Not so sure about that. Container ships are awesomely efficient and fill space very well.
A car carrier may have cheaper overhead - but it’s also carrying orders of magnitude less cargo. I checked a rates from between Japan and Australia and was seeing prices at least as high as a 40-ft. container. More like $800-$1300. Longer distances would be more expensive, though you might be able to get a volume discount.
But ships aren’t necessarily adaptable to the purpose. Autos are actually really annoying to transport as they damage easily, compact poorly, and have irregular shapes.
You may have a point re cost. I know people who work in the trade. I’ll see if I can ask someone. Where did you check rates? If you are using rates for one-off car carriage for private individuals, there would be almost no comparison to the rates that a major car exporter would be able to obtain by chartering all or most of a car carrier and filling it.
But general purpose ro-ro’s are used to carry a lot of breakbulk cargo into Australia, and have little to carry out. They could be used for cars outbound if we had a car export industry.
I don’t know offhand as I said. I’ll see if I can find out though I suspect it will be difficult to determine because it’s not a retail thing and would be determined if theoretically Australia had a significant car export industry which it doesn’t. My original point though was that given that Australia can easily import cars at a cost that is not prohibitive, the same would be true in reverse.
Unfortunately, that’s not necessarily true either. While I make no claim whatsoever to especial knowledge the economics of Australian shipping, you’d need some advantages. None are these possibilities are so likely that I’d put cash on it:
(1) Australia needs competitive rates for shipping substantial vehicle volume to a reasonably large market. This is possible, but I’d be extremely dubious that even with a discount for reverse-trip cargo you could compete with China, Japan, or Taiwan, Korea, or India. They’re all going to be closer to virtually any market you could name, including themselves obviously. And most of them have established, export-oriented (no pun intended) businesses.
(2) Australia must have a competitive advantage in making cars. Sure, possible - but the fact that it’s losing its last domestic manufacturer implies that the nation as a whole doesn’t have any special knowledge or skills, resources, or location.
(4) Australia must be able to offer extremely low prices per car. Doesn’t seem to be a possibility, as they have high resource costs, high labor costs, and the aforementioned lack of special skills or knowledge.
I’m not saying it’s an obvious lost cause, but Australia definitely isn’t the first place I’d look to establish an industrial center for cars. Now, I might well consider it a useful source for parts. It has good education and an industrial base which means it might be an excellent source of high-tech automotive components. But those are vastly easier to store and ship compared to vehicles, and require more specialized skills and knowledge, and fewer resources.
If thisquote is accurate it costs something like $800-$900 to ship a car from Japan to Australia. That’s to ship one car. No doubt the big manufacturers get a substantial discount on that. I’d guess maybe $500 a car. Once the car is landed in Australia I’d guess the transport costs from there on are the same as a domestic manufacturers would be.
Here’s a nice little article about car carriers.. I love the bit about how the loaders mark the crucial car to take off first. Oh and the 0.04% damage rate is really impressive.
They’re also right across the channel from continental Europe. ETA: It’s basically like building a car in Korea and shipping it to China. Not a big deal.
You guys seem to be fixated on the cost of transporting vehicles.
It’s incidental, maybe $200 in a $10,000 build cost.
The impact of exchange rates is more significant by a factor of 10.
It’s the assembly lines that cost the big bucks, and building them on a scale to get the through-put necessary to finance them. Parts & componentry can and is be sourced from around the globe.
“billions” is not very precise, and I can’t find a cite for over what period of time it was given, so let’s be very conservative. If “billions” means “at least 2 billion”, and it’s the cumulative subsidy over 60 years, that amounts to $5500 per employee per year that the government is paying to get those jobs.
That’s a substantial sum. There have got to be more efficient ways to increase employment.
If you’re sourcing from around the word, and selling to around the world, exchange rate is meaningless. You pay at the same rate as you sell.
But you’re right: we trade coal for cars. Because we have so much coal, anything we can buy with coal is cheaper than anything we can make. And you can’t use coal to pay for anything we make here, because we have so much coal.
This is a predictable result of recent economic policy. The only question is if the blame goes back to the previous conservative government, or only back as far as the previous labour government. I can see an argument both ways on that.
My opinion is that it would be better if the country was poorer, but had full employment. The policy that has been adopted is that we should be richer, by funding ourselves by selling coal and iron-ore overseas. To restrict sales, we would have had to restrict mining development, so that we had fewer mines, so that we had less to sell. It’s all a bit late now: we’ve had the development, we’ve got the mines, we are going to be living off the mining income for years now.
Incidently, the same thing is happening in Russia right now. They’ve had a massive boom in oil wealth, they’ve used the oil wealth to be rich, which has destroyed their industry, they’re running at the limits of their oil wealth now, and if oil prices continue to go down they are going to be in deep poo. It will be interesting/terrifying to see how that plays out.
It’s not rocket science: the same thing happened to the Spanish when they got all that new-world gold, and the Dutch after they opened the Groningen gas field.