We should have let the auto industry fail in 2008 too. The factories and IP still would be there for more innovative entrepreneurs to buy and make use of. Instead we have 3 legacy companies that can't even deliver an EV to compete with Tesla after 15 years of pretending to try.
The factory equipment would've just been sold to foreign competitors in China and Mexico though.
You can argue that did actually happen. China invested in GM through their partnership during that crisis and in exchange got anything that was left worth having from GM. Now GM is an old husk lumbering along waiting to die.
Was it not? Grandstanding nonwithstanting, 15 years ago GM (and VW/Benz) were very active shifting assembly to Russia of all places.
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Not necessarily; the goodwill & trademarks (such as it was) plus facilities could remain w/ US buyers.
So I watch a lot of auto industry news and from their point of view and everything that has happened has made perfect sense. They react to the demands from the government in power. They got a mandate from Biden to go EV so they invested heavily into retooling and dropping their ICE programs. They were not going to piss off whoever was in power, especially not the Democrats so they did it.
When Trump took over, he scrapped so many of these programs and the companies were forced to take massive writeoffs in their investments. Those executives that championed these moves to EVs are persona non grata now in the industry(at least for the time being). These back and forth demands is really causing a lot of trouble for the legacy makers.
Tesla managing to be able to detach themselves from having to answer to wallstreet and not actually caring about what the government says has allowed them to go at their own pace. The other American EV companies are on life support and the Chinese companies have always answered to one entity: the CCP.
Disagree. The auto industry was not the cause of the great recession, and the money put into the auto manufacturers did help to remove excess capacity. Their subsequent failure to innovate is not Obama's fault.
I still think it was a waste of tax payer money. If your company can't survive without subsidies, then it probably shouldn't exist anymore.