just nobody would buy them. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:46 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 21:41
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The thing that must be terrifying the established auto makers is that not only are these Chinese EVs cheaper, but they're apparently a genuinely a better product than what the traditional auto makers have been making too. I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked A trip to the Beijing Auto Show reveals just how advanced China's EVs are. So what are the so-called "foreign" automakers doing about it?
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May 16, 2024 21:43
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Leperflesh posted:americans "do not want" an electric car, they said of the EV-1 and its predecessors, nor are they "willing to buy" a hybrid, they said of the goofy looking predecessors of the honda insight and toyota prius the prices on a ton of used 1990s poo poo are insane right now across the board including for quarter tons If you can't see the difference between first gen tech demonstrators and the fourth generation of Toyota's light pickup we're just gonna keep talking past each other and there's no point to this conversation
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May 16, 2024 21:46
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I'll get off of the car obsession in a second I promise but one more factor is that US crash safety standards are far more stringent than those in China, you can't just import a car that is legal on the roads of india or mexico either, there's a significant cost (and it may just not be possible) to get any given model ready to pass muster and sell in the US. The Hilux absolutely could and more or less did meet standards, but of the hundreds of chinese EVs... I'd guess that probably a lot of them can't. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:If you can't see the difference between first gen tech demonstrators and the fourth generation of Toyota's light pickup we're just gonna keep talking past each other and there's no point to this conversation I apologize if I'm being too aggro on it. My point here was that the consensus viewpoint about what americans wanted and didn't want was just wildly wrong because it was based on a lot of previous experiences that were not, actually, indicative. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:50 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 21:48
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Leperflesh posted:I'll get off of the car obsession in a second I promise but one more factor is that US crash safety standards are far more stringent than those in China, you can't just import a car that is legal on the roads of india or mexico either, there's a significant cost (and it may just not be possible) to get any given model ready to pass muster and sell in the US. I agree on the first point. FMVSS compliance requires a fair amount of work and is non-trivial. Some of it seems arbitrary, but it is a good thing that cars generally have to meet various safety standards. There's a big difference when you look at an existing, well established market (light trucks, USA, early 1990s) versus a new market (EVs and hybrids, late 1990s/early 2000s). I agree this is evolving and there's no true view of what customers do want that is not distorted by market offerings, I just get perpetually annoyed when people make claims that "Vehicle X would do so well here if it were available why doesn't [OEM] do it!!!" when the manufacturer of Product X would certainly offer that product if it would make them money. Sometimes that's due to other factors including tariffs and trade but that isn't the only thing that matters. The Fiat 500, Toyota Yaris, etc sucked poo poo here because Americans hate small cars, and you really cannot pin that one on protectionism.
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May 16, 2024 21:57
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I agree with you that it is impossible to divorce customer taste from incentives, but I think that it is also hazardous to claim that customer taste is driven entirely by incentives. The average American buyer of a pick-up truck has a very different profile and set of use cases versus the average Australian buyer of a Hilux. There are so, so many instances of "if only company X brought vehicle Y to the US I would totally buy one!" and then they... don't. Everyone loves the Honda Fit so much that it sold like 60k units in its best year. "I know truck guys and they would buy..." is super, super divorced from actual customer behavior. I don't disagree with any of this but I don't think it is enough evidence to say americans wouldn't buy foreign-built light trucks if they were made available at the market price, and I think foreign imports of cheap trucks would ultimately collapse the market for american medium trucks in the same way that it has collapsed the market for american sedans. Ford doesn't offer any sedans or hatchbacks any more, chevy only offers the malibu, stellantis has the chrysler 300 and a couple muscle cars and that's pretty much it.
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May 16, 2024 21:58
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