“Whether or not they ever be put into place, the damage is done,” said Greig Mordue, a former auto industry executive and associate professor at the W. Booth School of Engineering Practice and Technology at McMaster University.
He says Trump’s threats have already changed the landscape. Whether he goes ahead with the tariffs or not, or whether he carves out specific exemptions, the threat alone will drive investment out of Canada and into the U.S.
“For at least the next four years, there will be no serious investment in the Canadian automotive industry,” said Mordue.
I don’t know if I’d be mad if the auto industry crashed. Maybe that would incentivise our government to invest in more mass transit infrastructure.
I think the crash is inevitable. Auto sales has plummeted in the western world as people are driving less due to having less money to pay for it. Not to mention that so many eastern countries are building auto factories that can sell equal quality cars at a fraction of the price, it’s hard to see any future in the industry even if all this never happened.
We need to move on from auto manufacturing to some sort of higher tech product that is harder to brute force with cheap labour.
How about just mass transit? Publicly funded projects with special policies that enforce the construction of the vehicles locally.
To be honest, alternatives to cars is the solution to most issues that have to do with roads in cities. Public transit handles thousands of times the capacity possible via cars. A single bus when things are slow still is more than a dozen times more effecient at using road space, not to mention all the costs involved, including gas, insurance, road maintenance, etc. During rush hour, a single bus can do the same work a hundred cars easy.
Not to mention trains and street cars, as well as bikes and just plain being able to walk around by just having functional side walks that don’t get blocked off at the smallest little thing.
In the short term, we’d still buy cars, just from somewhere else. In the long term, to exaggerate a bit, yeah, poor countries have tons of dababs everywhere.
lol “dababs” that’s the first time I see that term.
Yeah, a standard English name doesn’t exist AFAIK.
It’s a vehicle of some kind that only sets off once it’s full of passengers, basically. If that sounds like it would fuck all schedules it does, but expecting someone to show up in a 15 minute interval is very much not how it works in, for example, rural Africa.