Most articles about the automotive industry looks at particular manufacturers or the state of the market in particularly countries, as the lead story in the Wall Street Journal does today: American Consumers Have Had It With High Car Prices.
But if we step back just a tad, policymakers and economists appear not to have fully grasped the bigger picture, that the car biz around the world is in bad shape, and not likely to get better any time soon. The UK and Europe are suffering from newly-high energy prices due to sanctions on Russian energy, which have put them into near or actual recessions. On top of that, the Ukraine conflict and continuing hostilities to Russia have pushed them to go further and faster into Peak Neoliberalism with more social safety net cuts, further reducing standards of living. That pressures all consumer spending, including of cars.
Analysts and industry incumbents saw China as a major growth opportunity for Western, Japanese, and Korean automakers, but that has gone hard into reverse. Not only have foreign offerings lost share to domestic product, even at the once-Western-dominated high end, but overcapaticy among Chinese EV makers is so high that it has produced what was once called ruinous competition, leading Chinese officials to intervene and try to rationalize the sector.
I am not sure how demand in Latin America is holding up. But even if it were robust, it can’t offset the weaknesses in these three major markets.
The generally poor health of automakers matters. First, even though worker levels are set to fall on a secular basis due to ongoing increases in automation plus the continued gain in market share of fewer parts, hence easier to assemble electric vehicles, they are still flagship manufacturers and major employers. Second, the automobile industry drives GDP and employment via parts manufacture, dealer networks, auto financing and leasing, and repairs and servicing (if nothing else, oil and tire changes). Third, for most households in advanced economies, cars are essential. In the US, comparatively few cities have sufficiently good public transportation to make that a great option. Lower density areas similarly are not a happy match with ride share services. For the financially stressed, car payments are the last to go, since if push comes to shove, you can live in your vehicle.
Now to some fresh sightings, the aforementioned Wall Street Journal article plus two stories from the Financial Times on Volkswagen’s seriously bad prospects, and tsuris at Stellantis. Key sections from the Journal account:
Car buyers are downsizing, buying used vehicles, taking on longer car loans and holding out for deals….
For the U.S. auto industry, 2025 was supposed to be a banner year fueled by tax cuts and a deregulatory wave. Analysts predicted a third-straight annual sales increase as automakers, who had been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and semiconductor shortages, finally got their factories running full steam. Now forecasts predict muted or no growth for the year and more of the same in 2026…
But now auto tariffs, persistent inflation and a tighter job market have more Americans rethinking their biggest-ticket purchases. Meanwhile, the collapse of the U.S. electric-vehicle market—hastened by the end of the federal government’s $7,500 EV credit in September—has cost the industry hundreds of thousands of potential vehicle sales…..
Signs of strain are beginning to show up in the data. Cars are sitting longer on dealer lots. Dealers are piling on extra discounts to make sales. Lower-income borrowers are defaulting on car loans. Americans as a whole are spending less overall on vehicle purchases than they did a year ago…
That tension is unlikely to lead to dramatic price cuts or plummeting sales, analysts and economists say. That is because years of tight new-car supply means that used cars, even older ones, are historically pricey as well, and many car owners are reaching the limit of how long they can hold out for a new vehicle.
Erm, have they not heard of motorbikes, the transportation staple of poorer countries? Continuing:
And not all shoppers are suffering. A swath of the nation’s consumers have continued to amass wealth and are bolstering industry profits as they pay top dollar for trucks and SUVs…
Less price-conscious consumers have already purchased their cars and now he’s seeing more people who’ve held out for years because they are loath to take on higher car payments. “More customers just aren’t willing to pull the trigger,” he [Michael Sassano, who manages a Chevrolet dealership in New Rochelle, N.Y.] said. “They say, ‘Wow, I’m paying $500 a month now, I don’t want to pay $700’.”
The good news, he said: Business is up on the service side of the shop as people try to squeeze more life out of their cars.
This story does not acknowledge another issue, the poor quality of too many American-made cars. Reader resilc sends regular tidbits, this one of his latest. Sadly YouTube shorts don’t embed, but check out Ford built this $80k truck with scraps.
Recall that we wrote at the end of 2024 about the accelerating crisis at Nissan. That ties directly into the “too pricey US car” story above. Nissan had been a very important maker of modestly priced but solidly performing vehicles. That all went to hell after Renault bought them.
The Financial Times has been chronicling the increasingly desperate state of Volkswagen, with two stories in the last week: VW says it can halve EV development costs with ‘Made in China’ car on the 25th and Will Volkswagen’s radical revamp be enough? today.
We will largely skip over the Volkswagen China EV story. It describes how the German maker intends to beef up investment in China, to compete more effectively there, when that market is already glutted and Volkswagen is not presently competitive enough on cost versus quality. So it would seem to be a struggle to catch up, let alone have any prospect leapfrogging Chinese incumbents. And how much of a there would be there given the yet-to-be-resolved brutal price cuts? Nevertheless:
Volkswagen has said it can produce an electric vehicle entirely made in China for half the cost of doing so elsewhere, as the German automaker fights to reclaim its share in the world’s biggest market.
Europe’s largest carmaker said on Tuesday that, following a series of investments in the country, it could for the first time develop cars outside Germany, including testing and deploying new technologies such as assisted driving.
VW is preparing to release about 30 EV models in China over the next five years in a bet on localised research and development. The carmaker said that, compared with the 2023 production costs for EVs in Germany, the cost for some models in China had been reduced by as much as 50 per cent due to supply chain efficiencies, including battery procurement, shorter development periods and lower labour costs…
The carmaker initially described its strategy as “in China, for China”. However, the group is in discussions about increasing exports of Chinese-made cars as well as applying China breakthroughs throughout its global operations, said executives.
So the initial idea had been to build cars for China’s market, but someone must have worked out that that was barmycakes, so now the clever idea is some may also be exported.
From comments:
AeraMiami
VW will struggle and likely fail because of fierce competition from >100 Chinese EV companies. The better strategy is to buy an existing Chinese EV icon like NIO.@keep calm and carry on
In reply to AeraMiami
Most of the >100 Chinese EV companies are going bust and VW is heading for a restructuring. The only 2 EV manufacturers actually making money selling EV’s are Xiaomi (probably) and Tesla. They don’t have 30 models – they have a handful.
PS – NIO is a financial basket case btw.
Now to the newer piece at the pink paper, on Volkswagen’s restructuring plans, starting with how Volkswagen will cut 35,000 jobs in Germany by 2030:
Volkswagen is struggling to adjust to the rise of electric vehicles, big sales declines in China and lacklustre demand in Europe….
