We don’t see BYD cars in the US or Canada very much yet because of tariffs. But head down to Mexico and they’re everywhere. The Chinese EV automakers are crushing it.
This is just going to hurt US car manufacturers. Tarriffs are rent seeking. Rent seeking in the long run is brittle. You get a little security now for loss of competitiveness in the future - once the rent seeking goes away, you’re screwed. You haven’t had to compete, so you haven’t adapted. Consumers flee because they’ve just tolerated you - they actively dislike being forced into fewer choices
Rent seeking is industry suicide. It feels like it helps, but it’s not solving the real problem.
At a certain level it can lead otherwise competitive companies to rest on their laurels.
On another level, it would be game over without them. For example, US shipyards would simply stop existing without protection. There is no management strategy or measure they could implement that could compete with Asian shipyards.
The theory is that in both cases (ie. with and without tariffs) shipyards are going to die sooner or later. It is better for the society to let them die as soon as possible and direct efforts to things we are better at while taking advantage of cheaper ships produced elsewhere.
Some industries are of national security or other strategic value, so protecting them even if that means some stagnation is desirable over the offshoring of said industry.
The question is: how do you define "national security" and "other strategic value"? At the end of the day both really mean economic interest. Especially in case of US.
So if someone says "national security" is above economic interest of US, I would say these people mean _their_ economic interest is above economic interest of US and use both terms as a cover.
> Insofar as the country being conquered and Americans being slaughtered wholesale would be against our economic interests lol
> There are clear national security reasons for the government to prop up shipbuilding and semiconductors.
Are you saying countries without shipbuilding facilities or not producing semicondutors are being conquered and their citizens being slaughtered?
I'd say that is fear mongering done by the people doing business on "national security".
> Are you saying countries without shipbuilding facilities or not producing semicondutors are being conquered and their citizens being slaughtered?
Yes that is a clear risk. For most of human history, powerful leaders have unleashed violence on their neighbors to increase their wealth and prestige. For about 70 years, the cold war balance prevented very catastrophic wars between powerful nations but we now seem to be having an atavistic throw back of powerful nations being led by expansionist leaders. You either need to create your own manufacturing capacity or be at the mercy of others.
You can call it fearmongering but I can point to the whole of human history and tell you that not only has it happened, at a certain point it is inevitable. I can point at Ukraine, right now, as an example of what happens when one country appears much weaker than an aggressive neighbor.
The United States is the greatest power the world has ever seen. While the oceans protect us, the truth is that even the White House was once burned down in a war.
The economic interest is the US ability to as rapidly as possible convert those shipyards to military shipyards during a large scale prolonged war. The US did not make (relatively) many ships before WW2 and then during WW2 was briefly the largest ship builder in the world.
> The economic interest is the US ability to as rapidly as possible convert those shipyards to military shipyards during a large scale prolonged war.
Nah, that doesn't add up. US needs _ships_ and SOTA military equipment to make sure that any military conflict is as short as possible (ie. US wins). Losing money on unused production capability does not make sense because in case of prolonged conflict there is time to build the capability (as it happened during WWII).
In reality, what you call "prolonged military conflict", is nothing more than normal international competition. One could even argue US is in prolonged military conflict since WWII.
In which case making rational decisions based on hard economic criteria (ie. not losing money) is the key to success.
Sure I can see the argument for national security. And to balance out Chinese companies own rent seeking.
OTOH still strategically it’s not great. As the Asian companies have an actual market, this will lead Asian manufacturers to have better ships than comparable US ones.
The way China approached their internal market for EVs is very different.
They didn't just put tariffs on foreign EVs, they poured a lot of money into their own industry to produce a lot of different companies that became fiercely competitive in their own local market.
Once they got a few big players they stop a lot of the subsidies which led to a lot of companies falling under but at the same time the process produced some really good, competitive and profitable companies like BYD which then were ready to take on the international market.
