This article seems to be focused on manufacturing for the Chinese domestic market, not the export of cars. They are worried about being shut out of the Chinese market.

So there is a joke in the USA that if you don’t have a girlfriend you pretend you have one. She’s always super pretty, but your friends can never meet her because she lives in Canada.

Let me guess, this super ai lives in Canada and we can never meet it, but it’s totally real.

There were many other formats that came and went between vhs and dvd. There is a lot of media history being conveniently forgotten to make it seem like VHS was the only video format until 1995.

I owned many of them at the time they came out. They all had advantages and drawbacks.

when using the tv’s in most homes at the time, the advantages didn’t matter. You needed to use high resolution composite computer monitors with the video sources and surround sounds equipped receivers to get a significantly different experience. That was such an expensive niche .

The killer thing that vhs had over the numerous formats that came and went was price.

Once dvd got inexpensive enough it took over. That was about a decade after DVD’s introduction.

I agree that dvd will likely outlive the legacy of VHS in pure years.

When an objects time was nearly 5 decades that puts a bit of context around it. By modern standards nearly everything from decades ago is garbage.

VHS has many competitors, but they were too expensive to really challenge for regular people.

The quality of the media determined the quality of your experience. Cheap tapes broke and looked bad. The fact that a tape could be rented from blockbuster dozens of times really showed the durability of the media. Many tapes I had were pulled from rental pools and they looked acceptable.

VHS stood for nearly 30 years before it was credibly replaced. Just because something was eventually replaced doesn’t mean it was bad. It was an awesome format because it was affordable. You could have always mortgaged a home and purchased a professional deck.

There were plenty of other formats that came and went during VHS. Many took away consumers control of content. Only when flash cards came commonplace was the VHS and the ability to make mix and match your own media replicated.

You could deck to deck make your own tapes if you wanted and edit with scissors and tape.

I went looking for data and it seems cd sales are on the decline again. So my info is outdated. It looks like it was trending younger with Taylor swift and k-pop titles as the top sellers. It appears to be less of a revival and more of a fad.

It looks like vinyl is still growing in 2026 even while cd decrease again.

It’s a bummer since artist can get a bigger cut of physical media sales and cd are easier to make than a records.

In audio circles stamped cd’s have been making a comeback. It’s much like the last decades vinyl revival.

It’s not the older generations getting nostalgia, it’s the younger generations looking for ‘experience’ over content. Buying a physical thing, storing on the shelf, having a visible collection of disks to show off.

Additionally it is a revenue stream for artists, where despite the costs of mastering and pressing a cd, they can get more money from a cd release than from streaming. So artists have been incentivized do make releases a big deal since they money goes straight to them. It’s a bit like a ‘buy me a coffee’ but with a physical item.

You can buy brand new cd players, not just blueray players or vintage units that need service.

It’s a thing.