If they have better products it's not their fault it's our fault

something that most Americans have supported for decades. Autos are overpriced in the US.

I worry more about US policies than a Chinese threat.

I agree that we have supported the bloated industry for a long time.
Regardless of that, they are cheaper partly because they pay their workers what be less than minimum wage in the US.
How can we pay our automakers a living wage, it be able to compete with subsidized EVs, or a nation that pays low wages so the labor costs results in a cheaper product?
All of the people who insist on being able to buy a cheap EV are blind to the fact that the end results is NO domestic automobile companies, because they will go out of business because their is no way they can be competitive and pay for American labor prices.

Chinese EV makers’ labor costs average around $585 per vehicle produced. This is much lower than US mainstream automakers at about $1,341 per vehicle, Japanese at roughly $769, and premium European brands often exceeding $2,000. The gap comes from hourly wages in Chinese manufacturing typically ranging $4–7 (sometimes up to $10 in coastal areas), versus $30+ per hour plus heavy benefits for US auto workers.

Japan was viewed as cheap in the US. In fact many people would refuse to buy Japanese products (or Jap as they used to say - a holdover from the war). In reality, Japan set the standard in quality for years and many of our present day quality standards come from the Japanese.

Like Japan, the Chinese might decide to move some of their manufacturing to the US and along with bring their manufacturing concepts with them. Competition creates benefits for consumers and although not sure how much the US government will be willing to subsidize auto manufacturing prices can come down even as most auto companies no longer use the manpower of the past (robots).

But the price of autos has increased dramatically in the last 10 years along with Executive pay, stock buybacks, even as labor costs are down because of automation.

Prices are too damn high!! And it apples to everything, everywhere and is not sustainable. ☮

No shortcuts. No small family trying to save some money should be flattened by Johnny McBroDozer who is busy texting his cousin about what they should name their next child.

I can also see the Big 3 (Ford, GM, Stellantis) somehow "insisting" (re: paying off congressidiots) that they be imported and rebranded as their own products, adding 25% to the cost with zero actual input nor benefit. That's the shitty timeline we've been on and will continue to be on.

Yet they still produce expensive, unreliable pieces of shit, and have done so since the 1970s. I am totally disgusted with them. The last decent American car I owned was a 1965 Mustang.

And they got lazy.

A '65 Mustang was a dog compared to the autos of today. I've owned both foreign & domestic autos over =the past decades.
2007 342k miles on a Pontiac; only replaced the water pump
2013 279k Hyundai Elantra, water pump
2004 254k Chevy Monte Carlo, radiator & water pump
1999 214k Pontiac Grand Prix, water pump
1992 & '96 224k Acura Integra, water pump & fuel pump ; another Integra 218k
1986 Dodge Daytona, 228k transmission. The ONLY major issue & thats 40 yrs ago.
Currently driving a 2013 Civic with 212k on it & still own a 2005 Dodge Grand Caravan with 159k on it

According to JD Power survey, the number of defects per 100 cars between the #1 vehicle & the #20 car isnt much. #1 is a Lexus w/166. The #20 is a Lincoln w/206

Now if you want to bash PRICES I'll wave that flag with you every day. Thats why the ONLY new car I ever bought was my FIRST car. And I'll never buy another new one.

In 1965, the Mustang was the best little runabout around, compared to anything else out there at the time. And it was no dog.

Fast forward to the 1970s and 1980s, as gas got more expensive and people wanted something zippy but fuel efficient, Japan gave us the Civic and Corolla. American manufacturers gave us crap like the Pinto and Chevette. American car manufacturers never caught up and now have abandoned that segment to the Japanese. Your experience with American cars is not the norm.
And as you note, you now drive a Civic.

American manufacturers continue to lag behind foreign manufacturers with major component (i.e. engine & transmission) reliability issues that you don't get with Japanese manufacturers, and the disparity has only gotten worse. It's not just the number of defects per car, but what the defect is.

I would be happy to pay the high prices if the American cars were as reliable and efficient as Toyotas or Hondas. But they're not.