America, on the other hand, hasn't done much to increase the competitiveness of their own internal market for EVs. Hence, the protectionist measures will have the consequences the poster above described.
Tariffs are not "good" or "bad" they're an economic tool countries can use. It's how you use the tool and in conjunction with which other tools that can have negative or positive consequences for the industry they're applying it to.
It's like "america uses a scalpel to peel oranges" versus "China uses a scalpel in open heart surgeries". The scalpel can cut, but context matters to say if it was used properly or not.
Ok but this thread is about “all tariffs being rent seeking”. Now tariffs are sometimes ok - gotcha.
What has china actually don’t different than America? Was a 10-15 percent subsidy not enough? Were the carbon credits not enough? We’re the limitations on gas cars dependent on ev sales not enough?
As far as I’m aware both china and the us have heavily subsidized ev sales. What’s different?
It's an easy way to make money. There will always be people with too much money who for some reason want a Dodge Ram. Does that mean that US made cars are a serious competition? No. But they are like luxury Swiss watches- nobody minds if the government taxes it.
I'm trying really hard to think of a US car maker that's actually super relevant outside of the US.
Ford in Europe is Ford Germany, a fully owned but separate entity (which is probably why Ford sales in Europe are decent). I think they have presence in other markets but most of their money comes from the US.
GM used to have Opel/Vauxhall, but it sold it to Stellantis.
Chrysler is now owned by Stellantis, which is a mostly European car maker.
Tesla is the obvious new kid on the block but unless they're the only ones with self driving cars globally, I don't really see them hanging on to their global market share 20 years from now in front of Chinese, South Korean, Japanese and European car makers.
>> This is just going to hurt US car manufacturers.
still don't understand why this is going to hurt US car manufacturers. Have the Japanese auto imports improved the US auto industry past 40+ years? Is Ford or GM more competitive? The US automakers are highly competitive in large vehicle/truck segments, protected under the Chicken Tax past 60+ years, but they barely have any presence left in small, cheaper segments dominated by the Japanese and Koreans. Farley recently said Ford has shifted its focus from affordable, mass-market cars because it couldn't compete against the Japanese/Koreans.
Just not convinced that allowing autos from another auto industry built on forced joint venture/tech transfer, illegal (export/local content) subsidies, or otherwise benefited tremendously from the very same rent-seeking policies themselves past 15 years is solving the real problem.
Japanese competition has absolutely improved US car manufacturers.
They have leaner assembly lines. More sophisticated supply chain. They now make a product that it turns out people want (reliable/economy)
One big one to consumers is the focus on long term reliability. This was a complete joke in the 1980s-1990s for US cars. Everyone knew Toyota and Honda would last 300k miles and an American car would crap out at 80k miles. We are in a completely new world of more consistent reliability with cars. Even if Ford is 90% Toyota - that’s a much better place to be.
Everyone wanted trade barriers in the 80s and 90s but without the pain of competition our cars would feel like the modern equivalent of a bad Eastern European shitbox - only optimized for power and not economy.
>> They now make a product that it turns out people want (reliable/economy)
Sure, Ford has always made cars that their customers want, F-150 for instance, the best selling vehicle in the US for an unbroken streak of nearly 50 years, during which it continued to improve and maintain its popularity. The Chicken law has done wonders for the American automakers.
>> ... the focus on long term reliability.
Sure, I don't question the Japanese automakers' reliability, but, in the cheap, small vehicle segments they compete with the Japanese import, the American automakers are now more or less wiped out. Most small, affordable vehicles from GM and Ford are now made in either Mexico or South Korea. So where is their "competitiveness" that otherwise wouldn't exist without the Japanese imports? In other word, the Japanese imports clearly did not prevent the "loss of competitiveness in the future."
>> Rent seeking is industry suicide.
