Growing up on the Gulf Coast, it wasn’t initially obvious to me that Southern rap didn’t get the respect it deserved. In retrospect, this is hilarious given that a large portion of said music is devoted to complaining about that lack of recognition. Although my bias is towards music from my hometown of Houston, there was a long period where New Orleans was the epicenter of non NY/LA hip hop.
During the late ’90s and early ’00s, Louisiana produced two incredible music machines: No Limit and Cash Money. The former was prolific, releasing a hit record seemingly every week, while the latter managed to sign blockbuster acts before anyone else noticed. The difference between the two was not so much musical as it was organizational. No Limit, as helmed by Master P, had a better plan and a better deal, which allowed the company to earn let’s-get-a-gold-plated-tank money, whereas Cash Money’s story ended with angst and infighting.
I say all of this in The Morning Dump to point out that, for all the issues Chinese automakers have, they seem to have the upper hand in the trade war. This is clear in the United Kingdom, where it sounds like Chinese automakers will be utilizing excess capacity from JLR in order to build cars. This is the UK joining Canada in warming up to China.
Eventually, of course, the tilt towards American production might make all of this trade war business worthwhile. For the moment, being a strong ally of the United States is costing our Japanese and South Korean allies a lot of money. China’s automotive surge has been bad for Tesla, as well, which reported better-than-expected numbers in Q4, but is still sitting on a German plant it currently doesn’t need, especially with its Chinese operations likely in a better position to serve Canada and other markets.
The Federal Reserve declined to cut interest rates, which is yet another reason to think that the cost of buying a car might not drop much this year if you’re having to finance.
Jaguar Could Reportedly Build Cherys In The UK
Looking merely at the roster of artists, you might assume that Cash Money was the more successful New Orleans record label. With Birdman, Lil Wayne, and Juvenile, you’ve already got a starting lineup that screams 2025 Dodgers, and that’s before signing Drake and Nicki Minaj (cringe).
That isn’t to disrespect Master P, post-Death Row Snoop Dogg, or Mystikal (I would never), but they don’t quite have the level of household names Cash Money had in its prime. No Limit, though, was the much more successful company. How? There’s a whole podcast on this if you’re interested, but the short version is that Master P played the long game.
To be successful as an artist, you need to own your music. This is why Taylor Swift made copies of her own albums, and why so many artists complain about having hits and still being indebted to the record companies. Master P didn’t have this problem. Famously, he worked out a distribution deal with Priority Records to not only own his masters (the original recordings), but also to get at least 80% of sales.
This meant that No Limit’s founder, Master P, could be earning way more per record sold than Cash Money or, frankly, almost anyone else making popular music. This was also timed to the period before streaming took over. As Master P later said:
If you can’t work that good of a deal, he advises, “At least get a piece of the piece,” he told Yahoo Finance’s Jen Rogers, in an interview for Yahoo Finance’s My Three Cents . “It has to start with owning property, owning your business.”
[…]
“I tell people, if you get in a business, you need to know everything about your business,” he explained. “You need to know what the janitor is doing. You need to know what the guy who’s cooking the burgers is doing … You need to know what the mail room is doing. You need to know everything about your business to be successful.”
At the time, the way No Limit operated seemed absolutely bonkers. The label was constantly churning out artists, and if someone was even remotely popular, they’d have that artist appear on everyone else’s record. Snoop Dogg’s first record with No Limit has Mystikal, Silkk the Shocker, Soulja Slim, Mia X, and Master P a couple of times. On Mystikal’s album, you get Snoop, Silkk again, Master P again, and on and on. If you’re only netting out, say, 10% from your music, you have to make sure anything you do is a huge hit. If you’re making 90%, you might as well produce as much music as you possibly can, and it doesn’t even need to be a huge hit to be that monetarily successful.
In many ways, China’s approach to the auto industry has been more like the No Limit approach. From the outside, the huge number of companies, the numerous failed startups, and the heavy reliance on state financing/support make it seem like a terrible way to operate. There’s no invisible hand of the market here; there’s just a heavy hand that creates overcapacity and encourages automakers to cheat to sell cars.
