Chinese factories build fire trucks for under $400,000 in six weeks. In the US, it's $2 million in 4 years
This is a video transcript, for the report found here:
Bullets:
Wall Street firms have taken over the manufacturing industries for first-responder vehicles in the United States.
After years of consolidation and the closure of dozens of production lines, three companies control 80% of the industry.
Costs for fire trucks of all types have soared, along with delivery times. Ladder trucks, for example, jumped from $1.3 million to $2.3 million in just two years.
Cities typically wait over four years to receive their rigs, after placing deposits for them.
Firms also cut back on supply of replacement parts, and as a result hundreds of trucks across the United States are out of commission, awaiting parts that do not arrive for months.
These were contributing factors in the Pacific Palisades fires, which ravaged Los Angeles and caused over $52 billion in damages.
Report:
Good morning. These are the prices on fire trucks, from Chinese factories. Once they are fully outfitted, trucks like these, for example, will be about $100,000 out the factory door.
Much bigger ones go for much more. This model is nearly $400,000, and this is from a company I know in Qingdao, for $300,000. They all come with warranties, and they will ship replacement parts overnight for buyers who need to make repairs. Total manufacturing time is about 45 days, on average. The buyer pays half the price up front, the factory in China has it ready in about six weeks, then you pay the rest and they ship it to you. Add 3-6 weeks to get it delivered almost anywhere in the world, and you can be putting out fires in four months or so.
So I was surprised to learn a few days ago that fire departments in the United States are paying 5 times for this same equipment, and waiting years to get it. This is an attorney on Substack, and he was poking around to find out just why Los Angeles burned down—one of the richest cities in the world—and why so many fire trucks were sitting in the maintenance yards instead of in Pacific Palisades, putting water on burning houses.
And the story here is much bigger and runs much deeper than typical American big-city dysfunction and bad management. Greenwich is a small town, who budgeted $1.7 million dollars for a new ladder truck, and just a few months later they were told, sorry, the price went up another half a million. In other words, the cost increase itself was more than a whole brand-new truck from a top Chinese factory. So the city council agreed to pay the money. Now this article is from 2023, and the fire chief says it won’t come until 2027. That’s four years. He bought another one back in July of 2022, and he thinks that one might show up in November, later this year. So, Greenwich ordered a truck in July of 2022. This article dropped in October 2023, and the truck ordered more than a year previously had not even begun production.
Waupun is a small town in Wisconsin, population 11,000 or so. They need a new ladder truck to replace the one they’ve got, which is over 20 years old. New trucks cost around $2 million. So the city visited factories across Wisconsin, trying to find a truck that would fit inside their fire house. It was “scary because of the amount of money”, but they “just needed to figure it out.” They voted to spend $1.8 million to buy an aerial ladder truck from Pierce Fire Apparatus and Equipment, and remember that name because we’ll see it again.
The Waupun City Council then moved to other business: how much to spend to replace a police car that was totaled by a reckless driver, who we should assume did not have insurance. The city carefully studied five bids to replace the car, and even though Homan Auto was $200 more than the lowest bid, Homan’s pays taxes in the city and agreed to deliver the car for free and maintain it. So it was worth the extra $200, for those perks. The City Council of Waupun, Wisconsin wants their good citizens to know that they are diligent, and getting their money’s worth for the extra $200 for a squad car, while spending $1.8 million on a fire truck they could have ordered from China for $400 thousand.
Here is another small town, this one in Pennsylvania. They have a volunteer fire department, and they were happy about a $545,000 grant from FEMA to buy a new pumper truck. But they are still short hundreds of thousands of dollars, because those cost around $900,000. In China, pumpers are under $120,000. What’s worse, it will take three to four years to have it ready to use, delivered. They expect their final bill to be $1 million or so.
And even when the cities have fire trucks on hand, they can’t get parts for them anymore. That was one of the big problems in Los Angeles during their fires there. LA didn’t have enough mechanics on hand, but they also couldn’t get new trucks, or parts for their old ones. The fire truck manufacturing industry has for years been increasing prices, and fails to meet delivery schedules for the ones already ordered and paid for. Fire departments are waiting for years to get new vehicles, and need to find replacement parts on the internet, instead of from the manufacturers.
Private equity, as usual, is causing these supply problems, deliberately, to make more money, and now the backlog of fire trucks in the United States is billions of dollars. Gil Carpenter runs the fire department in a town in Arkansas, and he says his prices are going up, and suppliers don’t even answer his phone calls anymore. Public safety is being traded away so they can make more money.
The United States once had many manufacturers for this equipment, then Wall Street came in, consolidated the industry, and shut down production lines. American Industrial Partners bought a group of manufacturers of equipment for emergency response, as well as school buses and street sweepers—so these are factories that build for city governments, then. Other companies were doing the same, including Pierce Manufacturing, the company that will charge the city of Waupun 1.8 million for a truck they might get three years from now. These three companies control most of the American market.
As a result, competition is gone. So wait times are going up, and the industry has a huge backlog that will take years to clear. The backlog for Pierce/Oshkosh quadrupled in four years, and in 2023 was $4 billion in orders placed but not delivered.
The companies are in no hurry to build any faster. Rev Group explained that once a city votes to spend the money, it’s hard for them to cancel the order later. The customer is stuck, and just needs to wait on the company to get around to build it. The money is allocated, so they “feel good about that.” That’s a direct quote, from their CEO, explaining why his company is fine with the big backlogs on fire trucks.
This company spends almost nothing on upgrading its facilities. An investor—a former investor—asked how the company can justify a backlog of $4 billion dollars for trucks that put out fires, and not spend any money to expand capacity, so they can build them any faster? And the reason is that the market is not competitive. There’s nowhere else for these cities and towns to go to get the equipment they need.
