Keep in mind that the US auto industry is also very much a Canadian one. A lot of Big Three stuff happens across the border in Ontario.
But all the policy support that would have let North American automakers build up a competitive position with China is gone, so this is more about just acknowledging reality now.
> Keep in mind that the US auto industry is also very much a Canadian one.
As someone who's worked in the auto industry (in Canada) I have to 'hard disagree.' The big three have proven time and time again that we (Canadians) are second-class citizens when it comes to how they operate the facilities built here. Even before any of this nonsensical tariff nonsense, billions in government money has been given to the likes of Stellantis and GM over the years in an effort to keep jobs in Canada, with them putting in the bare-minimum effort to satisfy people in the short-term and thanking us by continuing their movement of production out of the country. Instead of trying to talk the president down from his pointlessly harmful tariffs, or doing what Toyota/Honda have done in pivoting to building worldwide models beside the domestic ones, the big three are gleefully taking the opportunity to expedite the closure or downsizing of facilities here.
Outside of the chuds who 'need' a pickup truck to satisfy their fragile ego, sales of "American" vehicles are starting to drop, with buyers choosing domestically-produced where possible (like the Toyota Rav4, Lexus NX/RX, or Honda Civic/CR-V).[0]
> billions in government money has been given to the likes of Stellantis and GM over the years in an effort to keep jobs in Canada, with them putting in the bare-minimum effort
You could replace "Canada" with the "United States" and it's equally true. They aren't treating you any different than us.
The expensive cars sell well in the us - customers are not that price inelastic. Those who are prefer a used car with all the high priced features of 5 years ago to a new car with no options
Agreed, that’s exactly what i did. But I wonder how much of that culture is because the new cheap Chinese cars aren’t here.
If all you have in town is a target, that’s where people will shop. If you open up a goodwill there might be some handwringing and “I would never” rhetoric. But many people will go to the goodwill even if they don’t admit it.
Having previously owned a Chinese car (Great Wall H5, bought new), I'm on the fence about buying Chinese cars. Initially it was a great car -- lots of features and they used high quality OEM parts (e.g. a Mitsubishi engine). However, I found that it didn't hold up well* and was missing some of the touches that come from engineering not coming from a car culture. As one example, the tensioner for the accessory belt was a single 14mm bolt. Technically it worked, but it was not fun. Meanwhile, even my '85 Ford Escort had a half-inch square opening in the belt bracketry that accepted a half-inch socket driver/breaker bar for setting the tension. I don't think this is uniquely a Chinese problem, as I heard similar complaints from owners of early Nissan/Toyota full-size trucks. Toyota was able to eventually improve, but Nissan had to pack it in on the Titan.
*To roughly quantify, I'd say mid-to-late 80s Ford/GM car, not 70s Ford/GM car. It never stranded me, but it did break a few times in inconvenient fashion.
I don't think Chinese cars ever came into their own until two things happened:
- A move to automate auto factory lines in Chinese auto factories. Up until about a decade ago the emphasis was still on using human labor, and quality took a hit accordingly. Robots are much more precise and consistent, the quality difference between a Chinese-made cars and the same kind of car made in Japan was huge.
- EVs. EV motors are just more reliable in general, and are easier to replace when they wear out or are defective. You don't have so many moving parts any more, and the Chinese became world leaders in battery tech.
If I ever live in China again and need to buy a car, it will definitely be an EV. Heck, I would never buy a BMW ICE (maintenance sucks) but I bought a BMW EV...
> Yeah thee was never any competing with china, our industry just relies on our market using different values to purchase a car.
This is patently false. The US could have competed with China if it had maintained investments spinning up battery manufacturing and downstream systems to build EVs at scale, while subsidizing EVs (fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year [1]) and increasing taxes on combustion mobility. The US picked legacy automaker profits and fossil fuel interests instead, simply out of lack of will and short term optimization over long term success.