The crisis has spilled over to the carmaker’s premium marques, Porsche and Audi, which historically have driven high growth and rich profits. US President Donald Trump has imposed tariffs on imported cars.
These will cost Volkswagen up to €5bn this year alone, putting it among the hardest hit carmakers in the world…
Auto industry experts are now asking whether last year’s landmark cost-cutting plan will be enough…
Analysts polled by Reuters forecast that the group’s net profit will more than half to €5.2bn this year compared to last. Porsche, the maker of the iconic 911 rear-engined sports car, fell into a loss in the third quarter after writing off €1.8bn because of delays to new electric vehicle models.
Even if a forecast rebound materialises as expected, Volkswagen’s group profit in 2027 will still be 16 per cent below its post-pandemic peak in 2023….
Rival German carmakers BMW and Mercedes-Benz have also been hit hard by the downturn in China sales and the imposition of tariffs. But Volkswagen, the global symbol of German carmaking prowess, is more reliant on lower-margin mass market cars and employs a disproportionately large number of staff in Germany — two-fifths work there, even though only 19 per cent of its vehicles are manufactured domestically. Production costs in the country are among “the highest worldwide”, says [Helena] Wisbert [professor for automotive economics at the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences in Wolfsburg].
Note the bind that Germany is in: its once vaunted workers, who by all accounts were once sufficiently productive so as to be still be competitive on a world basis, now part of high cost operations even for premium products. Admittedly this is not due just or even mainly to factory labor costs, which are only 3% to 5% of wholesale car costs. It’s also due to now high energy costs and older plants being less efficient.
One of the German/European responses to the self-harm done by the Russian sanctions is fever dreams of converting car plants to tank and armed vehicle making so as to hold the predatory Putin at bay. This idea is so crazy it is hard to know where to begin. First, experts have pointed out that this conversion would be no makeover but would be close to starting afresh, as in the existing plants would be of little value. Second, the high energy, labor, and other workplace safety costs would similarly result in Germany being a high-cost source, further blunting what is already expected to be an inadequate effort, were the Russian threat to be real. Third, the focus on tanks and vehicles is wildly out of date, as anyone who has been watching the advances in technique in Ukraine would know well. Near-total theater-of-combat surveillance and heavy use drones have made tanks and other means of massing forces obsolete. motorcycles have become more important in moving troops than armored carriers, and drones now deliver most supplies. As a result, Russia has been “seeping” infantrymen in very small groups through the (now many) weak spots in the line of contact, so as to attack from the rear.
To round out these updates, the Financial Times also provided an update on Stellanis today. From Stellantis car production in France set for 11% drop by 2028:
Production at Stellantis’ French factories is set to drop over the next three years, as the maker of Peugeot, Fiat and Jeep vehicles suffers a sharper manufacturing slowdown than European rivals.
The number of units being produced at the company’s five assembly factories in France is predicted to fall by 11 per cent between 2025 and 2028, according to trade union estimates based on presentations by Stellantis last week….
A report by McKinsey for automotive suppliers representative group Clepa on Thursday estimated production of light vehicles in Europe would fall 6 per cent to 8.9mn between 2024 and 2028.
According to the report, European car production in 2024 was more than 30 per cent below levels in 2017, and in that time Stellantis had the steepest drop in growth of any major automobile manufacturer on the continent.
And a comment on this article confirmed the basic conundrum: the Europeans (and Americans and Japanese and Koreans) will find it well nigh impossible to close the gap with China, at least in EVs, leaving them to fight it out over a shrunken ICE and not-that-large hybrid market:
Androcydes
A friend of mine recently bought a BYD. I didn’t drive it, but I did sit in it. It cost about £35,000 and frankly the quality of the interior and the features it had blew me away. A similar European made car would cost over £50,000.
The European car industry is utterly doomed. It is will go the same way as the European textile industry.
Keep in mind that these developments are a tragedy not just for auto industry employees and the big ecosystem that depends on car manufacture, but is symptomatic of what is happening across all but the least developed economies. As Karl Polyani depicted in his landmark account, The Great Transformation, the operation of capitalism is destructive to the fabric of the societies in which it operates. This “progress” had been made tolerable only by reforms blunting, as opposed to reversing, that trajectory.
But are we reaching a point where this sort-of Hegelian process has hit an end state? Capitalism is a system in which most must sell their labor as a condition of survival. Political leaders, at least until Peak Neoliberalism, had recognized the importance of providing for enough employment, and better yet, with rising real wages, as a requirement for social and political stability.
That is being turned on its head. CEOs now celebrate making do with way fewer employees. The press touts the AI revolution and notes ite expected wipeout of white collar jobs, with no idea as to what they might do instead. There are only so many jobs in HVAC, after all. Political leaders wonder why birth rates continue to fall as precarity and job instability continue to rise. We pointed out even before that in a highly atomized society like the US, the response is more likely to take the form of random-seeming outbreaks of individual violence rather than organized protest. So prison jobs will also be a growth sector.
On cost, out here in western NC, I see a ton of Subaru and Kia SUVs, I assume because cost, so I finally looked.
According to cars dot com, for 2025s, the Subaru Outback is $29,995, the Kia Telluride is $36,390. The Hyundai Santa Fe is $34,400.
The Explorer, Pilot, and Highlander from Ford, Honda, and Toyota respectively are all $40k.
Ignoring all kinds of dealer (mis)incentives, available financing, and whatever, this kind of confirms what I’m seeing out here. In an area where you’d expect everyone to be all-in on American made cars only, but it ain’t so.
The Jeep Wrangler (32k) is also extremely popular, and there’s a rubber duck craze and virtually every owner has sometimes dozens of these visible on their dashboard; feels like a cult.
Anyway.
I don’t know about the current Subaru Outbacks, but they have long been a favorite in Maine due to off-road and snow sturdiness. My brother took possession of my father’s 1996 Subaru and it was still going strong as of this year in snowy Escanaba MI since 2006. He finally bought a newer (still used but barely driven) car and I think gave the Subaru to a friend for use by his teens.
I have a 2015 Subaru Impreza: very reliable, fuel efficient, all-wheel drive, corners like a slot-car. I am very happy with it. I consider it one of the best values for money, I haven’t checked out the newer models but I think Consumer Reports and others still rate Subaru highly.
Subaru is discontinuing the base Impreza and will offer only models at least $3,000 costlier. Margins are too low. Hyundai/Kia, Chevy, Ford, Dodge, Toyota, Nissan, Honda and VW have already done the same over the past 5 years or less.
