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gyulai 1 hours ago [-]
I live in Germany and am sure as hell that I will never be driving a $30k electric pickup here. They'll make sure nothing like this ever becomes legal to import or drive on German roads until after there's a German car brand on it, and it costs 10x that while being identical, just to subsidize lots of local jobs that are low-wage, high-tax, and taking away manpower from other sectors/fields where it's more needed.
CalRobert 1 hours ago [-]
That sounds similar to the lamentations of American buyers who want Japanese kei trucks.
It’s protectionism all the way down I guess.
Though I see tons of US pickup trucks in the Netherlands, and have seen even lifted ones in Germany too for that matter.
throwaway2037 14 minutes ago [-]
> American buyers who want Japanese kei trucks.
It is crazy when I hear people say they want to drive a kei truck on American roads. American SUVs and trucks are enormous in both height and weight. The kei truck does not offer the necessary crash protection.
JumpCrisscross 13 minutes ago [-]
> That sounds similar to the lamentations of American buyers
Is there a good international metric for how much a given country’s car buyers pay extra due to tariffs, duties, protectionist regulation, et cetera?
cucumber3732842 57 minutes ago [-]
Lamenting the difficulty of registering kei trucks is kind of rich coming from the patron saint of "the roads are horribly dangerous and we need to do everything to safen them up and drivers can bear whatever that costs"
Protectionism when I don't like it, public safety when I do I guess.
In any case, they're pretty easy to register if you don't lick the boot. Whatever state you're in typically isn't gonna come after you for tax evasion for an object they aren't in the business of taxing if you catch my drift.
Lvl999Noob 28 minutes ago [-]
> if you catch my drift
Not OP but I don't. What do you mean? How do you make the kei truck an object they aren't in the business of taxing when they are, in fact, in that very business? Or maybe I have some deeper confusion about the issue here.
JumpCrisscross 11 minutes ago [-]
> What do you mean?
I think they mean it’s easier than many of us suspect to register an imported car as something close enough and get away with it. The most challenging bit would probably be maintenance.
I mean, you can see how a kastenwagen nutzfahrzeug is a very different vehicle from a consumer mid-size pickup, right?
Sure, technically some would call the vehicle you linked a pickup, and technically German law still identifies the consumer pickup truck as a nutzfahrzeug instead of a PKW, but it doesn’t feel like you’re making a best effort to meet GP in the middle.
gyulai 30 minutes ago [-]
The distinction gets at something interesting though, and it's a weird intermingling of culture and politics. I think a truck as owned by a consumer, and as an American would understand the word, is, at least in part, a lifestyle statement derived from maybe overprovisioning on the horsepower. Such a lifestyle statement in Germany seems to be perfectly socially acceptable when it ties in with luxury and doing your "civic duty" by buying German, but it clearly ruffles feathers and meets with political headwind when it ties in with the culture and financial constraint of the "commoner".
JumpCrisscross 9 minutes ago [-]
> lifestyle statement derived from maybe overprovisioning on the horsepower
For what it’s worth, that horsepower is billed for towing.
cheschire 14 minutes ago [-]
In my experience the resistance seems to come from the sense of “waste” that comes from buying a specialized vehicle. Anecdotally the folks I talk to (all blue-collar “commoners”) are overly focused on buying the eierlegende Wollmilchsau[0] vehicle. They view specialized vehicles, especially luxury-priced specialized vehicles, as an unnecessary waste.
Does this relate with your experience? It sounds like your perspective is broader than mine and more informed.
It looks like after Tsinghua Uni, he moved to the United States and attended Georgia Tech to get a Master's and PhD. Further, he has worked his entire professional career in the United States and has never worked for a Chinese company.
cbg0 2 hours ago [-]
China, being a superpower, has a vested interest in bringing other superpowers down a peg as well as increasing other countries' dependence on China.
Their state has a serious incentive to ship out cheap cars to destroy the automotive industry in the US and the EU for example. When that happens they can double the price on all their vehicles and you can't restart your car factories to compete with them again until years down the line.
With Huawei its about telecom equipment which is essential in today's age, with TikTok it's about controlling the narrative, also essential.