China is building under the same rules of physics as everyone else. You can choose not to, but that is a choice.
(I believe in climate change, so I am thrilled China is going to steamroll fossil fuel incumbents out of self interest [2] [3], regardless of negative second order effects; every 24 months of Chinese EV production destroys 1M barrels/day of global oil consumption at current production rates, as of this comment)
Your salary information is out of date. Average Annual Salary for a Chinese working in an auto factory: ¥102,173 CNY (approx. $14,000–$15,000 USD based on projected exchange rates).
Also, Chinese auto factories are heavily automated now, even when compared to American auto factories.
Around 9? years ago, Chinese salaries without qualification in coastal city industries were between 600 and 800€/month + lodging (that caused issues in the countryside and less affluent areas that can't offer salaries as competitive), so at worst 7k, at best 10k. Auto workers should be somewhat qualified, so it should be a bit higher. Also the salaries might have grown since
China buys and deploys more robotics for manufacturing than any other country in the world. Automate or die as a business [1] [2]. It's not "cheap China labor" vs "expensive union labor"; it's labor vs automation.
And, to be clear, that does not mean you need to get rid of union US labor. It just means the existing folks can do more with the same number of folks they have today, and the pipeline for new workers can shrink while maintaining productivity (and we're going to need those folks for other jobs automation cannot do; trades, electrical grid and renewables infra, nursing and care, etc). This does require both unions and corporations to partner in good faith and share in the gains from this operating model, versus the traditional "squeeze labor as hard as you can for shareholder gains and management comp." If we get to the point where a just transition is needed (like coal mining and generation), that is a policy problem; make good policy, be humane to the human, package them out appropriately if we scale automation faster than expected.
This is simply smart policy as the world reaches peak working age population and heads towards depopulation over the next century [3] [4]. Labor will only get more expensive over time as demand exceeds supply [5]. The capital is there, simply look at annual legacy auto profits; they choose profits over investing in the business, and that is a choice.
This is one half of it that's correct, but the other half is the US is in a late stage capitalism death spiral.
On a huge number of products in the US there is little to no US competition. Instead of using product means (build it better) they use capital means (use your size to get loans to buy up anyone that looks like they could compete in the future).
Lots of US companies minimize actual competition via civil contracts. Cola companies are a great domestic example of this. You give them all the space they want and crowd out competition or you get 'standard pricing', which is way more.
A sizeable portion of the large US companies moved away from making products to printing money via becoming a financial institution. Car companies are a notorious example.
Simply put making products is a side gig, rent seeking is the primary goal. Until we kill that off, we're in for a worsening level of hurt.
I've always gotten the impression that China is becoming a technological manufacturing powerhouse because of massive investment by the Chinese government, whereas America is falling behind because the government giving grants to corporations is incredibly unpopular because of the belief that the investment is just going to get pocketed by the CEO and board of directors and spent on stock buybacks rather than the development the people and the government wanted to see.
Even if the money is spent properly, it's still highly criticized. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people complain that Tesla was only successful because of massive government grants.
In fairness to the US system, it’s certainly better than the European system or pretty much all but a few around the world. Yes, there is corruption, inefficiency and the largest subsidies are often for huge corporations that obtained them by buying politicians, but! The US government still manages to fund the cutting edge in 2026 in countless fields, to fund real American manufacturing, if you want to get grants you have a real shot at real money regardless of who you are, etc. In China you’re not getting a dime without the right political opinions. In Europe you have to be part of a very specific academic-professional class. In the US you can be anyone.
