It is far more monolithic than people realize. Folks think that only the Fox News if the world were being overly generous to Trump when he was just a candidate. The reality is that all mass market news outlets were.
I was a loooong time listener of NPR, a news outlets that most would probably consider as neutral or even left of center as you'll get from US mass media. And I totally lost respect for them hearing them cover Trump as a candidate. Even now, I can just about hear Steve Inskeep chuckling after a Trump speech and simply never taking him as a serious candidate. This was someone who was running for the highest office in the land. He would have access to our nuclear codes. And these fucken reporters, who I had previously held in high regard, were just laughing at some of the insane antics that Donald was pulling. They were letting this shit slide while they would have roasted any other candidate if they had said the same thing.
And it's not just NPR but any mass media news outlets acted the same way. That's where the majority of Americans get their news and they were all doing the same things.
I have absolutely no love for German carmakers (at least not these days), but I do want to be fair here. The shift to electric is not as simple as people make it out to be. Yes, Tesla definitely was the one who got everything going and is still years ahead of the competition, but you have to understand that even today, EVs make up a small percent of new car sales in most countries. That percent is growing each year, but these companies have billions upon billions of dollars of tooling and know-how in how to create an ICE car, and those ICE cars still dominate the industry. On top of that most EVs are not really making anyone any money yet (except Tesla). So from I can't blame carmakers in going about this very cautiously. With all the talk about EVs online, new car buyers are still not totally flocking to them in most countries. Early adopters are, sure, but average consumers are not. And that's just the reality.
Spare me the outrage from the press, when the press is the entity that helped create this mess.
All this could have been avoided some 6 years ago if these clowns in the press did their goddamn jobs. Trump had a history of corruption going back decades. Between sexual assault cases, crooked business dealings,connections to the Russians as well as connections to the mafia, and everything in between. Rarely any of that came to light or was taken as seriously as it should have been. It was one free pass after another. They gave him endless air time because they loved those sweet, sweet ad-dollars. They considered him a joke candidate and never dove deep into his past finances or connections.
...And then it happened. He was actually elected. And that's when it became serious.
Fuck every last one of these journalists who just sat back, let him slide, and just let it happened. Now they have the gall to talk about authoritarian-this, and fascism-that.
They are considerably less complicated than ICE cars. And since they've been building iPhones and Playstations and TVs for a couple of decades now, they have the expertise to manufacture electrical components which is where they have learned about the E in EVs.
They creates this mess. This is a perfect "LeopardAteMyFace" situation.
For the last 15 to 20 years car makers have been fighting over themselves to get a foothold into the domestic Chinese market. To do so, the Chinese government required these foreign carmakers partner with a local company. Those local Chinese companies then had access to intellectual property, engineering data, design, planning and a whole host of other internal manufacturing data that was decades ahead of them.
Chinese carmakers were a good 50 years behind the rest of the industrialized world at the turn of the millennium. These days, they are roughly only a few years behind, to actually beijg ahead of them in some ways. All while still having some big labor savings. These Western car makers essentially trained their replacements and they did it for that sweet, sweet short term profit, while the Chinese government was playing the long game.
So go start your own business producing these $25,000 machines if it is that easy. Go on then. Clearly you have everything figured out. Your are supposedly worth $75k a week but you're only getting paid $1k a week. Start your own company and even if you have yourself 10x the salary, you'd still have one of the most profitable companies on the planet.
If it's that easy, then why aren't you doing it?
Is it maybe because there are dozens of other people involved in building these machines? It is because the labor to build something doesn't cover the cost to design and engineer it. And test it. And logistics. And the costs for any regulator certification these machines must go through.
Loving hearing people with all the answers only to find out they really have no answers.
Grand Central Station in NYC has 750,000 visitors a day.
JFK Airport gets 150,000 visitors a day.
Mall of America gets 110,000 visitors a day.
I think you wouldn't be able to leave your house and go just about anywhere if you are so hell bent on not going anywhere heavily trafficked. If the biggest mall in America gets 110,000 visitors a day, your local mall might still be in the tens of thousands a day.
This is the equivalent of all those stupid new door handles that EVs have these days. Different and overly complicated just for the sake of being different.
No argument there.
That's where governments should have stepped in and said "woah. WTF are you guys doing?"
But in a free market economy, it is considered bad when governments tell companies what to do, usually.