I'm surprised "make our pickups and SUVs even bigger" wasn't suggested.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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This child-murder truck is not child-murdery enough!
If you can't fuck em kill em right? /s
"It's bigger because of safety innovations."
For the driver, of course. We need more data on dead kids to continue to innovate. And cyclists or anyone else who dares to use a mode of transporation that isn't a box on four wheels.
Child-animal-wheelchair users-short people-etc.-murder truck*
I'd settle for cheaper.
If they stopped adding features nobody asked for it would be a lot cheaper. Look at how Slate is doing.
They haven't delivered anything yet. They have pre-orders for now that will fill a year of production, but how much of that is people who buy anything new but won't buy again, vs sustainable people like this and so customers will keep coming.
Only time will tell.
Sure, they have simply demonstrated that there is demand.
Just like all the deposits on the cybertruck……oh wait.
There was lots of demand for Cybertruck… mostly from fanboys and bootlickers though.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable that an established EV maker got 10x the reservations than a brand new manufacturer did, even on a product clearly designed for edgelords.
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My bet is that the vast majority of the cost of the vehicle comes from making the basics, and then they add the features "no one wanted" in order to look good in the showroom, because they are a cheap way to sway dumb people to buy their car over a competitors
Battery production is still the bottleneck, so they want to squeeze out as much value per kwh as they can.
Selling one expensive luxury SUV with a 90kwh battery is a lot more profitable to them than selling two barebones econoboxes with a 45wkh battery pack.
And just to clarify, since this is Lemmy: This is not meant to justify or condone their behavior, just explain it.
The company that can make an EV that gets you 100 miles range for $10,000 and can fit at least three people will become one of the dominant players.
My cargo e-bike could do that, assuming you can carry an extra battery and the passengers are kids. And for a lot less than $10K, too.
It's annoying how the world, especially North America, is designed around vehicles that "can fit at lest three people" but are most frequently driven by a single person.
I love my ebike, and don't own a car, but even for short trips things would be more convenient with a car. The roads are designed for cars. Parking is designed for cars. Laws protect cars far more than bikes.
Maybe that will change. What happened in the Netherlands since the 1970s gives me hope. But, right now it's sad how the switch away from the gas-powered car seems to be toward electric cars rather than bikes, ebikes and mass transit.
Any vehicle I have must fit at least 3 people, because at any time I must be able to move myself + the 2 kids. I could get a little 2-seater runabout for 90% of my driving (or maybe a motorcycle or something similar), but then I would have to have another vehicle, at additional license costs, interest costs, storage costs, and then have to guess which one I will need by the end of the day at the start, consistently every time. Because of this, every vehicle I own must be able to do every thing I can conceivably need to do in a given day.
From what I can tell, this condition exists for a plurality of drivers in the driving-centric parts of the US, and so became the standard because it's the minimum for those people.
Car brain really is a thing. Here in the UK it seems to be considered a thing that if you can afford one, you have one.
I sold my car (my wife has and needs one to be fair) 4-5 yrs back. Tried to make an ebike work but it didn't fit my lifestyle so I bought an electric moped and it's handled everything I've thrown at it.
Traffic is no longer a thing so it saves me so much time not having to allow time for it, it's generally quicker/as quick as a car on all the trips I do, parking is easy and it's dirt cheap to run.
Not sure I'll ever buy a car again
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I live in Atlanta, which ain't exactly the poster-child for bike-friendliness. But even here, at least in my part of town, it actually is getting to the point where short trips are genuinely more convenient on a bike. Dropping the kids off at school definitely is because I don't have to wait in line, and any destination downtown is best reached on a bike because I don't have to pay for parking. Going to the grocery store isn't quite better by bike, but the margin is close enough that I bike anyway.
Parking is one of those things that could be improved for biking. I really hate most of the bike racks that most places use, and if you get a bad one it can take a significant amount of time to lock up your bike. And, a big reason why locking up a bike takes a while is that bike theft isn't really treated seriously. IMO if bike theft were taken more seriously you wouldn't need to make sure you had an excellent lock and had your front wheel secured, etc. Thieves would be much less willing to take the risk of stealing one, so a simple chain would be enough to discourage most thieves.
I feel like excessive parking for cars is a much worse problem than inadequate parking for bikes. But yes, parking for bikes could be better (and very easily, too).
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Here in the UK you can pick up a secondhand Tesla with 60% depleted battery with a guranteed 100 miles range for £8,000. Less than 10 years old and with less than 40k miles.
Obviously everyone will call you a cunt but it's possible.
I think you vastly underestimate the number of people that believe they need 400+ mole range on their vehicle despite never leaving their city.
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The worst thing is GM has a decent competitor (a little bit pricier, but not terrible) in the Bolt, but they are not producing many of them with their new release, and are instead refocusing on larger, worse EVs.
BYD is picking on GM because GM is the only legacy US automaker making a full range of decent EVs.
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The actual thing they need to do in order to compete is in-source parts manufacturing in order to take advantage of economies of scale... Like the Chinese EV manufacturers do.
Basically, toss out the Chicago school of economics thinking and go back to their roots as an all-things manufacturer. Ideally, they'd innovate as part of that by adopting new technologies like 3D printing to bring costs down and accelerate improvements.
I don't mean "3D printing for prototyping." They already do that. I mean, 3D print the final part. If it works for fucking rockets going into space, it can work for cars too. Especially electric vehicles which are much simpler to make.
If you think 3D printing is advantageous for economies of scale, I have a bridge to sell you.
Rockets are the complete opposite of mass manufacturing.
Yeah, 3d printing only makes economic sense if you're not doing mass production. It involves a lot of compromises.
Also, OP argues that it's better to be an "all-things manufacturer". Most of the time that isn't the most efficient way unless you have government assistance in some form. That might just be having patents or copyrights. BYD started as a battery company and has battery-related IP. Now they're China's leading company in patent filings, with over 13,000 of them.
Most of the time it's more efficient to specialize in something and buy parts from other specialists.
idk shit about manufacturing, but can you do that at scale? I know my 3d printer is slow as fuck if I want it to make a good print.
The actual thing they need to do in order to compete is in-source parts manufacturing in order to take advantage of economies of scale... Like the Chinese EV manufacturers do.
That's called vertical integration. Ford was the original pioneer of vertical integration in auto, but they lost their way.
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I love my BYD Dolphin Mini. It never occurred to me to look at a US made electric car lol
Ditch cars, build/use rail.
ugh, if only
I wonder if we tariff Chinese EVs on the difference between labor rates, what would that look like? And how much of the difference is something like socialized medicine? Most foreign labor doesn't have to spend a significant portion of their paycheck for health insurance.
According to this I found from a quick search: https://www.motor.com/2025/05/new-analysis-examines-labor-cost-per-vehicle-amidst-changing-automotive-landscape/
If you put a flat $1000 tariff on Chinese EVs it would more than cover the difference in labour costs.
And it stands to reason, car manufacturing is very automated. Of course you could attempt to factor in the labour costs to build the machines and make the materials used to build the cars too, but you'd need detailed information of what goes into a car, which I don't know.
Chinese manufactures are subsidized and they have a regulated home market to their advantage to build from. It is a well thought out cooperation between companies & government, which the USA and the EU are lacking.
American companies are subsidized with bailouts and tax write offs, it just goes to the owners instead of making the products cheaper.
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