In the 2010-2012 period I sold Subarus, at that time the gross margin on the base Impreza was about $700, that was the invoice less the hold back margin, known as “net-net.” Typically those cars went out the door at about $100 over net-net. For the sales guy it was a minimal commission, about that $100, plus a $50-$250 dollar spiff from Subaru depending on how many cars you sold in a month.
Don’t feel bad for the dealer, they made their money in the finance office, marking up the loan rate, various add ons like paint protection and extended warranties etc. Plus the dealer gets a chance at a large pot of money if they make their quotas, have the staff trained to required level and are in compliance with corporate ID (what the store looks like).
Yep, Subaru does LL Bean special editions. Subarus are insanely popular in the PNW too, with Portland, Ore., being the Scooby capital of the world, AIUI.
I bought a used 2024 Toyota RAV4 hybrid earlier this year & couldn’t be happier with it (although it was expensive for my budget). I’ve made a small investment in a couple of Chinese EV companies (Geely and Leapmotor) but the stocks have been doing poorly. After reading the above I think I will take the losses and sell them off.
I’m hoping my Subaru outlives me at this point. Not only are newer cars way too expensive, but they have “features” that I don’t want, like internet connectivity that I will never use but that lets some manufacturers download “upgrades” to the software that the car was not advertised as needing. And for some manufacturers, that means restricting functionality that used to not have limits or forcing subscriptions on the owner (renter?) to keep going. Not to mention all the tracking and surveillance vulnerabilities. So if I have to buy another car it will be the oldest one with lower mileage that a dealer will sell me with some service guarantees, one without all these supposed enhancements.
Congress punted for years on raising CAFE standards, otherwise we wouldn’t need to be pushing electric vehicles as a solution in such a half-assed way. So a high percentage of the newer cars have been fashion accessories with crappy mileage still. Where I am (a liberal area of a blue state) there are still huge numbers of giant pick-up trucks on the road, most of which function as assertions of manliness for their owners, a sort of metal uniform to replace to replace the leather jacket and dangling cigarette that the tough kids affected in the 1950s. (This is ignoring the one guy here whose giant macho pick-up sports rainbow flag and “I LOVE ANAL” stickers on the back bumper.) And what the point of the huge SUVs is I don’t know. Even Subaru keeps making each model larger when they do a major revision, to the point that a Forester (which used to be reasonable) is now too big and unwieldy and has more blind spots. Twenty years ago the car sizes made some sense. Not now.
Subaru’s only do well in the US. Their very heavy fuel consumption makes them prohibitively expensive to run in Europe and most of Asia.
My Impreza gets over 30 mpg on the highway (and that is with CA emissions) , which is considered excellent fuel economy in the US. The larger Outbacks and Foresters don’t get as good fuel economy.
Compare that to the ubiquitous full-size US pickup truck that typically get around 15 mpg. Where I live the vast majority of vehicles are either SUVs or pickup trucks. Only in amerka
I know someone here (New Zealand) who uses a Forrester for off road and outdoor work. It does very well at that job. He’s still looking to get rid of it, because of the fuel consumption.
Italy here. I’m very happy with the fuel consumption of my Subaru. It runs on LPG, and with 25€ I get around 450km.
I owned and commuted with two Subaru Foresters for years in NH. Very dependable and sure footed in smile and slush.
Price a bit less than Outback, and slightly higher clearance.
In the 1990, I had a small Subaru station wagon, also great all wheel drive.
Retired now leased a RAV4
2010 Subaru Forrester here, with just over 264,000 miles on it (yes, I drive a lot). Runs very well, and I’ve kept up the maintenance – save repairing some dents that the dimwits at the parking garage added. It’s been a great car, and I’m reluctant to upgrade to a newer one: I drove one last week while having the snow tires put on and the oil changed, and don’t like the screen-based controls, don’t like all the added beeps and whistles, or the features that nobody asked for, but they still seem to provide. I’ll reconsider at 300k miles.
I recommend renting some cars and taking a trip, enough to get a grip on the controls and what the seat does to you. My favorite seat was a nissan and straightforward controls, but bad reviews… favorite interface and highway driver cx 50, but worst seat…good mileage… rav 4 came in the middle for me, did the job but not impressive mileage.
I have a 2021 Subaru Crosstrek 6 speed manual transmission and a (family blogging) key, not a fob. Someone will have to pry this thing out of my cold dead hands.
Anecdata – of late I am seeing late ’80s, early 90s model cars whilst pootling about in rural New Hampshire. Southern cars, most likely.
I drive a 2005 GX470 with 205k miles on it and plan to drive it until it dies.
Purchased it after a year of searching because I wanted a car that was low on maintenance and high on longevity.
Best $10k I ever spent.
My car before this was a Mini Cooper and when it was new, freaking go cart and a blast to drive, after 100k miles, money pit.
We spent most of Thanksgiving in Atlanta, which has metastasized beyond recognition as the thoroughly atomized, anomie-inducing, car-dependent urban/suburban agglomeration. Downtown, once a vibrant city, is now mostly faceless convention hotels plus a few tourist attractions. We also used the MARTA train to get to a football game at Mercedes-Benz (Ha! But an engineering marvel!) Stadium downtown. Compared with metro rail transit in virtually every other serious city in the world, MARTA rail borders on the dysfunctional and is apparently little used except for such special events. On the other hand, the MARTA bus system is quite good. Car culture is on its last legs. What comes next?
Don’t forget the “New Urbanism” that has somewhat reversed the suburban exodus and brought more residents into the Atl urban core.
I never go to the big town these days but I hear the gridlock is worse than ever. A lot of people use MARTA to go to the airport.
I visited briefly for a convention, of course, in 2013 I believe. I ran about 7.2 miles around downtown area to the university. What I most remember at that time is a cop on every street corner. I was surprised to learn there was a train, though I didn’t ride it.
Due to the low urban density, bus transit is the only way US cities can realistically provide an alternative to car dependency. But ultimately, it does not matter how much you invest in public transport, and this includes free public transport, it never succeeds unless its paired with active restrictions on car use (either by way of reduced parking, reduced lane space, or tolling). Even in Europe and densely populated Asian cities, its proven very politically difficult to develop the type of consensus needed to do this.
All that aside, and being a fan and user of public transit in Boston in a past life, during a Pandemic I’d never set foot on it again in my life. I’m keeping my car for my personal safety.
What a shame.
I am told but never had this confirmed that the way that was achieved in the Sydney CBD was providing for pretty much no parking, as in making driving in practically impossible.
