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”
Cold Take:
Good. They don’t deserve to survive. Demand will ensure industry bounceback and stability long term, at least nationally as new buniesses fill the void and labour recovers. Mind you, the US industry will probably never compete globally again having collectively chosen to just lag behind technological trends toward efficiency and sustainability to appease fossil fuel entanglements. These companies made the decisions they did not to adapt at a critical turning point and this is the result, and their current rhetoric is an artifact of decades of coddling by a lopsided nanny state spoon-feeding subsidies and bailouts to shitty investors and executives with garbage management practices at the expense of public services and infrastructure. There is no too big to fail, that’s capitalist coping propped up by a corrupt and captured economy that THEY lobbied for.
In short, get fucked, and take your CEOs with you.
This depends on the strategy. If China lowered the prices and waited for the US car makers to go bust, they could then raise the prices as high as they want. US manufacturers would eventually continue production, but things would need to be automated for them to be competitive.
Personally, I think they should allow China to sell small cars in the United States. It’s a product that isn’t currently sold on our market.
I completely agree, and frankly I think most working class people would welcome the access regardless of where the manufacturing is being done, because the need of transportation isn’t going away. In an actual free market Chinese EVs simply would be adopted due to the compltete lack of a comparable product with reasonable pricing, or alternatives, which is part of why you’re seeing the market shifting in Canada, not that it’s an actual free market either but it is being helped by a response to aggressive US imperialism. The US market is artifically ‘free’ and constantly manipulated, so I’d think it’s more likely administrators will cling to the albatross of legacy manufacturing and prop it up to the detriment of the economy and general quality of life for the working class to appease fossil fuel interests. This is what extreme isolationism gets you I guess; The big auto manufacturers bought in to the regime selling tarrifs as some kind of cheat code to their industry dominance extending eternally, which to me suggests their leaders and inverstors are desperate or delusional. I’d like to see more of a move toward mass transport systems investment and infrastructure personally, but the required shift in ideology in the political and governing space is definitely not there right now. Change can come fast, but hope is also scarce in this current staus quo.