Fantastic! Let another countries tax payer pay for me to buy a cheap car with my strong dollar. I couldn't think of anything better.
Well no one was implying an economic recovery out of this, that is out of the question. But if you were to stop spending all the money currently spent on vehicle infrastructure and imported oil there would be a nice federal surplus next year I am sure. This is the major stumbling block to the cornucopian low energy future many envisage. They see us all tooling around in little carbon-fiber electric cars, presumably on dead smooth super roads, which you would need if you wanted the cars to last longer than a single season. Our roads are made of oil though, the rock base crushed and transported with oil, the concrete similarly. It has even been calculated that replacing the combined automobile fleets of the world today with electric vehicles would consume every last drop of oil on the planet. One thing is for sure though, no one is going to take my car off me, or my mother's or my girlfriend's, without a big fight, and I would bet that a lot of people here feel the same way. So you see, some problems just don't have a rational solution.
The subsidies for car manufacturing pales when compared to subsidies for the fossil fuel industry in this country. If we want to prosper in auto manufacturing, we need to go electric, and we need to do it fast and smart. I realise that "green" is a dirty word on this forum, but if you can offer a car that can be powered from the sun that hits your homes roof for free, instead of weekly trips to the oil company outlet, which is a depleting, polluting and expensive resource, then you will find a very accepting market. Let alone the maintenance needed for an electric motor with one moving part as opposed to the hundreds in an ICE and the savings that go with it. Building gas guzzlers with century old technology is rediculous, and companies that continue to do it deserve to go bust. As for the lost jobs, apparently there is a shortage of skilled and semi skilled workers here in the west, to the tune of 50,000 over the next couple of years, so these semi skilled workers layed off should have no problem securing work if they are serious. As for the people who think this is Julia [insert offensive play on words here] fault, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
More cornucopian dreams. Show me an electric car or a solar panel or a suitable road that is not made from using massive amounts of oil and coal? It can't be done, it is a placebo, nothing more.
