And, a recent tour of one of the Asian powerhouse’s vehicle plants has proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt, at least to Honda President and CEO Toshihiro Mibe.
“We have no chance against this,” Mibe said upon a visit to a Shanghai parts factory, commenting on its seamless automation across all levels of production. Logistics, procurement and all aspects of the process were so automated, in fact, that he did not spot a single human worker on the supplier’s floor.
Ford executives saying even three years ago that China was way ahead of the game
Toyota’s CEO has likewise said regarding not just his company, but the industry in general, “unless things change, we will not survive”
GOOD.
Stop blocking progress or these companies will die.
The market can remain irrational far longer than the economy can remain solvent.
Kinda think thats chinas plan
Maybe the US needs to take a play out of China’s book - require >50% ownership stake of any Chinese company doing business in the US and allow American companies to just take that technology and roll with it.
This is the very same extreme capitalism that they have enjoyed, engineered, abused. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Or, rapidly change expectations for what they charge. They cannot have it both ways
I genuinely think there will be a few major auto manufacturers who don’t survive the EV transition. Either they will go bankrupt altogether, or be bought out by other, more competent manufacturers.
That’s been going on for a while already. Stellantis was founded only a few years ago and they already have a ton of different brands in their pockets. Obviously PSA and FCA already had a ton of those brands before merging, but similar merges have been happening for decades, for example GM has been gathering different brands since 1920s.
Why would anyone want to buy out Stellantis? Or GM?
What is worth salvaging?
Stellantis in particular has some brands that deserve a decent vehicle to put their badge on.
Gm to a lesser extent.
That’s exactly China’s goal. Put everyone else out of business and then leverage the hell out of their position as the only automaker left standing in the world like the Walmart or Amazon of cars.
I’ve been wanting Honda to make an affordable all-electric car for years. Based on how BYD is selling, I’m guessing I’m not the only one.
Instead they keep making bigger and bigger, gas-guzzling vehicles, with bells and whistles we don’t need, saying that’s what sells and they can’t make an electric vehicle they’re happy with.
Well, too bad. It seems I’ve bought my last Honda, sadly, because my next vehicle will not burn gasoline.
What will be your next vehicle then?
I honestly don’t know. Probably BYD, based on how things are going…
Maybe the Honda Prologue, which I only just found out about. But I’ll keep driving my gas guzzler Honda for a while, since ei don’t drive it a lot so it will last a long time.
But really my point is that they’ve had a lot of chances to get ahead of this and they keep sticking to gas and hydrogen and not moving forward on electric.
The new Honda Super-N looks pretty small and is way better value than the Honda E was.
I don’t need a car, but if I did that would be what I’d get.
On the same boat and yes it’s depressing. It’s also depressing that nobody seems to be thinking about all electric small cars, or even normal width cars, at least where I live. Teslas and BYDs here are about as wide as buses. I can only dream of Honda or Toyota making an electric vehicle no wider than 70% of the lanes they’re supposed to drive on.
Renault seem to offer quite a few these days that are fairly small.
Renaults are rare in Australia (and for some reason also disliked by aussies in general ). I would say the most popular brands are BYD, Tesla, Honda, Toyota, Kia, and Hyundai, easily more than half the cars you see in circulation today. I can probably count with my fingers the amount of times I’ve seen a Renault while driving.
They did. The Honda e was the perfect tiny EV, except for its massive price tag and small-ish range. And of course, in classic Honda fashion, as a promising but flawed attempt didn’t succeed immediately, they promptly abandoned the segment instead of capitalizing on acquired knowledge, battery technology advances and price drops. Given how successful the Renault 5 is, I’m pretty sure a 2nd gen e at half the price would have been a massive success.
Of course, being Honda, they changed their mind and came back with a significantly worse SUV.
They would probably not have managed to slash the price in half with one generation.
The original Honda E was € 35.330 in 2020, which was a difficult sell given the small 170km range.
Half price would mean an electric car for ~€ 18.000Looking at other Western manufacturers (e.g. Peugeot, Citroen, Volkswagen, Dacia) for a fair comparison, that is a stretch even today. Most EVs don’t really go below 20k, and 25k seems to be the current range for affordable EVs.
The issue is largely the cost of the battery. That cost has come down over the years, but not to the extent that Honda could have suddenly slashed the price of their EV in half.
Edit: That is not to say Honda shouldn’t have kept releasing more EVs.
I’m just pointing out that they probably would follow the same path as the other Western automakers that have pretty consistently been releasing EVs over the past decade orso.
The Honda e was the perfect tiny EV, except for its massive price tag and small-ish range.
