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> Yeah thee was never any competing with china, our industry just relies on our market using different values to purchase a car. This is patently false. The US

> Yeah thee was never any competing with china, our industry just relies on our market using different values to purchase a car. This is patently false. The US could have competed with China if it had maintained investments spinning up battery manufacturing and downstream systems to build EVs at scale, while subsidizing EVs (fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year [1]) and increasing taxes on combustion mobility. The US picked legacy automaker profits and fossil fuel interests instead, simply out of lack of will and short term optimization over long term success. China is building under the same rules of physics as everyone else. You can choose not to, but that is a choice. (I believe in climate change, so I am thrilled China is going to steamroll fossil fuel incumbents out of self interest [2] [3], regardless of negative second order effects; every 24 months of Chinese EV production destroys 1M barrels/day of global oil consumption at current production rates, as of this comment) [1] https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-change/energy-subsidies https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie... [2] https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-explorer/ https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales

brianwawok 10mo ago
Chinese autoworker makes what, 5k USD a year? Vs 50k+ for union autoworker in the US? How can you win that battle?
- toomuchtodo 10mo ago
  China buys and deploys more robotics for manufacturing than any other country in the world. Automate or die as a business [1] [2]. It's not "cheap China labor" vs "expensive union labor"; it's labor vs automation. And, to be clear, that does not mean you need to get rid of union US labor. It just means the existing folks can do more with the same number of folks they have today, and the pipeline for new workers can shrink while maintaining productivity (and we're going to need those folks for other jobs automation cannot do; trades, electrical grid and renewables infra, nursing and care, etc). This does require both unions and corporations to partner in good faith and share in the gains from this operating model, versus the traditional "squeeze labor as hard as you can for shareholder gains and management comp." If we get to the point where a just transition is needed (like coal mining and generation), that is a policy problem; make good policy, be humane to the human, package them out appropriately if we scale automation faster than expected. This is simply smart policy as the world reaches peak working age population and heads towards depopulation over the next century [3] [4]. Labor will only get more expensive over time as demand exceeds supply [5]. The capital is there, simply look at annual legacy auto profits; they choose profits over investing in the business, and that is a choice. [1] Inside China's 'dark factories' where robots run the production lines [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftY-MH5mdbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftY-MH5mdbw - December 4th, 2025 [2] Chinese EV makers accelerate robotics drive for ‘game-changing’ edge over US - https://www.scmp.com/business/china-evs/article/3333310/chinese-ev-makers-accelerate-robotics-drive-game-changing-edge-over-us https://www.scmp.com/business/china-evs/article/3333310/chin... | https://archive.today/sJKKv https://archive.today/sJKKv - November 19th, 2025 [3] The Demographic Future of Humanity: Facts and Consequences - https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf - May 31st, 2025 [4] Mapped: Every Country by Total Fertility Rate - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fertility-rate/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fert... - December 22nd, 2025 [5] HN Search: labor shortages - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=labor%20shortages&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (TLDR Increase productivity with automation to compete with others who already have, buy robots, not share buybacks)
  - pixl97 10mo ago
    This is one half of it that's correct, but the other half is the US is in a late stage capitalism death spiral. On a huge number of products in the US there is little to no US competition. Instead of using product means (build it better) they use capital means (use your size to get loans to buy up anyone that looks like they could compete in the future). Lots of US companies minimize actual competition via civil contracts. Cola companies are a great domestic example of this. You give them all the space they want and crowd out competition or you get 'standard pricing', which is way more. A sizeable portion of the large US companies moved away from making products to printing money via becoming a financial institution. Car companies are a notorious example. Simply put making products is a side gig, rent seeking is the primary goal. Until we kill that off, we're in for a worsening level of hurt.