The thing about China is that they’re more strategic with their money and have longer timelines and clear, achievable visions. If you read the Wikipedia page for Made in China 2025 you’ll get the wrong impression that their success is due to more recent pushes; the vision is far more universal and has existed for far longer. You don’t get to the forefront of advanced manufacturing from nothing in ten years. Look at the 5th and 6th Five-Year Plans, into the seventh… you see the groundwork laid for present day China. The US rarely does that sort of long term thinking or planning these days, and it’s not even about the political winds changing or short-termism as much as that we lack one unified vision. Without that unified vision you can’t plan long term and you also can’t correct glaring problems. For example, if we had a unified vision on manufacturing, an obvious issue would be the lack of an American JLCPCB. You could create one with a stick and carrot approach, tariff assembled PCBs, new rule that any imported assembled PCB has to prominently display “electronics made in China”, smart subsidies for US board houses that encourage scaling and cost reduction. But that level of cohesion and vision rarely happens in the US and so we get a chaotic hodgepodge.
Nope, you are spot on. The broad argument is "Engineers are in power in China, lawyers in America." I see the US as no different as when Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged; everything about making and building takes a back seat to line go up. Well, you can't eat, live in, build with, or go to war with line go up. The stock market is not the economy, nor your industrial and manufacturing base. But it keeps going up, so everything must be fine, right?
Wrong, unless you can prove otherwise. EVs cost a little more emissions to build but are widely regarded as breaking even with a gas car in 1-2years after production. And even shorter as grids decarbonize.
I would love to see a thorough, agreed upon study comparing ICEs and EVs. If you have hard data (say, from a reputable journal, not just the news), please post.
This is a bad argument because you're assuming that the US needs to compete with China on EVs or that not competing results in somehow "losing". A car is a car, at the end of the day. Frankly, the best car is no car, but I'll leave that for some other discussion around transit.
China has gone all-in on EVs because over the years they smartly built up the world's best rare earth refining capabilities and immense manufacturing prowess while the United States has undoubtedly secured the global oil supply (remember tanks and fighter jets to fight wars aren't running on batteries) which, even amongst the doomiest of doomers will last quite a while.
China was never going to be an oil-producing powerhouse, but it did have the ability to leverage alternative energy sources so that it wasn't quite as beholden to the petrodollar institution, so that is what they did. And of course running cars on batteries and doing so at a very cheap cost makes sense there.
Meanwhile, the US can obviously produce good cars at a good enough price and with cheap oil for the foreseeable future it's hard to argue in favor of EVs as a national policy. What, we're going to switch to EVs? Who is going to build them? Tesla? We don't have access to the rare earth refining capabilities to meet demand. It's just physics. And if China is using less oil, that means more for the United States and others.
As you said, China has taken these actions out of self interest, but the self interest isn't "clean environment" or anything like that, it's just down to being not as reliant on the US for energy. Though that's a nice benefit. I do own an EV and I think the driving experience is superior but geopolitically things seem to be trending in a different direction.
>China has gone all-in on EVs because over the years they smartly built up the world's best rare earth refining capabilities
If by that you mean they propped up their industry and undercut everyone else until they went out of business, then increased prices to a point just below where it would be profitable for someone else to try again?
Then use their monopoly position to further their interests in other sectors?
Edit: Which I may note is probably the same strategy being applied here as well.
> Meanwhile, the US can obviously produce good cars at a good enough price and with cheap oil for the foreseeable future it's hard to argue in favor of EVs as a national policy. What, we're going to switch to EVs? Who is going to build them? Tesla? We don't have access to the rare earth refining capabilities to meet demand. It's just physics. And if China is using less oil, that means more for the United States and others.
This is false. The US has chosen to produce expensive (average new vehicle price is $50k), fossil combustion vehicles to the detriment of its population. I want a cheap EV. I will buy a cheap EV from a US automaker. They do not want to sell cheap EVs. The US won't allow me to buy excellent, cheap Chinese EVs. The US population is being held economically hostage for legacy automaker profits and the fossil fuel industry. Why should the US consumer collectively have to pay more for these low quality decisions? I am incentivized to root for the destruction of US legacy auto so that I can eventually get a high quality, inexpensive Chinese EV, because that will be all who is left building them. China sells more EVs than the US sells entirely. It is only a matter of time as they continue to spin up manufacturing.