Yes, US and EU manufacturers need to innovate and be less greedy but the cost to make things will always be higher than in China so even though protectionism sounds bad, you'll always have some of that around to even the playing field.
pjc50 1 hours ago [-]
Something I've been trying to articulate for a while is that the EV revolution is a smaller version of the phone and internet revolutions: it requires a bunch of infrastructure buildout, but it's also the result of individual consumer choices. And it's highly synergistic. But along with that, it will create "losers", existing companies whose business can't adapt to the new ways. Sears had a hundred-year start on Amazon as a mail-order business and couldn't adapt, for example.
In the middle of this was Jack Welch's "destroy your business dot com", which is still highly controversial. But he did at least recognize that running a big ossified business in a time of change was going to need a massive kick to get everyone out of their complacency (and if not, out of their jobs!). Cannibalize your own legacy business, or some competitor will.
I think this is a serious problem in existing car companies. They attach too much prestige and career to being "petrolheads", or simply working in the engine division; after all, that's the most expensive to develop and least easy to substitute part of the car. The EV transition threatens to sweep that all away. Probably most of the EU manufacturers won't really get on board until those people retire.
There's probably a whole other essay that could be written about labour relations and the decline of mass car manufacture in the UK while we retain a lot of high-end boutique expertise (Formula 1 etc).
Anyway, I have an EV on order from FCA Poland, so we'll see how that turns out.
adithyassekhar 24 minutes ago [-]
> They attach too much prestige and career to being "petrolheads", or simply working in the engine division; after all, that's the most expensive to develop and least easy to substitute part of the car. The EV transition threatens to sweep that all away. Probably most of the EU manufacturers won't really get on board until those people retire.
“Those damn pesky artists still painting by hand. We need to wait for them to die out to let the stable diffusion guys take over and then we will be number one!”
I know what I said. Engines are an art.
pjc50 19 minutes ago [-]
> “Those damn pesky artists still painting by hand.
Long ago hand painters used cadmium yellow. It may be art, but it's also poisonous. Same for Napoleon and his arsenic wallpaper. In the end, same for CO2-emitting engines.
JumpCrisscross 7 minutes ago [-]
> Jack Welch's "destroy your business dot com"
What is this?
kalleboo 45 minutes ago [-]
This is somewhere where sensible tariffs actually do make sense. Set the tariffs to offset any government subsidies or environmental regulatory costs. If the cars are actually better, let people buy them, make domestic manufacturers compete. Just don't allow dumping.
Complete protectionism doesn't work because it makes your own manufacturers non-competitive on the global stage.
pjc50 17 minutes ago [-]
> Set the tariffs to offset any government subsidies or environmental regulatory costs.
The problem is this is really hard to objectively measure.
> Complete protectionism doesn't work because it makes your own manufacturers non-competitive on the global stage.
Yes - and this is a problem Detroit has been struggling with since Japan got decent at cars. The recent wave of protectionism is backing them into the dead end.
mcdonje 2 hours ago [-]
US companies outsourcing all of their manufacturing to countries with cheaper labor and laxer environmental & labor laws led to this. What did those titans of industry think would happen down the road? "I'll be retired." Corporations have way too much power in the US, and that has considerably weakened it.
interactivecode 1 hours ago [-]
Clearly the USA has the same vested interest. The difference is they are aggressively initiating war outside their borders to bully and get what they want.
seydor 2 hours ago [-]
How come this price hike hasn't happened with solar panels, inverters, telecom equipment, batteries etc. It's been a while that such industries in europe have become obsolete
TreeInBuxton 46 minutes ago [-]
For telecom, at least, governments have legislated against Huawei equipment, Nokia is going strong from a European side
cbg0 2 hours ago [-]
Solar panels, inverters and batteries are not critical infrastructure and I'd wager the jobs impacted are considerably lower than the automotive industry.
1 hours ago [-]
abc123abc123 1 hours ago [-]
It has. There's an enormous amounts of solar panel manufacturers in china that had to close down, due to the governments ordered over capacity, to try and take over the world. This has led to enormous waste of resources in china.
Now the government has ordered massive development of electric cars, to push down prices to loss making levels. In a few years, a lot of chinese elctric car manufacturers will close down, just like what happened with solar.
The trick here for the west, is to copy china, and once the internal bubble bursts, launch its own companies in solar and e-cars based on copied chinese technology.