In 2021, Watertown, New York bought a $1.2 million ladder truck, and were told they could take delivery over a year later. They paid the money, then learned that the factory would shut down, and it might come later this year—four years later. So they bought a used one--again, over 20 years old--to manage the best they could. Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta—these are big-city fire departments, are relying now on old equipment that break down, and they’re out of commission frequently.
Our firefighters are the first to see the problems, and the fire chiefs say that the public is at risk, and so are their firefighters. Previously they could replace a part quickly, by calling the factory, and it gets overnighted, and shows up the next day. Now when they call, it takes months.
Ladder trucks have almost doubled in price, from $1.3 million to $2.3 million, and so Los Angeles is buying fewer of them, and cannot get the replacement parts they need to repair the old ones. Then the fires started, they didn’t have enough equipment to put out the fires, and the losses were over $50 billion.
The writers on Substack led the way, then the New York Times followed up with their piece, and so then our Congressmen had no choice but to do their jobs. They sent a letter to the CEO’s of these companies, and want to find out what’s going on.
Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts. Congratulations. There may be just five things, in the whole world, that those two Senators in particular can agree on, but we’ve found one. Right wingers from the Midwest and Left wingers from the Northeast are intensely curious why it costs $2 million dollars Wall Street to build a big red truck that squirts water? And why, after paying the $2 million dollars, does it take 4 years for them to build it? So the Senate is demanding answers to these questions, here.
The heads-up on this story came to us from a viewer who sent me an email. John O’Keeffe, here it is. I get a lot of emails, and I just have no time to respond to most of them, and usually when I do it’s after a while, and I know that’s rude. But my schedule is tight too. I need to go to Guangdong to do a final round of inspections there. Then, to Ningbo for capsule houses. Between those two is one to Heilongjiang for a factory that builds apartment buildings. Each of those visits is a week, and they all need to happen before 31 May. I also have five videos prepared with all the notes and charts, and I haven’t had time to shoot yet. And if this one here goes as I expect, I’ll spend a lot of time in June and July with my guys learning how the Chinese build fire trucks, so we can hurry some over before California burns down again.
And on a personal note, my daughter had my grandchild--my first--and it would be nice to meet her in person before she starts high school. With all that, John O’Keeffe here took about thirty seconds out of his life, copy-and-pasted six links for me to check out, thinking that I would be so enraged by what I found, that our fire truck problem would go straight to the top of my to-do list. And he guessed right.
When we talk about the high tariffs and the trade wars and the import bans on products from China, we need to be real honest about what it is we’re talking about. Edward Kelly is the president of the International Association of Fire Fighters. Mr. Kelly and his buddies are the guys who risk their lives to put out fires, and pull other people out. He has a perspective that is first-hand, and one that is literally life-and-death.
And it turns out he is also a pretty good economist, when he notes here that this whole industry is a monopoly, the manufacturing of the fire trucks and ambulances that they need to do their jobs. It’s monopoly capitalism. There is no competition, so nobody cares about keeping costs down, and nobody cares about doing the job better, or faster.
That is the cost: We pay more than five times more for the equipment than we have to. We wait more than 20 times longer to get it. And during that time, we have no choice but to hope our house doesn’t catch fire. Or our neighbor’s house. Or if it’s a windy day, any house or tree within five miles. Because there’s nobody coming.
Resources and links:
Senators Investigate Private Equity Role in Soaring Fire-Truck Costs
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/us/private-equity-fire-trucks-congress-investigation.html?unlocked_article_code=1._04.ZC3U.Ugn10OaJ9r3n&smid=url-share
Did a Private Equity Fire Truck Roll-Up Worsen the L.A. Fires?
Senators Banks, Warren probe harms of private equity in fire truck manufacturing
As Wall Street Chases Profits, Fire Departments Have Paid the Price
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/17/us/fire-engines-shortage-private-equity.html
75 Los Angeles fire trucks wait for repairs as wildfires rage — while city spends $1.3B on the homeless
Despite Grant, PA Dept. Says Rising Apparatus Costs a Challenge
City Council approves purchase of new fire ladder truck and police squad car
Greenwich fire department needs a new truck, but it might be years before vehicle arrives
https://www.greenwichtime.com/news/article/greenwich-fire-truck-rtm-18442480.php
https://www.hawley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Hawley-Letter-to-Firetruck-Executives.pdf
Links from source email:
https://x.com/matthewstoller/status/1891521655978992004
https://x.com/bymikebaker/status/1912194637957329338
https://x.com/musharbash_b/status/1842156326677299456
https://x.com/moetkacik/status/1883235496010396032
Wow, this one hits close to home. The rural district I live in had a new fire truck on order, which I read about in the local paper. $1.2M! I realize there's no economy of scale when it comes to fire trucks, it's a small market, but still. So I looked around and found a good used truck of the same type for $450K. Only a few years old, reconditioned, and very low mileage (fire trucks sit parked most of the time). The truck was in Utah, so I offered to drive it to BC for them for free if they paid my airfare and hotel. Sent them the information but never heard back. Not even a thank you.
USA firetrucks problems continued:
The EV CO2 scam spilled over into firetrucks and school buses and other commercial vehicles. Nothing can beat a diesel truck for reliability, torque and range.
The kickbacks, graft and inefficiencies surrounding the climate and EV scam has been deeply injurious to the USA, and at least temporary boon to China.
Couple that with outsourcing manufacturing to China and others overseas, the USA is facing a crisis in it's manufacturing base, including spare parts.
Los Angeles is a glaring example. At first blush the ex fire chief might appear to be a DEI hire. Actually she was a competent person who advocated for more fire trucks, personnel, etc.
The LA Mayor, an incompetent DEI hire, fired her.