this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Australia had automotive production. They don't anymore, because it wasn't viable.
South Korea is definitely an exporter of automobiles. Thing is it took them about ~40 years to get to the point where they caught traction with it. The early Korean exports were pretty low quality and sort of unreliable (different people had different experiences). It took time for their R&D to work it out, and for economies of scale to develop.
It's not the belief that we need to sell to the United States that would be stopping us here. It's that they are right next door + 100 years ahead of us on R&D and progress, not to mention having long established integrated facilities and economies of scale. You'd have to enter the global marketplace with a car company built from scratch, that would need billions if not even maybe hundreds of billions dumped into R&D, design & development, which takes time. You would need manufacturing facilities that would be huge, that would also probably cost tens if not hundreds of billions to develop. Where is your steel going to come from? How are you going to stamp it? Where's all the parts coming from if you don't want to work with the US, and then how are you going to get them on a timely basis if they are coming by ship? Not to mention the zillion other questions one would need to figure out. It would take ~a decade to get this all sorted out. And godless sums of money. All to then compete in a global marketplace with international companies that have centuries of experience.
Magna would be the only developed enough option where this could even be feasible, but even they've sort of poked around looking at developing a product in the past, and the absence of said product in the marketplace kind of tells you everything you need to know about the viability of it.
I know you were using hyperbole with 100 years of R&D and progress so for fun I wanted to know how old the modern car is and wikipedia said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile#%3A%7E%3Atext=Benz+was+granted+a+patent%2Cwas+capable+of+extended+travel. 1886.
So like, 139 years of automotive history and being 100 years behind would really suck lol.
In all seriousness, you raise very real points and links to globalisation and Pierre Trudeau's analogy of sleeping with an elephant has never been more real. I'm not gonna lie, I'm worried.
Yeah, but we have history and old blueprints and universities full of people who know how to make good cars. And an existing advanced auto industry (just integrated with the US). OP was just guessing at a lot of things, and missed the mark quite a bit.
I wasn't guessing. I cut my teeth in automotive. I have an education in automotive engineering, amongst other things, and I have extensive working experience at both the retailer, and Tier 1 and 2 manufacturing experience earlier in my career. Not proclaiming to be the end all be all, or the smartest person in the world, or that I know much of anything, but I'm also far from being the village idiot on this topic.
It ain't happening bud, I'm sorry. There's not enough marketplace to recover the costs, it would be complicated to transport finished goods to other markets, especially considering that most of the manufacturing facilities are located in southern Ontario. Which means you'd have to pretty much stick everything on a ship, and that adds costs, versus trucking to the states. It obviously can be done, easily enough, but it cuts into margins at higher production levels. Margins aren't high in this industry, and the labour is mostly unionized, or very quickly will be if it's not, and that adds a dearth of costs. Volatility in commodities pricing alone would be enough to knock something like this into non-profitable territory. It likely wouldn't be profitable for a decade either. Even look at something like Tesla, it took them 17 years to turn a profit, and it actually doesn't really turn a profit from its cars, it's actually from the sale of environmental credits.
If you are going to see any automotive investment and new OEMs, something like a new Tesla or whatever, it's almost certainly going to be in Europe, not North America. Donald Trump has all but guaranteed that there's not going to be one dime spent in deepening or expanding automotive manufacturing capabilities spent here, for quite a while, likely a decade or more if he keeps it up. Canada has learned its lesson here, and I would imagine if anything happens in the automotive sector, it'll be a contraction, not an expansion. Even as close as four of five months ago, there have been new plans launched for factory expansion and construction of tier 1 suppliers in Southwestern Ontario, but I would bet you that'll be off now. We'll have to wait and see though, only those closest to the projects will know, and nobody else's crystal ball can predict the future.
And let's not even begin to consider that China is foaming at the mouth to dump mostly state backed, very viable electric cars here, for a fraction of the price tag that we've been paying. We aren't going to be able to block that off forever, they'll find a way around the tariffs eventually. How are you going to compete with that?
I'm sorry then. What I read there is that Canada doesn't already have an auto industry, and if that had been what you meant, that could only be a guess.
I'll respond to the rest on the thread with just you.