I can’t seem to buy much of anything that’s not made in China these days. I was wondering why the Chinese haven’t developed a car and built it using their cheap labor and exported to the USA? It seems natural that they would.
humm. There are already to many car manufactures, and a lot of factory over capacity worldwide. I bet it’s not long before many parts factories move to china.
I generally think that the quality of chinese made goods is low, with the exception of some electronics. Actually I think the quality of the electronics are low also, but since computer things are throw away items, it makes them a good buy.
I worked for a company that made transformers primarily for military and aerospace applications. For some of our commercial parts, however, we outsourced work to various place, including China and Mexico. One particular part was moved to a company in mexico, from China, because the cost would be less. When that happened we went from less than a 1% failure rate to over 20%, due to scratched SNE magnet wire caused by improper handling. We moved them back to China.
Jeep Cherokees are made in China, and several other car makers have operations in China as well. China has been wrestling with the issue of cars for some time now. They really don’t know what to do with them. There’s over 1 billion Chinese, if they all got cars, can you imagine the air pollution problems? The Chinese have considered using propane to power their cars to solve this problem. Rumor has it, that GM sold China the tools and dies used for building the Chevette, so perhaps you might see a Chinese branded car sold in the US soon.
Indonesia has at least oneindigenous car maker, but none of their cars have made it to the States.
oh oh oh oh me me me. I know this one. Actually, several of my clients are Western or Japanese automakers and I just spent 4 hours yesterday and 2 hours today at Shanghai Volkswagen, which is the market leader.
The main problem is one of scale and price. China produced approximately 600,000 passenger cars in 2002. Depending on what you define as passenger. I can’t tell you the breakdown of a Buick Regal, VW Passat but the Audi A6 built 30,000 units in China in 2002. So, the economy of scale thing really isn’t there.
The amount of localization of parts is still only 70-80%, so they have to import expensive parts for that other non-localized content. That dirves up costs.
Cars produced in China cost at least 25% more than comparable models in the US. Also, the China models are probably 12-24 months behind in terms of generation.
So, to answer the OP, they probably will but not even close on the price points yet.