Dead on arrival.

China will sell you fully kitted hilux equivalents with japanese engines for 10k. Even toyota is making 10k trucks in thailand.

US manufacturers are just not ready to face free market competition these days. They're entirely reliant on tariffs protecting them.

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voakbasda 12 hours ago | parent [-]

That is not just the auto industry either. US manufacturers have really dropped the ball across the board, and tariffs are not going to fix it for them.

I’m not really sure what the solution is at this point. We can’t just drop the tariffs, as that will decidedly end almost all manufacturing that has been propped up by them. On the flip side, the current administration’s recent erratic application and resulting litigation in this area have created an environment where no one in their right mind would invest in building out new capacity. The winds have demonstrated that they are too likely to shift again.

I hope someone can swoop in on this thread and explain how it’s all going to work out. Because I just don’t see it anymore….

And that makes me sad, because I want to love the Slate. Seems great. But I can’t see past how the pricing is tantamount to systemic theft, knowing that it has been artificially inflated by such protectionism.

	▲	therealdrag0 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		US manufacturing is hanging on by leveraging heavy automation. At least a couple years ago I saw a chart that showed while employees dropped, manufacturing output stayed steady or went up. Labor is too expensive relative to Asia for it to be otherwise. That’s not a full answer but party of the story. As a nation we want a local manufacturing base. But as consumers we just want the thing, and it doesn’t matter where it’s made.
	▲	Server6 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I think the answer is subsidy rather than tariffs (maybe a combination). One of the reasons China is beating the US in manufacturing is because they have a fully thought out economic plan and directly subsidize targeted sectors. In the US its a free-for-all with tariffs, which means we can't compete on world markets.
	▲	eudamoniac 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You say inflated by tariffs, I say protecting workers' rights from being undercut by other countries. We can have a bunch of workers' rights, 8 hour days, and minimum wages, or we can compete with China, but not both.