- Marsymars 10mo ago
  You're off by a notable amount I think, but that doesn't account for the meat of the price difference anyway. Chinese manufacturers have an average labour cost per vehicle of $585. American manufacturers have an average cost of $1341. You can't buy an equivalent American EV for an extra $756. Source: https://afia.pt/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/labor-cost-per-vehicle-report.pdf https://afia.pt/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/labor-cost-per-ve...
- bluedino 10mo ago
  Workers at the General Motors factories in Mexico make between $3-7 an hour. So half to a third of what starting wages are in the USA.
- orwin 10mo ago
  Around 9? years ago, Chinese salaries without qualification in coastal city industries were between 600 and 800€/month + lodging (that caused issues in the countryside and less affluent areas that can't offer salaries as competitive), so at worst 7k, at best 10k. Auto workers should be somewhat qualified, so it should be a bit higher. Also the salaries might have grown since
- seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
  Your salary information is out of date. Average Annual Salary for a Chinese working in an auto factory: ¥102,173 CNY (approx. $14,000–$15,000 USD based on projected exchange rates). Also, Chinese auto factories are heavily automated now, even when compared to American auto factories.
adamiscool8 10mo ago
The offset is not positive when you factor in the externalities that go into escalating Chinese EV production.
- golem14 10mo ago
  I would love to see a thorough, agreed upon study comparing ICEs and EVs. If you have hard data (say, from a reputable journal, not just the news), please post.
  - collinmcnulty 10mo ago
    https://theicct.org/publication/electric-cars-life-cycle-analysis-emissions-europe-jul25/ https://theicct.org/publication/electric-cars-life-cycle-ana... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S095965262300269X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596... (paywall) https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/no-doubt-about-it-evs-really-are-cleaner-than-gas-cars/ https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/no-doubt-abo... is a writeup of https://www.bnef.com/insights/33557 https://www.bnef.com/insights/33557 which is paywalled.
    - golem14 10mo ago
      the first and last link seem less trustworthy as they seem to be affiliated with industry orgs that benefit from EVs. But link #2 seems solid, and a related search on Google Scholar points at a lot of interesting papers. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:B47EWn6YcDUJ:scholar.google.com/ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:B47EWn6YcDUJ:sc... I looked at a few, and the overall consensus seems to be that at least EVs are not worse than ICEVs (and I suppose EVs will get efficient faster than ICEVs(. Thanks!
- dalyons 10mo ago
  Wrong, unless you can prove otherwise. EVs cost a little more emissions to build but are widely regarded as breaking even with a gas car in 1-2years after production. And even shorter as grids decarbonize.
Sohcahtoa82 10mo ago
I've always gotten the impression that China is becoming a technological manufacturing powerhouse because of massive investment by the Chinese government, whereas America is falling behind because the government giving grants to corporations is incredibly unpopular because of the belief that the investment is just going to get pocketed by the CEO and board of directors and spent on stock buybacks rather than the development the people and the government wanted to see. Even if the money is spent properly, it's still highly criticized. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people complain that Tesla was only successful because of massive government grants. Am I off base here?
- toomuchtodo 10mo ago
  Nope, you are spot on. The broad argument is "Engineers are in power in China, lawyers in America." I see the US as no different as when Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged; everything about making and building takes a back seat to line go up. Well, you can't eat, live in, build with, or go to war with line go up. The stock market is not the economy, nor your industrial and manufacturing base. But it keeps going up, so everything must be fine, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_Assets_Supervision_and_Administration_Commission_of_the_State_Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_Assets_Supervision... Dan Wang: 2025 Letter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454413 - January 2026 (323 comments) (Dan Wang’s book, Breakneck [https://danwang.co/breakneck/ https://danwang.co/breakneck/], is excellent and I highly recommend on this topic as others do in the above thread)