People will always opt for the car over public transport, even if its cheaper. In 2012, Tallinn in Estonia started providing free bus and train travel to all local residents (outsiders still pay a fare). Car use actually increased – they found that the free transport mostly just encouraged cyclists and pedestrians to take public transport instead.
Almost all cities that have found a good balance have done so by severely restricting car access – usually by reducing parking. Strict speed controls and special toll areas are also successful (Oxford in the UK has been transformed by doing this). In Paris, they fund the excellent metro mostly from business taxes, but the city was still traffic choked until they found a major willing to remove huge areas of parking. London has tried this, but its proven very politically divisive. Important and wealthy people love their cars and will always fight to keep them.
Car use increased because at the same time a lot of manufacturing and other jobs moved to the city limits, where the public transportation network is weak or non-existent.
I may also be said that cars are not taxed in Estonia (so they are cheap!) and outside of the city center parking is free.
When a new tram track was laid in the city center a few years back causing a lot of traffic congestion and even blockages, people keenly switched from private cars to public transport.
Large blocks of America would be abandoned toot suite were it not for cars, and i’m in the sweet spot in that regard.
Public transport here presently is limited to one bus that comes twice a day, and would be hopelessly inadequate should everybody need to ride it all of the sudden.
The big advantage of trams is that they simultaneously remove road space, so they create their own demand.
I haven’t followed the Tallinn story in some time, from what what I understand they have made several significant changes to their policy to improve things. The free public transport idea is a worthy one, it’s just that it can’t work in isolation from other policies.
“Car use actually increased.” This is ‘induced demand’, a concept that traffic engineers revile and refuse to integrate into their models. After all, what’s the use of building more roadways to decrease congestion when people will simply use the perceived free space to take a vehicle trip that they wouldn’t otherwise take. More roadways leads to more congestion.
I can’t recall the source, but I read recently that the single most important determiner of a vote against Mamdani in the NYC mayoral election was car ownership, and that’s in the city with the best mass transit in the country.
In seattle they call it the road diet. I haven’t ridden there since the new lanes have been installed so there is another commentor who can say how good it works.
https://www.feetfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Road-Rechannelization-Road-Diets1.pdf
Sydney used (c2000) to have a great monorail, subway, and bus system that got me around efficiently and for a fair price. And I never felt threatened or unsafe.
“Realistically” is doing a lot of work in that statement. The inherent advantage of rail is that it performs both functions at once: it provides for transit while not being available for dual use for private automobiles. In a serious relatively short term push for transit in the US, I agree that buses are inevitable. But in the longer run rail is undoubtedly superior. A bus based system relies on a long term deliberate political commitment to suppress car use. Rail doesn’t, once it’s built you just have to keep using it.
Density isn’t what people think it is. Residential population density relative to location in the US isn’t particularly different than Europe. Having vast open spaces and rural areas doesn’t affect where the vast majority of people actually live. What’s different is the particular built environment and physical arrangement of housing. But more than that, residential density isn’t as important for transit as commercial density is. Commercial destinations get vastly more traffic per unit area than residential, and basically all trips are between residential and commercial (whether for work or consumption).
An auto is transportation. Drive it until it won’t drive any more. If the neighbors are offended, too bad. If you are driven to keep up with the shin y new ones next door, shame on you.
IMO the biggest problem the automotive industry is facing is not Chinese competition in itself, but a consistent build up of debt and overcapacity over the past 3 decades resulting from a belief that market growth worldwide, combined with economies of scale, would allow a small number of big brands to dominate. At the same time, jealous of the profits of BMW, they all aimed for the mid to upper market, trying (mostly successfully) to drive up prices and consumer expectations of what type of a car everyone needed. This has led to companies like VW and Nissan and Toyota and Stellantis all fighting for the high (i.e. the most profitable) end, and grossly overinvesting in capacity in every market element except those cars that consumers actually want (basic, reliable, cheap).
This is exacerbated by numerous countries encouraging the process to develop national champions – its not just the US, Europe, China, Japan – countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, etc., all have their car manufacturing ambitions and have invested hugely in trying to compete – although nobody can match the staggering level of overinvestment in China.
VW and the others are deluded about their future in China. Even if they could produce better, cheaper cars than domestic manufacturers, they will simply not be let compete. They have nothing more that China wants.
But China is in very big trouble over its industry. The overcapacity has to be seen to be believed, and to make it worse, they have hugely overinvested in highly automated plants which give little financial scope to roll back production when needed. Every region and province of China has its own local champion, and will willingly get into unsustainable debt to keep them producing. Something like 40% of Chinese brands are directly owned and financed by local government investment vehicles – in other words, the buck stops with the local tax payer. There will not be a pretty outcome, unless somehow Beijing can come up with another few tens of millions of willing car buyers every year.
As to quality – Chinese cars have struggled with this, despite the comments made above. Their ICE vehicles are still way behind the best worldwide. Even with EV’s, while they can make them cheaper, this is not the same as being able to win market share in foreign markets. European EV buyers want Renault 5’s and Hyundai Insters and Teslas – regular ‘best of’ lists put Chinese brands well down the list. BYD and MG make the most attractive cars for non-Chinese markets, but this is through deep discounting – its unlikely they are making much money. There are many rumours that BYD is in deep trouble. Berkshire Hathaway exited BYD ownership for a reason.
The biggest loser in all this is likely to be Japan – Nissan and Toyota are in big trouble and seem far behind the curve in addressing the problems. As usual, the South Koreans are quietly doing very well, even if Hyundai has some problems – mostly related to its weirdly complex ownership structure. But Korean EV’s are very highly rated and although like the Europeans they are struggling with cost, they will use their existing worldwide sales and manufacturing networks to eat into many local markets, especially in the US.
For a model of how it will shake out, Polestar seem to have the right ideas. A Swedish design base, lots of UK input in car dynamics, with manufacturing and EV knowhow and investment from China. Crucially, they don’t manufacture themselves, so they can maintain flexibility. Its likely that in the fairly near future, nearly all cars worldwide will have Chinese underpinnings, especially EV drivetrains and batteries, but with far more smaller design/marketing brands like Polestar using spare factory space to their own advantage. The motor industry has always feared the commodification of cars – i.e. that they would become a very low cost entry, low profitability industry like TV’s or white goods, due to the wide availability of all the parts and components needed to make them. With the exception of some premium brands like BMW, their worst fears are likely to come true very soon.
I love my Korean car. It has a few glitches but seems well designed.