I’ve long been concerned that, in the absence of exports and access to other markets, Chinese automakers are in trouble. They’ve built enough capacity to easily serve the local market and have, slowly, elbowed out Japanese, American, and German automakers. But there’s not a lot of juice left to squeeze there. China’s automotive industrial policy is built on exports, and a popular United States that leads the world to resist those exports has long been a check against China.
No more. Canada has said that, hey, if you’re going to keep taking away our local production, then we’re going to start letting in Chinese-built cars. British consumers love Chinese cars, and it no longer makes sense for the UK to resist them, given that car production in the UK has plummeted to a 70-year low. That’s right, the UK now makes fewer cars than it did when it was still recovering from being bombed by the Germans.
For a Chinese company, the ideal world would be only exporting cars to the UK, given that it has neither supply nor labor shortages. For the UK, the ideal would be to have only local production. According to Auto Express, something in between might happen:
Prime Minister Keir Starmer is currently on a visit to Beijing in order to bolster trading relations between the UK and China. One of the key subjects of official discussions will be the UK and Chinese car industries, with a deal between JLR and Chery on the cards, which could see the latter building its cars on British soil.
A deal between JLR and Chery is not a new thing; the two automotive giants formed Chery Jaguar Land Rover in 2012 in order to build some JLR models on Chinese soil. Despite a decrease in sales in 2025, China remains JLR’s second-largest market outside the U.S, with models such as the forthcoming electric Freelander to be produced exclusively for Chinese buyers.
However, this latest deal could see Chery take advantage of spare capacity at JLR’s manufacturing plants; maximising productivity in this way should help protect jobs and rake in extra revenue for JLR after a disastrous year in 2025 as a result of the cyber attack, which saw production shut down for more than five weeks.
This is net good for the Chinese auto industry as those vehicles will likely still rely on much of that country’s automotive supply chain. The idea of a Chinese automaker using a JLR plant to build Chinese vehicles (probably not the Defender-like Chery above), sounds unlikely even a few years ago, but now it makes perfect sense.
Even if it doesn’t end up happening, this just goes to show that the current trade war is a boon for China, which gets to suddenly look like a more reasonable trading partner in the face of pressure from the United States. Overall, the “reindustrialization” of this country might be worth all the disruption, though it comes with costs when it’s done this confrontationally.
Hyundai And Kia Take A Huge Tariff Hit
Hyundai and its Kia brand are, like Toyota, companies that build many of their most popular models in the United States. They also import a lot of cars, both because it makes economic sense and because they’re not American-owned companies.
Until they make all products in the United States, however, there’s going to be a tariff cost. A high one, as Bloomberg reports:
Operating profit was 1.7 trillion won ($1.2 billion) for the three months ended Dec. 31, down about 40% from a year earlier and the lowest since 2022. The results missed analyst estimates for 2.7 trillion won ($1.9 billion) and came despite revenue of 46.8 trillion won ($32 billion), a record for the fourth quarter.
Hyundai said tariffs cost it about 4.1 trillion won ($2.8 billion) last year, including 1.5 trillion won ($1 billon) in the fourth quarter alone. Despite the duties, wholesale deliveries in the United States topped 1 million for the first time, buoyed by strong hybrid and sport utility vehicle sales.
The company said it was able to offset about 60% of the tariff impact, though it didn’t provide details on the measures
Bigger sales with less profit is not a recipe for success, and even offsetting 60% of the impact of tariffs means that there’s now a large premium that has to be paid by someone. That someone will eventually be the consumer, although prices haven’t jumped dramatically yet.
South Korean automakers don’t have much of a choice in terms of how it approaches this trade war, as it’s not likely they’ll be able to offset their reliance on the American market with China or Europe.
What’s Tesla Going To Do With Its German Gigafactory?
I don’t want to only write about Tesla when the company does bad things, so it’s worth mentioning right away that my old friend Alex Roy set a zero-intervention Cannonball Run Record from LA-to-NY in a Model S, even with all the crazy weather. Also, the company did better than expected in Q4, even if overall revenue was down.
All that’s well and good, but with Tesla moving away from traditional passenger cars in order to build robots and Cybercabs, what good is Tesla’s Gigafactory in Berlin? Certainly not to build cars for Europe because, if the first month of Q1 is any guide, Europeans don’t want Teslas.
