4 ms·

It’s not just tariffs. They’re not homologated to the US market, so even if you were will to pay multiples more than people in Australia do, you can’t register

It’s not just tariffs. They’re not homologated to the US market, so even if you were will to pay multiples more than people in Australia do, you can’t register one in the US.

HDThoreaun 10mo ago
BYD isn’t developing an American model for multiple reasons, but the biggest one is likely tariffs.
ulfw 10mo ago
It's 100% tariffs. So yes, it's of course tariffs. They’re not homologated because there's no point of selling something when half the price goes to import taxation
rswail 10mo ago
Tariffs are exactly the reason that situation is as it is. BYD can outwait the adjustments of the US car industry to a new reality, in the same way that the Japanese did back in the 80s. Last time, the US did it by screwing the union workers of the rust belt, while also giving up on passenger cars and moving to SUV/trucks, but this time it's a complete change in technology and the US (and Japan to an extent) is having trouble reorienting its manufacturing and supply chains to support the change. If Ford can't sell an EV version of an F-150, then it has a real problem, because the rest of the world is not staying on ICE technology. Artificial trade barriers don't last.
- Spooky23 10mo ago
  The Ford thing is bizarre. My brother has an F-150 Lightning. It’s an amazing vehicle that they just couldn’t market in this gonzo social landscape. He is literally the walking version of the stereotype of a rural cowboy type. He runs a small hobby farm, leases pasture to local farms. He works in financial management for a regional company and his wife is a procurement officer for a state government. They produce most of their electricity with solar. Replaced some tractor use cases with oxen. They literally don’t pay to operate their daily drivers. (A lightning and a Volt now Bolt) The lightning replaced their emergent generator when that reached its end of life. He got into this stuff after doing the numbers for the company. It’s cheaper and better to operate. Last year they bought a dozen Silverado EV pickups for their field people. They work fine where they deployed them. The workers love them and the opex is better. The self described rednecks hate it because the internet told them to. He almost removed the branding because he gets approached by people warning him about all of the terrible things that will happen.
  - ssimpson 10mo ago
    Isn't part of it the dealer network as well? They've existed so long on service money, they were actively pushing people away from the Lightning because the service needs were so low and they wouldn't be making money off them.
    - abracadaniel 10mo ago
      This has been my experience when trying to buy any EV in the US. They technically exist, but finding one at a dealership is hard. Harder still is finding one that they actually have charged. Finding one without massive dealer fees is impossible. They use the forced scarcity as an excuse. Chevy dealership told me I was better off buying a Tesla. Hyundai told me “this isn’t really an EV kind of city”
    - WorldMaker 10mo ago
      Yeah, Ford realized that early on and had once raised the idea of building their EV division as a direct-to-consumer more directly competitive as a Tesla-rival, but as soon as that news floated the dealers had a fit and one of Ford's ancient problems is that the dealers are also often its largest shareholders. That's been a recipe for Ford's many little disasters since 1919 (where the Dodge Brothers were dealers and shareholders and convinced US courts to force Ford to pay more profits to shareholder dividends than reinvest in R&D, those dividends then helping to finance the Dodge Brothers' next business, the Ford rival Dodge; the terribly broken concept of "fiduciary duty to shareholders" comes almost directly from that 1919 lawsuit, if you've ever wondered how American businesses became the quarterly-focused way that they are instead of longer horizon focused).
  - deflator 10mo ago
    It's the towing issue that compromised the Lightning too. Attach something to an EV to tow and you kill the range. A lot of people in this country buy a pickup to tow something with it occasionally.
    - tromp 10mo ago
      > Attach something to an EV to tow and you kill the range It reduces the range, just as it reduces how far an ICE truck can go on one tank. But that's only an issue if you tow long distance and cannot find a place to charge on the way. You could choose to rent an ICE truck for such (increasingly) rare occasions. People for whom that's not so rare should stick with ICE or hybrid, or in future with an EREV.
- laurencerowe 10mo ago
  > If Ford can't sell an EV version of an F-150, then it has a real problem, because the rest of the world is not staying on ICE technology. Is that a problem for Ford though? Basically nowhere outside of North America buys trucks like the F-150. You see a few Ford Transit chassis cabs with a flatbed on the back in Europe but mostly enclosed Transit vans.
