Examples are the strange Japanese flip phones and the computers with CF card and floppy drives with a 1.5 ghz single core CPU selling for twice the price of a MacBook Pro.
With BYD selling globally now, and Boeing losing its reputation, American vehicles of all sorts are at risk.
You can't cut costs infinitely. You still need to pay people, suppliers, and above all, people who had nothing to do with the company but hold a piece of paper saying they're entitled to profits.
It's probably the case that you cannot do that enough to compete with the Chinese if you're in the US, so they won't try.
We're in a post-"what about the long term economic outlook of our country"-era and have been since the 1970s. John Q. Public in the US and Helga Öffentlich in Germany don't care that their purchase of a Chinese EV hollows out their country's industrial base, they just care that they spent less on the EV. And why shouldn't they? The countries themselves are lead by people who do the exact same thing on a massive scale.
The US domestic auto industry was hollowed out decades ago. Germany's domestic auto industry is just starting to be hollowed out, that process is in the early days. China's auto rise will ravage European manufacturing, not US manufacturing. Auto manufacturing is a small share of the US industrial base, it's a large share of the German industrial base for example.
Boeing and Airbus will both lose large chunks of their global airplane business to cheaper Chinese competition over the coming decades. It's definitely not exclusive to Boeing. The US airline market is far more lucrative than the European airline market, US carriers like Delta are very profitable and can more or less be forced to not buy from China.
I can continue to milk a specific market while my competitors do other things.
Yeah eventually that will be dried up, but by than point enough wealth has been accumulated for generations of me and my family.
Plus if the worst comes too quickly there’s a fair chance I’ll get bailed out by my long time buddies in the government.
> (b) Become a parochial, US-only, business hoping to squeeze what you can out of a gradually shrinking industry
It's (c) invest in plug-in hybrids that work everywhere. US customers demand something that can do a road trip without stopping to charge? No problem, and on top of that it will get 40+ MPG. European customers paying high gas prices? No problem, it has a 150 km all-electric range so if you keep it charged you never have to put gas in it.
They don't have to be bad EVs, you could theoretically make one with a good EV powertrain, but then it would likely be more expensive than a cheap pure EV. And battery prices drop substantially every year, and ranges are increasing fast.
They're a dead end.
(1) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
These are the things they make irrelevant because they're hybrids. It doesn't matter if it has a short range or takes 8 hours to charge because you charge it once a day overnight or while you're at work, which is enough for 98% of the days because the range is still double the average commute, and then the other 2% of the time you put gas in it.
> minimal use of electric engines at higher speeds
There are hybrids that can do 85 MPH before starting the gasoline engine.
> you could theoretically make one with a good EV powertrain, but then it would likely be more expensive than a pure EV
You could make a hybrid that could do 200 MPH in electric mode and the main thing you would have to change is use a bigger electric motor, which isn't the expensive part. But nobody really needs it to do that.
> And battery prices drop substantially every year
Do they get substantially lighter though? Because that's the expensive part. A hybrid can have a battery which is 25% the size and then spend less than half the saved weight on the ICE powertrain. Then it's lighter, which not only increases the number of miles per kWh, it means you don't need such heavy duty propulsion, suspension, brakes, etc., which saves even more weight and cost.
Did you read the link? It absolutely does matter. The pathetic ev system in hybrids mean they save -19% of gas in the real world. Aka, basically nothing. Approximately no-one is doing 98/2 on electric.
Semi-solid states with 500+ mile range are already shipping in china, the remaining niche of hybrids is dying fast.
The other is that it's a plug-in hybrid but that doesn't mean much unless you actually plug it in. A lot of people are presumably buying them without installing a charging port and then just running them on gas all the time. But that's not the car's fault. You make your choices and then the money comes out of your own wallet.
These are the hybrid cars that are getting built, and this is the way people drive them. Yes the cars could theoretically be made different, but they arent today and they wont be in future. Yes people could theoretically use them differently, but they aren’t today and they wont.
The data is in. They are a bad solution for real people in the real world today. Saying “oh if they were just built different and people used them differently “ is … not a good argument. Let’s wait and see whether those two things change before EVs completely obsolete them in few short years.
Both types are being built. You can buy whichever one you want.
> this is the way people drive them
This is the way people from some sample at a particular time and place drive them. If you buy one you can drive it however you want, so what other people do isn't particularly relevant.
Moreover, they're presumably running them on gas because there wasn't convenient charging infrastructure available to them, but that's the same problem EVs have so if you change that then you also change the proportion of the time that plugin-in hybrids run on electricity.
As an obvious example, if a place has high electricity prices, like say central Europe after Germany shut down all their nuclear power plants and stopped being able to buy Russian natural gas, then people with a car that can run on either gasoline or electricity are going to more often choose the former because the latter is more expensive. But "real world data" from the time and place where that's happening is irrelevant to some other place or time where the cost of electricity is lower.
And that's just one factor.
And in retrospect subsidizing EV by governments around the world could be a bad decision. If instead fuel taxes were raised or at least the subsidies went to development of more economical cars, then total CO2 emissions could be lower at this point.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
Keep product lines and factories semi targetted for their individual markets. Ford discontinued the Fiesta in North America but they are still being built in the EU AFAIK. Major car markets product their domestic auto industry anyways so you're probably going to have to setup local production in any case.
The surviving vehicle(s) on the platform are the Ford Puma and Puma Gen-E, which are subcompact crossovers not sold in North America.
American brands were considered prestigious as I understand it.
For automotive, kind of but not really (excluding Tesla).
Volkswagen Group was the primary foreign manufacturer that was also a status symbol in China.
Tesla is a US company?
Imagine you're a US car manufacturer. You see EVs growing around the world, and stagnating in the US. Do you:
(a) Double-down on investments in EVs (billions of USD!), even with a soft US market for EVs, hoping you might compete globally.
(b) Become a parochial, US-only, business hoping to squeeze what you can out of a gradually shrinking industry
When other countries subsidize consumers to buy EVs, and the US does not, it effectively creates a self-own trade barrier for domestic companies.