Whatever it takes to get cheap EVs with the sharpest deployment trajectory possible, I am not particular, regardless of the harm it incurs on US automakers or the US itself (if unwilling to build EVs, which appears to be the case). Climate change does not care about nation state boundaries. Certainly, if you don't believe in climate change, or don't believe it to be pressing, there is no discussion to be had.
It's not false. See Honda, Toyota, &c. many models are made in the US by Americans even if they're Japanese companies.
> The US has chosen to produce expensive (average new vehicle price is $50k), fossil combustion vehicles to the detriment of its population.
The US industry regardless of reason isn't going to be able to make a cheap, high-quality EV because it doesn't have access to affordable refining capabilities due to various reasons. So the actual situation is, sure the US could let China ship in a bunch of awesome EVs, but then the US automakers will suffer and some will go out of business and then the US just won't be making cars and those union autoworker jobs will be gone. Some people are fine with that I guess, but strategically it doesn't make a lot of sense for the US to allow the domestic auto industry to be crushed. Same thing with Germany. The EU is already starting to roll back EV mandates [1] for the same reason the US is focusing back on oil and natural gas.
> Whatever it takes to get cheap EVs with the sharpest deployment trajectory possible, I am not particular, regardless of the harm it incurs on US automakers or the US itself
On the other hand, as an American voter and even an EV driver, I disagree with these actions. EVs at all cost isn't a goal that makes sense or that I'm interested in. A better argument is to just do away with cars entirely. EVs still create c02, require toxic processing of materials and components, and while they're better for the environment, they're not as good as walking or transit.
> On the other hand, as an American voter and even an EV driver, I disagree with these actions. EVs at all cost isn't a goal that makes sense or that I'm interested in. A better argument is to just do away with cars entirely. EVs still create c02, require toxic processing of materials and components, and while they're better for the environment, they're not as good as walking or transit.
Well, you're arguing this in the wrong country. You might check your priors. I regret to inform you that only about 5% of Americans use public transit [1] [2] [3], and that is unlikely to change unless there is a sea change of migration towards urban areas from the suburbs and rural areas.
A majority of US miles are driven in rural areas or areas without mass transit [4], and the sun belt, where there is limited to no public transit, holds roughly half of the US population. I certainly agree to destroy demand for light vehicle passenger miles in urban areas with robust public transit and other non vehicle options, but the rest of the US will require EVs of some sort. Most of the US does not have mass transit infrastructure, and won't for the remainder of most of our lives (as of this comment).
> Well, you're arguing this in the wrong country. You might check your priors. I regret to inform you that only about 5% of Americans use public transit [1] [2] [3], and that is unlikely to change unless there is a sea change of migration towards urban areas from the suburbs and rural areas.
Yes… I’m aware. I’m arguing for change in that figure. Part of the reason American cars are so expensive is because as an industry manufacturers can raise prices because there are no alternatives to car ownership.
The US won’t require EVs for any purpose anytime in our lives. We don’t have the processing and manufacturing capacity to build them here, and we won’t allow our auto industry to go defunct either. It’ll be gasoline for the foreseeable future. Not necessarily a future I like as an EV owner but that’s how things look today. Winning a war is more important than the climate, unfortunately.
It was. Then the U.S. turned into whatever the hell you call all that.
Now we have U.S. automakers who are derefential to the current regime's leader and are pulling out. The Federal and Ontario government both tried to somehow make them happy, but you can't make that kind of monster happy. So it's time to move on.
Big auto style auto manufacturing, with American-style union relations and a messy web of parts suppliers was never going to be globally competitive. GM and Ford deserve to go bankrupt with their current backwards practices.
It's also still not true. My son has a Windows machine that he's responsible for, after a long time running ChromeOS. He's reported all kinds of weird driver things, and having had to watch YouTube tutorials to figure out how to fix issues.
It gave me pause in the sense that it doesn't feel true.
