When Elon gets excited about displacing his engineers on a whim with H1Bs, why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?

Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers. And all we cared about is writing messenger apps. Totally missed the boat on building things, like houses, boats, and most of all new weird things we don't even have a concept for.

Andrew Yang launched a presidential campaign based on this idea, he wrote a book:

“Smart People Should Build Things”

They go where it's feasible to go. As long as regulation hamstrings industries, it'd be idiotic to build there. Ambitious people just want everyone else to get out of their way so they (I) can build stuff - and they'll go where there's less resistance.

Oh, there's a "tax credit" to make it easier? Sounds like more paperwork & friction. No thanks!

That's one reason Tech is such an attactor. Low barrier to entry.

Because compensation?

Can you demonstrate that this misallocation is worse in the US than it is in other countries?

BYD could slash european prices by quite a bit. They price them competitively to take advantage of the margin. The increase in price compared to their domestic MSRP is pretty wild, 2x in some cases. In a race to the bottom, they will win.

EU import taxes designed to make them less cheap than local cars do that.

Within only a few months I see more Chinese Electric cars than Tesla (or us cars generally) on swiss streets.

Depending on what you are looking for they are WAY cheaper than comparable cars.

The EU has imposed tariffs and levies on BYD, totaling 27% [1].

[1] https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/chinese-e...

You're right, but comparing Switzerland to America... You need a car to live in 90% of the USA. That said, talking only about specs or prices is pretty reductionist. If anyone on this forum could forecast car sales based on pre-delivery marketing, you know, become a billionaire investor.

There also is the chicken tax which has been protecting US automakers in the pickup truck space which has lead to then leaning much more into that. Together with absurd CAFE rules that benefit huge cars and more beneficial tax write-off rules for vehicles over 3.5t regulation has lead to US automakers focusing on cars that are absurd by international standards.

> When they badly, badly screw up, they just get bailed out with public funds

When this happens, I think it's only fair that the bailed-out company becomes publicly owned. If I'm forced to invest in a company with my tax dollars, then I damn well better be treated as an investor. Where are my shares? Where are my dividends?

They definitely tried... $7.5 Billion worth. It's on pause now :-(

https://www.govtech.com/transportation/federal-funding-for-e...

> They could have strong-armed the states into it with a combination of funding the construction and the way they mandated the 21 drinking age: by threatening to withhold highway funds.

Yea let's give the federal government more power. That's going so well right now.

Isn't this lack of forward thinking somewhat the general problem now?

From an EU perspective the world as it has existed in the living memory is a world shaped by decisive US-actions. The way EVs have been approached were anything but that. Arguably neither did Germany, because of the way their politicians are entangled with the car manufacturers.

I adored my Spark EV til it sadly died (fairly scarily, on a highway access road) one day. Chevy was never able to repair it and ultimately gave me a nice payout after paying for a rental for me for nearly a year.

But if you sold the Spark EV for 20k today with like 120mi of range, it would be perfect and would satisfy all my needs 99% of the time. Even mine (13k all in) was great here in LA with ~60mi of range. I loved how small and easy to park it was without feeling cramped to me at all. If it had CarPlay I'd've said it was the perfect car haha.

It's a shame they haven't rebooted it yet as a pure EV. It's right there in the name!

Even if there were no improvements to be had in the vehicle itself, improvements in manufacturing processes determine how expensive the product is and thus how competitively priced the vehicle can be. Falling behind on price means falling behind on market share which means falling behind on efficiencies of scale which often means going out of business or at best becoming a niche producer.

Honda and Toyota weren't able to outcompete US manufacturers in the 1980s by offering higher performance vehicles but by delivering similar quality products at lower prices by making use of superior production techniques like Lean and JIT inventory management.

Are you serious? EVs have been the biggest disruption in the auto industry. It has created major corporations who made the attempts of traditional manufacturers seem obsolete.

VW Group and Stellantis totally failed to compete with Chinese manufacturers and were driven out of the Chinese EV market almost entirely. Competition is extremely fierce.

>That EVs are still expensive

Look up what they cost in China.

>So long as production is limited EVs will remain a luxury product

Around 50% of new sales in China. Not "luxury" in any meaningful way.

The issue is that EVs do not differentiate themselves by power train. They differentiate themselves by battery and software.

I was curious about this statement and did a search and could not find anything about it.

It appears that EV technology is new enough that it's Chinese companies that are the ones innovating, especially in battery technology.

That is not that much in terms of subsidy for a critical industry. I tried finding the awards for Tesla but the articles lump in government contracts and report the figure to be in tens of billions. I am sure they have received a comparable amount of funding. BYD has just been able to make better use of it I suppose.

No. Five years ago BYD introduced their "blade battery", which is a lithium iron phosphate battery built up of plate-like "blades" in rectangular casings.[1] Wh/L is about the same as lithium ion, Wh/Kg is not as good, and Wh/$ is better. It will survive the "nail test" and does not not go into thermal runaway.

Today, most of BYD's products use this technology. It's been improved to handle higher charging rates. Seems to work fine. Lithium-ion has better Wh/Kg, and it's still used in some high-end cars, mostly Teslas. BYD's approach has captured the low and medium priced markets.

BYD has announced that they plan first shipments of cars with solid state batteries (higher Wh/Kg) in 2027. Price will be high at first, and they will first appear in BYD's high-end cars. Like these.[3] BYD has the Yangwang U8, a big off-road SUV comparable to the Rivian, and the Yangwang U9, a "hypercar". Just to show that they can make them, probably.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIt5z4wT9RE

[2] https://electrek.co/2025/02/17/byd-confirms-evs-all-solid-st...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHWXx1KsvVY