Agreed, they probably are cheap garbage (I myself don’t know, I haven’t driven cars regularly in a while), but two things:
Manufacturing volume is really important in making cars. You need know-how, you need experts and ways to make things better and deliver incremental improvements, and that becomes a lot easier when you have higher volumes.
People don’t have lots of cash to burn these days - quality is easy to sacrifice when you don’t have the cash to pay up.
This is true, but the risks of the oil economy have been known for a very long time. Everybody knows that the oil/auto fuel supply chain is in areas with fragile geopolitical relations and it’s not like this hasn’t happened before.
What we should be doing is channeling our frustration toward transitioning from ICE automobiles to EVs[1], but look at how slowly European carmakers are adapting. The rate of change in Germany has been embarrassingly slow and China is galaxies ahead of anyone else. We need to invest and compete, rather than throwing up our hands and blaming others for fucking up things we shouldn’t be depending on anymore.
[1]: and improving public transit too of course
Yeah, this should definitely not be allowed. Google should not be allowed to dictate which operating systems people are allowed to use. And no doubt that this is harmful to many European companies and prevents competition in the space of mobile operating systems.
That said, it remains to be seen if anything will get done about it.