So it wasn’t even close to being perfect was it? Those are like the two most important aspects
No perfect in a cute little way
nobody seems to be thinking about all electric small cars, or even normal width cars,
Hey ? There’s dozens, if not hundreds of them, Chinese, European, Korean…
at least where I live
Oh. In the USA huh ? Damn, shame about your govt blocking them all. Maybe you’ll change things up at the mid terms, good luck with it.
Oh. In the USA huh ?
No
At a 30 sec glance at your history and based on your reference to Renaults in Oz then first question - WTF - it’s 3am over there, go to bed !
Then 2nd question, what exactly are you lacking in the way of small car options ? Another 30 sec dig suggests Oz has any number of small BEVs available all of the usual culprits from China, Korea and Europe are available (as they are in most countries, Canada being 1 exception for a few more months, and obviously the US).
https://www.cars24.com.au/car-guide/best-selling-bev-models-australia-2025/
Nissan Leaf, MG4 and BMW iX1 are not exactly F150s - they’re all reasonable sized hatches.
Yes there are plenty of people driving large cars in Oz (I’m from there originally) and they’re now feeling the pain of the fuel prices, it will shape their behaviour, particularly the city folk driving Ford Rangers etc without ever taking them off road.
If I’ve guessed wrong on the country whatever. There’s very few countries outside of North America that don’t have small and medium BEVs easily available
You got the country right. What’s your idea of a small car? When was the last time you drove in Australia? How large are the lanes where you live?
Of the cars you listed (or better said the website listed) only the Nissan Leaf is under 1800 mm width ( 1780 mm ). With a length of 4490 mm it’s not exactly a small car though, but I’ll grant you it’s within an acceptable size range for a vehicle. I haven’t seen many around tbh. The MG zs EV follows closely at 1809 x 4323, acceptable sizes but not small.
The Tesla T3, TY (you see these two a lot), Kia EV5, and BMW ix1 are well above 1900mm width. The T3, by far the most popular, is exactly 1933mm W x 4720cm L, the TY only 3cm longer. Hardly, hardly what I’d call a small car.
The other models listed are all above 1800cm width, and their lengths are over 4200 mm.
Let’s compare these sizes against popular PICKUP models. Ford Ranger: 1910 mm x 5225, Volkswagen Amarok: 1910x 5350, Mitsubishi Triton 1815x5305, BYD Shark3 1994x 5195, Nissan Navara 1850 x 5120.
TESLAS ARE WIDER THAN PICKUPS. Why??? Most other EVs have comparable widths to those of a pickup. Is that small?
Examples of actually small cars: Honda Jazz 1694mm x 3996, Toyota Yaris 1710x 3940, Suzuki Swift 1735x 3840, Nissan Micra 1665x 3780, Fiat Mini Cooper 1744 x 3876. These are relatively recent models. If you look for older ones, before 2020, you’ll find even more under 1600mm. Before the 2000s, you get cars even narrower than that.
New roads might take the current average car sizes into account, but nobody is broadening already existing streets.
So the US will be very limited in their options for EV’s in the future. The bastion of freedom and choice is strangled by monopolies. It becomes more realistic every day that this will the Chinese century and the fall of faux Christian empire (at least that how they see themselves).
I dunno how the Japanese and Koreans will do, but I 100% guarantee that the American companies will do absolutely nothing, whine about it to their child rapist in chief and then get a massive government bailout paid for by ordinary Americans.
I dunno how the Japanese and Koreans will do
They’re equally freaked out, as they’ve been lashed to the same Wall Street piloted sinking ship as the rest of the US periphery. If you check out the politics in Japan and Korea over the last fifteen years, its been on a reactionary bent of increasing domestic militarization amid a continuous “Why aren’t our naturally superior native peoples making more babies?!” eugenics freak-out.
You can throw in The Philippines, Taiwan, India, and Australia while you’re at it. None of these countries seem to have a serious long term plan for their economic futures. Everything revolves around “containment” of the Chinese super-economy, even as individual plutocrats demand carve outs for their own supply lines and revenue streams.
ok
Legacy car makers have become complacent. They wouldn’t survive doing the same thing they have been doing. They will adapt or die, competition is good.
Honda and Toyota have been EV technology laggards all along, even behind us automakers
Is everyone going to import the dregs of their technology to the us, to eke out a few more quarters of profitability before becoming irrelevant?
I would absolutely love to have a Toyota Tacoma hybrid to replace my v6 Tacoma but I’m not going to spend $90k + to buy with old tech when the BYD one is looking to be $40k and will have the latest battery tech.
Compete or die
almost as if competition is what capitalism was always supposed to be about
No, thats what markets are about. Capitalism is about making money by stealing other people’s surplus labor value.
No, that’s what capitalism becomes when unregulated. Just as communism does the same when unregulated. The fact the US is on the literal same trajectory as Russia post USSR collapse is proof.