The hunter has truly become the hunted!
cjrp 2 hours ago [-]
I guess it's a bit like the nuclear deterrent. The threat of them raising prices or refusing to sell to other countries might be enough.
pjc50 1 hours ago [-]
Really this is conspiracy level thinking. It's not like there's no car industry in the EU, it's just that it's grown in the low-COL areas like Slovakia and not in high-COL areas like Germany.
Chinese imports and local manufacture should be able to compete in the "free market". It's just that that term has been heavily debased by idiots misusing it, like everything else.
58 minutes ago [-]
mschuster91 2 hours ago [-]
> How come this hasn't happened with solar panels, inverters, telecom equipment, batteries etc.
It actually began a few months ago regarding solar panels and batteries [1].
How is that different from what the US and (to a lesser degree) the EU tried to do? Both are examples of capitalism.
Actually I know why it's different, I was just doing an online knee jerk response the difference is that western capitalism has a hands-off (but regulated) approach, letting the companies do their own thing. China and their companies are much more involved. I'm sure the US was a lot more directly involved in setting the directions of its industry in decades past, but since then the industry and stock market took over the reins.
Another factor may be that in the west, workers have more rights, unionized, and set their own boundaries. But they were also constrained - what would've happened if someone at Ford 10, 15 years ago said "I want to develop an EV?". In the US, it took a new company (Tesla with a heap of investor money) to make strides in that area. But because Tesla didn't have any actual experience in making cars, they reinvented the wheel and are (from what I gathered) still building sub-standard cars.
If an experienced company like Ford or VAG set aside money and resources to reinvent the car every once in a while they would've been able to keep up. As it stands, all the existing car companies bolted a battery and engine to their existing models, turning their cars into some weird frankenstein of 20+ year old car electronics, electric drives, and entertainment systems because they didn't have what it takes to design a car from scratch.
They also tried to min/max and moved a lot of production to China; short-term that was a benefit, especially VAG was the biggest car manufacturer / seller over there, until they caught up and overtook them in very short order.
DaedalusII 36 minutes ago [-]
the ironic factor is - this is how vw itself started, as did mitsubishi etc
this is called: sensible state industrial policy
AngryData 1 hours ago [-]
I don't believe at all that China will always be cheaper. And in many cases I wonder if that is even true right now. Labor costs aren't what is keeping US manufacturing cost high, it is capitalist's demands for high and ever increasing profit margins and managerial bloat. Labor is only a small part of the cost of a vehicle. Workers wouldn't care if company profit margins were smaller or if the vehicles they help manufacturer are sold for less than the maximum possible, but the c-suites and investors do.
cbg0 1 hours ago [-]
According to ChatGPT the labor cost per vehicle is more than twice as high in the US versus China. $1,341/vehicle vs $585/vehicle
Still: if the number is that small a fraction of the overall cost, it barely matters which country it's made in? That's basically the cost of selecting a non-standard paint colour option, by the time you look at final price?
Theodores 25 minutes ago [-]
Such a weird take, it sounds as if you have never read or listened to anything that the Chinese leadership have had to tell the world. Or for that matter, Confucius. Yet there is certainty of a paranoid mindset, with some 'yellow peril' going on. Hearst did well with that one!
Just read their five year plans. Not the 'yellow peril' fearmongering, just go to source and make your own mind up. The Chinaman is not out to get you. In fact, until recently, he looked up to you and had the open hand of friendship. He made you many beautiful things and you didn't say thank you, you wittered on about 'stolen IP' (from your stolen land, and it wasn't even your IP, not personally).
China is in no urgency to supply their fine electric cars to the 5% that consider themselves to be American. Why would you? The most litigious place going, with the cheap gas, sinophobia, tariffs and special dealership rules. There is no 'rug pull' either, you are on the 'rug pull' now, with US/EU vehicles costing a fortune. Chinese cars offer savvy consumers a way off, to the sensible land of great value cars.
What you are failing to understand is that, internally, China is hyper competitive, with no rent-seeking class and no settled in mono-duo-trio-polies to stifle all innovation, as per the West. What emerges from the brutal competition of the free market in China (free from rent seeking monopolists) is super-good when it makes it to the wider world.
Huawei kit was just too good, plus the backdoors for five eyes weren't in it, so it had to go. Do you honestly think they had 'communist' backdoors to key infrastructure they were selling into the West, to be scrutinised by armies of security engineers? They are not stupid.
