I’m disappointed and confused as to why countries would impose things like 100% tariffs on vehicles, especially Chinese ones. Their labor force is massive and they can iterate and build much better machines than anyone else, so rather than a tariff helping the local economy, it’s going to cripple it in a relatively short amount of time due to lateral advancements in technology that facilitate every-day cars being built. Smaller countries don’t have the manpower to keep up. So what’s the point of this?
That's what we all thought about Walmart too and I think most people would agree that the west could have handled the transition to mass imports and overseas manufacturing without destroying local businesses overnight in a better way.
If 6% of your economy is directly tied to auto manufacturing (Germany) than by allowing ultra-cheap cars to flood the market will just piss off workers who inevitably get laid off in the chaos. Europe is starting to catch up on competing with price again (see Citroen for examples) but it takes time to build these factories and there is a lot more red tape wade through.
The US is trying to tackle the affordable car space through weird startups and longshots, but their production numbers will be so much less than demand for another decade if they even gain real traction in the market at all.
If a country wants to give up on their own automotive exports that's fine, but they need a plan for how to proceed when those jobs are gone and so far nobody has that plan figured out yet. Until then, they will continue to tariff the crap out of any competitors and keep kicking the can down the road.
> That's what we all thought about Walmart too and I think most people would agree that the west could have handled the transition to mass imports and overseas manufacturing without destroying local businesses overnight in a better way.
“Handled better”? this sounds like apologizing for corruption and nepotism that ruined the west and handed Chinese a massive advantage in just about every imaginable way. And we can say well yes and the Chinese are also corrupt, and they are, but at least their corruption is making them wealthy. Our corruption has made everyone poorer. The greed blinded the greedy.
It's quite different if it happens in 2-3 years time or spread across 10-20. You don't want a sizeable percentage of your workforce to lose jobs in a short span, there's no capacity for retraining so many people for them to be productive, governments gets higher dissatisfaction, and a diminished tax base.
The rest getting decent cheaper cars might not be worth the trade-off of also getting a more unstable society.
Not talking about US in this case.