And this is where China comes in again, because it’s probably cheaper to build Model Ys for Canada in China than it is in Europe, which means Canada opening the door to more Chinese-built cars makes for one fewer market for Giga Berlin.
As Manager Magazin notes, the Germans sense this is an issue, and the answer seems to be battery production:
Until now, the battery cells have been shipped to Germany from the sister plant in Austin, Texas. In Grünheide, they are then assembled into battery packs. The first battery cells are expected to roll off the production line in Grünheide soon.
Musk had already announced the plan in 2020, promising the “world’s largest battery factory” – with a capacity of up to 250 gigawatt-hours. Now, the figure being discussed is only 8.6 gigawatt-hours. This is theoretically enough for around 130,000 electric cars, which is less than half the capacity of the Grünheide plant.
The math doesn’t math for me.
Fed Keeps Rates Steady
I’m almost at 2,000 words, which means there’s no way I’m going to do a bit about Fed Independence. Go somewhere else for that. All I care about right now is that cars are expensive, and that so long as rates stay high, car financing is unlikely to get that much cheaper.
As investors expected — and in defiance of President Donald Trump’s wishes — the Federal Open Market Committee left its federal funds rate target range unchanged at 3.5 to 3.75 percent Jan. 28 after a quarter-point cut Dec. 10. Changes to the central bank’s benchmark rate can have a ripple effect on the interest rates lenders offer auto buyers.
The Fed first began to reduce the benchmark rate in September 2024 after leaving the federal funds rate target for more than a year at the postpandemic high of 5.25 to 5.5 percent to combat inflation. The Fed slashed a full point out of the rate by the end of 2024, and it made three 0.25-point cuts in 2025.
But vehicle payments have continued to climb.
Rates aren’t going to come down until inflation comes down, but keeping things expensive forever doesn’t necessarily help lower costs.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
Master P turned “Make ‘Em Say Uhh” into a company that reportedly made him a quarter of a billion dollars. Much respect.
The Big Question
Which carmakers are which record labels? Or, if you don’t know record labels, which automakers are which bands? Who is the Coldplay of automakers?
Photo: No Limit Records
Interest rates are not high by historical standards.
“All I care about right now is that cars are expensive”
But are they really any more than they were in the glorious past?
My 23′ Miata cost less than the original after accounting for inflation.
Friend dude bought a new F250 gasser. Ran his sticker through the inflation calculator and it was the same as my old man’s 92′ F250.
I lived in the glorious past of the workers paradise when cars were cheap, by this Blogs assertion, and I rolled in a 81′ Toyota pickup. $8100 out the door.
That’s a touch over $29k.
A new one that’s far better equipped but is the base starts at $32.
What’s the fuss?
The main problem is wages have not kept pace with inflation.
I think it’s more impactful that we outsourced so many jobs that had filled in the gap between entry-level low-skill jobs (e.g. Fast food) and jobs that require larger amounts of experience and even certifications. The factories and mines closed, and there weren’t jobs to replace them.
Look at all the folks doing jobs that are meant to be gigs but doing them full-time (and even overlapping). They have the skill to essentially self-manage, and the financial ability to have a vehicle, but they drive/deliver for AmaDoorHubCartMartLyberMates. They could make more consistent money working for UPS/FedEx/USPS or a taxi company and likely get benefits. Still not a factory job or other intermediate-level job let alone a career, but it seemingly pays their bills (though the vehicular toll is often overlooked).
I was a lead fabricator/shop foreman for a high end architectural metal shop in the San Francisco bay area for decades. If I look at my wages starting in the late 1980s when I moved into management, till I retired my wages were flat, and even declined when adjusted for inflation over the last decade. I worked for some of wealthiest people in the country on homes where they spent more on a single bathroom than I spent on my house. I feel lucky I’ve been able to retire. After my last back surgery my doctor told me my days of being a “beast of burden” (his words) were over. Anyway, the people who actually do the work in this country aren’t getting paid enough. That’s my opinion.
I would imagine much of the fuss comes from the multitudes who have not experienced wage increases that must accompany inflation to keep things affordable. The thinning middle class is a festering rot that could bring everything down.