I really wanted to continue to support American manufacturers, but they have made it impossible. I currently own a 2021 Ford Escape PHEV. I wish I had bought the more expensive Toyota RAV4 Prime. The trips to the Ford dealership have gotten to be almost monthly. It took them 4 tries to fix a check engine light the last 2 months. The Escape was in the shop for weeks. My next car will definitely be a Toyota RAV4 PHEV. Life is too short to spend at the dealer. And Ford discontinued the Escape this year anyway. Ford has now abandoned the compact SUV market to the Japanese as well. Pathetic.

I'm tall so I've always preferred a 2 door.
If I buy American 2 doors now, it's gonna be a hot rod; Challenger, Mustang. And for a "regular" coupe, it's gonna pretty much only be a Honda. Toyota & Nissan is gonna be a Lexus & Infiniti; much more expensive
Monte Carlo is gone. Grand Prix is gone. Even my 2 door Hyundai was only made 2 yrs.
Thats irritates me but it's the market that forced it; all the "keeping up with the Joneses" types who HAVE to have Yukon to take Jimmy & Megan to soccer because all the OTHER wives have one. Or bearded tattooed Butch who HAS to have the full sized elevated Silverado because it's the only way to stay masculine.

Your comments re insulting!

But go ahead...keep bashing the industry that employs hundreds of thousands of your fellow Americans and many more thousands around the globe.

Because CEOs are idiot bean counters who know nothing about cars, and certainly have no passion for building good cars like you do.

They did you dirty, not me.

lol...

Bill Ford Jr, who is not CEO but sits on the board, has a MIT degree in business management, not engineering. He's a bean counter.

How about Trump suck-up and current CEO Jim Farley? What explains his dereliction of quality control? Or abandonment of the small car market? Or abandonment of the compact SUV market?

Those guys failed you. And us.

Just stop - I know the commitments to quality and his passion for cars. My god. Just stop already. I get it, you don't like FMC

I was a lifelong Ford fan. I owned a 1965 Mustang, a Ford XL convertible, an Escort, and a Focus. And I currently own a recall-plagued Ford Escape PHEV. Ford discontinued the Escape this year. Why? Why couldn't they just make it BETTER? I was a loyal Ford customer for decades (my entire adult life), until Ford made it impossible. Now, they are basically just a pickup company.

They've cracked the code on how to get range, reliability, and price up there.

They're expected to have almost unlimited lifetime & a range of over 600 miles per charge

I've seen them in other countries, and I'm very impressed. Far better quality than Tesla or anything else from America.

Take Argentina - where Trump's Mini-me, Javier Milei, parades non-stop as the "most anti-Chinese human alive today" (though the 'human' part is still up for debate).

Electric vehicle sales are finally starting to take off there. And BYD - which sold its first car in Argentina only last September, made up 72% of the 533 EVs sold there this January.

JMEV - another Chinese firm - made up 5% (GM was #2, at 7%).

And Tesla? One.

Not 1%....one car.

And the trend is only intensifying in BYD's favor: https://www.mendocinobeacon.com/2026/01/21/argentina-chinese-evs-arrival/

Their carma ran over Milei's dogma, you might say.

... we have a BYD electric. It is great for moving around town and I have taken int out to other parts of the country. With careful planning - making sure it is fully charged before starting - we made it there and back with no issues on a single charge.

I see a surprising number of Chinese vehicles - cars, medium to large trucks, buses, etc - many of them electric or hybrid all around Africa.

I would certainly consider on in the US. But parts and maintenance are a question here and would be a bigger one in the US.

Can we consider the "Big 3" American anymore. Crysler is not, not really, and I have doubts about Ford. Don't know enough about GM these days.

I used to live in Michigan and drove a Toyota Camry. I was at a gas station in Flint when a guy in a GM asked me, "What's it like to drive a foreign car?" I replied, "I don't know. This one was built in Tennessee. I hear your engine is from Mexico." I doubt I was very accurate with my assertions, but it did shut him up.

