America Has an Answer to the Biggest Problem with EVs

I think these stats are biases towards junky brands with high turnovers.

Otherwise, you’re just using regulatory capture to protect legacy auto profits and overly expensive vehicles. Protect US labor (within reason considering the value of a domestic manufacturing base and supply chain), but don’t protect the profits.

That said, my own policy would result in even more extreme trade restrictions for completely different reasons.

I think it is absurd to impose extensive regulations on some players but not all players. It makes no sense to me that I can walk or click into a store where two identical products are offered but the rules imposed on each producer are so different. One is regulated in the age of employees, the safety requirements for employees, the working conditions of employees, environmental protections, and so forth. The other is allowed to ignore all those considerations. When the US government imposes all those regulations on US players it is essentially making a rule that US companies are not allowed to compete.

I think that USians like to complain about government interference but actually support most of the restrictions they suffer. They don't want to see 10-year-olds in factories, or toxic effluent flowing into waterways. We may not all agree on all the regulations but we generally agree on most of them. Yet we are not willing to impose those restrictions across the board on all participants in US markets.

A company that plays by USA rules inside the USA cannot escape the costs imposed by those rules. So two identical products show up on the same shelf with drastically different price tags. It's no surprise that the higher-priced item does not sell. So if you want to sell your products inside the USA you are forced to move your production outside the USA and damage the labor force and ecology of some other part of the world.

There are two obvious alternatives to the existing status quo. One is to remove restrictions from producers within the USA. I do not advocate for this and don't think most USians would tolerate this. The other obvious choice is to impose USA regulations on the production of any product sold inside the USA. I do advocate for this but I don't think most USians would tolerate this either. The obvious effect on prices would be untenable for most USians. It would be political suicide to support such an action.

Yet, as the parent comment highlights, we see arbitrary trade restrictions for politically powerful industries despite the effect on prices. Clever appeals to nationalism and other hideous ideologies can sometimes produce public support for good policies for terribly wrong reasons.

In the case of EVs you have a very interesting conflict of choosing to allow irresponsible companies to do irresponsible things in order to create cheaper products that might save the environment. Or do you force companies to be environmentally responsible even if it makes environmentally safer products more expensive. (This ignores, of course, the whole debate about whether EVs are, in fact, environmentally safer. It also ignores other price factors like labor which might have a greater effect on prices than environmental protections. But it makes interesting conversation.)

If a non-USA producer can play by the same environmental protections and most of the same labor protections as the USA producers and still put a less expensive product on store shelves in the USA, I don't mind allowing their product into the USA. Of course, if that ever came to be the general case we could start worrying about the rest of those labor rules. But right now we are so far away from a level playing field that an abrupt leveling would cause too great of a shock. I wonder if USians could agree on what constitutes low-hanging fruit in any effort to level the playing field.

If we allowed Chinese autos into the country free of tariffs, prices would almost certainly decline materially in real terms over the next few years.

This isn’t even getting into the regulatory capture which prevents foreign products from being used/sold in USA.

[1]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/02/hrw-urges-european-commi...

[2]: https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3232456/your-made-chin...

Nor will a sub-$10k Chinese car compare to the build quality of even a $20k American car.

As with Temu, there's a reason Chinese EVs are super cheap.

A few things:

1. We should tax vehicles according to their road damage, i.e., O((weight/axles)^4*axles);

2. Vehicles with bumpers/hoods higher than Xcm should never be allowed in the left lane;

3. Vehicles with gas mileage worse than 3g/100miles shouldn't be allowed to go over 45mph.

My neighbors almost universally run small businesses; and, almost universally, slap their business sticker on their 100k$+ 250s & 350s and then take the whole cost as a "write off" for "tax purposes". If the IRS was doing their jobs, these fuckers wouldn't be on the road — they'd be paying off fines and/or in prison for fraud.

I also needed the truck, he didn't need his, he just wanted to have what his other buddies had.

They did that: https://www.cato.org/blog/im-government-im-here-give-you-gol... (the article is kind of snarky but 100% accurate).

And I know people who bought those free golf carts (that's how I heard about the program in the first place - if I had a place to park the thing I would have done it myself), drove them around a little and then they broke and that was the end of that.

Nice waste of government money.

You can leave the AC running while you're in a store. You can charge at home on 110v. not that much to maintain. no smog, no oil changes, 125k coolant changes.

you're a well-paid engineer, buy it as an experiment and have some fun with it.

This is what the government along with standards bodies and manufacturers should be doing. It shouldn't be a market decision, because the market can't optimize this outcome.