this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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Electric Vehicles
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Yes.
The question isn't whether or not EVs will be the future - they will.
The question is who will lead the market in them, and the Republicans are effectively working to ensure that it will not be the US - it'll be China.
It's never been the US imo. Tesla was one of the first to make an EV that didn't look like a child's imagining of a futuristic car (read: incredibly stupid looking). All anyone needed to do was make a regular ass car with an electric motor and a decent chunk of people would be interested. Ford and Chevy and all the rest either categorically refused to make them or made them look so ridiculous that no one wanted to be seen in them.
A normal body style and a decent marketing team is pretty much all Tesla had going for them but it was enough to put them in the running for dominating the auto industry. They may have been able to pull it off if Nazi Musk could have kept his ego in check. Now Tesla is tanking and all the rest are so far behind they're getting lapped by manufacturers from just about every other nation with a sizable auto industry.
Mostly agree, the other parameter was making it a normal usable car rather than a short range city car. The Japanese & Europeans were just as guilty at building short range stupid looking things (hell Toyota only just stopped this year). If it wasn't collusion it sure looked like it. Not to mention a massive astro turfing campaign to fuel range anxiety & other FUD
Man, that’s a sweet ass-car.
For marketing... sure, because people are stupid and follow norms. ICE vechiles are built the way they are because they have to house the powerplant and keep it cool and have ample room for maintenance. EVs are free to be any shape they want, thus they should be made extremely aerodynamic for maximum efficiency. But then they'll look "futuristic".
he also made them overpriced for such a low QC product.
Before he went nazi, Teslas had one of the highest customer sat ratings of the car manufacturers for years. The whole QC thing was part of a campaign against Tesla - if the customers were extremely happy with their cars then skeptical assessments of the accusations are in order. The Model Y didn't outsell the Corolla world wide for no reason. If people were willing to pay it then they can't have been over-priced in the eyes of the buyers, no ?
Nazi man bad, but Tesla made cars that fit the needs of a lot of people for a while. They'll rightly go broke now because Elon has broken US democracy (and is trying to do so in other countries), but the cars were fine, in fact the big problem I have at the moment is finding a better car to recommend when people ask. The range/functionality/performance/fitout combo is really only matched by BYD (not available in the US) although the Koreans are now pretty decent. Depends on a user's needs/parameters.
Pretty sure the future isn't every person carrying around multiple tons of steel with them every time they need some milk. The push isn't to full sized electric cars, it's to electric bikes and micro cars. But yes, China is doing both and the US auto Industry will collapse because it doesn't care that people don't want to drive something bigger than a tank.
It's always so mind boggling how (most of) US cities are designed just for cars. And if you are used to that, I get its hard to even imagine the alternative. I like the bike centric cities in Europe, or the amazing public transport in places like Japan or Korea.
It was a conscious decision. After the Second World War, the US needed somewhere to shift all of the manufacturing that had been built for the war effort. So cities were deliberately designed to keep houses away from jobs away from shops, so you need a car to get around, inducing a market for the personal car that never should have existed. People forget that before the car, there were cities across America that were walkable and had streetcars. The current state of affairs was never preordained. It’s the result of decades of corporate influence over government decision making.
In the case you described it might be autonomous delivery systems. Why leave the house and drive around town when a little delivery drone on wheels can deliver it at the same time?
In functional societies, leaving the house isn't a terrifying or stressful thing. It's actually nice. Shopping in functional countries isn't horrible because you aren't going through space designed around cars to stuff warehouses designed around cars.
Weird way to spell trains.
Trains, metro, trams, and occasionally busses for mass transit. Bikes and microcars for individual transit.
Wait. Isn't it that in US people want to drive tanks? And having couple of tons of steel is prefferable? Like lemmy is such a small part it's opinions are like drop in the ocean - what I understand is that US loves it's big cars.
Yeah, Americans love big cars. They want to feel big and safe in a giant vehicle, and large swaths of the country have enough wide open space to accommodate that. You'll see very different vehicles in cities vs in the countryside.
I wish the US auto industry would compete and innovate instead of going all in on regulatory capture
I don't think they have any choice.
I have zero doubt that any visionaries or innovators who might've made it to the executive ranks have been long since weeded out so that they wouldn't make the poseurs and weasels and manipulators look bad. So the poseurs and weasels and manipulators are all that's left. And their skill set is entirely built around taking advantage of systems other people built - they couldn't build one themselves if their lives depended on it.
~~In~~ I'm afraid that train already left the station. It also leaves EU behind. The only thing that protects Western industry today are automobile industry protecting tariffs.
Having a domestic industry requires a balance of unity. It's nice that fellow citizens have nice jobs, but the rest need decent value cars. Cleaner air and a sustainable planetary civilization, are part of the value proposition.
But having domestic industry is rarely a national security requirement. Australia gave up on a car industry, and have higher per capita income than Canada. A bigger difference on ex transportation income.
I mean... With the US falling as a leader, does it even matter? It's juts a stab to a bleeding beast.