If it's as bad as you say it is, why turn a blind to China's rent seeking past 15 years and promote their industry, which again benefited tremendously from forced JV, forced tech transfer, restrictive market access/licensing, local content/sourcing/production, high-tariffs, shadow-banning foreign competitors, arbitrary regulatory/safety barriers, etc?
I think we can glean a lot of lesson from the Chicken Tax past 60+ years and China's rent-seeking policies in the EV business past 15 years. We know what works and what doesn't -- and BYD is not it.
I agree, and it's also worth pointing out the EV market has been artificially buoyed by the use of state-funded incentives to buy electric cars, and we know this because now that those incentives are ending, EV sales are cratering.
In a vacuum, I don't hate the idea of paying people to switch to EV's who can do it, but the problem is especially in America, those benefits are going not to working class people who really need new cars (and who's cars are the most environmentally problematic) but to solidly upper-middle class buyers of incredibly large and impractical EV's which are either sports cars or suburban panzers, that rip through tires and consume vast amounts of lithium for their enormous battery packs, and beat the shit out of our already deteriorating roads.
Additionally we're finding that EV's have a major, probably unsolvable issue: they age much, much faster than ICE vehicles in one particular area: the battery. EV's have the same problem as cellphones effectively; their cells deteriorate with use, and unlike used ICE vehicles for which parts are widely available and usually cheap, it's not even remotely economically feasible to repair this issue. Replacing a battery costs so much you might as well just replace the entire car.
you're just repeating a list of tired anti-ev propoganda points, that have been debunked over and over.
- they're not much that much heavier, class-for-class. Substantially lighter than the ridiculous
ly oversized trucks that people buy for suburban use.
- Theres nearly infinite lithium in the world, depending on economics of extraction. new battery chemistries dont even use lithium.
- battery degradation hasnt turned out to be a big issue. Real world tesla data shows ~80% capacity at ~300k miles, which is approaching EOL for a car.
working class people cant buy cheap EVs because the US keeps cheap EVs out of the market with import restrictions, tarriffs and legacy manufacturers that refuse to adapt and offer a product people want. EV sales "cratered" for the same reason. Meanwhile, EV sales in the rest of the world are accelerating fast.
You're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying "EVs are bad, stick with ICE." I'm saying EVs are not solving the broader issues of why car dependency is a bad idea for transporting people at scale, which is what they were proposed to do. Having everyone own their own car and drive themselves everywhere does not nor has it ever scaled properly, which is why we continue struggling with urban sprawl, lack of parking, smog and particulates, and all the rest.
EV's just shift the energy burden from the fossil fuel industry to the power grid. It's not a fix, it barely qualifies as a band-aid.
oh. im not really sure how i was supposed to get that point from a post that was seemingly just criticizing EVs vs ICE. But sure yeah, EVs wont make the world less car centric. I dont think thats ever going to happen, sadly.
> EV's just shift the energy burden from the fossil fuel industry to the power grid
Thats actually great! even if the electricity comes from 100% fossil fuels we would still reduce vehicle emissions by ~60% (ICE are only 20-30% efficient). And then of course grids are getting clean fast with the scaleout of renewables, which is accelerating rapidly worldwide. We will see 100% emission free personal car transit in my lifetime (somewhere, in whichever country gets to a net zero grid first). Thats exciting!
The broad push of EV's was to make consumer cars "green." It's classic greenwashing nonsense. They are broadly better...? than ICE, with so many caveats and variables that even that statement feels like it's giving too much credit, but yes, for standard consumer use, they are an improvement.
> even if the electricity comes from 100% fossil fuels we would still reduce vehicle emissions by ~60%
That emissions number is only looking at what comes out of the tailpipe, which isn't the full story. You have dust coming off the brake rotors, plus and much worse, the particulate from the tires as they wear down, and on that front, EV's are actually notably worse because a dead battery weighs as much as a full battery, a condition not shared by an ICE vehicle, and EVs do trend heavier on curb weight which means they go through tires faster and roads too for that matter.