Now compare with the median income or the mean of the middle quintile. A few multi-billionaires are skewing everything, making things look a lot better than they are.
Mom bought a new Honda Accord that started at $9,999 in 1982 when median household income was a bit over $23k. That was 42% of income yet came with a carb, drum brakes in back, and manual everything. Median income in 2024 was over $80k and a new base Civic which is significantly bigger and better starts at $25k, or only 31% of income. Cars are far better and far cheaper today than they were back then and it’s not even close.
“Which carmakers are which record labels?”
Hard to say, but it sure seems like a lot of them are getting their naming ideas from hip hop artists.
Mcpura feat. bZ4x
“However, this latest deal could see Chery take advantage of spare capacity at JLR’s manufacturing plants;”
Yeah… the ‘Jaguar’ part of JLR has A LOT of spare capacity given how their production of new cars went to zero… and it doesn’t look like it will be going up much any time soon given the model their ‘future’ is supposed to be based on (Ironically called the 00… or zero zero… which is like what their new car sales dropped to) looks like it’s gonna be a complete flop.
It’s too busy doing jerk-off motions every time someone from the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, or the Chamber of Commerce misquotes Adam Smith
In the most 2000’s way possible, Scion was a record label. Literally had a division called Scion A/V. Every car maker today would clumsily trip over the “hello, fellow youths” alarm trying to do what Scion did. Especially Toyota.
No-Limit was in the streets.
They shot Soulja Slim on the front lawn of the house he bought for his mother, and robbed him while he was laying there dead on her walkway. I believe this was in the broad daylight.
C-Murder, shot and killed a teenager at the club.
Master-P was running with some people. Now he’s a pastor and wants to coach your kid in basketball while they listen to Lil Romeo.
At least Birdman and Wayne stopped that shit once they made some money.
*Matt, after Master P, lil Wayne’s “Ice Cream Paint Job” from his No Ceilings mixtape is a real classic and the title makes it slightly car related.
No, it won’t, and you know damn well it won’t. This isn’t balanced reporting, it’s normalizing an insane and self-destructive policy by an insane and self-destructive regime.
Is that harsh? Maybe. I’m not in a good headspace to judge, given that people in my state are literally fighting for their lives against these scumbags. But I can pretty confidently say that “maybe the fascists have a point” bullshit like this is not helping.
I think its to keep from fully alienating MAGA readership?
But I agree it comes across pretty forced.
Is it possible the efforts to reintroduce industrial jobs to the U.S. might be successful? Certainly, and many think such jobs are necessary to fill in the hollowed-out upper-lower and lower-middle classes’ work opportunities. These classes’ members can’t all work for fast food companies and such, after all.
If anything we should hope an overall effort to strengthen the U.S. economy and workforce is successful, and that it provides enough internal balance that we can improve our standing on the global stage.
Is the way the current administration is going about it the best? Probably not. But something effective needed/needs to be done; what alternative methods would you propose? Expand and extend unemployment benefits ad infinitum? Create a government bureau just for these same fellow citizens to “push paper”? Expatriatize and deport them en masse? Euthanize all the unemployed and underemployed so then there’s no job deficit? Start a war and force all those selfsame members to joined the armed forces?
Using inflammatory and inaccurate language doesn’t really help your argument, either, and is counterproductive to proving your point.
Here’s the thing: The tariffs aren’t about bringing back American manufacturing any more than ICE is in Minneapolis because of illegal immigrants. It’s all an attempt to strongarm people who disagree with this administration into compliance.
Even discussing it as a purely economic policy is giving it more credit than it deserves, so I won’t.
Funny that Matt brought up Master P. I actually saw him performing in a stadium once. But he wasn’t singing… he was playing basketball for the now-defunct team the Fort Wayne Fury of the since disbanded CBA league.
He tried out for the Hornets and actually was being considered. A lot of guys in hip-hop had a chance in sports. As with a lot of things, if someone is talented at one thing, they usually are in others as well.
Alice in Chains is Nissan. I mean they literally have a song called Man in a Box.
This is Kinja era Jalopnik funny. Thank you for the chuckle.
Any Nissan buyer is the dog that gets beat.