  - butisaidsudo 10mo ago
    That book has been on my list since I heard him on this podcast: https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/chinas-quest-to-engineer-the-future-dan-wang/ https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/chinas-quest-to-engineer-th...
- FuriouslyAdrift 10mo ago
ericmay 10mo ago
This is a bad argument because you're assuming that the US needs to compete with China on EVs or that not competing results in somehow "losing". A car is a car, at the end of the day. Frankly, the best car is no car, but I'll leave that for some other discussion around transit. China has gone all-in on EVs because over the years they smartly built up the world's best rare earth refining capabilities and immense manufacturing prowess while the United States has undoubtedly secured the global oil supply (remember tanks and fighter jets to fight wars aren't running on batteries) which, even amongst the doomiest of doomers will last quite a while. China was never going to be an oil-producing powerhouse, but it did have the ability to leverage alternative energy sources so that it wasn't quite as beholden to the petrodollar institution, so that is what they did. And of course running cars on batteries and doing so at a very cheap cost makes sense there. Meanwhile, the US can obviously produce good cars at a good enough price and with cheap oil for the foreseeable future it's hard to argue in favor of EVs as a national policy. What, we're going to switch to EVs? Who is going to build them? Tesla? We don't have access to the rare earth refining capabilities to meet demand. It's just physics. And if China is using less oil, that means more for the United States and others. As you said, China has taken these actions out of self interest, but the self interest isn't "clean environment" or anything like that, it's just down to being not as reliant on the US for energy. Though that's a nice benefit. I do own an EV and I think the driving experience is superior but geopolitically things seem to be trending in a different direction.
- toomuchtodo 10mo ago
  > Meanwhile, the US can obviously produce good cars at a good enough price and with cheap oil for the foreseeable future it's hard to argue in favor of EVs as a national policy. What, we're going to switch to EVs? Who is going to build them? Tesla? We don't have access to the rare earth refining capabilities to meet demand. It's just physics. And if China is using less oil, that means more for the United States and others. This is false. The US has chosen to produce expensive (average new vehicle price is $50k), fossil combustion vehicles to the detriment of its population. I want a cheap EV. I will buy a cheap EV from a US automaker. They do not want to sell cheap EVs. The US won't allow me to buy excellent, cheap Chinese EVs. The US population is being held economically hostage for legacy automaker profits and the fossil fuel industry. Why should the US consumer collectively have to pay more for these low quality decisions? I am incentivized to root for the destruction of US legacy auto so that I can eventually get a high quality, inexpensive Chinese EV, because that will be all who is left building them. China sells more EVs than the US sells entirely. It is only a matter of time as they continue to spin up manufacturing. Whatever it takes to get cheap EVs with the sharpest deployment trajectory possible, I am not particular, regardless of the harm it incurs on US automakers or the US itself (if unwilling to build EVs, which appears to be the case). Climate change does not care about nation state boundaries. Certainly, if you don't believe in climate change, or don't believe it to be pressing, there is no discussion to be had. New data: EVs grew more in ’25 than ’24, despite constant lies saying otherwise - https://electrek.co/2026/01/14/contrary-to-popular-belief-ev-sales-growth-continued-to-accelerate-in-2025/ https://electrek.co/2026/01/14/contrary-to-popular-belief-ev... - January 14th, 2026 The World Hit ‘Peak’ Gas-Powered Vehicle Sales — in 2017 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-30/world-hit-peak-gas-powered-vehicles-as-evs-gain-market-share https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-30/world-hit... | https://archive.today/p2hl1 https://archive.today/p2hl1 - January 30th, 2024