Additionally, in cold climate areas, EVs end up spending a decent portion of their stored energy heating both the passenger cabin and the battery itself, and by constrast, heat is basically free from an ICE thanks to how it operates.
Like, if you live in an area with charging infrastructure, and the limitations/challenges of an EV aren't an issue for you (which to be clear, a LOT of people fit that description!) then by all means, get an EV. They are better, broadly. However if you have an ICE vehicle that is largely doing fine, is reasonably modern and well maintained... then it's arguably much greener to not buy a new car at all and just keep running the one you've already got. Better for the wallet, too.
> We will see 100% emission free personal car transit in my lifetime (somewhere, in whichever country gets to a net zero grid first). Thats exciting!
I have a lot of doubts, but hey, that will be some delicious crow to eat if it turns out true. I love cars, both electric and ICE, all their issues aside.
On a clean grid they are ~100% better on tailpipe emissions. They create less brake dust, not more, due to regen. Yes, more tire particles due to being 10-20% heavier, but way less particulate overall because of no PM2.5 from combustion.
Massive massive improvement, that’s not greenwashing imho.
(Something that is greenwashing is PHEVs, they have proven to be mostly a lie in practice)
> heat is basically free from an ICE thanks to how it operates.
Does it not bother you that over 60% of the energy in gasoline is wasted as heat into the atmosphere? Of which a small amount is captured to heat the cabin in cold weather?
> buoyed by the use of state-funded incentives to buy electric cars, and we know this because now that those incentives are ending, EV sales are cratering.
Oil subsidies are so interwoven with the way the US works that this is easy to miss in these discussions, but if not for these subsidies ICE vehicles would be much more expensive:
BYD, Geely, ZeekR, Kia, Hyundai, Mini, MG see them all around, more than Teslas (inner city Melbourne).
Also noticing that a lot of the rideshare/taxis are going EV quickly. I'm guessing the much lower maintenance and service requirements are outweighing any "range" issues, plus the trade-in value is irrelevant with warranties covering the batteries etc.
Opinionated in this context usually means “doing their own thing” or “trying again from basics” instead of following the herd and being like everyone else.
The standard new house isn’t opinionated - a custom build with features not normally seen could be.
Opinionated usually results in love it or hate it style design - unless they happen on something that just becomes standard.
The original Jobs iPhone was opinionated - an all touchscreen design went against the common “knowledge” that a physical keyboard was the way to go.
I was always stuck by how different all the cars in the BYD line are. There are some pretty bold styling and fitout choices between the models.
I have mostly driven BMW and Toyota sedan and fwd's. And as you progress in car price and size its a matter of getting more features, and a better version over the cheaper model.
Isn't that the opposite of being opinionated? In software I've heard "opinionated" about programs that limit configurability in favor of one fits all default. I believe it was Ruby on Rails which popularized the term.
For cars, I guess Henry Ford's anecdotal comment that "you can have any color you like as long as it's black" was a form of opinionated design. If BYDs cars are all different, surely they're less opinionated?
Instead of having a bland, don’t-take-any-strong-decision, please-every-one design ("un opinionated"), each car has its own very distinct design ("opinionated").
You could say that at a brand level, they are equally "opinionated" because the average car of each brand is average, but the OP argues that BYD does it by sampling N very distinct points from the car distribution, and other by sampling N times the same average point.
> In software I've heard "opinionated" about programs that limit configurability in favor of one fits all default
While this is one form of opinionated, it really just means that they are doing their own thing different from the other established players. This could mean MORE configurability in some cases. Another poster also said it, but opinionated just means that they have taken a stand in product design (features, looks, usability, etc) that they think it correct and it does not bow to 'the herd'. IMO, an opinionated design is neither good nor bad, but it is respected by me.
When I first moved to Spain, I was surprised beer was available in McDonalds, and that people commonly had beer with lunch. But not even here do we have beer available in car show rooms, that seems like the slightly wrong place for that, especially considering how strict Singapore seems from the outside.
