To clarify, the bailouts of US car companies were Chrysler around 1980 and GM and Chrysler around 2008. To help them avoid bankruptcy and the resulting loss of jobs, they received loan guarantees (like having a cosigner) and direct loans, all of which they paid back. I think the public generally has a misconception that a corporate "bailout" means they just giving them money, but it doesn't.

Note - I'm not trying to convince you not to hate corporations, and there's no need for a lecture on how evil they are, I know they are. Just clarifying that one topic.

Glad you learned something!

The program started under W and ended under Obama and I think at the end the government actually made money off the deal.

Don't confuse this with the COVID PPP loans that were given out by Trump, forgiven by Trump, and then had a lot of the records about them destroyed by Trump.

Would be great if the competition was not about stealing others' technologies

Sienna's are great! I've owned 4 of them (because I tend to total cars), and been happy with all of them. Gets decent mileage for a van, and they hold value better than just about any other mini van. Never felt safer when ramming into the back of a semi while going 70mph! The van was totaled, but me and the kids were perfectly fine.

Yeah, I'm certainly looking around, but they also tend to have spyware. I just want a simple car that goes and stops when I say, and is really easy to repair if something goes wrong. EVs should be perfect for this, but for some reason manufacturers get away with tons of nonsense on them.

Bill Gates has entered the chat.

To be fair GM sold or closed a lot of its brands and foreign subsidiaries, and paid back the loan.

I fucking hate what the US auto industry has historically and is currently doing (making constantly bigger and more expensive trucks in a time we need smaller lighter EVs), but it’s actually a bit different from the SpaceX or EV credit subsidies and more of a low interest loan.

The US has far too many dispersed rural towns for public transit to cover. Yes we need more high speed rail and light rail, but we’re gonna need personal cars because of distances, weather and employment practices for a long time still. And there’s no reason they need to be 3 ton high speed blind spots.

I'd argue that a critical piece of competition for all nations has always been stealing knowledge and technology.

Sucks to suck, our car companies suck and they absolutely should loose and be forced to fire people if they can't compete. Give me my cheap and decent Chinese cars please. I live in a capitalist country so lets act like it instead of being fucking pussys

Capitalism isn't about anything other than keeping the ruling class rich and in power. How it chooses to do that has varied throughout time. During the 20th Century the lie was that "American Style" capitalism was fair because the capitalists would promote Laissez-faire style economics ("Free Trade") out of their mouths, while actually building monopolies.

With the rise of Trump-style 'conservatives' Republicans have adopted a new strategy, Mercantilism. Mercantilism doesn't even pretend to be fair or free. The word 'Competition' doesn't even appear anywhere in that article because competition is bad for Capitalists and they see no reason to continue to lie about that. They actively oppose free trade.

Even if 'Capitalists' possessed the ability to feel shame for being hypocrites (which they certainly do not), calling them out for not following along with the principles of 'the free market' does no good since they have abandoned advocating for that a while ago.

Not the same thing?

Yeah that's a good point in a sense. Mechanically I think they're a lot less repairable (or at least a lot less at home repairable), but from the angle of needing repairs, they also need less repairs because most of what tends to fail on ICE vehicles is all the mechanical stuff attached to the engine. Even on my hybrid I repair a ton less and my mechanic said that because all the accessories are electronic since they can't be belt/chain driven because the engine is off half the time that they're ultimately more reliable in the end - it's the mechanical aspects of them that fail on ICE vehicles.

No confusion at all, I was talking about car company bailouts only, since the other person mentioned "all the bailouts US car manufacturers received". I think the Bush/Obama thing you're referring to was TARP, which was for financial institutions.

<Page Not Found> on your link. But yeah it would be great if competition were about improvements.

Good, let's do it. I'm tired of our tax money keeping shitty car companies floating.

After 25 years of other brands I finally went Honda and I can't believe how happy I am with it. I never have problems.

there. too bad Musk lost interest after he completed SEX + Cyber truck

Over the years I think Honda and Toyota are the two brands I most commonly see an old guy managing to keep running well for 30+ years and hyper focused on wanting to break 500k miles or dreaming of hitting 1 million miles someday

Got a subaru as my first non-american car. The old CVT torque converter is wearing out after 120k miles, but she survived being lightly t-boned with just a door repair