I don't understand how people don't get it. You don't choose what car you want, you choose the car AVAILABLE to you. If you only have expensive options, you'll buy a expensive option. If they don't provide you options, or the cheaper option suck compared to what you are paying and what you are getting, you'll buy the expensive option because it would be the better "decision"
You HAVE to buy a car(in america). Why the FUCK would car companies offer you something cheap and reliable if they simply don't have to? You don't have 30 different car companies, you have 3 car companies (in cahoots with one another) with 30 different flavours that makes you feel like you have a choice
This tactic is called escape to high grounds.
It is depicted as a fallacy in the book 'the innovators dilemma '.
This leaves you strategically open to grass roots development. Startups can with very low profit margin generate revenue and expertise. The moment the startup manages to increase profit margin and economy of scale you have to play catchup while you cannot sell your current portfolio and even steep discounts might not help.
If a large corporation cannot pivot fast enough they'll go bankrupt. This has happened in many places: solar in Germany, apparently in hard disks for consumers (from the book), digital cameras and Kodak (inventor of digital photography), xerox and computers. The list goes on.
The obvious car enemy is chinese EVs. The moment they make a breakthrough it will be hard to recover from with standard petrol engines. In Europe this can be seen, until now EVs from Germans where nowhere, but with BYD entering the market VW put the ID polo for 24999 in the portfolio. This shows how much a threat BYD is.
Cheap manufacturers will never take root in murica. The "too big to fail" auto manufacturers have lined pockets for decades now to prevent this, hence the chicken tax. American automanufacturers make 99% of the money on parts, ford for example makes a coil pack for 35 cents and sells it to the dealer for $120.56, the consumer can in turn buy the same coil themselves for $200. Thats just a normal wear part. Thats why cars are expensive. Even the cheapest car on the market still has very expensive parts.
It is risky if the market was free, but free market doesn't really exist. and there is no way in hell that it's possible for a new car company to exist unless it has some kind of help from the government.
I'm from brazil, BYD is an AMAZING car company. We have been bombarded with everyone saying for years the cars here are expensive because of taxes. Then BYD comes. Then every car company drops their prices by 20~30% NO JOKE. They are still expensive, but a lot of the price is just greed because they can
The cars are WAAAY cheaper than any other brand, and offer waaaaay more. The only reason of not buying a BYD in brazil is if the range is important to you. I travel more than 600km every month so it's a no from me, and I prefer to ride motorcycles, but the point stands.
In america the car companies are just colluded with the government to not allow this. The moment BYD enters the american market you can just forget every other brand. Tesla would be bankrupt in a couple of years
Look at Royal Enfield worldwide, mechanically simple, reliable motorcycles. I don't need 300 riding modes, buttons on my handlebars and LED displays. Give me one analog speedometer, one analog tachometer and I'm happy. The only eletronic stuff I want on my bike is fuel injection and abs. NOTHING ELSE.
Unfortunately this options doesn't exist in cars anymore because why would they?
This simply cannot happen in the US, though. The big car monopoly has the government by the balls. A grassroots company could never get their car approved for road use.
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u/Susarn 6h ago
I don't understand how people don't get it. You don't choose what car you want, you choose the car AVAILABLE to you. If you only have expensive options, you'll buy a expensive option. If they don't provide you options, or the cheaper option suck compared to what you are paying and what you are getting, you'll buy the expensive option because it would be the better "decision"
You HAVE to buy a car(in america). Why the FUCK would car companies offer you something cheap and reliable if they simply don't have to? You don't have 30 different car companies, you have 3 car companies (in cahoots with one another) with 30 different flavours that makes you feel like you have a choice