It seems like automakers would much rather sell fewer premium and luxury units at higher margins than sell more units of affordable cars at lower margins. I suppose I understand why, but it does leave a large consumer segment unserved. That seems like a good opportunity for a competitor to come in and serve the unserved market, but none of the big legacy car brands seem interested and new car companies don’t have access to the capital it would take to build the manufacturing capacity necessary to mass produce affordable vehicles.
Sounds like a great opportunity for foreign car companies, from, say, China, for instance, to come in and serve that under served lower end of the market. But then, tariffs.
There’s still lots of money to be made in the used car market. Make new cars expensive, then more people will lease. Then you have a constant stream of income and you can raise the prices on your used leased cars.
Abused, falling apart, shit boxes are selling for what a decent used car was 5 years ago, and decent used cars are the price of a new car 5 years ago, yet basically no one is earning enough to afford the difference.
More auto loans are underwater than ever before, and a lot of them are for used cars. Eventually something’s gonna have to give.
There’s a reason that Obama pushed so hard to bail out the auto industry during the financial crisis. If the car market fails, it means less able bodied Americans will be able to get to their jobs due to how our entire country is structured. If the Auto industry fails, America will slowly grind to a halt.
This is coming before Christmas next year. Many researchers say the auto loan industry right now is worse than both the 2000 and 2008 crashes. So the trump 2026 crash could destroy the entire country if millions of loans are defaulted and the government is broke.
10ish years ago it was a conscious choice they made, the automakers.
Now?
They are trapped, they can only continue to exist if they have the margins from luxury car prices for basically standard cars.
The other thing that goes along with this is… horrendously shoddy construction and design, they’re literally built to break down, intentionally.
They’re not really automakers.
They’re managers of very troubled tranches of debt obligations who happen to be in charge of auto plants.
We should have let them all die back in 09, but instead we bailed them out and their management became a punch of sycophantic ‘dont rock the boat, we’re experts’ accountants, just like what happened Boeing after McDonnel Douglass bought them out, ousted their middle and upper managers, and wore the Boeing brand name like a skin suit.
They are completely incompetent, but even if they weren’t, nobody could solve the mess they are in now after decades of coddling and kickbacks from the government, collusion with regulators… rotted them from the inside out, smothered themselves, not really caring because C suite gets golden parachutes no matter what happens.
Your last sentence underscores one of my main frustrations with this system of corporate enshittification. No matter what happens, there is no such thing as real life consequences for the c suite. They do as they please and retire comfortably without a care in the world.
And the inescapable logic there means that unless people put their own credible threat of violence on the table, nothing will continue to ever change.
You don’t play a rigged poker game, you play the uh, meta-game, around and above it, otherwise, you always lose.
Capitalism does violence via complex bureaucracy, via obscuring and normalizing the system itself, by making it very complicated to try to draw some kind of moral line as to where responsibility for the acts of which actors in a system should lie.
The reality is that the system itself is violence, and that you are guilty to the degree that you partake in and profit from it.
This is why Luigi Mangione is pretty much seen as the modern day Robin Hood.
Large margins and small supply are a lot easier to deal with though, and mass production is very expensive to set up.
Honestly we need regulation in this space. Incentivize building a cheap car so the manufacturers will do it.
Honestly the gov is in a good place to do this. Spec out a vehicle and place an order for a could hundred thousand of the them for general purpose government worker transportation needs. Set a low cost target. Let them build it for normal people too.
It seems like automakers would much rather sell fewer premium and luxury units at higher margins than sell more units of affordable cars at lower margins. I suppose I understand why, but it does leave a large consumer segment unserved. That seems like a good opportunity for a competitor to come in and serve the unserved market, but none of the big legacy car brands seem interested and new car companies don’t have access to the capital it would take to build the manufacturing capacity necessary to mass produce affordable vehicles.
Sounds like a great opportunity for foreign car companies, from, say, China, for instance, to come in and serve that under served lower end of the market. But then, tariffs.
There’s still lots of money to be made in the used car market. Make new cars expensive, then more people will lease. Then you have a constant stream of income and you can raise the prices on your used leased cars.
Used cars are also entering a bubble.
Abused, falling apart, shit boxes are selling for what a decent used car was 5 years ago, and decent used cars are the price of a new car 5 years ago, yet basically no one is earning enough to afford the difference.
More auto loans are underwater than ever before, and a lot of them are for used cars. Eventually something’s gonna have to give.
There’s a reason that Obama pushed so hard to bail out the auto industry during the financial crisis. If the car market fails, it means less able bodied Americans will be able to get to their jobs due to how our entire country is structured. If the Auto industry fails, America will slowly grind to a halt.
This is coming before Christmas next year. Many researchers say the auto loan industry right now is worse than both the 2000 and 2008 crashes. So the trump 2026 crash could destroy the entire country if millions of loans are defaulted and the government is broke.
10ish years ago it was a conscious choice they made, the automakers.
Now?
They are trapped, they can only continue to exist if they have the margins from luxury car prices for basically standard cars.
The other thing that goes along with this is… horrendously shoddy construction and design, they’re literally built to break down, intentionally.
They’re not really automakers.
They’re managers of very troubled tranches of debt obligations who happen to be in charge of auto plants.
We should have let them all die back in 09, but instead we bailed them out and their management became a punch of sycophantic ‘dont rock the boat, we’re experts’ accountants, just like what happened Boeing after McDonnel Douglass bought them out, ousted their middle and upper managers, and wore the Boeing brand name like a skin suit.
They are completely incompetent, but even if they weren’t, nobody could solve the mess they are in now after decades of coddling and kickbacks from the government, collusion with regulators… rotted them from the inside out, smothered themselves, not really caring because C suite gets golden parachutes no matter what happens.
Your last sentence underscores one of my main frustrations with this system of corporate enshittification. No matter what happens, there is no such thing as real life consequences for the c suite. They do as they please and retire comfortably without a care in the world.
And the inescapable logic there means that unless people put their own credible threat of violence on the table, nothing will continue to ever change.
You don’t play a rigged poker game, you play the uh, meta-game, around and above it, otherwise, you always lose.
Capitalism does violence via complex bureaucracy, via obscuring and normalizing the system itself, by making it very complicated to try to draw some kind of moral line as to where responsibility for the acts of which actors in a system should lie.
The reality is that the system itself is violence, and that you are guilty to the degree that you partake in and profit from it.
This is why Luigi Mangione is pretty much seen as the modern day Robin Hood.
Capitalism serves capital, not the needs of the people. And the free market of competition is just a convenient myth with which to distract people.
Large margins and small supply are a lot easier to deal with though, and mass production is very expensive to set up.
Honestly we need regulation in this space. Incentivize building a cheap car so the manufacturers will do it.
Honestly the gov is in a good place to do this. Spec out a vehicle and place an order for a could hundred thousand of the them for general purpose government worker transportation needs. Set a low cost target. Let them build it for normal people too.