Chapter 1: What complexities underlie the automotive industry?
Whether you drive one, ride in one, or wait for one to pass, cars are a constant in modern life. And it's easy to think of car as a simple machine. You turn it on, you press the pedal, you go. But behind every vehicle on the road is a sprawling, complex web. And Camila Dominovsky covers this world for NPR, even though she started out in something very different. Camila studied poetry.
I started at NPR on the books and arts team, and I loved working specifically on the poetry coverage at NPR. Unfortunately, the poetry journalism world is extremely small, so I did have to eventually diversify.
And now she covers cars. What keeps her with the automotive beat is the complexity of it all.
The sheer number of parts that go into a car and each part having its own supply chain, its own network of people who touched it in various ways, going all the way back to the raw material getting pulled out of the earth. It is improbable at the end of the day that like your car drives, let alone that it has the safety features that it does, that these things work is incredible.
Consider this. The automobile industry is changing and changing fast. Companies and countries that have bet big on electric vehicles are facing new, quickly moving variables in the market and the world. From NPR, I'm Emily Kwong.
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It's Consider This from NPR. Camila Dominovsky covers cars for NPR and how cars reflect important changes in the global economy. So I started our conversation by asking her about the most surprising development coming out of the automotive industry.
When you talk to car executives about electric vehicles online, A lot of them maintain this belief that electric vehicles are the future. And they say that not necessarily for environmental reasons. That's part of it. Car companies are making a consumer good. And electric vehicles are really nice to drive. They're very smooth. They're very quiet. The acceleration is really quick.
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Chapter 2: How are companies adapting to the electric vehicle market?
You know, K-Car is the tiny little Japanese cars. They're just these... teeny tiny little cars, very common in Japan, very hard to get in the US. President Trump commented on how we should have more of them here. I went and I just talked to these people about their cars. Sounds kind of like an angry sewing machine. That's Andrew Maxson.
We're riding in his red AutoZam AZ-1, a vehicle he lovingly calls ridiculous. We're sitting a few inches off the ground with the turbo engine a few inches behind our heads, racing at 40 miles per hour. Maxson founded the Capital K Car Club, which gathered at a park in northern Virginia this month to talk with me about their beloved little vehicles, which are best described as... Tiny.
Very tiny. Tiny.
It's so fun to talk to people who are as excited about something as anybody who loves their cars.
You have reported on how Tesla is no longer the global leader in EV sales, and that is because of EV cars manufactured in China. And the U.S. has been very determined to keep those China-made cars out of the American market. How much longer do you see that as being a
I'm obsessed with this question. It is one of the most interesting questions in the auto industry right now, I think, because it doesn't seem sustainable long term, right? For there to be vehicles that are cheaper and by all accounts just plain better that the U.S. is keeping out of. And this is something that the auto industry is acutely aware of.
And, you know, whether it's probably not under the Trump administration allowing a huge number of EVs to be imported from China, but could a Chinese automaker take up shop in the US and build vehicles here? in North America for North America. Could Chinese companies partner with U.S. companies, which is incidentally how Western automakers entered China was in partnerships with Chinese companies.
Could the same thing happen in reverse where a Chinese automaker strikes a joint venture with, say, Ford? There's been some reporting that Ford is actively talking about this with the administration. Right now, these vehicles are essentially impossible to get. In the U.S. But that could change at really any time, especially with President Trump at the helm.
And if it changes, it's going to be a huge disruptive shift to the existing automakers.
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