  - WorldMaker 10mo ago
    If North America is mostly only buying trucks from Ford and Ford can't sell an EV only truck, then has Ford given up on North America if EV is the present competitiveness need? (Of course the related news was that in Europe Ford also moved to an agreement to rebadge Renault EVs instead of manufacture their own. Has Ford given up on Europe, too?) The argument that tariffs could protect Ford to do the hard work at building more EV models seems proven wrong when Ford makes the short-term decision that it can kick the can down the road on supporting EV models until after the tariffs expire.
    - laurencerowe 10mo ago
      > If North America is mostly only buying trucks from Ford and Ford can't sell an EV only truck, then has Ford given up on North America if EV is the present competitiveness need? No, because American truck buyers seem to prefer non-EV trucks while commercial EV buyers seem to prefer Ford's more practical E-Transit vans. > The argument that tariffs could protect Ford to do the hard work at building more EV models seems proven wrong when Ford makes the short-term decision that it can kick the can down the road on supporting EV models until after the tariffs expire. Ford's truck sales are not protected by the newly introduced tariffs but by the 25% Chicken Tax tariffs imposed in 1964. Seems unlikely that will change. (There's been a lot of consolidation in the car industry over the past few decades which Ford hasn't much participated in. I guess the platform sharing agreement is a consequence of that as it wants to reduce development costs.)
      - WorldMaker 10mo ago
        > No, because American truck buyers seem to prefer non-EV trucks For now. In a market with very few EV trucks (and very few EVs in general, and very few cheap ones). If Rivian found a way to mass-produce an R1T at half the price, does Ford compete? If BYD builds a North American truck in Mexico, does Ford compete? GM's Silverado EV is growing at a decent clip, including commercial fleet sales, and looks possibly set up already to eat the market that Ford is leaving behind. If GM sales continue and maybe extend to another, cheaper pickup truck EV model, does Ford compete? If Hyundai or Honda figure out how to get EV truck sales going in the US, does Ford compete? Ford's pitching an EREV pivot as a "best of both worlds" situation. GM back in 2019 said EREV was a "worst of both worlds" situation that complicated drive trains for not enough benefit, especially to the consumer. Is Ford signalling competitiveness by ignoring warnings from their actual competitors?
cogman10 10mo ago
It is just tariffs. The reason BYD is killing it is because they can offer their cars at a price point unavailable to the US. The reason for that price point is because China is producing some of the cheapest batteries in the world. BYD cannot build their cars in the US because the core part they need to make them cheap is the batteries. CATL makes the batteries that BYD uses and they aren't going to setup shop in the US. A lot of what makes CATLs batteries cheap is because China has a raw materials trade pipeline that's now superior than what's available in the US. All of this goes back to tariffs. By putting insane tariffs on all imports the US has effectively isolated itself from the rest of the world. Manufacturing will defacto be more expensive in the US because a significant portion of any incoming raw resources will get an automatic 25% tax. The US does have it's own raw resources, but they aren't fully developed. Prior to 2024, we were heavily reliant on imports for a lot of our manufacturing. Shaking up the entire market for stupid reasons has destroyed manufacturing in the US. It'll take decades to repair and rebuild. The steep tariffs against china that Trump did in his first term against solar, steel, and batteries were maintained by Biden. In term 2 Trump ramped those up to 11.
- expedition32 10mo ago
  This is the hard truth. Consumers choose on price. With a squeezed middle class nobody can afford to give a shit about patriotism or geopolitics. Chinese automakers can give you a lot of car for 30k.
  - cogman10 10mo ago
    The US could have had a competitive manufacturing industry, but we traded it for cheap offshore labor. That destruction has been ongoing since the 90s. We've hollowed out our ability to make things. We basically focused on the exact wrong things which has put us in a pretty vulnerable geopolitical position. Rather than trying to bring resources into the US to aid manufacturing, we tried to bring finished goods into the US at a lower price. China has done basically the opposite. They've focused on bring raw resources into china while centralizing manufacturing. That's what has turned them into the global powerhouse they are when it comes to producing everything. For the US to turn this around, tariffs would have been in order, but they needed to be pretty focused and with internal plans on building out the industries we wanted to grow. Doing tariffs first without building manufacturing was just dumb.