As for the costs being higher in the West, that is just rent seeking, not workers getting paid more, just having more rent/mortgage to pay due to the class of rent seekers the West upholds as 'smart' when they are just parasites, in a financialised economy that is broken.
pjc50 11 minutes ago [-]
> Do you honestly think they had 'communist' backdoors to key infrastructure they were selling into the West, to be scrutinised by armies of security engineers? They are not stupid.
The UK used to have a special BT+Huawei+MI6 joint office where the kit was subject to inspection. I never heard of anything confirmed coming out of there, and the thing seems to have vanished from the internet. So I suspect the order to phase out Huawei was similarly politically motivated.
vsgherzi 2 hours ago [-]
The US is concerned about Chinese EVs taking over the market. For good reason they’re not happy bad and they’re extremely cheap. I’m no economist nor moralist so I can’t say if banning Chinese evs are the right move or not but I can understand the US wanting to try to create its own market before getting destroyed by the competitor. I don’t think it’s fair to say that speaks to the quality of the US alternatives. There’s plenty of smart people trying to put this together to create affordable domestic electric cars. Personally I applaud that and am happy that competition is getting legacy auto manufacturers to finally make some interesting cars.
pepperoni_pizza 2 hours ago [-]
Ultimately China and US (and anyone else in the world for that matter) are doing the same thing - helping their domestic industry compete domestically and internationally, because they want prosperity for their country. They do it via different means - China via massive subsidies and US via bans and tariffs, but the end is the same.
If someone tries to tell you that these are somehow morally different, and one of them is the good guy and the other is the bad guy, they are pushing propaganda, knowingly or unknowingly.
graemep 2 hours ago [-]
There is a national security and sovereignty issue that the European countries (and others) not facing - its similar to dependence on American clouds etc.
A lot of these vehicles rely on OTA updates or are controlled through apps. This essentially means the manufacturer controls them. Imagine the consequences if half the vehicles in your country stopped working, or became unsafe? Do you really want to hand this power to a foreign country?
pjc50 1 hours ago [-]
> This essentially means the manufacturer controls them
The thing is, this problem exists regardless of who the manufacturer is, and using nationalism to make it about China disguises the real problem. Tiktok didn't magically become safe or unsafe when it was divested.
Cthulhu_ 2 hours ago [-]
No, but at the same time, the established car manufacturers are very protective of their own stuff so they are disincentivised from e.g. building a car that works offline. John Deere is infamous for this, locking down their machines to the point that they would become scrap if the company ever went under (for example).
But it's all capitalist forces, because while in theory new companies could start that make basic / offline / affordable / maintainable / reliable cars (and tractors, and everything else), there is simply not enough demand making them non-starters.
It's like people (on here) asking for open phone platforms or phones with smaller screens; they're a minority. Most people do not care.
GreenSalem 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
vsgherzi 2 hours ago [-]
China is definitely a manufacturing powerhouse. But if you think it’s morally superior to the USA I strongly recommend doing some reading. China is an authoritarian nation with extreme censorship as can be seen with the GFW. Criticism of the government is not taken well, LGBTQ content is forbidden, poor treatment of unsupported religions, poor acts of espionage, they have mongered plenty of wars and territory disputes themselves, and have been extremely poor stuwards of their corner of the internet onto the rest of the world.
China has no legs to stand on in a mortality debate. I’m not exactly of fan of things in the US recently either for the record
Edit: forgot to mention Taiwan as well as the Hong Kong protests. Recently individuals and an Artist were arrested in China for trying to remember those passed.
vsgherzi 2 hours ago [-]
Above all I believe in a democratic system where the people’s voices can be heard and we can agree on things together with proper representation. The US definitely dosent always get it right and there’s tons of evidence of this, however I do encourage our effort and hope that one day we can achieve the full foundations of the promises of the US.
UltraSane 2 hours ago [-]
If the US is shit, then the CCP is shit that has been eaten and puked back up.
verve_rat 2 hours ago [-]
You know China is busy genociding its Uyghurs population, right?
Their cars are probably better than US ones, but they are not free of the taint of genocide.
Edit: and that's not counting their aggressive territorial expansion in the South China Sea and their threats against Taiwan.
kaon_2 2 hours ago [-]
I don't want to come across as the China pisser because most big countries do scumbag things of have done them (cough colonialism). But some more of China's vices that are out of sight:
- Keep the war going in Myanmar with terrible results for the population of one of the biggest and most populous countries in the world. You just don't hear about it because no journalist goes there.
