It’s funny – or sad, depending on your point of view.
America car companies are downsizing and U-hauling operations to China as fast as they can . . . at the same time that Chinese car companies are preparing to launch a kind of vehicular Operation Overload directed at the mainland United States.
Two Chinese car companies – Zotye and GAC, which sells cars under the Trumpchi label (no reference to the Orange Man, it translates as “passing into happiness”) have announced they will begin selling cars here just a few months from now.
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There will be “landings” in a dozen states, including Virginia, Florida, California, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kansas, Oklahoma and Maryland.
GAC has met with 80 potential distributors, according to the trade publication, Automotive News. Zotye has reportedly signed non-disclosure agreements with at least 120 prospective U.S. dealers.
And that’s probably just for openers.
The Chinese car industry is a state-sponsored industrial juggernaut that already outproduces the American car industry in terms of total volume – in excess of 23 million vehicles manufactured annually vs. about 17.2 million in the U.S.
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This is analogous to what happened in the United States around 100 years ago, when Henry Ford began cranking out the Model T in numbers.
Just smaller numbers, over a much longer period of time . . . vs. the Chinese.
From 1909 to 1927 – a production run of almost 20 years – Ford built just under 15 million cars.
The Chinese built almost twice as many cars . . . last year.
That stat is giving nightmares, surely, to every round-eyed executive in Detroit. Better brush up on that Mandarin.
And – like the Japanese first and the Koreans second – the Chinese can make cars a whole lot cheaper.