25 years ago I was on a project that was based out of offices next to a BMW factory, so we got canteen privileges, and the food was awesome, and beer was available as one of the beverages.
This was at a car plant for people working in manufacturing.
At the university canteens/cafeterias in Italy they had wine and beer on tap next to the soda. It wasn't very good, but I was amazed the first time I just saw the tap there in the middle of the cafeteria where anyone could just go refill when they wanted.
Car show rooms are about catering to clients, selling them both a vehicle and a lifestyle, plus people are much more likely to make deals when they're offered food and drink.
Well, almost anywhere. There are places where if you have a beer with lunch and they saw you arrive in a car, they'll ask you for your car keys otherwise they'll call the police on you. Daily life works differently around the world :)
> There are places where if you have a beer with lunch and they saw you arrive in a car, they'll ask you for your car keys otherwise they'll call the police on you.
In Singapore you wouldn't necessarily arrive in a car (yet alone your own car) when you go to a car showroom. I'm not even sure they'd have enough parking around there.
I'm glad I don't live in a place where one beer would cause that. Several, yes, that's certainly an issue. But so much of the world seems to have lost the ability to be reasonable in favor of black-and-white thinking.
For those without religious objections or addictions, one glass of beer or wine with a meal is a complete nothingburger. Yes, it technically impairs your reaction times, but not enough to be a crime.
Yeah, Sweden is one hell of a place, few places have so many sticklers for rules collected in one place, for better or worse. And it's a very secular place in general, but very "zero tolerance" when it comes to drinking and driving, but completely opposite when it comes to "drinking too much only on weekends".
Why? Just make sure the customer who's test driving has the beer and wine after the ride. And their companions you can fill up before to put them in a good mood.
Right, but in countries where they're very strict about drinking and driving, you won't see even salespeople trying to get people drunk while selling a car.
It’s a fancy showroom, not a car lot. You can’t drive off in one of the products unless you want to make a grand exit through the plate glass windows. Singapore car registration costs as much as the car itself and all they’d do is get you started on the paperwork.
I think they can do the paperwork pretty quickly. And I'm reasonably sure they let you do test drives.
Just need to make sure that the driving customer has the beer after their test drive. You can fill up the companions before, however.
But to strengthen your point: I don't know for sure, but from what I can tell by looking at the place there's barely enough inventory at that showroom to allow some test drives. It's definitely not a car lot.
Aha, I'm not entirely sure what a "car lot" is, but the showrooms from BYD and other car makers here in Spain definitively let you test drive cars there, although you won't buy a car and drive away from it there. Apparently it works differently in Singapore :)
It’s not just tariffs. They’re not homologated to the US market, so even if you were will to pay multiples more than people in Australia do, you can’t register one in the US.
Tariffs are exactly the reason that situation is as it is.
BYD can outwait the adjustments of the US car industry to a new reality, in the same way that the Japanese did back in the 80s.
Last time, the US did it by screwing the union workers of the rust belt, while also giving up on passenger cars and moving to SUV/trucks, but this time it's a complete change in technology and the US (and Japan to an extent) is having trouble reorienting its manufacturing and supply chains to support the change.
If Ford can't sell an EV version of an F-150, then it has a real problem, because the rest of the world is not staying on ICE technology.
The Ford thing is bizarre. My brother has an F-150 Lightning. It’s an amazing vehicle that they just couldn’t market in this gonzo social landscape.
He is literally the walking version of the stereotype of a rural cowboy type. He runs a small hobby farm, leases pasture to local farms. He works in financial management for a regional company and his wife is a procurement officer for a state government.
They produce most of their electricity with solar. Replaced some tractor use cases with oxen. They literally don’t pay to operate their daily drivers. (A lightning and a Volt now Bolt)
The lightning replaced their emergent generator when that reached its end of life.