brianwawok 10mo ago

Chinese autoworker makes what, 5k USD a year? Vs 50k+ for union autoworker in the US? How can you win that battle?

toomuchtodo 10mo ago
China buys and deploys more robotics for manufacturing than any other country in the world. Automate or die as a business [1] [2]. It's not "cheap China labor" vs "expensive union labor"; it's labor vs automation. And, to be clear, that does not mean you need to get rid of union US labor. It just means the existing folks can do more with the same number of folks they have today, and the pipeline for new workers can shrink while maintaining productivity (and we're going to need those folks for other jobs automation cannot do; trades, electrical grid and renewables infra, nursing and care, etc). This does require both unions and corporations to partner in good faith and share in the gains from this operating model, versus the traditional "squeeze labor as hard as you can for shareholder gains and management comp." If we get to the point where a just transition is needed (like coal mining and generation), that is a policy problem; make good policy, be humane to the human, package them out appropriately if we scale automation faster than expected. This is simply smart policy as the world reaches peak working age population and heads towards depopulation over the next century [3] [4]. Labor will only get more expensive over time as demand exceeds supply [5]. The capital is there, simply look at annual legacy auto profits; they choose profits over investing in the business, and that is a choice. [1] Inside China's 'dark factories' where robots run the production lines [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftY-MH5mdbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftY-MH5mdbw - December 4th, 2025 [2] Chinese EV makers accelerate robotics drive for ‘game-changing’ edge over US - https://www.scmp.com/business/china-evs/article/3333310/chinese-ev-makers-accelerate-robotics-drive-game-changing-edge-over-us https://www.scmp.com/business/china-evs/article/3333310/chin... | https://archive.today/sJKKv https://archive.today/sJKKv - November 19th, 2025 [3] The Demographic Future of Humanity: Facts and Consequences - https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf - May 31st, 2025 [4] Mapped: Every Country by Total Fertility Rate - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fertility-rate/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fert... - December 22nd, 2025 [5] HN Search: labor shortages - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=labor%20shortages&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (TLDR Increase productivity with automation to compete with others who already have, buy robots, not share buybacks)
- pixl97 10mo ago
  This is one half of it that's correct, but the other half is the US is in a late stage capitalism death spiral. On a huge number of products in the US there is little to no US competition. Instead of using product means (build it better) they use capital means (use your size to get loans to buy up anyone that looks like they could compete in the future). Lots of US companies minimize actual competition via civil contracts. Cola companies are a great domestic example of this. You give them all the space they want and crowd out competition or you get 'standard pricing', which is way more. A sizeable portion of the large US companies moved away from making products to printing money via becoming a financial institution. Car companies are a notorious example. Simply put making products is a side gig, rent seeking is the primary goal. Until we kill that off, we're in for a worsening level of hurt.
Marsymars 10mo ago
You're off by a notable amount I think, but that doesn't account for the meat of the price difference anyway. Chinese manufacturers have an average labour cost per vehicle of $585. American manufacturers have an average cost of $1341. You can't buy an equivalent American EV for an extra $756. Source: https://afia.pt/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/labor-cost-per-vehicle-report.pdf https://afia.pt/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/labor-cost-per-ve...
bluedino 10mo ago
Workers at the General Motors factories in Mexico make between $3-7 an hour. So half to a third of what starting wages are in the USA.
orwin 10mo ago
Around 9? years ago, Chinese salaries without qualification in coastal city industries were between 600 and 800€/month + lodging (that caused issues in the countryside and less affluent areas that can't offer salaries as competitive), so at worst 7k, at best 10k. Auto workers should be somewhat qualified, so it should be a bit higher. Also the salaries might have grown since
seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
Your salary information is out of date. Average Annual Salary for a Chinese working in an auto factory: ¥102,173 CNY (approx. $14,000–$15,000 USD based on projected exchange rates). Also, Chinese auto factories are heavily automated now, even when compared to American auto factories.

adamiscool8 10mo ago

The offset is not positive when you factor in the externalities that go into escalating Chinese EV production.

golem14 10mo ago
I would love to see a thorough, agreed upon study comparing ICEs and EVs. If you have hard data (say, from a reputable journal, not just the news), please post.
- collinmcnulty 10mo ago
  https://theicct.org/publication/electric-cars-life-cycle-analysis-emissions-europe-jul25/ https://theicct.org/publication/electric-cars-life-cycle-ana... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S095965262300269X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596... (paywall) https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/no-doubt-about-it-evs-really-are-cleaner-than-gas-cars/ https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/no-doubt-abo... is a writeup of https://www.bnef.com/insights/33557 https://www.bnef.com/insights/33557 which is paywalled.
  - golem14 10mo ago
    the first and last link seem less trustworthy as they seem to be affiliated with industry orgs that benefit from EVs. But link #2 seems solid, and a related search on Google Scholar points at a lot of interesting papers. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:B47EWn6YcDUJ:scholar.google.com/ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:B47EWn6YcDUJ:sc... I looked at a few, and the overall consensus seems to be that at least EVs are not worse than ICEVs (and I suppose EVs will get efficient faster than ICEVs(. Thanks!
dalyons 10mo ago
Wrong, unless you can prove otherwise. EVs cost a little more emissions to build but are widely regarded as breaking even with a gas car in 1-2years after production. And even shorter as grids decarbonize.