And I don’t follow the local news closely but our BMW plant seems to be thriving. What some of us dearly hope is that the US mania for pickup trucks will decline due to factors in the above article.
The Koreans have an incredible focus which has (so far) made them enormously successful – it helps that the Korean government regularly forces domestic rivals to co-operate in international markets. Their EV’s are very good although its not clear how profitable they are, especially as Korean battery tech and pricing seems to be falling behind China.
BMW has had a magic touch for decades – they manage to be both mass market, and yet still can charge high prestige prices. Every car maker has tried its own BMW-lite brand, but none can quite seem to match them. But like VW, they’ve been badly hit in China where they have a massive market and brand visibility, but are being slowly pushed out. But unlike VW, China doesn’t have a domestic brand yet who can touch BMW for prestige, so they’ll last longer.
Why do you think Toyota is in trouble specifically? They are still hitting record numbers of sales and production numbers during the first half of 2025 and 3rd quarter was still showing gains. Anecdotally, Toyota’s biggest “problem” here in North America is not being able to produce enough hybrids to meet demand, especially so on vehicles like the Highlander Hybrid and the Sienna minivan (all-hybrid now). Good luck finding a new Sienna on a dealer lot, people are literally on months long waiting lists for those vehicles.
Toyota has such a good name and reputation worldwide that I think they will do well as long as they stay focused and conservative, building decent vehicles that don’t cost an arm and a leg to maintain. They get into trouble whenever they try to get too fancy.
Your Polestar point was pretty interesting, I think there’s definitely more space for that kind of contract manufacturing. In fact, it’s already being done for a number of years now by Canadian auto parts giant Magna, at their Magna-Steyr subsidiary in Austria. They are even apparently making some Chinese brands at the moment:
Not only will they build the car to your requirements, they can even help design most of it. I’m surprised this hasn’t been more widely adopted as a model, although what you mentioned about the huge amount of extra capacity being added over the past few decades might have something to do with that.
Toyota will survive and thrive. their conservatism (see: sticking with hybrids and waiting ’til battery tech matures), mocked by armchair pundits, is their strength.
when a “great reset” hits EV makers, Toyota’s balance sheet will let them get good terms from battery and component suppliers
I’ve been renting Toyota Camry hybrid’s when I travel, which I have to do a fair amount of. It’s a really solid car. I don’t like what it looks like, but I like driving it.
I spent 3 hours in line at the Avis in Austin after being assigned an EV I specifically told them I didn’t want prior to having it assigned to me, just like the dozen or so people ahead of me in line.
Incompatibility and incompleteness of the build out of EV infrastructure in Texas makes the limited range of EVs fatal, and my Thanksgiving evening a rare treat, hanging out in the Avis parking garage with other the disgruntled turkeys!
Although there are a lot of different figures out there, from what I understand Toyota has a huge debt load – even bigger than VW’s – nearly all generated over the past decade to fund expansion. They have fallen well behind their peers in EV tech and have failed to secure the joint ventures with battery companies that more nimble companies have done. They have a secure foothold in the US, but are suffering in other markets.
Volkswagen also does poorly in Consumer Reports quality surveys. Not that this may matter in my increasingly upper middle class neighborhood where Miss Daisy’s routine of a new Hudson every couple of years is the norm (think Land Rover or Subaru for Hudson).
In other parts of town the new poor people chic of cars with missing front bumper cover prevails. They leave off the expensive plastic part after accidents or perhaps take it off just for the look of it. The real bumper–a chunk of ugly metal–is still there.
The plastic front and rear ‘bumper’ area of newer cars actually reduces the cost of repair; $1300 is the average cost for front or rear damage per mild collision. It’s that it is so easy to do damage (dent, scrape, discombobulate) newer cars that the average cost repair occurs regularly. And the drivers run out of money covering the insurance deductible.
A problem with Volkswagens is they are too tightly engineered. So like an F-35, for every hour you drive one, it needs five hours in the service bay. They’re great when they are working, but they need a lot of work$ to keep them that way.
In 2020 I bought a used 2019 VW Golf hatchback. It came with a 7 year warranty, which we have barely had to use. It gets 35 – 40 mpg, handles beautifully, and basically has been a joy to own. Whether it will turn into a pumpkin when the warranty runs out remains to be seen.
A lot to process here, and the conclusion sums it up nicely. The contradictions of ( especially unregulated, neoliberal) capitalism are becoming more and more problematic.
People have been asking: “where are people going to work?” Rising real wages that bring political stability and help social cohesion are largely non-existent. While crime rates in the US have fallen, the US remains heavily-armed and one of the most violent societies in the so-called developed world. The plebs are distracted, divided and confused. Talk of creating a universal basic income have been floated here and there, but I don’t see that happening on a large scale.
Rising necessity costs like health care, food, and energy have created the “affordability crisis” that even the mass media are starting to talk about.
“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”
Speaking of prison industries, the US already has the highest number of incarcerated people in the world, in absolute terms as well as percentage of population. Prion Industries are already well-established, so yes this will be a growth industry. Privatized prisons, and forced labor, what a wonderful investment opportunity.
https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/unicor.jsp
https://www.calpia.ca.gov/
Eating at a diner in Mid-Coast Maine this summer, the paper placemat on the table, filled with ads for locals businesses, included one for the Maine prison system’s furniture shop.. Needless to say, the ad was presented within an “uplift ” and “rehabilitation” frame.
I don’t think either of these points is by any means new, though it is perhaps easier at the moment to see their truth. Certainly at the time Marx wrote his major works in the mid 19th century, the destructive nature of capitalism was extremely easy to see. A major campaign in the western information system since World War I was dedicated to suppressing this truth, and even the word “capitalism” has been almost impossible to utter in the last century. That prohibition has started to develop cracks since the organized capitalist media has lost its steam in the internet age.
As for societal leaders worrying about the health of their populations, this seems to have been getting strictly lip service during my lifetime. I think deep down, leaders know it to be true, but no one wants to be the first to act on it or advocate for it for fear of being labeled class traitors.
IMHO the world is in an extremely dangerous place now, with the vast majority of the population having little or no stake in the existing political systems and at the same time having no avenues open to effect peaceful change. I am one leftist who does not think violent revolution is going to lead anywhere good, but we are busily making it impossible for any alternative strategy to exist.
Did you miss the reference to Karl Polyani? His book was published in 1944.
YS: Political leaders, at least until Peak Neoliberalism, had recognized the importance of providing for enough employment, and better yet, with rising real wages, as a requirement for social and political stability.
Time for a UBI approaching?