He got into this stuff after doing the numbers for the company. It’s cheaper and better to operate. Last year they bought a dozen Silverado EV pickups for their field people. They work fine where they deployed them. The workers love them and the opex is better.
The self described rednecks hate it because the internet told them to. He almost removed the branding because he gets approached by people warning him about all of the terrible things that will happen.
Isn't part of it the dealer network as well? They've existed so long on service money, they were actively pushing people away from the Lightning because the service needs were so low and they wouldn't be making money off them.
Yeah, Ford realized that early on and had once raised the idea of building their EV division as a direct-to-consumer more directly competitive as a Tesla-rival, but as soon as that news floated the dealers had a fit and one of Ford's ancient problems is that the dealers are also often its largest shareholders. That's been a recipe for Ford's many little disasters since 1919 (where the Dodge Brothers were dealers and shareholders and convinced US courts to force Ford to pay more profits to shareholder dividends than reinvest in R&D, those dividends then helping to finance the Dodge Brothers' next business, the Ford rival Dodge; the terribly broken concept of "fiduciary duty to shareholders" comes almost directly from that 1919 lawsuit, if you've ever wondered how American businesses became the quarterly-focused way that they are instead of longer horizon focused).
This has been my experience when trying to buy any EV in the US. They technically exist, but finding one at a dealership is hard. Harder still is finding one that they actually have charged. Finding one without massive dealer fees is impossible. They use the forced scarcity as an excuse. Chevy dealership told me I was better off buying a Tesla. Hyundai told me “this isn’t really an EV kind of city”
It's the towing issue that compromised the Lightning too. Attach something to an EV to tow and you kill the range. A lot of people in this country buy a pickup to tow something with it occasionally.
> Attach something to an EV to tow and you kill the range
It reduces the range, just as it reduces how far an ICE truck can go on one tank. But that's only an issue if you tow long distance and cannot find a place to charge on the way. You could choose to rent an ICE truck for such (increasingly) rare occasions. People for whom that's not so rare should stick with ICE or hybrid, or in future with an EREV.
Once they can reset their range quickly like an ICE vehicle can then this becomes a non-issue. EV torque would be great for towing. But it's not quite there yet, outside of some BYD fast-chargers AFAIK.
But losing (even theoretical) tow range is something I think would bother the typical F150 buyer. Even changing from a V8 to a V6 in the F150 was a problem for such folks. They don't like change, and they don't like their truck's "stats" to reduce, even if it gives better overall performance.
The people with serious towing needs are buying F-250s anyway. The people towing their toys to the lake are mostly fine. If not, it’s not the right vehicle choice.
If North America is mostly only buying trucks from Ford and Ford can't sell an EV only truck, then has Ford given up on North America if EV is the present competitiveness need?
(Of course the related news was that in Europe Ford also moved to an agreement to rebadge Renault EVs instead of manufacture their own. Has Ford given up on Europe, too?)
The argument that tariffs could protect Ford to do the hard work at building more EV models seems proven wrong when Ford makes the short-term decision that it can kick the can down the road on supporting EV models until after the tariffs expire.
> If North America is mostly only buying trucks from Ford and Ford can't sell an EV only truck, then has Ford given up on North America if EV is the present competitiveness need?
No, because American truck buyers seem to prefer non-EV trucks while commercial EV buyers seem to prefer Ford's more practical E-Transit vans.
> The argument that tariffs could protect Ford to do the hard work at building more EV models seems proven wrong when Ford makes the short-term decision that it can kick the can down the road on supporting EV models until after the tariffs expire.
Ford's truck sales are not protected by the newly introduced tariffs but by the 25% Chicken Tax tariffs imposed in 1964. Seems unlikely that will change.
(There's been a lot of consolidation in the car industry over the past few decades which Ford hasn't much participated in. I guess the platform sharing agreement is a consequence of that as it wants to reduce development costs.)