Is heroin the Jatco Xtronic CVT?
That would explain a lot, actually.
“Eventually, of course, the tilt towards American production might make all of this trade war business worthwhile.”
Well, no, not even a sarcastic ‘might’. It categorically won’t. The benefits of trade are imports (and the competition forcing domestic products to improve), not exports. We’ve only known this for about 300 years at this point, so we shouldn’t expect Trump fans to have caught up with such hypermodern thinking.
China playing the long game, and the long game is communist utopia, but it has to use capitalism to get there. Overcapacity and oversupply is bad for capitalist economics, because profits and subsequently wages go to zero. Oversupply is kind of the goal for building the inevitable communist utopia, everything is automated, human labor is no longer necessary, working is optional. Robot factories provide everyone a basic house, basic clothes, basic food, and basic healthcare. You work if you want more than that, and you kind of are just doing it for fun.
I’m sorry, I’m a software engineer who got laid off twice in the last three years. I have too much time time on my hands and I’ve been thinking too much about the robot apocalypse. You guys are the closest thing I have for friends these days, because I grew up isolated in the suburbs and have on idea how to properly be social except to post stupid stuff on the internet. Should I stop? I should stop. I should go outside.
I think you should get a dog. No joke.
I am not convinced that China wants to build a communist utopia but capitalism is fucking broken. Without a social component, it just eats itself. The US is the prime example.
Capitalism isn’t broken. The US is uncivilised, but that’s an unrelated problem.
Capitalism, free markets, and so on, are parts of a system for generating wealth and developing new things people want – in fact, the only system that we’ve found which does so. What we do with that wealth has nothing to do with how it’s generated. Civilised countries share it around, to some extent.
Pure capitalism HATES free markets. Capitalism can only exist with regulations and it has to have an element of socialism, otherwise the people at the top end up with all the money every time. So sorry, pure capitalism is broken.
A reminder to chillax.
That’s… Not even wrong. You don’t understand the meaning of any of the words you’re using – and hopefully therefore also don’t understand that the words you’re using end up with rebuilding Auschwitz, and are just a useful idiot rather than a committed fuhrer-worshipper.
See, this is why we can’t have nice things.
Look, I’m just a guy who reads stuff on the internet. I’m going to assume you are to otherwise you won’t be posting armchair philosophy on a car blog, you’d be writing papers and advising leaders of the world. Now you seem like a person who is, at the very least, interested in this stuff. From what I can tell you are reciting a lot of Neo-libereal economic theory and that’s okay.
Now I don’t know you, and I don’t know how much of this stuff you’ve studied, but I hope you follow your curiosity and dig deeper into where Neo-liberal theory came from, why was it created, what was it a reaction to. The same with Communism that came before it, and Capitalism before that, and Mercantilism before that. These ideas were all reactions to what came before them. They all started out as great ideas, people tried them and then after a generation or so the next generation saw the results, and started thinking about what came next. What worked, what didn’t work, and how can we make things better given improvements in technology, our understanding of economics, our understanding of the world, and our understanding of the human condition. Maybe you already know about all this stuff. Again, I don’t know you.
We’ve been implementing Neo-liberalism for about a generation now, basically Trump and Biden’s generation. We are witnessing the results. It’s time to start thinking about what comes next. I’ve seen some movement in the ether, stuff about caring for one another before all else. There might be an economic system and political party in that. Maybe it will be resilient to the coming robot apocalypse.
Huh, you sound like a nut case. Connecting capitalism/socialism to Auschwitz is a sad pathetic thing. Don’t criticize without extrapolating what you actually mean. You end up sounding like a know it all moron instead.
This is what pisses me off the most in the capitalism v. socialism debate. A well functioning economy has to be based on a carefully tuned,complex, and ever-changing mix of both capitalist and socialist policies (and personally, right now I think the pendulum has swung a bit too far in favor of capitalism). But we often have two sides ever-screaming that their form of absolutism is the right absolutism.
It’s like arguing food is more important than water, or water is more important than food. Making either argument is a fool’s errand.
And back to cars, I know they’re stupid, under-powered, and over-valued…but I really want a Bandit Edition Trans Am. Maybe a Chinese manufactured EV platform/swap could solve some of the performance issues.
