Why bother to innovate and compete when you can get bailed out by taxpayer money?
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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All Detroit automakers made EVs...no one bought them. 93% of US sales are not EVs.
Ok, but nice way to cherry pick numbers. EVs are only 7% of sales in North America, so US automakers still sell far more trucks and SUVs. 75% of 7% is only about 5%. Unlikely to change much in a spread out country with poor charge infrastructure.
They have been in trouble for a while. Comparatively no one buys US cars outside of the USA, and maybe CA/MX.
Who remembers fElon laughing about the idea that Chinese EV car makers could overtake his market share? What a tool.
Maybe they should have spent money on R&D during covid, instead of doing fucking stock buy-backs.
Fuck them. Fuck them to death.
Or paid their employees properly instead of diverting that funds to shareholders.
You could finance 5 labourers with the salary of one CEO earning €200,000. And with universal and free healthcare and education with affordable housing, €40,000 becomes a lot worth.
The CEOs are earning way more than 200k. The lowest paid of the US auto CEOs earns north of $20 million.
Yeah, and they do that through "bonuses".
You could remove €15 million of the bonuses and still get 100 new employees with a comfortable €50,000 salary.
But... but the short-sighted profits?
Looks like extreme focus on short-term profits and shareholder value isn't a great way to do long-term business.
Who could have forseen this?
The problem is that major companies have unsustainably, and against all easily available wisdom, started to run their companies like Private Equity/VC companies, who aren't trying to build something of value but just profit from arbitrage or short windows of positive data.
It just means the US automakers will pull in and only focus on the US, and the government will put in more anticompetitive measures to keep other brands out. In 5-10 years the cars we have will be crappy caricatures of what the rest of the world has and at twice the price.
It just means the US automakers will pull in and only focus on the US
It's a market of 20 million vehicles a year. Lemmy has a nice fantasy hot box cooking, but Americans really are not buying EVs.
The free market is so keen until one becomes its lunch.
The north American auto industry sold out the bottom 85% of its consumers.
It deserves to collapse.
That is a car GM is gonna sell in China for what is $19,999. The US auto analyst then says:
Figure a 150% price bump for the US market to put it in at $49,990 and I think GM would have a winner.
I'm not down with that. I'm not gonna support that.
1970's American auto industry: First time?
70s Detroit made small cars to address the gas crisis. They got killed by Japan and VW over build quality and reliability.
Not my first one. But that was a more US American industry. Now it is truly an US/Canada/Mexico industry because of how we divided up manufacturing and labor. Which I think is good.
Insulation over isolation.
But auto companies aiming 80% of their products at 15% of the population after years of lobbying against any other form of public transportation. When they made cheap cars that was OK, fine.
But when they stopped making cheap car and made it 100% tariffs for cheap cars like now ... well fuck that shit right there.
Not a surprise. This is the end result of prioritising immediate profit for shareholders and C-suite members over the longterm survival of the company.
The US auto industry only exists because of bailouts and federal protection policies that block or limit overseas competition.
Boeing is another good example of a leader hollowed out.
I blame trucks and SUVs hollowing out the market for affordable domestic vehicles. The cost to electrify these vehicles is eyewateringly awful with their huge batteries and they can't be charged quickly enough on level 1 charging, drastically impairing barrier to entry for daily driving in absence of infrastructure. So of course they didn't electrify when they only really made profit on a segment hostile to EVs, they have enough difficulty moving their vanity trucks and bloated SUVs when more and more people can't afford any kind of new car.
But assholes love trucks and muricah has no shortage of assholes.
Oh shit this whole time I thought the TV were saying “Otto makers” but auto makers makes way more sense