> No, because American truck buyers seem to prefer non-EV trucks
For now. In a market with very few EV trucks (and very few EVs in general, and very few cheap ones).
If Rivian found a way to mass-produce an R1T at half the price, does Ford compete?
If BYD builds a North American truck in Mexico, does Ford compete?
GM's Silverado EV is growing at a decent clip, including commercial fleet sales, and looks possibly set up already to eat the market that Ford is leaving behind. If GM sales continue and maybe extend to another, cheaper pickup truck EV model, does Ford compete?
If Hyundai or Honda figure out how to get EV truck sales going in the US, does Ford compete?
Ford's pitching an EREV pivot as a "best of both worlds" situation. GM back in 2019 said EREV was a "worst of both worlds" situation that complicated drive trains for not enough benefit, especially to the consumer. Is Ford signalling competitiveness by ignoring warnings from their actual competitors?
Which is also why the US administrations of the Marshall Plan era thought they made it clear that tariffs were a bad way to stay competitive in a global economy. Tariffs were absolutely the wrong move. Ford's actions seem to be proving that.
It's 100% tariffs. So yes, it's of course tariffs. They’re not homologated because there's no point of selling something when half the price goes to import taxation
The reason BYD is killing it is because they can offer their cars at a price point unavailable to the US. The reason for that price point is because China is producing some of the cheapest batteries in the world.
BYD cannot build their cars in the US because the core part they need to make them cheap is the batteries. CATL makes the batteries that BYD uses and they aren't going to setup shop in the US. A lot of what makes CATLs batteries cheap is because China has a raw materials trade pipeline that's now superior than what's available in the US.
All of this goes back to tariffs.
By putting insane tariffs on all imports the US has effectively isolated itself from the rest of the world. Manufacturing will defacto be more expensive in the US because a significant portion of any incoming raw resources will get an automatic 25% tax.
The US does have it's own raw resources, but they aren't fully developed. Prior to 2024, we were heavily reliant on imports for a lot of our manufacturing. Shaking up the entire market for stupid reasons has destroyed manufacturing in the US. It'll take decades to repair and rebuild.
The steep tariffs against china that Trump did in his first term against solar, steel, and batteries were maintained by Biden. In term 2 Trump ramped those up to 11.
I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Tariffs could be an important tool as part of a strategy to kickstart US manufacturing.
A big issue is education. In my region the state government is pushing hard to support semiconductor manufacturing. In addition to incentives for building facilities they funded education in community colleges to train up the workforce, did some similar stuff at the high school level and implemented incentives for supporting industry.
But… you get the army you have, not what you want. POTUS has the strategic insight of a cab driver and is surrounded by a wack pack of sycophantic C-team players. We’re hurting manufacturing because without a strategy you’re just driving margin enhancement for a few industries, and the grinding down of the economy will hurt most others.
We should look to the Chinese as a place to learn from rather than a faceless enemy. They achieved amazing results and made some mistakes and sought out to do some things that are kinda gross as well. But… they aligned policy, governance and incentives to move their country out of the sorry state it was in. DJI has like 20k PhDs working on drones. I doubt we have that many in the US.
I'm not saying that Tariffs are necessarily bad or wrong. But they are a shape blade that is really easy to cut yourself with. Blanket tariffs are effectively putting a sword on a rope and wildly swinging it around in a crowd.
Can they? I can get a lot of car for that money if I buy something used that's just a few years old, and I'll have a fairly good idea how to get my car serviced and how much it will cost, and how much I'll be able to sell it for.
Even if we don't consider these things, here in the EU, very few Chinese models look like a steal.
Tariffs or not (PHEVs and ICE cars are not tariffed like EVs afaik), the consensus seems to be that Chinese cars at a given category, are built better, cost like 10-20% less, are well equipped, but generally drive worse and often have annoying usability issues
All things considered, they're certainly competitive depending on what you're looking for, but don't look likely to oust the existing competition.
