Russia can't do it because they're broke. Even if they could they would have to build something with soviet technology at this point because they can't get modern components in quantity. And if they could, it would be seconds from China. While I think air cooled diesels are neat, they aren't ideal from an emissions standpoint...

The only way in which German cars are at all special is that they make very high horsepower gas burners and nobody else bothers to do that in quantity except for the USA. But that's special as in eating crayons because it's completely ass-backwards in every way.

Japan has been making vehicles of superior quality since the 1990s, which was possible because Germany stopped making vehicles as good as they could in the 1980s and went for absolute cost savings ever since, so it's all the same flimsy plastic shit as everyone else. This is not about valve covers, it's about all the parts which matter. The difference is that the Japanese are actually better engineers. German vehicles depend on parts quality, Japanese ones have more resilient systems. Since Bosch is a bunch of trash like everyone else now, this strategy no longer works and the result is that German cars sprout a new expensive problem every week once they get to be about ten years old. This isn't a problem for rich people who sell cars every couple of years, but it is for everyone else. Incidentally Hitachi hasn't gone to shit like Bosch has so that's another win for Japan.

The very top halo vehicles are somewhat special, although I've seen some reviews of those cars showing parts reuse from lesser models in a lot of them, so they're not as special as you might think. But returning to those plastic valve covers, they don't actually seem to make the cars cheaper, do they? BMW is still charging the same price premium for their marque, just with crappier parts than in the eighties.

That's capitalism.

Capitalism is destroying our ability to derive profit from the land.

That's what's happening under capitalism. You will own nothing and suck it.

Slavery is capitalism. Literally nothing could better exemplify capital controlling the means of production.

You don't know what any of these words mean and shouldn't be trying to use them in public.

Mission in progress

Cars with no powertrain electrification at all no longer make any sense. Combustion cars only make sense in countries with lots of cheap fuel, except really they still don't make sense because AGW, but I'll go ahead and put that aside here. The performance and even reliability benefits of a hybrid are just too significant, and the cost continues to fall. The price is only an issue here in the USA, where we don't make the batteries or controller components at scale yet/anymore and it will take time to ramp up in the best case.

I don't honestly myself want a Chinese car, and I even see a national security argument against them, but don't know if that really merits banning them or just installing some auto-deploying pop-up bollards in places which really should have them already.

No one provided you with roads?

How many times have the US automakers been bailed out?

Worldwide sales of the S class plummeted when Lexus brought out the LS.

The idea that China is a communist country makes sense only until you read the definition of communism and find out there are numerous incompatibilities.

Not all cowards are Nazis, but the one modding me down is

Cowards are dumb as fuck, especially the cuck ones happy to see their country fucked

You are a coward. That is all you will ever be.

Unions can't help people who were replaced by automation.

And that is why we will bail out the American automakers when they inevitably fail again

For example, making idiots think AI is an arms race and not a cold war