Where the new hubs for low-cost car production are

[rcjordan]

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/06/trump-tariffs-cars-tesla-mexico-china

[ergophobe]

Tom Friedman, recently back from China, has been saying that the Trump policy against China makes total sense... for 1992. Because we forget how small the Chinese economy was when the first Bush left office and how dramatically the US would have had the upper hand in any 1990s trade war. But no more.

Friedman has been writing that we already saw US business pulling back from China partly to protect IP, but then saw a wholesale loss of interaction with Covid. As a result, American politicians and business leaders are about 10 years out of date with respect to China and, in the Chinese context, 10 years is a very very long time.

Anyway, this highlights to me how associating China with cheap labor really misses the picture. China has the most automated factories in the world, and yet the labor cost per automobile are much higher than places with far lower levels of automation.