TPTB will call the system something like People’s Capitalism, the UBI will be NIT for Negative Income Tax, and they’ll pay individuals receiving NIT as little as they can absolutely get away with, while everyone will be surveilled by AI so if anyone even looks like they’re making any waves at all they’ll lose their NIT.
And in the US this will be resisted till the end, by which point cities will be going up in flames and the national guard or the police will be outmatched when they’re sent in, and elites will have literally no other resort.
UBI will just lead to companies paying even less.
And the US does not believe in paying the undeserving, as in not-working, not-disabled poor. Look at our punitive Medicaid work rules.
YS: UBI will just lead to companies paying even less.
Paying those that have jobs working for companies, sure. That might even be an argument for it from elites’ POV, that they can use a minimum UBI to force down labor costs of the workers they do employ and it’ll net out. TPTB will resist it, yes. But literally they could finally decide it’s just cheaper to pay the surplus people as little as they can to keep them quiet. Give it till about 2040-2045.
YS: And the US does not believe in paying the undeserving, as in not-working, not-disabled poor.
Oh, I agree. But that’s now. Wait, like I say, till there are “cities …going up in flames and the national guard and the police (are)… outmatched.” Also, attacks on rich enclaves including, forex, with bioweapons. Think I’m being science-fictional? No attribution with that stuff, limited defense, and it’s astonishingly easy with materials existing in nature and a little knowledge that’s all out there — which isn’t even to get into how fast biotech is advancing and proliferating.
This all sounds too far out now, I know. But back in 2007 would you have predicted we’d be where we are today in 2025?
Indeed, as you bring up Karl Polanyi’s analysis, would even the likes of H.G. Wells and John Maynard Keynes, say, if you’d asked them back in 1912 just how the world would look in 1945, have been able to predict that, on the one hand, over 70 million military personnel would be mobilized during WW1 and more than 40 million people overall would die, while in WW2 more than 127 million would be mobilized, and 50-85 million would die; while, on the other hand, there’d be nuclear weapons*, jets, rockets, radar, television, and all the rest of what looked like a ‘Buck Rogers world’ to people in 1945?
We always overestimate change in the near term and underrate it longer term. Fairly clearly, we’re unfortunately on course now to repeat and replay the general contours of Polanyi’s ‘Great Transformation’, aren’t we? And that isn’t even to mention climate change, is it? So serious dislocations are coming in the next few decades.
* Though, yes, Wells predicted atomic weapons back in his The World Set Free in 1913 and that’s where Leo Szilard got the idea of a nuclear chain reaction from —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Set_Free#Influence_on_invention_of_nuclear_weapons
But what we got was thermonuclear weapons and MAD, which was somewhat different.
Creating that level of wealth transfer when there is massive social disorder is na ga happen. In fact, the destruction of property would strengthing the resolve not to reward the rebelling poors. Gaza is the model for what to do with rebellious densely populated areas. Please stop fantasizing.
Gaza is the model for what to do with rebellious densely populated areas.
Sure. Credit to you for considering that scenario. Those in control will certainly think about it and maybe even try it for a while. But after I thought about it myself a few years back, I decided it was naive because, long term, there are two very large practical problems —
[1] Gaza and the West Bank constitute a small, open-air prison whose population is penned in and easily targeted. By contrast, the US is 3.79 million square miles and the third-largest country (if country it will still be) in the world — a continental expanse encompassing deserts, mountains, plains, and multiple climate zones.
Putting it another way, the USA is about 16.3 times larger than Ukraine in square miles, and look at the problems either side there is having, that both the US and USSR had in Afghanistan, that the US had with the Houthis in Yemen, or will have if it’s stupid enough to try to go into Venezuela.
[2] The other problem is that the weapon systems of the 21st century are no longer about cost, and size in the way the US has customarily promoted.
So, on the one hand, we can both propose that in 2025 it’s theoretically feasible to control a mostly flat terrain of Western Ukraine’s scale with drone networks, loitering munitions, missiles, and overhead surveillance and depopulate it. And maybe we’re right.
But on the other hand, all you need to run 95 percent of the drones being operated in Ukraine is a microprocessor chip than can handle an instruction set equivalent, roughly, to what a 2010 cell phone chip could do. There are 30–40 billion chips floating around the world now with at least that capability.
So: shanzai drones and, expanding this concept beyond drones, shanzai war.
https://www.wired.com/story/shanzai/
Shanzai began as a Chinese term for pirated or imitations goods and electronics. Then some of the people who think about this stuff started seeing rebels in the Middle East repurposing consumer electronics to hack into their enemies’ guidance systems and turning pick-up trucks into armored rocket-launchers, and applied the term to mean a kind of warfare where regular folks hack together cheap, do-it-yourself versions of fancy weapon systems they’ve seen the big boys using on YouTube or TikTok.
And if it began in the Middle East and finally gets there to the US, that’ll be kind of appropriate. Thank God, I won’t be there and neither will you.
UBI?
No, a living-wage jobs guarantee is immeasurably preferable, for socio-political and economic reasons. And since it’s no more or less likely than UBI – the Overclass will not willingly permit either, for labor disciplinary reasons, unless you consider some kind of minimal-calorie Soylent Green scenario to be UBI – we should fight for that.
jobs guarantee sets a wage floor and gets alot of not done stuff done. Then those workers can take the free public transit downtown to spend some of the money. I know, I’m some kind of utopian…
Michael F: No, a living-wage jobs guarantee is immeasurably preferable, for socio-political and economic reasons….
Bless you.
Michael F: .Unless you consider some kind of minimal-calorie Soylent Green scenario to be UBI.
I wrote ‘minimum UBI to force down labor costs of the workers they do employ,’ didn’t I? That’s exactly what I expect the TPTB to offer.
Michael F: ….the Overclass will not willingly permit either, for labor disciplinary reasons
‘Labor disciplinary reasons’ will be irrelevant for the population segments when it comes to the Overclass considers simply surplus to purpose.
I follow a couple of long time influencer mechanics who have many decades of working on cars, and they are of the opinion that Hyundai/KIA are utter crap, while American makes might even be worse, followed by good at first German autos that then turn on you as the miles accumulate.
I’m a buy a new car and run it into the ground kind of driver, and the Mighty Tacoma has nearly gone 1-way to the Moon, and was thinking in regards to that new car smell, when the clutch went out after perhaps a million times of me pressing down on it, so I had to replace it for a few grandidos-prompting me to keep it.
New Tacomas have a 4 cylinder engine with turbo boost-which everybody seems to not like all that much. At the dealership I counted a dozen new 4×4 Tacomas for sale-which means they’re crap in my mind.
