Welcome to Media Events by Drew Millard, where you can find high-level cultural commentary at recession-proof prices. Today, we’re talking about cars. Vroom vroom!

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A Chinese car company called BYD has quietly spent the past few months freaking the global car industry the hell out. They make a car called the Seagull, whose domestic base price of $12,000 places it well below the price of the cheapest new cars in America, which can be had for about $18,000. 

The big difference between the BYD Seagull and, say, the Mitsubishi Mirage, a car so shitty you probably didn’t know it even existed, is that the Seagull seems Actually Good. One thing car companies do is set their models’ base price at an attractively low price, but then upcharge you for things like armrests, an automatic transmission, or rear seats that you can fold down to increase your storage space. You know, things that you would like to have in a car. The Seagull, meanwhile, is an electric vehicle that does all the basic car stuff and, again, costs $12,000. 

The Seagull would have a massive effect on the American car market if it were brought here in its current form. First off, the average new car here costs $47,870, and the average used car costs $25,571. At some point, being able to buy a car at all, used or new, became a luxury for Americans, despite the fact that car ownership remains a necessity for the vast majority of adults. What the fuck are we doing over here! Oh yeah, that’s right, cars are expensive because you’re supposed to take out loans for them and get locked into paying hundreds of dollars a month on them even as their value depreciates faster than you can pay the loan off. A $12,000 price tag is going to still saddle lots of people with a loan, but at least it’ll be way cheaper — and APRs, generally speaking, are more favorable when you’re dealing with a new car vs. a used one. 

Personally, if my car died right now and I had to buy another one, I would probably be willing to pay about 12 grand for one. And if I had to pick between a $12,000 used car and a $12,000 new car, and that car were electric, I would strongly consider copping the brand-new electric one.* I strongly suspect that this would be the case for lots and lots of people, which brings me to my second point: The BYD Seagull coming to America would likely lead to a lot of people switching to electric cars, simply because one of the reasons people buy new cars is that there is a greater presumption of reliability and longevity there that you won’t get with a car with tens of thousands of miles on it, and its price point would make owning a new car an option for millions of people. This would have profound implications on American infrastructure, as demand for EV chargers would presumably go through the roof. Electric vehicles aren’t perfect for the environment by any means, but on the margins, they’re better than gas cars. And if mass adoption were coupled with greater pushes to decarbonize the electric grid and switch to sodium-based batteries instead of lithium, then we’d really be cookin’. 

Whatever, it doesn’t actually matter because the Biden administration is imposing a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, which will go into effect on September 27 (i.e., the day I’m posting this). Per comments a White House economic advisor gave to Reuters, the tariff are meant to combat the “very significant unfair cost advantage” that Chinese car companies have over American ones. But like, if they just let the $12,000 EV come to America, wouldn’t all the other companies in our market try to make comparable cars in order to compete? Like, isn’t that the point of a market-based economic system? Regardless, this whole situation means that the car companies already operating here have no pressure to make better/cheaper/greener cars, and the American consumer will suffer as a result.

The idea that we should rely on a supply-side shift to green vehicles, and green energy at all, to help stave back our super-dying-ass climate is, of course, depressing. America’s widespread lack of quality public transportation, not just within urban areas but between them, is one of the great infrastructural failures of my lifetime. 

When I was in college, there was a free bus that went from Raleigh to Chapel Hill. It was tight. There was a dude I DJ’d with at the radio station who took it to and from campus every day and loved it, because the bus was comfortable and uncrowded, plus he got free Wifi on it that actually worked. How somebody pulled the WiFi part off in like 2009 is either a minor miracle or me misremembering what he told me about the bus. Maybe he actually just read books on it. Either way, it was part of a larger bus system that connected Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, three cities that are kind of one big lump of a metro area but are 10-20 miles apart. They were supposed to build a rail system handling the same set of routes a few years ago, which would have been huge for the hundreds of thousands of people who regularly commute between the three cities and didn’t want to eat shit in interstate traffic for an hour a day there and back. But there was some sort of issue with the planned system involving being too close to a cancer research facility and the vibrations from the train messing up experiments where people were trying to cure cancer. Which, fair. Curing cancer is important, and so is getting people around without making them use their car, regardless of whether it’s electric or not. 

In the years since that initial cancellation, local governments in the Triangle simply have not been able to come up with a new plan that they can go through with, because nobody wants to pay for it. And so the dream I once had of taking a train from Durham to go hang out with my cousin in Chapel Hill is now dead, and not just because both of us moved away from the area a couple years ago. This failure fits in with a larger trend in U.S. transit spending. Ben Schneider notes on his blog that:

As the U.S. lavishes billions on highway expansions and subsidizes tricked-out SUVs, other countries are investing in transit systems that are setting new standards for speed, convenience, and technology. Increasingly, transportation is looking like another area of American exceptionalism. [...] High-quality [rail] transit is the only way to facilitate upward growth without causing unbearable amounts of congestion. It’s the only way to speed up trips through crowded neighborhoods. And it’s by far the most efficient and straightforward way to reduce pollution and carbon emissions from transportation. As an added bonus, a transit-oriented model of urban growth allows for much more pleasant surface-level streetscapes, with more space for walking, biking, and communing. 

This isn’t just a failure of imagination on the part of local and federal governments, though: Uber and Lyft have a habit of displacing public transit in ways that taxi services didn’t, especially among Millennials. To rideshare companies, public transportation isn’t simply another category of getting around. It’s a competitor, and should be treated accordingly (and by that, I mean lobbied against in tandem with the Koch family). 

Ironically, I now live in Philadelphia, a city with a pretty robust commuter rail system, as well as a subway and bus line. But SEPTA, the organization whose umbrella all this stuff is under, is woefully underfunded to the point that the organization has warned it’s on the brink of a “death spiral” that could crash the local economy:

This is an especially big deal when you consider the city’s recently announced plan to relocate the 76ers from South Philadelphia, where the team plays in an arena surrounded by all the other sports complexes and not much else, to the center of the city. The team and local government essentially steamrolled concerns from local activists about the effects that the new arena will have on Chinatown (lots of bad ones!), and part of their plan involves the presumption that the already-hectic traffic in the neighborhood won’t be exacerbated on game nights, because people will take the subway to see the games. 

It’s projected that the arena won’t be ready until 2031 at the earliest. But no matter how good Tyrese Maxey is by then, people aren’t going to want to come see him ball out if they can’t get there. To this end, the plan allocates $3 million for improvements to SEPTA. Which seems like a lot! Until you realize that SEPTA is currently operating at a $240 million deficit, and then you remember that this is all a joke and the city’s about to get screwed on a real estate project that will make things worse while doing nothing to make things better.