That’s just dumb both-siderism BS.
Being able to afford healthcare and decent education are just the common-sense standard in a non-banana-republic in the 21st century, and not a communist take-over, regardless of what FoxNews and Tucker Carlson are telling you every day.
Also not really a utopia, since somehow the rest of the world has figured out how to do it for the better part of a century now.
Yes, we do need to pay taxes in order for that to happen, but we do that anyway, although it’s just the poors atm, which is partly the problem.
and thus my comment that the pendulum has swung too far in favor of capitalism. I 100% agree that healthcare should be a universal right. same goes for education, and not just through high school. again, no argument from me.
What we need is more of a sphere than a bipartisan “us versus them” mentality. A la carte politics, and more equally-strong parties that better represent the constituents and socioeconomic theories so we do not overcommit (or undercommit) to one particular school. There’s souch division in the existing main parties anyway, we’d all be better off if they earnestly split and started their own parties. Let there be more representation for centrist moderates (which is where much of the majority is anyway), and let the extremes continue to offer their own takes to keep fresh (or at least different) ideas in the cultural zeitgeist.
Yeah it is honestly not that complicated but the sad thing is we as humans are so tribalistic. So idiots end up acting like one way is the only way when things are not black and white. It is always a shade of grey.
Outside? In January?!
Mech engineer who has been laid off twice in his career and also done major international relocations twice in his adult life. It’s not so much that I don’t know how to be social, it’s that I don’t have anyone to be social with, nor have much time to do it thanks to work and kids.
Dear friend,
Hope you are feeling better.
Perhaps it may be good idea to get some coffee from outside and take some walk
Coldplay of automakers? VW. They used to glom onto the styles of much fancier brands, then established a huge following on their own and developed an identity…then they turned to guest celebrities and electronics and lost the plot. Am I doing this right? (full disclosure: coldplay fan, albums 1-4 and a couple others)
The record company analogies lose me quickly since so many of them are doing multiple genres and demographics at the same time.
Interscope: Dodge.
Sony: Honda
BMG: Jeep
Death Row (Suge Knight Era): Nissan (Carlos Ghosn Era)
Sub Pop: Morgan? Your weird uncle making a Geo Metro El Camino?
As a VW owner, ouch
As a 3-time VW owner who has listened to thousands of hours of Coldplay in the cars, it’s like playfully punching yourself in the face.
Stax: Lincoln Mk III
The Coldplay of automakers??? Jesus Matt, I don’t think I dislike an automaker enough to make that comparison, I can’t even get Tesla to work for that.
I thought we were pro-car here at The Autopian, lol.
(sort of a joke, not actually looking to argue about this, Coldplay is almost aggressively inoffensive, and is probably what Toyota aims to be)
“ChatGPT, eliminate all references to the music industry of this article, so that it is readable.”
“I can’t do that, Dave”
“Dammit, HAL, …”
“ChatGPT, eliminate all references to the automotive industry in this article so that Joke #119! can learn more about the music industry.”
I have sat through every episode of ‘Cocaine and Rhinestones’, and I got a crash course on quite a bit about the music industry, and I could follow it- when it’s artists who I know and understand the references. If you aren’t into rap, as I am not, those portions of this article are difficult to follow. Names, dates, and events lack the relevance and context that is needed. It’s like sports- if you don’t have a player or team you follow, it’s all gibberish and impossible to understand or *want* to understand.
That said, I appreciate the different approach to explaining things in the automotive market, even if it didn’t land with me.
I have never even heard of 95% of the names mentioned.
I’ve been living in Chicago for half a decade, and a friend said something about Kanye West’s neighborhood. When I asked who she is, my buddy couldn’t stop laughing for a while.
Given that Tesla’s sales have cratered here in Canada, and the Chinese EV agreement states that roughly half of the allotted 49,000 vehicles have to cost below $33k BeaverBucks ($24.5k EagleDollars)…
…I seriously doubt Tesla is going to be much of the imported vehicles. BYD will probably be the main draw. There’s already a BYD Bus plant here.
It’s a fair point, but we’re still talking about 20k units per year for Tesla in Canada, which is not nothing. That would eat up a lot of the 24,500.
