this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
510 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
82227 readers
4603 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It’s amusing to me that the same folks to deride Chinese car manufacturers because they are somehow cheating by getting support from the government are the same people demanding that the US government artificially protect the US car industry by blocking Chinese imports. The point being that neither side actually objects to government participation in the market. But, one side uses it to make better products and service consumers, and the other does it to protect worse products from market forces.
People CONSTANTLY harp on Chinese government support of the EV industry.
Name one ICE manufacturer not taking state and federal money. Detroit took $80B in handouts after 2008. That's far more than the Chinese government has spent, and the largest investor in Chinese industry, by far, has been Apple Computers.
So China ended up with a new industry taking the world stage. What did we get from Detroit? Bloated low tech shit boxes that barely make it past warranty.
Don't forget the bailouts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_bankruptcy
The UK was constantly bribing car makers to stay, and most of them still fucked off.
Australia just gave up and told GM and Ford to go it alone. The fact that they shut it all down in 2017 says there was no business plan without government subsidies.
Well there is a plan, it's just "make them in countries where you can still have slaves".
"A free market is self regulating" until someone makes a better product for less money, I guess.
We tasted some of that self regulating 'free market' a while ago. Banks were having huge profits from the housing bubble until the subprime crisis hit, banks went into default, and the losses were picked up by public money.
My profit. Our losses.
My profit. Your losses.
After that it's "unfair competition" and the state has to intervene
The point both of you deliberately overlook is that China is not participating in a free market anyway. They never played by those rules so there‘s no point in treating them the same way as anyone who does. There is a lot of hypocrisy to be found in politics and economics around the world and China itself is a prime example of that. But a measure to defend yourself from an obvious case of economic warfare is the most understandable thing in history. Your criticism is misplaced and irrational. I mean do you seriously think a monopoly is desirable?
When has the US ever participated in a free market?
Man..interweb really drinks that anti-China koolaid.
Decades of propaganda works. Centuries of racism helps as well.
There no such thing as a free market. It's a constant pull between monopolistic forces and government restriction.
And there never will be. Not so long as it is possible to hide information from the consumer, and any sort of barrier to entry exists for market competition to spring up.
My point was it's literally impossible.
Ideally, although the US is trying our best for monopolies…
We've had of ecocomic warfare already. It was just fine for US companies to hollow out domestic manufacturing so China could build the manufacturing infrastructure that could have been built in the US.
But now that a Chinese company is building things that undercut a US company, you want protections for US billionaires that weren't afforded to US workers.
American companies only make up a small portion of the US auto industry.
Are you ignoring the whole subsidies thing on purpose? This is not BYD attacking Tesla. This is the Chinese government attacking western industries.
USA subsidized Detroit $80B since 2008, and that's ignoring state graft for building assembly plants. What the fuck did they do with that money, attack Eastern industries?
Well, it was $79.7B to be exact. And what the US government did with that was not cut checks, but rather, purchased stock in the companies.
When it sold the stock it bought from manufacturers, it sold for around $70B. When they sold the approximately $2.4B invested into Ally (an auto financing firm), it sold for $17.2B.
So the money spent in 2008 actually made a profit. It was not distributed to the manufacturers or finance companies at all. Just used to shore up their value to prevent them from going out of business – and more importantly, probably, make sure investors didn't lose money, or at least not too much.
When you take into account inflation and the overall market gains over that time, they absolutely did not make their money back.
When you take into account that the original assertion was tht eighty billion was given to the auto manufacturers, I don't think my comment deserves the reaction it got, not a reply like yours.
Would you rather they ended up with zero dollars?
Yes.
The only terms under which I could potential accept tax money being used to save a company from a collapse leading to massive layoffs, is if the resulting company is also made entirely employee owned.
Well, that's not how it would happen and you know it.
Then it doesn't happen. Your fear is not my fear.
oh, touche! but that was only after 2008, and not including previous bailouts to Ford. Then, every state, everywhere is paying to either get or keep assembly plants but that does not factor into your selective math.
This is BYD selling cars for less than the billionaires you care about want to.
Nothing more.
If an American company badge engineered these cars and sold them in the US at US prices, you would be fine with it just like you're fine with the economic warfare against the poor that US manufacturers and China have been allies in for decades.
If the Chinese government is losing money on each car they export, soon China will be bankrupt. It only makes sense to buy more China cars at cheap rates and bankrupt their country.
Also, there is no proof of subsidy, it's just made up Western cope.
The US government has been propping up Detroit for over 20 years with over $100B in subsidies and tax relief, plus every state government grafts to get a new assembly plant.
BMW is not in South Carolina for the quality of workers.
China defends its interests and follows what rules it deems advantageous. Just like everyone else does. It may upset you but they're just better at playing this game than most countries nowadays.
Because they don't have a class of politicians and billionaires stuffing their pockets.
Nobody's immune to that
ftfy
We should be critical of our manufacturers but we should also not forget China is basically getting its R&D for free by stealing tech from everybody (all do, but some more than others).
Bullshit. China is the pioneer in battery technology for years now.