I mean, yes, I've had to look things up to see how to do things in Linux. I've also had to do that on MacOS. (Just the other day, I couldn't remember what the Task Manager-equivalent on MacOS was, and nothing I typed into the launcher was coming up with an appropriate app, so I had to ask the robot what it was named.)
But dozens of hours? Maybe back in the Red Hat 4.2 days, but not now. Some of that is obviously just that I have a lot of knowledge about things, but even so.
Some advanced uses from Windows that are very easy can be very difficult on Linux still. PipeWire, for example, while more stable overall, has made getting my audio routing all correct (e.g. for streaming) much more difficult than it is on Windows. Once it's set up it's just as stable but it took me longer to set up.
I could see that among other things totaling dozens of hours for a Linux beginner. Power management on laptops is still a common sticking point; i probably spent more than a dozen hours on that alone before giving up and going back to Windows on my laptop. And I've been using Linux for 20 years.
You know how much time I had to spend doing desktop support for developers who couldn't get their own Zoom/Teams meetings to work on Windows? Its not as intuitive as you think, you're probably just used to it.
Persistent input to output mappings in PipeWire is impossible without third party tools or custom scripts you run on boot. Something windows just does automatically. It's not even about ease in that case, just literally what you're able to do.
What's funny is, the author is only having these questions because they chose a wacky Arch-based ultra-techie distro that I'd never even heard of.
If they'd just installed normal Ubuntu or Fedora, they wouldn't even know what a bootloader was, and they'd just use whatever desktop environment (probably GNOME, maybe KDE) came with it.
For real. I should write a blog post about my expierience but it would only be like 2 sentences. "Hey! I switched to Linux. I bought a desktop from System76 and it all just worked."
I suspect they sincerely picked CachyOS because they read people advocating for it, and were convinced by the advocacy. People advocate all kinds of distros, and all of them except the one I advocate are bad choices.
If you want a bit more automation on your spreadsheet, check out Tiller. They provide the integrations with your banks to automatically download your transactions into a spreadsheet (support Sheets or Excel), as well as some handy templates that you can use for budgeting/dashboarding/whatever. But fundamentally, just pulling data into a spreadsheet so that you can use it however you want.
I'm sorry, but no. I ran Slackware 96, Red Hat 4.2, Mandrake 5.0, a bunch of Ubuntus from 12.04 onward, and Fedora now. It is absolutely, qualitatively different now than it was at the turn of the century.
In the Red Hat 4.2 days, it was something that I was able to use because I was a giant nerd, but I'd never ever ever have recommended it to a normal person. By Ubuntu 12.04, 15 years later, it was good enough that I'd recommend it to someone who didn't do any gaming and didn't need to use any of the desktop apps that were still then semi-common. In 2026, it's fine for just about anyone unless you are playing particular (albeit very popular) games.
I mean, yes. That's how people work: They don't care about the OS for itself, the OS is a means to run the software they want to run, and it'll be ready when it runs that software.
(I'm typing this on my Linux desktop right now... but also have a separate Windows PC for running the games I want to run that don't work on Linux yet. When they work, I'll be thrilled to put Linux on that machine or its successor.)
I have the HP Zbook Ultra G1a. AMD 395+, 129GB RAM, 4TB 2280 SSD. Works great with Ubuntu 24.04 and the OEM kernel. Plays Steam games, runs OpenCL AI models. Only nit is it is very picky on what USB PD chargers it will actually charge on at all. UGreen has a 140W that works.
I've had Linux running on a variety of laptops since the noughties. I've had no more issues than with Windows. ndiswrapper was a bit shit but did work back in the day.
I haven't, because I buy hardware that's designed to work with Linux. But if you buy hardware that doesn't have Linux drivers, it just won't work. That might mean Wifi not working, it might mean a fingerprint reader not working, etc.
But all the policy support that would have let North American automakers build up a competitive position with China is gone, so this is more about just acknowledging reality now.
reply