It’s not just tariffs. They’re not homologated to the US market, so even if you were will to pay multiples more than people in Australia do, you can’t register one in the US.

HDThoreaun 10mo ago

BYD isn’t developing an American model for multiple reasons, but the biggest one is likely tariffs.

ulfw 10mo ago

It's 100% tariffs. So yes, it's of course tariffs. They’re not homologated because there's no point of selling something when half the price goes to import taxation

rswail 10mo ago

Tariffs are exactly the reason that situation is as it is. BYD can outwait the adjustments of the US car industry to a new reality, in the same way that the Japanese did back in the 80s. Last time, the US did it by screwing the union workers of the rust belt, while also giving up on passenger cars and moving to SUV/trucks, but this time it's a complete change in technology and the US (and Japan to an extent) is having trouble reorienting its manufacturing and supply chains to support the change. If Ford can't sell an EV version of an F-150, then it has a real problem, because the rest of the world is not staying on ICE technology. Artificial trade barriers don't last.

Spooky23 10mo ago
The Ford thing is bizarre. My brother has an F-150 Lightning. It’s an amazing vehicle that they just couldn’t market in this gonzo social landscape. He is literally the walking version of the stereotype of a rural cowboy type. He runs a small hobby farm, leases pasture to local farms. He works in financial management for a regional company and his wife is a procurement officer for a state government. They produce most of their electricity with solar. Replaced some tractor use cases with oxen. They literally don’t pay to operate their daily drivers. (A lightning and a Volt now Bolt) The lightning replaced their emergent generator when that reached its end of life. He got into this stuff after doing the numbers for the company. It’s cheaper and better to operate. Last year they bought a dozen Silverado EV pickups for their field people. They work fine where they deployed them. The workers love them and the opex is better. The self described rednecks hate it because the internet told them to. He almost removed the branding because he gets approached by people warning him about all of the terrible things that will happen.
- ssimpson 10mo ago
  Isn't part of it the dealer network as well? They've existed so long on service money, they were actively pushing people away from the Lightning because the service needs were so low and they wouldn't be making money off them.
  - abracadaniel 10mo ago
    This has been my experience when trying to buy any EV in the US. They technically exist, but finding one at a dealership is hard. Harder still is finding one that they actually have charged. Finding one without massive dealer fees is impossible. They use the forced scarcity as an excuse. Chevy dealership told me I was better off buying a Tesla. Hyundai told me “this isn’t really an EV kind of city”
  - WorldMaker 10mo ago
    Yeah, Ford realized that early on and had once raised the idea of building their EV division as a direct-to-consumer more directly competitive as a Tesla-rival, but as soon as that news floated the dealers had a fit and one of Ford's ancient problems is that the dealers are also often its largest shareholders. That's been a recipe for Ford's many little disasters since 1919 (where the Dodge Brothers were dealers and shareholders and convinced US courts to force Ford to pay more profits to shareholder dividends than reinvest in R&D, those dividends then helping to finance the Dodge Brothers' next business, the Ford rival Dodge; the terribly broken concept of "fiduciary duty to shareholders" comes almost directly from that 1919 lawsuit, if you've ever wondered how American businesses became the quarterly-focused way that they are instead of longer horizon focused).
- deflator 10mo ago
  It's the towing issue that compromised the Lightning too. Attach something to an EV to tow and you kill the range. A lot of people in this country buy a pickup to tow something with it occasionally.
  - tromp 10mo ago
    > Attach something to an EV to tow and you kill the range It reduces the range, just as it reduces how far an ICE truck can go on one tank. But that's only an issue if you tow long distance and cannot find a place to charge on the way. You could choose to rent an ICE truck for such (increasingly) rare occasions. People for whom that's not so rare should stick with ICE or hybrid, or in future with an EREV.
laurencerowe 10mo ago
> If Ford can't sell an EV version of an F-150, then it has a real problem, because the rest of the world is not staying on ICE technology. Is that a problem for Ford though? Basically nowhere outside of North America buys trucks like the F-150. You see a few Ford Transit chassis cabs with a flatbed on the back in Europe but mostly enclosed Transit vans.
- WorldMaker 10mo ago
  If North America is mostly only buying trucks from Ford and Ford can't sell an EV only truck, then has Ford given up on North America if EV is the present competitiveness need? (Of course the related news was that in Europe Ford also moved to an agreement to rebadge Renault EVs instead of manufacture their own. Has Ford given up on Europe, too?) The argument that tariffs could protect Ford to do the hard work at building more EV models seems proven wrong when Ford makes the short-term decision that it can kick the can down the road on supporting EV models until after the tariffs expire.
  - laurencerowe 10mo ago
    > If North America is mostly only buying trucks from Ford and Ford can't sell an EV only truck, then has Ford given up on North America if EV is the present competitiveness need? No, because American truck buyers seem to prefer non-EV trucks while commercial EV buyers seem to prefer Ford's more practical E-Transit vans. > The argument that tariffs could protect Ford to do the hard work at building more EV models seems proven wrong when Ford makes the short-term decision that it can kick the can down the road on supporting EV models until after the tariffs expire. Ford's truck sales are not protected by the newly introduced tariffs but by the 25% Chicken Tax tariffs imposed in 1964. Seems unlikely that will change. (There's been a lot of consolidation in the car industry over the past few decades which Ford hasn't much participated in. I guess the platform sharing agreement is a consequence of that as it wants to reduce development costs.)
    - WorldMaker 10mo ago
      > No, because American truck buyers seem to prefer non-EV trucks For now. In a market with very few EV trucks (and very few EVs in general, and very few cheap ones). If Rivian found a way to mass-produce an R1T at half the price, does Ford compete? If BYD builds a North American truck in Mexico, does Ford compete? GM's Silverado EV is growing at a decent clip, including commercial fleet sales, and looks possibly set up already to eat the market that Ford is leaving behind. If GM sales continue and maybe extend to another, cheaper pickup truck EV model, does Ford compete? If Hyundai or Honda figure out how to get EV truck sales going in the US, does Ford compete? Ford's pitching an EREV pivot as a "best of both worlds" situation. GM back in 2019 said EREV was a "worst of both worlds" situation that complicated drive trains for not enough benefit, especially to the consumer. Is Ford signalling competitiveness by ignoring warnings from their actual competitors?