Sohcahtoa82 10mo ago

I've always gotten the impression that China is becoming a technological manufacturing powerhouse because of massive investment by the Chinese government, whereas America is falling behind because the government giving grants to corporations is incredibly unpopular because of the belief that the investment is just going to get pocketed by the CEO and board of directors and spent on stock buybacks rather than the development the people and the government wanted to see. Even if the money is spent properly, it's still highly criticized. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people complain that Tesla was only successful because of massive government grants. Am I off base here?

toomuchtodo 10mo ago
Nope, you are spot on. The broad argument is "Engineers are in power in China, lawyers in America." I see the US as no different as when Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged; everything about making and building takes a back seat to line go up. Well, you can't eat, live in, build with, or go to war with line go up. The stock market is not the economy, nor your industrial and manufacturing base. But it keeps going up, so everything must be fine, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_Assets_Supervision_and_Administration_Commission_of_the_State_Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_Assets_Supervision... Dan Wang: 2025 Letter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454413 - January 2026 (323 comments) (Dan Wang’s book, Breakneck [https://danwang.co/breakneck/ https://danwang.co/breakneck/], is excellent and I highly recommend on this topic as others do in the above thread)
- butisaidsudo 10mo ago
  That book has been on my list since I heard him on this podcast: https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/chinas-quest-to-engineer-the-future-dan-wang/ https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/chinas-quest-to-engineer-th...
FuriouslyAdrift 10mo ago

ericmay 10mo ago

This is a bad argument because you're assuming that the US needs to compete with China on EVs or that not competing results in somehow "losing". A car is a car, at the end of the day. Frankly, the best car is no car, but I'll leave that for some other discussion around transit. China has gone all-in on EVs because over the years they smartly built up the world's best rare earth refining capabilities and immense manufacturing prowess while the United States has undoubtedly secured the global oil supply (remember tanks and fighter jets to fight wars aren't running on batteries) which, even amongst the doomiest of doomers will last quite a while. China was never going to be an oil-producing powerhouse, but it did have the ability to leverage alternative energy sources so that it wasn't quite as beholden to the petrodollar institution, so that is what they did. And of course running cars on batteries and doing so at a very cheap cost makes sense there. Meanwhile, the US can obviously produce good cars at a good enough price and with cheap oil for the foreseeable future it's hard to argue in favor of EVs as a national policy. What, we're going to switch to EVs? Who is going to build them? Tesla? We don't have access to the rare earth refining capabilities to meet demand. It's just physics. And if China is using less oil, that means more for the United States and others. As you said, China has taken these actions out of self interest, but the self interest isn't "clean environment" or anything like that, it's just down to being not as reliant on the US for energy. Though that's a nice benefit. I do own an EV and I think the driving experience is superior but geopolitically things seem to be trending in a different direction.

toomuchtodo 10mo ago
> Meanwhile, the US can obviously produce good cars at a good enough price and with cheap oil for the foreseeable future it's hard to argue in favor of EVs as a national policy. What, we're going to switch to EVs? Who is going to build them? Tesla? We don't have access to the rare earth refining capabilities to meet demand. It's just physics. And if China is using less oil, that means more for the United States and others. This is false. The US has chosen to produce expensive (average new vehicle price is $50k), fossil combustion vehicles to the detriment of its population. I want a cheap EV. I will buy a cheap EV from a US automaker. They do not want to sell cheap EVs. The US won't allow me to buy excellent, cheap Chinese EVs. The US population is being held economically hostage for legacy automaker profits and the fossil fuel industry. Why should the US consumer collectively have to pay more for these low quality decisions? I am incentivized to root for the destruction of US legacy auto so that I can eventually get a high quality, inexpensive Chinese EV, because that will be all who is left building them. China sells more EVs than the US sells entirely. It is only a matter of time as they continue to spin up manufacturing. Whatever it takes to get cheap EVs with the sharpest deployment trajectory possible, I am not particular, regardless of the harm it incurs on US automakers or the US itself (if unwilling to build EVs, which appears to be the case). Climate change does not care about nation state boundaries. Certainly, if you don't believe in climate change, or don't believe it to be pressing, there is no discussion to be had. New data: EVs grew more in ’25 than ’24, despite constant lies saying otherwise - https://electrek.co/2026/01/14/contrary-to-popular-belief-ev-sales-growth-continued-to-accelerate-in-2025/ https://electrek.co/2026/01/14/contrary-to-popular-belief-ev... - January 14th, 2026 The World Hit ‘Peak’ Gas-Powered Vehicle Sales — in 2017 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-30/world-hit-peak-gas-powered-vehicles-as-evs-gain-market-share https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-30/world-hit... | https://archive.today/p2hl1 https://archive.today/p2hl1 - January 30th, 2024