“This action follows the automakers’ unacceptable decision to scale back their manufacturing presences in Canada, directly breaching their commitments to the country and Canadian workers,” the government said in a late-night media release.
“This action follows the automakers’ unacceptable decision to scale back their manufacturing presences in Canada, directly breaching their commitments to the country and Canadian workers,” the government said in a late-night media release.
Market is too small to survive.
Name one quality product designed and made in Canada.
Even if we did this, needledicks would still need their Silverados.
Germany is only double our population, and they have VW/Audi, Mercedes/Smart/Maybach, BMW/Mini/Rolls Royce, Porsche and Opel. And their wages are higher than us. We have no excuse.
What a fantastic argument. “We don’t make anything good, therefore give up”. This logic has always irked me. “We call this invention ‘the computer’! It’s not very fast, and the quality is a bit shaky, so we are just going to give up now and never do this again, because it’s not very good.”
Right…
“market is too small”
89% of households have at least one vehicle. That’s not a small market
Well dontcha know you can only make a viable company if you sell 4 million cars per year?
Canada has about 1.8 million new vehicle sales per year. It’s not impossible to serve a market that small, but a lot of profits in the auto industry are due to their ability to scale.
Any new manufacturer will have to start in the high priced, low volume, luxury segment anyway, but there isn’t huge room for growth while remaining in Canada.
If they expand to the States, then they just end up with the same problems we have now. If they expand to Europe, shipping is a pain, though doable. But if that’s the plan, anyone with enough money to start a new car company will probably just start it in Europe to begin with, since Europe has a bigger market than Canada.
The other way to do this would be a non-profit or Crown corporation, where profitability isn’t the goal. That has a lot of other issues, but avoids the biggest one.
A market of only 5000 cars a day?!? That’s peanuts.
Is … is that your point? That 5000 cars A DAY is somehow small?
The Oakville Ford plant produces 200-300K vehicles per year. That plant is profitable at that scale. We’ll need 6-7 like it to satisfy our current needs. If we license manufacturing and models from another firm, we can start building the same vehicles at similar cost of production as the original maker since we’d skip the R&D. Lots of precedents for this sort of arrangement, past and present. China did it with western autos by creating 50-50 joint ventures. They built factories there and began production of their existing vehicles. The first was VW I think, back in the late 70s or early 80s. We could do this with existing plants of departing US manufacturers. Maybe wholly owned by “Vehicles Canada.” Trump wins, being number #1 in car manufacturing. We win sovereign vehicle manufacturing he can’t destroy. 🤔
Are you under the impression that this new manufacturer will somehow capture the entire market?
To use Tesla as an example, since they’re the largest and fastest growing “new” auto manufacturer… In 2024, they sold about 50,000 cars in Canada, and manufactured 1.7 million. So we’re barely 3% of their market, and if their Canadian sales drop to zero (as they should), they would barely notice.
As you said, licensing could save a lot of R&D costs, but it would almost certainly come with a stipulation that we couldn’t sell the vehicles outside of Canada. If a new manufacturer were to take up the entire Tesla market in Canada (which would be incredibly ambitious), they’d need to be about a quarter (or less) of the size of the Oakville Ford plant. I don’t think that it can be profitable at that scale, but I’d love for someone to prove me wrong.
Of course not. It’s a hypothetical that illustrates how many plants worth of vehicles we consume in some tangible manner.
Also my point is that the fixed cost other than R&D and administration is per plant, not per manufacturer. So given Ford’s example, a plant that makes 250K per year in Oakville is profitable assuming no other costs. I don’t know how much the rest of the costs would be. A back of the napkin of 3000 extra employees making 200K/yr each is $2.4K per vehicle at 250K vehicles per year. Can a lean manufacturer run on 3000 admin and R&D staff? Don’t know. But it doesn’t sound impossible. Slate Auto has 250 and they seem to have produced working prototypes.
But given that there’s Honda and Toyota made here, we probably won’t have to venture there either way.
As for looking at existing large manufacturers like Tesla, I don’t think they’re a good way to gauge how low of output is sustainable because these manufacturers aim to grow as large as possible and maximize profit. If they can spend $240 per vehicle in R&D and admin instead of $2.4K by growing to other markets, they will do exactly that. They don’t aim to satisfy a transportation need. They aim to create shareholder profit. So they’ll get to the $240 and they’ll give the remaining $2160 to their shareholders. The hypothetical firm that has a mandate to fulfill (or supplant) a country’s transportation needs instead of maximizing profit would not give that $2160 to the crown, and give it to its employees instead. Allowing it to have 3K of them with lower production output at the same price.
All hypothetical of course. Could be wrong. I’m just thinking here.
maybe the market is now too big to cater too and countries should start focusing on themselves if the rest of the world won’t play nice.