Older V6 Tacomas from 2023 and earlier almost fetch what they sold for new, people know what’s up.
There’s a Nissan dealership next door that is bursting with new inventory, and maybe its time to go back to Datsun, as they have ruined their reputation the past few years, in particular in regards to CVT transmissions in many of the vehicles.
I’ve owned Toyotas and then a Nissan for decades and so far had the least trouble with my Hyundai. It just runs. But I don’t drive nearly as much as I once did and don’t expect to take it to the 200k+ of my last car.
My brother loves those Youtube mechanics. I have my doubts.
I believe CR still gives Toyota products the best repair record with Hyundai/KIA in the middle rank and Volkswagen toward the bottom.
My local transmission rebuilders told me that small-car CVTs last about 80k miles, regardless of brand…
Honda CRV went with the small turbocharged which made me go to RAV4. Leased.
Yeah it’s a shame they insist on sticking turbos onto almost every bloody car nowadays (“better gas mileage”), which naturally hurts reliability, even in Toyota-land who are relative late-comers to the “turbo EVERYTHING” game, and it shows with their recent Tundra V6 twin turbo explodey engines.
The CVT has absolutely wrecked Nissan’s reputation, they put those POS transmissions into everything and now that the word has got out people won’t touch those cars used with a ten foot pole. Shame because the rest of the vehicles are good, even great. The best Nissan’s are their manuals, or conventional automatics that they still offer on their pickups and SUVs. CVT’s are best avoided entirely if you value long term ownership, although it seems that Subaru, Honda and Toyota manage to make them last a lot better than other makes.
The absolute best auto transmission is the auto planetary type (aka “power split device”) that Toyota (and Ford now also) uses on most of their hybrid cars, confusingly also called an “eCVT”; confusing because they aren’t anything like a crappy belt/chain and cone style CVT. They most resemble a differential repurposed as a transmission. The simplicity and sheer genius of these things help make Toyota hybrids their most reliable vehicles by far, and you can routinely find Prius’s and other Toyota cars with the Prius style hybrid powertrain (Camry, Corolla’s, Highlander, Sienna minivan, Rav4) going 400K miles or more. No starter, no alternator, no belts, no clutches, no actual gear “shifting”, no valve body and no solenoid valves, no reverse gear even. It’s hard to wrap one’s head around how these things work, but the simplicity is kinda beautiful: Professor John Kelly on Toyota Hybrid Transmission Operation
Regarding the explody Toyota twin turbo V6 and the recall on them.
This guy does a tear down on one and offers his opinion on the engine. So far he has had more than 277K views in less than a week. It seems he has hit a nerve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL4tIHf_9i8
Buy and run them into the ground – that’s what we do too except a bit of routine maintenance makes those vehicles last a long time. I finally bought a new F-150 because my old one was thirty years old. The new one is a good truck (I always get the Fleet configured vehicles so nothing fancy and as cheap as possible), gets better mileage, can carry more and tow more (which I need on occasion, towing around a small tractor). And my wife’s car is a 2008 and still runs OK. My wife would like to get a practical (not fancy, cheap) EV to replace it sooner or later.
The big three has switched over to turbo engines as these are more efficient, but I avoid them. I don’t need the horsepower, and I think these require more routine maintenance (change that oil and oil filter!) or else these can blow up in spectacular and expensive fashions. Mix that in with the workforce and supply disruption from the pandemic and vehicle quality took a big hit.
I think America has fallen into the trap Michael Hudson has long talked about. It’s been a race to the bottom out sourcing and off shoring manufacturing to kill the American middle class while basic costs for food, housing, healthcare and education have gone through the roof. So now average Americans cannot afford a car. We have to somehow reverse this forty year long trend, but the uniparty still seems determined to have a whole country structured to make billionaires richer and [family blog] everyone else.
Bummer…
“Erm, have they not heard of motorbikes, the transportation staple of poorer countries?”
I’m seeing a lot of electric motor assisted bikes around town these days in my American middleclass suburban wonderland with really sucky mass transit options. Alas, my equilibrium went wonky a few years back so my bicycle and motorcycle just sit there gathering rust and evoking pangs of nostalgia for les temps perdu. No more two-wheel fun for me. I’m considering an electric assist tricycle, highly appropriate for ones second childhood. As for cars we are a three Toyota family, one just a couple of years old, another twelve years old, and a pickup still going strong at twenty-two years young.
As to the auto industry, I recently listened to an interview in which Andrew Sorkin stated that if it weren’t for U.S. tariffs on BYD cars we wouldn’t have an automobile manufacturing industry in this country.
Driving a car is the most dangerous thing people do on a daily basis. Two members of my extended family have died in auto accidents. Giving people lots of affordable cars is not good medicine for society. Driverless robo-cabs make much more sense, and working at home instead of at an automated plant or office will reduce the need for personal transportation dramatically. Cars that are human driven will be like boats: expensive toys for the wealthy.
Maybe consider being less fearful. In my case, my uncle died in a crash in 1960ish, since then nobody for me, thankfully. I did get hit by a car on my bike but unlike you I don’t expect robo taxis to have a flawless safety record. Think ice and snow for instance. You may be right about “the wealthy” but right now self driving is a wealthy persons game. so it seems you may be trying to stuff a square peg in a round hole, but I guess if you hit it with enough compute (or dollars, or bitcoins, tether, stablecoins, heck even gold!) one can maul any peg into any hole. as for the grandma trope, the time span between mom no longer driving and not driving at all (assisted living) was 6 months at most so that is no basis for a biz…noting that neither uber nor taxis would take her down the street to the coffee shop, too short of a ride, and thats what she wanted to do. Also theres a sunk cost thing, people have self driving cars now as in, I drive myself. Neither the people or the trucking companies are going to build out this fantasy program so where is the driving force to retool the transport sector for the tech lords benefit?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oYIFu4k7Fc
Computers do order, humans do chaos…
From this CDC report:
In 2020, 11,654 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes involving alcohol-impaired drivers, accounting for 30% of all traffic-related deaths in the United States. This was a 14.3% increase compared to the number of crash deaths involving alcohol-impaired drivers in 2019.
32 people in the United States are killed every day in crashes involving an alcohol-impaired driver—this is one death every 45 minutes.
The annual estimated cost of crash deaths involving alcohol-impaired drivers totaled about $123.3 billionA in 2020. These costs include medical costs and cost estimates for lives lost.”
There will be no drunken robo-taxis.
“There will be no drunken robo-taxis”.