cogman10 10mo ago

It is just tariffs. The reason BYD is killing it is because they can offer their cars at a price point unavailable to the US. The reason for that price point is because China is producing some of the cheapest batteries in the world. BYD cannot build their cars in the US because the core part they need to make them cheap is the batteries. CATL makes the batteries that BYD uses and they aren't going to setup shop in the US. A lot of what makes CATLs batteries cheap is because China has a raw materials trade pipeline that's now superior than what's available in the US. All of this goes back to tariffs. By putting insane tariffs on all imports the US has effectively isolated itself from the rest of the world. Manufacturing will defacto be more expensive in the US because a significant portion of any incoming raw resources will get an automatic 25% tax. The US does have it's own raw resources, but they aren't fully developed. Prior to 2024, we were heavily reliant on imports for a lot of our manufacturing. Shaking up the entire market for stupid reasons has destroyed manufacturing in the US. It'll take decades to repair and rebuild. The steep tariffs against china that Trump did in his first term against solar, steel, and batteries were maintained by Biden. In term 2 Trump ramped those up to 11.

expedition32 10mo ago
This is the hard truth. Consumers choose on price. With a squeezed middle class nobody can afford to give a shit about patriotism or geopolitics. Chinese automakers can give you a lot of car for 30k.
- cogman10 10mo ago
  The US could have had a competitive manufacturing industry, but we traded it for cheap offshore labor. That destruction has been ongoing since the 90s. We've hollowed out our ability to make things. We basically focused on the exact wrong things which has put us in a pretty vulnerable geopolitical position. Rather than trying to bring resources into the US to aid manufacturing, we tried to bring finished goods into the US at a lower price. China has done basically the opposite. They've focused on bring raw resources into china while centralizing manufacturing. That's what has turned them into the global powerhouse they are when it comes to producing everything. For the US to turn this around, tariffs would have been in order, but they needed to be pretty focused and with internal plans on building out the industries we wanted to grow. Doing tariffs first without building manufacturing was just dumb.