- Keeping North Korea in the saddle whereas they could have gently pushed for improvements.
- Keeping the war in Ukraine going. If Chinese leadership has any moral ambition, they could stop the war quickly. But they don't. Their own agenda comes first, as is the case with any superpower.
But yes man I would buy a BYD immediatey and it pisses me off to no end that hey are 5x more expensive in Europe than in China. I guess the whole morality of free trade was only 'good' as long as it benefited us.
2 hours ago [-]
culopatin 2 hours ago [-]
Even if objectively one could agree that currently the products from china are better than the US ones, all the “China so good now” stuff is starting to sound like straight up in your face propaganda.
XorNot 1 hours ago [-]
Or just objective reality? I've been shopping EVs lately and both Tesla and BYD have compelling offerings.
One things for sure: somehow Japanese cars aren't in the mix at all (the experience of trying to even see the bz4x at a Toyota dealer felt like the dealer was unhappy I was even there to see it).
sourcegrift 54 minutes ago [-]
Very bold move to come on an American forum and shit on america. But you cheated by putting a 'fuck maga' at the end.
Please try again in a few days without that and I'd love to see how it goes.
ulfw 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wongarsu 3 hours ago [-]
The list of 14 rules for running a skunkworks program and how they apply here is great and well worth reading the article, regardless of how you feel about the likelihood of Ford ever successfully executing on a $30k ev truck
2 hours ago [-]
iNerdier 3 hours ago [-]
Who says you need Ford to do it? Aging Wheels tried a prototype of a small electric pickup a year ago from a team making one without the support of a huge car company. I have no dog in this fight, other than wanting more of transport to go electric but if Americans refuse to buy vans which probably make more sense for transporting goods this might be a good option.
You don't need Ford per se, but you do need an experienced manufacturer to take a concept car to mass production, and you need mass production to make something affordable.
mft_ 3 hours ago [-]
I'm watching Slate [0] with interest; they aren't following a path according to your assumptions.
Would be interesting to follow, but as of now they look to be in a startup phase still. Car companies take years to establish themselves. This one seems close though, they say they will do their first deliveries later this year.
tomrod 3 hours ago [-]
They have financial capital via Bezos, I thought?
Not denigrating them whatsoever, I would like to have one.
mft_ 2 hours ago [-]
Yes; but they don't (AFAIK) have a track record or pre-existing facilities for car design or manufacturing, per the comment I was replying to.
brikym 2 hours ago [-]
#15 Don't tell anyone about it.
voxadam 2 hours ago [-]
Kelly's 15th rule was actually "Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy."
TomMasz 49 minutes ago [-]
I've worked on skunkworks projects. It's all fine and dandy until it becomes a product and the main company takes over.
leethargo 1 hours ago [-]
From the title, I expected this to be about electric guitars :-(
da_chicken 3 hours ago [-]
Kelly's 14 points are still a great read and should resonate with a lot of people here.
That said, when they tried this in the past they did it by changing the sticker price to $65k+. So, color me skeptical.
kotaKat 1 hours ago [-]
Can't wait for Ford's $40,000 electric pickup.
Pepperidge Farm remembers the $19,995 MSRP Ford Maverick with its standard hybrid drivetrain. Missed my chance to buy one, watched the price bloat out and nope.
It’s protectionism all the way down I guess.
Though I see tons of US pickup trucks in the Netherlands, and have seen even lifted ones in Germany too for that matter.
Is there a good international metric for how much a given country’s car buyers pay extra due to tariffs, duties, protectionist regulation, et cetera?
Protectionism when I don't like it, public safety when I do I guess.
In any case, they're pretty easy to register if you don't lick the boot. Whatever state you're in typically isn't gonna come after you for tax evasion for an object they aren't in the business of taxing if you catch my drift.
Not OP but I don't. What do you mean? How do you make the kei truck an object they aren't in the business of taxing when they are, in fact, in that very business? Or maybe I have some deeper confusion about the issue here.
I think they mean it’s easier than many of us suspect to register an imported car as something close enough and get away with it. The most challenging bit would probably be maintenance.
Its less than 10x
Sure, technically some would call the vehicle you linked a pickup, and technically German law still identifies the consumer pickup truck as a nutzfahrzeug instead of a PKW, but it doesn’t feel like you’re making a best effort to meet GP in the middle.
