could have banned the practice, demanded literal hardwire controls around it, etc. ensured that the customer cannot be pressured into enabling it all (so the vendor can't just disable unrelated functionality).

heaven forbid, demand selling infotainment-less configurations, or agreeing on a communication standard for real tablets and smartphones to communicate through.

instead, no, it's the chinese cars that should go.

We need to let them in at a limited capacity and our domestic companies need to feel the heat.

The geopolitical risks are real. Stronger foreign companies can kill local ones if there's no stopgap or means for local companies to catch up. The cars are microphones for politically exposed persons (which most of you are not). If there was ever a hot war, these cars can turn into remote bombs and take out key infrastructure.

But in the here and now, we need Ford and friends to grow up and face real evolutionary pressures.

American consumers like big SUVs. But they also want cheap and modern, and once they see what else the market has to offer, they'll use choice to force the hands of American auto.

Do you want your war munition manufacturers to say "we'd have better short term bonuses if we didn't manufacture what you need but instead just kept manufacturing our old stuff with no regard for the nations future"?

the real argument is efficiency, US cannot match efficiency and scale. Thats the root cause.

As a side note, counterintuitively BYD has a lot more workers per car vs a lot of their competitors, but that's because of their extreme vertical integration where most are assembling upstream parts.

in the US auto OEMs are mainly putting parts together, made by different suppliers like ZF, Bosch, Lemforder etc etc. Its assembly work and it split across hundreds of legacy car component suppliers

There's also been plenty of reporting of 'slave like conditions' at Tesla, GM etc.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fact-sheet-safegua...

For all the talk about data and technology sovereignty in Europe, you would think they would take that more seriously too. Instead Europe is flooded with underpriced Chinese cars that they have no control over.

Very well. Not only BYD but also other brands like GWM and Geely.

> What kind of vehicles are people replacing with BYDs?

Combustion cars with the same price, they are not replacing other electrical vehicles because the Chinese brands are way cheaper yet they are good cars.

> I always assumed Brazilians drove mostly "legacy" VW or Nissans

Nowadays we have many models from different brands.

In the past the fleet was basically VW, Ford, Chevrolet and Fiat. In the late 90s and early 2000s the Japanesne (Honda, Toyota and Nissan) and French (Renault, Citroën, Peugeot) became popular, and then Hyundai also became a success here. Recently, the Chinese brands are becoming more popular, especially Chery and the ones that I mentioned before.

> including the ID.4

But I never saw it here, even though VW is a very popular brand here.

I'd say around 60% of the Ubers I get are BYDs and I'm glad when it's one because that means it's a newer car and it's very comfortable.