This isn't a China problem. This is a Stellantis problem. Read the infamous letter from the organization of Stellantis dealers to the CEO.[1] That's from last September. The CEO was fired, but it didn't help much.
What's left of Chrysler is one minivan line. That's it.
I am an automotive components supplier and I’ve always wondered how automotive giants are staying open or even turning any profit at all (1)
Between this, Nissan and a dozen others, I guess there’s a lot of running-on-debt going on.
1: it’s so difficult with the latest round of laws making a very high level of ADAS mandatory. Huge spend in R+D, particularly software and vertical integration, and then again huge spend on the physical car electronics.
dmix · 1h ago
It helps markets like US and Canada have essentially banned competition from Chinese car makers and tightly controlled automotive trade in general from many other countries.
rafaelmn · 39m ago
EU also tariffed Chinese cars out of the market.
vkou · 30m ago
It's difficult to compete with automation.
mjmas · 22m ago
Or slave labour
jandrewrogers · 1h ago
They aren’t turning a profit on the hardware in many cases. They hope to make it up by selling financing and data from the platforms.
bn-l · 1h ago
I really don’t want my car to be a “platform”.
charcircuit · 52m ago
No one is forcing you to upgrade the trim on your car. That such an upgrade is available is beneficial. For something so expensive one would hope that it is extendable and you would not have to buy a whole new car if you wanted something different.
deepsun · 1h ago
New cars prices doubled in the last 20 years. If anything, I would expect them to make record profits actually.
The CPI's hedonic quality adjustment means that this graph doesn't mean what you think it means.
readthenotes1 · 56m ago
Also, that's not adjusted for inflation (tho obviously that may be difficult given how much this contributes to CPI)
thrwaway55 · 1h ago
This is honestly tighter then you might think accounting for inflation. A 2000 1$ is 1.87$ today. 2005 seems like they should be doing a lot better since it's 1.65$ but it's not nearly as gangbusters as this comes across.
epolanski · 1h ago
That doesn't cope with less vehicles being sold overall and inflation, even if margins on a single car have never been higher I think (at least in US).
lynx97 · 32m ago
That is called inflation. Almost everything doubled its price in the last 20 years. My rent, for instance...
WhereIsTheTruth · 45m ago
Western elites are finding out how bad of an idea it was to betray their own people for a quick buck, returning home will be difficult
ako · 14m ago
Assuming you’re referring to CEOs outsourcing production to china to reduce costs? I doubt they had any real alternative with consumers always buying the cheapest option. Either move production overseas, or loose all sales to companies that do produce at lower cost. But you say, consumers don’t earn enough to buy locally produced products. True, but raising salaries won’t fix it, as it will make local manufacturing even more expensive. The whole system is not really sustainable.
SV_BubbleTime · 34m ago
Automotive EE here…
If you would have gone back twenty years and been like “hey, you know how you think the Germans are running ChryslerDodgeJeep into the ground? … just wait until you see what the Italians do… and then the French right after that!!”
I wouldn’t have believed it. Turns out the Germans really weren’t so bad.
Honestly, Stellantis is making the wrong move at every turn and one possibility that makes sense is stripping the company… or some elaborate revenge plot… because it seems like they speedrunning destruction.
senectus1 · 32m ago
how much of this is China eating their lunch.. forcing them into poor decisions?
FirmwareBurner · 28m ago
Another (former)auto EE here. Their own poor decisions resulted in China eating their lunch. They couldn't stop shooting themselves in the foot, high on their own arrogance of European hundred year old industry superiority. I wish I had a way to digitally export
my memory of the townhall meeting in 2014 of a German exec laughing on how bad Chinese EVs were. They aint laughing now., that's for sure.
Germans and Italians had a multi decade lead on EV motors, battery, self driving and electronic tech over China (why I entered the industry) but they shelved it because they wanted to sell more diesel engines, outsourced all R&D to the lowest bidder to save costs and invest all profits into share buybacks or dividends instead of R&D (why I exited the industry).
Are the German and Italian executives in charge of those decisions being held accountable for the mess they created, or are the enjoying a golden retirements/parachutes while thousands of workers are now being laid off and governments forced to spend taxpayer money to bail out their mistakes and rescue what's left?
To me this is another nail in the western industry players falling victims to their own short sighted greed coffin. If only there have been any past examples in history to serve as cautionary tales. /s
olivermuty · 18m ago
While this is mostly true, a big missing context is that europeans simply didnt want to buy electric cars for a long time.
FirmwareBurner · 11m ago
Ah yes, the classic "let's blame the customer for not buying our shit products", amirite?! How come they were buying Teslas like crazy in 2014-2020 though, if they "didn't want to buy EVs"?
Also, a lot of Europeans are more urbanized, living in apartment buildings compared to US single family homes, so most don't have chargers at home to justify an EV purchase but still need cars to get to work, so of course that without matching charging infrastructure at home or at work, Europeans couldn't justify the purchase of an EV especially give the lower purchasing power compared to USaians.
I live in a supposedly rich EU country on paper, and public charging infrastructure is still severely lacking. Only newly built post-2018 apartments have power sockets in the garage so you can install a charger, the rest? God speed.
What's left of Chrysler is one minivan line. That's it.
[1] https://s3-prod.autonews.com/2024-09/Dealer%20letter%20to%20...
Between this, Nissan and a dozen others, I guess there’s a lot of running-on-debt going on.
1: it’s so difficult with the latest round of laws making a very high level of ADAS mandatory. Huge spend in R+D, particularly software and vertical integration, and then again huge spend on the physical car electronics.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1KzKj
In the US, authoritative data sources[1] suggest otherwise.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1KzJF
If you would have gone back twenty years and been like “hey, you know how you think the Germans are running ChryslerDodgeJeep into the ground? … just wait until you see what the Italians do… and then the French right after that!!”
I wouldn’t have believed it. Turns out the Germans really weren’t so bad.
Honestly, Stellantis is making the wrong move at every turn and one possibility that makes sense is stripping the company… or some elaborate revenge plot… because it seems like they speedrunning destruction.
Germans and Italians had a multi decade lead on EV motors, battery, self driving and electronic tech over China (why I entered the industry) but they shelved it because they wanted to sell more diesel engines, outsourced all R&D to the lowest bidder to save costs and invest all profits into share buybacks or dividends instead of R&D (why I exited the industry).
Are the German and Italian executives in charge of those decisions being held accountable for the mess they created, or are the enjoying a golden retirements/parachutes while thousands of workers are now being laid off and governments forced to spend taxpayer money to bail out their mistakes and rescue what's left?
To me this is another nail in the western industry players falling victims to their own short sighted greed coffin. If only there have been any past examples in history to serve as cautionary tales. /s
Also, a lot of Europeans are more urbanized, living in apartment buildings compared to US single family homes, so most don't have chargers at home to justify an EV purchase but still need cars to get to work, so of course that without matching charging infrastructure at home or at work, Europeans couldn't justify the purchase of an EV especially give the lower purchasing power compared to USaians.
I live in a supposedly rich EU country on paper, and public charging infrastructure is still severely lacking. Only newly built post-2018 apartments have power sockets in the garage so you can install a charger, the rest? God speed.