That’s assuming they’re allowed to ship those units. I don’t think it’s a “first past the post” system.
And again, that was 2025. Given the sentiment of things up here, folks aren’t looking to buy an American brand assembled in China. They want a Chinese brand to diversify.
I think we focus a lot on BYD and other Chinese companies that could enter the market, but perhaps the bigger beneficiary is those already in the market. JLR was mentioned, but Volvo stands to get a big benefit picking up sales north of the border while they are getting crushed on their EVs here to the south.
I care so little about the Manufacturers fighting for the “above $33k” slice. I care FAR more about the ones looking to go below that line.
Fair point. I was excited at the prospect of the EX30 for my wife – tariffs basically took it off the market. And I’ve always respected that Volvo still does Volvo things despite their new corporate overlords.
But opening up lower cost options in the market is exciting. Maybe they’ll sell them to you guys for real cheap to piss off the Americans.
I believe the BYD plant has already come and gone – the only reference I’ve found to is one in Newmarket, ON, where BYD’s got their logos on the building as of 2020, but they’re gone and up for lease by 2024.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/bGaN4NfzxavNjfR39
Fun fact – that’s around the corner from Stellar Dr and Pony Dr, which are named for the respective Hyundais (as Hyundai had a small parts factory in Newmarket for a few years in the 80’s and 90’s).
Too bad we never got the Pony and Stellar down here 🙁
Unsurprising. The EV Transit bus market had a lot of losers in the north American market in general.
That may change over time.
The BYD bus plant in Canada opened in 2019 and closed by 2022 after producing only 10 buses. Globe and Mail has a great article on the history of the plant.
The Chinese will sell every car they can bring in. and we’ll be demanding more. We Canadians are cheap buggers who like small cars. We bought Hyundai Ponys, Ladas, Yugos and other junk because of the price. And we hate Tesla. GM sold more electrics here in 2025 than Tesla.
The Canadian and US electric car markets are severely distorted compared to the rest of the world, with the cheapest current technology cars, the Leaf and Bolt, just appearing now and costing over C$40,000. Even the Europeans make cheaper electric cars than that, and they are arguably better. A compact ICE car can still be sold for little more than C$25,000. Other than battery, electric cars are cheaper and simpler to manufacture. With the lower cost of LFP batteries, there is no justification for the price difference.
Who are we trying to protect from the Chinese? Ford is currently producing zero cars in Canada. Stellantis has reneged on their production agreements for Brampton. GM just announced layoffs in Oshawa this week. Hyundai/Kia sold just under 250,000 cars here last year with zero Canadian production. Toyota and Honda produce RAV4 and CR-V here, and those will continue to sell like hotcakes.
There are considerably more than 10 BYD electric buses currently in North America.
Yes, but they were built at their California plant.
I’d like to see, once some dust has cleared on using tariffs & threats of invasion as a hammer, how this affects exports long-term.
I know production has shifted heavily from export in many industries, but I don’t have a macro view.
I suspect, just as you wrote above, China looks both more reasonable but, most importantly, “reliable” – that they will see a better long-term outlook.
Cadillac is Fleetwood Mac, because for some reason both got popular to young people. They also share names lol.
Rolls-Royce is Pink Floyd. British and Comfortably Numb.
…Coasting along on the reputation they established over fifty years ago.
Ford works better for Pink Floyd. Innovative early on, then the Jew-hate reared its ugly head.
But they love to drive in their Jag-yoo-are
The southern hip hop/chinese car analogy is stellar. Matt needs a raise.
For a while Toyota was everywhere making decent things and I just did not care. Now they’re closer to firing on all cylinders and being relevant. Kinda like the Dropkick Murphy’s (the apostrophe is their grammatical mistake, not mine)? I was over (boston) irish punk until they started acting, well, punk lately. Warms my heart.
Might be a stretch, but the Bad Boy/Tesla comparison was already taken.
Many people are saying this.
That you need a raise?
Good people. Amazing people. Just the other day a man came up to Matt, he said “Sir, I can’t believe the terrific job you’re doing. Best auto journalist since Csaba Csere” at least I think that’s what he said but maybe he said “Chubby Checker” you know The Twist, everybody let’s twist? Some of the finest music ever made.
