"Americans only want trucks and SUVs." (I hear people say.)

Cool. Then allow BYD non-trucks, non-SUVs into the U.S. then.

The Japanese back in the 70's showed U.S. automakers that price and mileage (in that decade anyway) were important to Americans. I suspect price is still important.

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khannn an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I wish I could get a BYD Dolphin hatch for ~10k USD. Somehow my 12 year old Prius is worth 9k on KBB and that's insane.

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vel0city 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

Dolphins don't sell for $10k outside of China. Dolphins in South/Central America are ~$22k. Even if there weren't tariffs on them I wouldn't expect to see them out the door for less than $25k in the US.

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energy123 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

Why the 120% price difference between China and South America?

	▲	vel0city 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Different government subsidies, different manufacturing costs, different regulatory requirements, and different markets have different market competition. Think about this concept. It costs you $1 to make a widget. It costs your competitors $1.25 to make a similar widget. They sell theirs for $5. Do you sell yours for $1.50 or $4.75? Obviously, other things could be in play for the market for widgets, but if you could sell all your widgets for $4.75 wouldn't you do that? If the cheapest car in the US is about $20k and is a complete POS, why would you sell your better car for $10k when you could still sell it for $22k and still sell just about all the ones you build?

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lifty 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why would they allow it? It would destroy the remaining car industry in the US. Better to at least maintain a car industry, even if it’s inefficient.

	▲	Animats a minute ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The historical track record of that kind of thing is terrible. You end up with a bloated, inefficient industry that produces bad products. Britain, pre-EU, did a lot of that. British Steel, British Rail, British Overseas Airways Corporation, British Petroleum, English Electric computers, etc. Then they needed bailouts. This resulted in what's called "lemon socialism" - the state owns all the dud industries.
	▲	epistasis 12 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		A jobs subsidy program that focused on more productive industries would be better than subsidizing an auto industry that never aimed for international competitiveness. We have exceptionally productive fields in the US tumor are the envy of the world. If we can't be productive in auto manufacturing, devoting a ton of our workforce too it is a misallocation of our limited resources. If we are going to be subsidizing unprofitable industry fro national security purposes, we need to either 1) ruthlessly cut the least productive manufacturers from access to subsidies, or 2) nationalize it. Any other choices would be very inefficient.
	▲	newAccount2025 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Why is that better?