For what it’s worth, that horsepower is billed for towing.
Does this relate with your experience? It sounds like your perspective is broader than mine and more informed.
0: definition for the English speakers: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eierlegende_Wollmilchsau
Far superior to American made rubbish.
One must admit that Jiaqi Liang, senior director of electrical hardware at Ford's Advanced EV team went to Tsinghua University.
So the Ford design is probably nearly as good as a purely Chinese design.
The problem is going to be the rubbish American MAGA manufacturing.
I found his LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jiaqi-liang-6a653b1b/
It looks like after Tsinghua Uni, he moved to the United States and attended Georgia Tech to get a Master's and PhD. Further, he has worked his entire professional career in the United States and has never worked for a Chinese company.
Their state has a serious incentive to ship out cheap cars to destroy the automotive industry in the US and the EU for example. When that happens they can double the price on all their vehicles and you can't restart your car factories to compete with them again until years down the line.
With Huawei its about telecom equipment which is essential in today's age, with TikTok it's about controlling the narrative, also essential.
Yes, US and EU manufacturers need to innovate and be less greedy but the cost to make things will always be higher than in China so even though protectionism sounds bad, you'll always have some of that around to even the playing field.
In the middle of this was Jack Welch's "destroy your business dot com", which is still highly controversial. But he did at least recognize that running a big ossified business in a time of change was going to need a massive kick to get everyone out of their complacency (and if not, out of their jobs!). Cannibalize your own legacy business, or some competitor will.
I think this is a serious problem in existing car companies. They attach too much prestige and career to being "petrolheads", or simply working in the engine division; after all, that's the most expensive to develop and least easy to substitute part of the car. The EV transition threatens to sweep that all away. Probably most of the EU manufacturers won't really get on board until those people retire.
There's probably a whole other essay that could be written about labour relations and the decline of mass car manufacture in the UK while we retain a lot of high-end boutique expertise (Formula 1 etc).
Anyway, I have an EV on order from FCA Poland, so we'll see how that turns out.
“Those damn pesky artists still painting by hand. We need to wait for them to die out to let the stable diffusion guys take over and then we will be number one!”
I know what I said. Engines are an art.
Long ago hand painters used cadmium yellow. It may be art, but it's also poisonous. Same for Napoleon and his arsenic wallpaper. In the end, same for CO2-emitting engines.
What is this?
Complete protectionism doesn't work because it makes your own manufacturers non-competitive on the global stage.
The problem is this is really hard to objectively measure.
> Complete protectionism doesn't work because it makes your own manufacturers non-competitive on the global stage.
Yes - and this is a problem Detroit has been struggling with since Japan got decent at cars. The recent wave of protectionism is backing them into the dead end.
Now the government has ordered massive development of electric cars, to push down prices to loss making levels. In a few years, a lot of chinese elctric car manufacturers will close down, just like what happened with solar.
The trick here for the west, is to copy china, and once the internal bubble bursts, launch its own companies in solar and e-cars based on copied chinese technology.
The hunter has truly become the hunted!
Chinese imports and local manufacture should be able to compete in the "free market". It's just that that term has been heavily debased by idiots misusing it, like everything else.
It actually began a few months ago regarding solar panels and batteries [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...
Actually I know why it's different, I was just doing an online knee jerk response the difference is that western capitalism has a hands-off (but regulated) approach, letting the companies do their own thing. China and their companies are much more involved. I'm sure the US was a lot more directly involved in setting the directions of its industry in decades past, but since then the industry and stock market took over the reins.
Another factor may be that in the west, workers have more rights, unionized, and set their own boundaries. But they were also constrained - what would've happened if someone at Ford 10, 15 years ago said "I want to develop an EV?". In the US, it took a new company (Tesla with a heap of investor money) to make strides in that area. But because Tesla didn't have any actual experience in making cars, they reinvented the wheel and are (from what I gathered) still building sub-standard cars.
If an experienced company like Ford or VAG set aside money and resources to reinvent the car every once in a while they would've been able to keep up. As it stands, all the existing car companies bolted a battery and engine to their existing models, turning their cars into some weird frankenstein of 20+ year old car electronics, electric drives, and entertainment systems because they didn't have what it takes to design a car from scratch.