No, but if a robo-taxi kills a drunk behaving like an idiot (something a human driver can more likely avoid), then what’s the penalty?
If there was a massive, automatic penalty to the estate of someone killed by a driverless vehicle, regardless of circumstance (including deliberate suicide attempts), then the software would get a lot better a lot quicker.
I like Canada’s approach to an American driver with a DUI on their record attempting to cross the border in a vehicle…
Turn around, eh.
Just hallucinating ones :-)
There have already been deaths attributed to autonomous vehicles.
By your own lights you signal that there will be wealthy drivers navigating amongst what they will view as second class plebes and yes wealthy people are affected the same as non wealthy by alcohol and other substances. This also doesn’t answer the who’s going replace the transport infra for the shift to robo taxi. If your answer is .gov that’s socialism which is not very popular just saying. You can’t get there from here. It has yet to be proven that robo taxis will not err, lose control, or fail to react to unexpected inputs.
https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/yearly-snapshot
Yes drunk driving is terrible and I regret the losses but the world will trundle on, for better or worse.
I have to agree that I find driving dangerous these days too – people are either aggressive or stupid or both. That said, I sure don’t see robo-cabs as the answer. I would never ride in one. Yves muses above about the proliferation of motorcycles in poorer counties. In Canada we have the problem of winter, meaning you can’t rely on them all year and with the way people drive nowadays, I think motorcycles are way too dangerous for a daily driver. I know a retired cop(in his late 50s) who owned and drove motorcycles for most of his driving life who gave them up recently after deciding it had become too dangerous to drive one.
I found that drivers on the West Coast and in the Midwest tend to be much, much more respectful of motorcycles than out East, but that said, aggressively idiotic drivers can be found everywhere– and this particular problem seems to have grown markedly worse over my 40-years of riding, seemingly especially so over the past five years.
I more recently dropped my bike twice over two consecutive years at the exact same intersection for the exact same reason: a four-way stop; I make a full-stop to make sure that an SUV coming from the West is going to stop; they do, so I proceed having the right-of-way– but they launch quickly forward as I am moving into the intersection. In 2021 it was a white SUV driven by a middle-aged woman. In 2022 it was a gray SUV driven by a middle aged woman. In both cases eye-contact had been made before the near-collison. Neither stopped, just rocketed their way down the street.
Yeah, motorcycles are super-economical, I did ride year-round except when there was ice, but…
There is a junk yard down the street. They have been clearing it out. I took a walk down there today to check it out. I guess it’s about four or five acres. A few piles of car part trash and two wrecked Toyota Prius left. I wonder if there is an issue with recycling EV?
A theme I didn’t see pursued in the previous comments is whether transit should primarily bring goods to customers or customers to goods.
Clearly, the latter is preferred by ‘advanced’ economies.
I may have missed it, but I did not see any comments on warranties. I bought a new Outback and it has a 60,000-mile, five-year power chain warranty. I was advised to get even more warranty because of the high chance of electronic failure in new cars. At the dealer, I learned that the Subaru Legacy, a decent sized sedan, with MSRN around a $30,000 MSRN is going to be discontinued with Suburu joining the domestics in abandoning sedans. If I recall right, when first introduced here to reassure customers, Hyundai gave 100,000-mile warranties.
Thanks for the piece.
German manufacturing is clueless.
Eventually it´s every man for himself.
BMW claimed to have made profit and purports the image of the only successful German car-maker.
I wonder what the truth is.
As I linked last week, BERLINER ZEITUNG reported that BOSCH, MAN and Mercedes are moving sites to Eastern Europe.
The last solar panel production in East Germany closed down.
Green steel already has been canceled.
At the same time the ruling to abolish combustion engines has been overturned. As if that would salvage anything.
The signs of a historical shift couldn´t be overlooked when the entirety of German economic and financial might went along with the decoupling madness of 2022. I was rubbing my eyes back then, incredulous.
Now the same pattern in smaller scale: After AfD had members – as private persons – go to Moscow to meet some people there (a totally insignificant event of course) – a few known mid-size companies declared to distance themselves from the AfD.
Eventually the small but well-known German association of family-owned companies followed.
I assume due to the threat by too many of its members leaving the organisation meaningless if it wouldn´t do the same thing.
Note: Those companies never had issue with the AfD´s (or any other party´s) anti-immigrant policies or anti labour unions stance both of which would feed into worsening working conditions and increased pressure on the workforce…
And so on. It´s a one-way ticket into insignificance.
PS – NIO is a financial basket case btw.
Since its listing in 2018, NIO has reported losses for consecutive years, with the total loss amounting to 120 billion yuan.
Late to the conversation but really enjoyed these comments! I bought my manual shift hatchback Yaris in 2008. It got over 40 mph then and still does in the high 30s. It’s currently my son’s second car, driven to work daily since remote work has been banned by the administration. My husband and I still have our slightly younger Prius hybrid. This car has been cross country several times and is still going strong. We’re not doing that sort of driving much anymore but the car remains reliable and fuel-efficient.
I keep being taken aback by the huge “trucks” that are on the road here in the DC suburbs. When I’m sitting in the driver’s seat and one of these monsters is revving beside me at a stoplight, my head is about at the level of the bottom of the cab door. And it’s easy to lose track of where I’m parked if I’m between SUVs.
I’ve been wondering about safety standards because the disparity between mass of these different vehicles certainly makes any collision between two vehicles much more dangerous for the smaller one.
Here is one of my of favorite YouTube car guys, Scotty Kilmer a mechanic with over 50 years of experience, with his list of the 10 worst to best cars available in the U.S.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5XVqbEgSIE
A six year old video but I think still germane. Hint: Fiat/Chrysler [Stellantis] and GM are at the bottom and Honda and Toyota at the top.
And from Uncle Tony’s Garage, another longtime mechanic and race car builder.
How The Automakers Deliberately Over Complicate Basic Systems To Milk You Dry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU81jEQPN-E
I own a 2013 Toyota Tacoma truck and a 2008 Honda Fit. Both have a manual transmission. I use the Taco for trucky duties and the Fit for most everything else. The Fit has all buttons, knobs, and sliders on the dashboard. No searching through menus on a screen for basic functions. With proper servicing I expect that both will last me for as long as I am able to drive.
They are both very well designed and reliable as all get out. The Fit is fun to drive and if driven assertively even feels sporty. At least to this old guy. ;-}
It is snowing now here in the British Columbia mountains and time to put on the studded tires. IMNSHO they are like half way to having tire chains on!
Another YouTube car guy I like is The Car Care Nut.