Open any Economics text book that defines what capitalism is, and by it’s literal definition, OP is correct. Capitalism, at its core, is about using capital + labor to make better products with better materials to compete in a market of others doing the same where consumers ultimately choose which company they buy from; in turn controlling which company thrives or dies. Competition is literally a key component of capitalism. It’s what most regulatory bodies were designed to protect (before they were captured). So without competition, we have something else that just looks like capitalism, but functions exactly like fascism.
I’m not defending capitalism by the way. I’m just pointing out what it is actually defined as versus what it has now become. I wouldn’t say Russia is Communist anymore by any means, so calling what the US and others practice now “Capitalism” is likewise mistaking what their system was in place of what it has become.
Wikipedia disagrees with you. Markets are just one component of capitalism.
The very first line is exactly my definition:
“Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit.“
Wikipedia fully agrees with me if you read the very next paragraph from your link you didn’t quote, emphasis mine:
This socioeconomic system has developed historically in several stages, and is defined by a number of constituent elements: private property, profit motive, capital accumulation, competitive markets, commodification, wage labor, and an emphasis on innovation and economic growth.
Yes I understand markets are one component of capitalism, I also understand that without them we don’t have capitalism as like you’ve said that’s a constituent component necessary for it to be defined as capitalism.
What market is there for Facebook? Google? X? Your ISP? Your government? Is it like 2 companies you have a choice between at most? Between Verizon or Quest? Between Facebook or MySpace? Between Democrat or Republican?
If there’s extremely limited choices in your markets, you don’t have markets. So you don’t have capitalism.
If you don’t have markets where things can compete for money based on their innovation, you get enshittification from the few companies who control everything. Which is very obviously where we are now.
In short, the enshittification of all things is because we no longer have competitive markets for consumers to use their money to buy what’s best. In its place, instead we have a CRAPitalist system that clearly doesn’t fit the definition of capitalism.
Which is my point. Which is why you cherry picked your answer from Wikipedia rather than reading more than the first paragraph.
So competitive markets are one part of a capitalist system, like I said… and capitalism is defined by using these markets to extract surplus labor value, like I said…
Back in the 80s, American cars got really, really crappy, and that’s when Honda, and Toyota, and later Hyundai, Daiwoo, and Kia were able to get market share. American car companies got their shit together, and started making cars that could compete again. So here we are a few decades later, in the same spot.
These scummy Capitalists get a taste of luxury, and they start getting lazy, while the Asians continue to crank away like they’re in last place. In the past, the Capitalists finally wised up, and got back into the game, but the current crop are so breath-takingly ignorant, that I doubt they could even recognize that they’re in trouble. If someone were to try to explain it to them, they’d probably just attack back.
The Japanese and Koreans will get their shit together. America won’t.
Weren’t some auto companies bailed out before? Why wouldn’t they expect the same thing again? Just get bailed out by the government again if things get bad enough.
They know they are in trouble but they think it’s because labor is lazy and needs more exploiting.
Part of getting Americas shit together is closing off immigration. The people doing this to us are mostly not American. It’s rich immigrants from various countries exploiting regular Americans. Thiel isn’t ours. Musk isn’t ours. Fucking murdoch… Why the fuck do they all move here? At some point it feels like an attack from other nations. From our own Allies. Who fucking needs enemies?
“we’ve built a model based on charging an assload of money for features that barely work and China is making cheap cars that do the job better. Because, you know, the cheap bullshit we’ve been building. If you force us to compete again we’ll lose!”
Okay, but have you considered that the Chinese Communist Party is ontologically evil? And therefore any amount of business (direct retail sale to consumers that sidesteps US rent-seekers) is in support of a genocidal regime of highly corrupt madmen who want to destroy liberty and justice across the entire planet?
We need to STOP CHINA NOW before they take over the damned world and ruin everything sweet and honest and pure that our glorious nation has created.
You got me in the first half. Ngl.
How many of those companies spent literal billions of dollars on stock buybacks to inflate share market price over the last decade instead of investing in the people and facilities and products to remain competitive. Even if there is dumping I doubt it’s anywhere near the combined spent on share price inflation buybacks & savings instead of investing in the workers and business, these companies enjoy unjustified tax breaks and subsidies from their governments as well.
This is a the economy being equated to wealth/investor class problem. Workers in and around cities want cheap affordable evs, mechanics and parts producers want to build and work on affordable evs. People who own stocks expecting growth returns and executive compensation want to sell 10 cars a year for a trillion dollars each if they could.
Yeah, this is what bad leadership is. Lack of leadership really. China and the US both found themselves the manufacturers of the world.
China took the money and built an infrastructure. The US took the money and destroyed unions…
It all went up oil subsidies…