They also tried to min/max and moved a lot of production to China; short-term that was a benefit, especially VAG was the biggest car manufacturer / seller over there, until they caught up and overtook them in very short order.
this is called: sensible state industrial policy
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a292f0205ec819182b54e48ce9702a3
Just read their five year plans. Not the 'yellow peril' fearmongering, just go to source and make your own mind up. The Chinaman is not out to get you. In fact, until recently, he looked up to you and had the open hand of friendship. He made you many beautiful things and you didn't say thank you, you wittered on about 'stolen IP' (from your stolen land, and it wasn't even your IP, not personally).
China is in no urgency to supply their fine electric cars to the 5% that consider themselves to be American. Why would you? The most litigious place going, with the cheap gas, sinophobia, tariffs and special dealership rules. There is no 'rug pull' either, you are on the 'rug pull' now, with US/EU vehicles costing a fortune. Chinese cars offer savvy consumers a way off, to the sensible land of great value cars.
What you are failing to understand is that, internally, China is hyper competitive, with no rent-seeking class and no settled in mono-duo-trio-polies to stifle all innovation, as per the West. What emerges from the brutal competition of the free market in China (free from rent seeking monopolists) is super-good when it makes it to the wider world.
Huawei kit was just too good, plus the backdoors for five eyes weren't in it, so it had to go. Do you honestly think they had 'communist' backdoors to key infrastructure they were selling into the West, to be scrutinised by armies of security engineers? They are not stupid.
As for the costs being higher in the West, that is just rent seeking, not workers getting paid more, just having more rent/mortgage to pay due to the class of rent seekers the West upholds as 'smart' when they are just parasites, in a financialised economy that is broken.
The UK used to have a special BT+Huawei+MI6 joint office where the kit was subject to inspection. I never heard of anything confirmed coming out of there, and the thing seems to have vanished from the internet. So I suspect the order to phase out Huawei was similarly politically motivated.
If someone tries to tell you that these are somehow morally different, and one of them is the good guy and the other is the bad guy, they are pushing propaganda, knowingly or unknowingly.
A lot of these vehicles rely on OTA updates or are controlled through apps. This essentially means the manufacturer controls them. Imagine the consequences if half the vehicles in your country stopped working, or became unsafe? Do you really want to hand this power to a foreign country?
The thing is, this problem exists regardless of who the manufacturer is, and using nationalism to make it about China disguises the real problem. Tiktok didn't magically become safe or unsafe when it was divested.
But it's all capitalist forces, because while in theory new companies could start that make basic / offline / affordable / maintainable / reliable cars (and tractors, and everything else), there is simply not enough demand making them non-starters.
It's like people (on here) asking for open phone platforms or phones with smaller screens; they're a minority. Most people do not care.
China has no legs to stand on in a mortality debate. I’m not exactly of fan of things in the US recently either for the record
Edit: forgot to mention Taiwan as well as the Hong Kong protests. Recently individuals and an Artist were arrested in China for trying to remember those passed.
Their cars are probably better than US ones, but they are not free of the taint of genocide.
Edit: and that's not counting their aggressive territorial expansion in the South China Sea and their threats against Taiwan.
- Keep the war going in Myanmar with terrible results for the population of one of the biggest and most populous countries in the world. You just don't hear about it because no journalist goes there. - Keeping North Korea in the saddle whereas they could have gently pushed for improvements. - Keeping the war in Ukraine going. If Chinese leadership has any moral ambition, they could stop the war quickly. But they don't. Their own agenda comes first, as is the case with any superpower.
But yes man I would buy a BYD immediatey and it pisses me off to no end that hey are 5x more expensive in Europe than in China. I guess the whole morality of free trade was only 'good' as long as it benefited us.
One things for sure: somehow Japanese cars aren't in the mix at all (the experience of trying to even see the bz4x at a Toyota dealer felt like the dealer was unhappy I was even there to see it).
Please try again in a few days without that and I'd love to see how it goes.
Video: https://youtu.be/1OgN_qctcGs
[0] https://www.slate.auto/en
Not denigrating them whatsoever, I would like to have one.
That said, when they tried this in the past they did it by changing the sticker price to $65k+. So, color me skeptical.
Pepperidge Farm remembers the $19,995 MSRP Ford Maverick with its standard hybrid drivetrain. Missed my chance to buy one, watched the price bloat out and nope.