cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/44012689
Yeah… another piece for the 24/7 stream of propaganda…
Actual reality: 59% answered in a survey that they are not generally opposed to buying a chinese car.
But let’s keep talking about those cheap chinese fairy tale vehicles flooding the market that in reality will barely be cheaper here, so we have a “reason” to waste more public money.
We really, really need to “protect” European car makers from having to innovate at all, so they can keep falling behind while maximizing dividends for shareholders. Just like they did so successfully for decades already.
So instead you suggest we ship the money to china, allow the European industry to fail completely and let all the workers become unemployed while atrofeeing the knowledge needed to actually recover from this blunder… and once the industry in the EU is dead and buried we get to be price gouged.
The strategy has been seen before with solar by OPEC… artificially lower prices and kill the European Solar panel businesses… once done raise prices.
The Chinese car manufacturers where accused of having artificially low prices due to government subsidies. They where requested to open part of their books to show this was not the case. They kept their books closed… This is the consequence.
Would I have liked cheaper electric EVs… hell yes. At the expense of everything… hell no.
In that fairy tale reality were European industry actually is lagging behind and needs protection you would be right. But that’s a lie. Those chinese electric motors are European designs. Their battery design was (and still is) researched in European labs.
Also those cheap Chinese EVs aren’t real. Prices are alwas adapted to market, its buying power and -more importantly- the bare bones versions will not be allowed on European streets anywhere. So in the end we get “cheap” cars for 10% less than domestic producers. When the fuck has 10% higher prices for solid quality ever been a problem. But instead we get flooded with stories of how European production can’t compete anymore… as if wages, energy, raw materials hasn’t been more expensive in Europe since basically forever. Really sad how our industry decayed nearly a century ago… oh, wait. It didn’t because there is an actual global market for high quality production with high standards.
The only actual difference is that China is actually producing stuff on scale while European companies spend decades on rejecting any innovation because lobbying politicians was cheaper and brought more short-term gains for shareholders and CEOs.
And they do exactly the same thing now. Sure, protect them from competition for another few years so they can keep worshipping the allmighty diesel. If we are at let’s scrap all environmental goals because they are obviously not doable with an industry refusing to even try. Then that industry will be soon dead indeed and rightfully so as they decided -totally voluntarily- to die off.