Eleventy (over 20 anyway) years ago I was part of a forum for one make/model of motorcycle. I think it was the FZR600, though it could have been the VTR1000F. I was so stoked when Csaba was in there looking for the same answers I was. It both made me feel cool and him feel human.
I’ve heard that every single Matt on staff has gotten behind the proposal to give you a raise.
Analogies work when people understand the “base” side of the analogy, so they can apply what they know about a known thing to infer something about the unknown thing.
I don’t know anything about hip hop/rap, nor do I care. The first 500 words of the article were gibberish to me. He might as well have been talking about French Renaissance writers (in French) for all I got out of it.
But if it meant something to you, great. Apparently he did it well, even if it left me with zero comprehension of whatever the hell it was he was trying to explain.
I thought it was great, and I would not have been able to tell you about the differences in how the two record labels were run. I learned more about that through the car analogy. The car bit is covered a lot here and further explained topics covered in the past.
Tesla might be Bad Boy Records. The guy at the top wants to make everything about him, even though he is not the talent of the operation. Into a bunch of shady stuff. Some suspicious deaths around the organization. Screwing over the talent/staff to enrich the guy on top.
I don’t know enough about most labels to make other comparisons. I don’t even know which company would be Death Row.
I like this.
“I don’t even know which company would be Death Row”
Jaguar.
What’s Kanye’s label called?
Oh, that’s another GOOD comparison (his label is called G.O.O.D. Music, apparently meaning “Getting Out Our Dreams”).
“We make EVs, what are we going to do with all this lubricant?”
I understood maybe 2% of the musical references today, so turning the question into one I can actually answer.
The Blink-182 of automakers is Ram. Impossibly cool to insiders while simultaneously loud, obnoxious, and rude (perhaps the fault of drivers/owners rather than the automaker) to outsiders. Projects a fiercely independent counterculture image while maintaining tremendous popularity especially at their height.
Yes, and you could say that Ram gets… all of the small things right.
I was getting ready to compliment you on an exceptional TMD today but that groaner killed it.
My friends liked Dude Ranch ok enough, but after that album we thought they were sell-outs making mall punk. To be fair we all had our heads far enough up our own rears to block out all sense and daylight…but my punk friends never thought they were cool when they were cool.
The only Blink song I ever truly liked was Dammit/Growing Up, right before they exploded. It was still pop punk, but it was a little more genuine and less “cheesy” than their later stuff, which almost felt like a parody of punk.
I was going to say Kid Rock was Ram, but maybe I’m reading too much into their target demographics. I’m on board with the Blink logic.
I think the Blink182 logic is sound, but Kid Rock feels truer to me.
Is it really inadvertently though? Seems like everything we are doing is pushing other countries towards China. Makes one wonder if there’s a reason beyond sheer incompetence.
Every day I think more and more the sheer incompetence is just a facade. Putting barely functional humans in forward facing cabinet rolls is generous. They couldn’t be competent if they wanted to.
Meanwhile there’s a whole lot of money to be made during the economic downward spiral if you know it’s coming.
I refuse to believe that they know what they are doing. We have seen this same nationalist bullshit over and over. There is nothing to lead me to believe that this is some 3d chess move.
It’s not, and it’s both. It’s do this crap over here, keep people’s attention on it, and do this over here, amassing more money and power.
Tariffs and heavy protectionism is the one thing Trump hasn’t ever really wavered on. He was calling for it publicly back when he was still a registered and active Democrat. There might be in other areas, but there’s no hidden strategy here.
I don’t think Master P gets enough credit, so I approve this message.
Calliope!!
Toyota, without a doubt. Some absolute classics and incredible vehicles in their history, but a very large percentage of their output has been acceptable vehicles that don’t have any particularly strong appeal, but are inoffensive and permeate every street corner.
They make a lot of white vehicles, so, yeah.
And all cars/songs look/sound the same.
“a very large percentage of their output has been acceptable vehicles that don’t have any particularly strong appeal, but are inoffensive”
Coldplay are not inoffensive! That awful dreck tends to make people want to smash speakers when played in public.
I’d say that Toyota is more like The Carpenters! 😉