cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/54358560
The European Commission said on Thursday it was reviewing tariffs on Volkswagen’s electric vehicles built in China, which the automaker hopes could be replaced with an annual import quota and minimum price mechanism.
You’re comparing absolute numbers without considering population differences, of course an industrial superpower, with 1.4 billion people, makes a shitton of cars. Meanwhile Germany produces 4x more cars for export than domestic consumption, and nobody says its overproduction.
That is most certainly the first time, I heared the United States of America described as a nobody.
Germany had 2.8million new cars sold in 2024 and a production of 4million cars. So net export is 1.2million cars. The difference is that Germany imports 4x more cars China does.
About the absolute and per capita. That does not make that much sense for trade. Countries with a smaller population have to specialize much more and trade in other products. Iceland would be stupid, if it had its own car industry for example, but it has a massive aluminium overproduction, which it can then trade for say cars. However larger countries are able to produce a lot more internally. So they tend to export and import less on a per capita bases. So yes China can not do certain things other smaller countries do, just due to its size. In this case even 4x lower net exports of cars then Germany, still mean 4x more cars being exported in total, which causes trouble around the world.
I can’t see your first link because the site blocks Hong Kong, and the great firewall blocks CNBC.
But while America is a huge market, the big 4 are kinda garbage riding off half a century of anticompetitive trade practices, people literally only import them as conspicuous consumption, except Buick (GM), taxi drivers I’ve spoken to seem to like them. We would expect the US to export a smaller portion of our shitty, overpriced cars and import more cars.
Skill issue. Refusing to make better, cheaper cars, and just buying politicians and newspaper articles to support anti-competitive practices is how you get a median ev cost of >50K in the US.
It is about Trump wanting German car companies to move their production to the US. Which is also really important to stress that a lot of cars made in the US are not made by the big 4, but by Toyota, Hyundai, Volkswagen, BMW, Subaru and other foreign car companies. A lot of countries are looking for similar set ups from China as well. So stuff like BYD building factories in Thailand and Hungary for example.