I had a hard time getting my Toyota serviced in Michigan, so I ended up getting an Oldsmobile after the Camry died.

It looks it's age but it's still a useful vehicle.

Of course we live in a place with a mild climate where cars don't rust away and everyone has a close relative or friend who is a mechanic.

My own favorite car was a Toyota Corolla I bought for $900. Approaching 200,000 miles it was still going strong when a distracted driver in a big SUV drove off the road and totaled it while it was parked in our driveway.

I would estimate that 7-8/10 cars, SUVs, and pickups here are Toyotas with the Corolla, RAV-4, and Hilux as the most common models. Most are 10-15 years old. Some 20-30 years old. I'm told this is because Toyota parts are readily available and all mechanics know how to fix them.

Parts a maintenance play a huge role in popularity here. It is one of the fears that keep new cars off the market. BYD and other Chinese makers are pushing to make sure parts are available and mechanics know how to service them. It is still a concern for many buyers.

It may also prove to be a concern in the US, as will the embedded smart systems all being primarily in Chinese with limited and sometimes faulty English translations.

... I looked for the machine guns mounted in the beds.

I haven't seen the makeshift weapons platforms in Rwanda, Angola, Tanzania, Ethiopia, South Africa, or Morocco -- but I would not be surprised if there are still some driving around Libya or Sudan.

They last forever with the right maintenance.

This old llady will be lucky to be alive, much less driving in 5 years.

I sure do dream about one of those cheap ass electtric Chinese cars though, and the motor homes.. pure genius!

No driving necessary. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.

They make cheap junk that falls apart fast and can't be repaired.

I could trade my 328i BMW.
Chump never worked on a car and is ignorant when he says we want gas and grease back.
Us Boomers had a wonderful run with the 60s and early 70s Muscle Cars.

Younger went smaller with Hondas and imports.

New drivers just want to get where their going whether driving or Lyft or Metro. I feel the big attachment is gone.

Inexpensive, safe, a good interior interface and style.

China is forcing change and no amount of tariffs will stop it.

They're cheap cars that don't satisfy Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) by the National Highway Traffic Safety administration (NHTSS)

For a Chinese car to be road-legal in the US, it must undergo extensive, expensive modifications to meet NHTSA crash test and equipment requirements.

But, Chinese automobile manufacturing is not a static proposition and neither are NHTSA rules or perhaps the existence of NHTSA itself in the Trump era. I’m not sure what your response is actually to? If you are suggesting that someone doesn’t buy a Chinese car from let’s say Europe and hope to register it here, then I agree that it would be very expensive to import and to modify to pass regulations. If you are asserting, tariffs or import bans aside, that Chinese automobile manufacturers couldn’t bring cars that pass US regulations after showing success in passing different but demand Euro regulations, I’d have to disagree, especially as they gear up to ent we the Canadian market.

Unsafe at any speed. Death traps.

strange things going wrong with them, getting locked out, starting by themselves, ect... I do know for a fact the China made transceivers are some of the finest I have used so what they sell here will probably be of higher quality compared to Russia.

for the Child Rapist on EVs. Trump will sell them out once China offers him a bribe. They have sought their own destruction. No sympathy.

The US doesn't have the infrastructure for mass adoption of EV and customers just didn't want them. FMC just wrote off $11.5B due to this and no company walks away from that kind of investment if they think it will get better.

in the US for quite some time, but with increasing backlash and disinformation campaigns by Big Oil and legacy auto. While the rate of increase did decline, the increase in sales was still positive. Dealers however did NOT want to sell EVs as it upset their profit model (ICE cars require more repairs and maintenance which is 50% of a dealer’s profits). I know this first hand from visiting dealerships posing as a buyer in my area. They would do everything possible to discourage buying EVs, including disparaging EVs with the usual canards. I also went with actual buyers of new and used EVs as a “friend” and got to listen to sales people lie through their teeth. Trump’s hostility towards EVs was present with legacy auto for the last decade.

The reason Tesla sold a lot of EVs is because it was the only dealer that wanted to sell EVs (and now Musk has screwed that up with his pro-Nazi/White Supremacist views and ties to Epstein.

Even with salesmen actively trashing EVs, sales growth was positive, but when Trump came in legacy auto caved immediately, as they shared his views. Meanwhile, Kia/Hyundai are selling more EVs every month.

have worked overtime to discourage EV sales and with arrival of Trump that action moved into overdrive. All the players have scrambled to abandon EVs and go back to ICE (except Musk, who just abandoned selling EV's for his asinine "transportation as a service" plan and vaporware promises of selling a trillion dollars worth of autonomous robots). By these choices they are actively harming their customers, public health, and the climate. They have willfully ceded their futures to squeeze more money out of the past.

This is stupid on dozens of levels and ultimately they are setting themselves up for bankruptcy since the rest of the world (minus Russia) is moving away from oil. There are a finite number of people in the US who will keep buying pickup trucks and monster SUVs.

Will this happen overnight? No, but the infrastructure of the world is moving that way. The future is a speeding train and car makers have decided to lay down and sleep on the tracks.

That was the only hope of re-energizing US EV sales that had plateaued.

I agree, Republicans and current auto manufacturers have willfully ceded our future to squeeze more money out of the past, much to the detriment of consumers, public health, and the climate...and ultimately, the auto manufacturers themselves.

I was one of the first people to buy a Chevy Bolt. I loved it at first, but trying to go on a road trip out of town was a nightmare of range anxiety and inoperable/nonexistent charging stations. So I switched to a Ford Escape PHEV in 2021, and found it to be the best of both worlds., running as an EV in town, then using the hybrid engine on the highways, with zero range anxiety. Now if only it was reliable!

It's been a downhill slide since they lost their empire, and that slide continues as they are now regretting Brexit.

Exceptionalism is not going to work out any better for the U.S.A..

China has become a major industrial power. That's the reality we live in.

With a few exceptions China can match the quality of anything made in the U.S.A. or Europe.

Here in the U.S.A we're going to be as surprised by Chinese cars as we were by Japanese cars.

Today many U.S. passenger vehicles are nostalgia cars, Corvettes and Challengers for example. Our exports are limited because monster American Trucks and SUVs are simply too big and clumsy to drive comfortably on city streets in much of the world.

Personally I want car culture to go away. We ought to be rebuilding our cities, turning them into affordable attractive places where car ownership is unnecessary. The people with the smallest environmental footprints generally live in cities, don't own cars, and have a largely vegetarian diet. We don't have to force that lifestyle on anyone because many people would prefer it but the opportunity is denied them.

US automakers seem intent on putting out giant pickup trucks with crew cabs for people with no crews and that require a stepladder to get into. They make a few small cars, but they're not affordable. I'm not paying 3 times the cost of my first house for a new car.

Can you imagine the junk we would be forced to buy today without the Japanese? But it wasn't all roses and fanfare at first and I'm sure the Chinese car makes will face the same harassments as the 70/80s.

Japan had the past laugh. They make the most reliable cars in the world now. And Detroit completely gave up on trying to make economy cars.

My dad was the black sheep of his family because he drove Volkswagens. Some of his relatives really did say things like "You can't park that here! What will the neighbors think?" and it was only partly in jest.

I drove used VW beetles through the 70's. I used the famous "How to keep your Volkswagen Alive" book and rebuilt engines twice. I replaced valve guide rods on the side of the highway on a cross-country trip. Replaced clutch cables, piston rings, brakes, etc. Wind or high altitude could slow the thing down to a top speed of 25 mph.

Now I rarely open the hood on our old subaru and honda.

I can remember a time when we supported protectionist policies like tariffs that benefitted American auto-workers.

Dems still support strategic, precisely applied tariffs in specific industries where there is unfair foreign competition, to level the playing field. They oppose the blanket, country-wide mindless tariffs that Trump has applied. Trump’s tariffs are for purely political reasons and they are killing our small businesses and farmers.

Please stop bashing Democrats. Dems (i.e., WE) are not the problem.