And I don't get the West's obsession with BYD - imo they look weird, they either get the interior or exterior styling wrong (with the notable exception of the Seal U), and aren't really selling that well compared to other Chinese brands.
The obsession seems mostly based around the naive assumption that you can take a Shenzhen sticker price, convert to USD, and that’s what the car would sell for at a US dealer, were it not for tariffs.
This is the wrong mental model for a few reasons, not least that breaking into the US market would require massive marketing and infrastructure investment that would have to be paid for. And that’s before you worry about reengineering for US regulations.
Also: The current Chinese EV market is not in a sustainable place. It’s the product of massive government investment and (over) incentive to produce. Most Chinese EV makers are headed to bankruptcy if current trends continue, so they won’t.
In the steady state, Chinese EVs with German-class tariffs would be competitive in the US but they wouldn’t blow the doors off the market any more than, say, Hyundai/Kia have.
I’m going to guess that a true competitive push into the US market would have marginal costs that exceed getting into Oz. But anyway your comment inspired me to do some digging:
The high end Sea Lion 7 from BYD apparently tops out at around 205k yuan in China. $29k USD.
I would think the comparison would be the BYD ATTO 3 premium vs Tesla Y premium.
Australian sticker price for the atto 3 is under $45,000 AUD, a smidgen over $30K usd.
With a wife with a mobility scooter and working 30-90 mins away from the office depending on traffic, I picked on up (salary sacrificing) as the lease costs less than what I was paying for fuel on the Kia carnival (Sedona in the us) each week.
Tesla model 3 entry level was another $10K AUD for a car with less features.
The US could have had a competitive manufacturing industry, but we traded it for cheap offshore labor.
That destruction has been ongoing since the 90s. We've hollowed out our ability to make things.
We basically focused on the exact wrong things which has put us in a pretty vulnerable geopolitical position. Rather than trying to bring resources into the US to aid manufacturing, we tried to bring finished goods into the US at a lower price.
China has done basically the opposite. They've focused on bring raw resources into china while centralizing manufacturing. That's what has turned them into the global powerhouse they are when it comes to producing everything.
For the US to turn this around, tariffs would have been in order, but they needed to be pretty focused and with internal plans on building out the industries we wanted to grow.
Doing tariffs first without building manufacturing was just dumb.
US car companies became banks that happen to make cars.
How much would you like to pay for that 80k new truck? Sure, we can give you that monthly payment, lets just structure it as a 10-year loan where you end up paying twice that on a rapidly depreciating asset. Boom, we've just sold two cars and only had to manufacture one.
We have manufacturing capacity here! Some of this is simply down to US automakers choosing high-margin SUVs and trucks over cars (most US auto brands do not offer a single car).
Basically only Tesla offers any car that is even similar to the extremely popular Toyota Camry. No US maker offers a compact car anymore.
Honestly, I don't think the immediate impact of dropping tariffs on Chinese vehicles would be as dire for the US automakers because the Chinese vehicles largely sell into noncompetitive segments. I don't doubt that the F-150s and Silverados can coexist with BYD sedans.
> Doing tariffs first without building manufacturing was just dumb.
Not dumb, worse than that. Affected companies are either eliminated or deeply discounted. The 0.001% is going to hunt the 0.01%. The erratic policy of the current administration reflects exactly that: conflicting personal interests being fought over, "the US" or "the people" be damned.
What you are looking at is unbound and shameless grifting. Not the first insurrection by the oligarchy in US history. Monopolies and wealth concentration come with a price. A very steep price.
Western auto makers are getting slaughtered by Chinese competition outside of the US (and maybe the EU? I don't know what the EU tariff situation is). I have a Chinese EV. It was half the price of an equivalent Tesla and better in every single way. Build quality and reliability have been excellent. I've driven 60,000 km with zero battery degradation.
It's just sort of amazing how badly the west dropped the ball on green tech. We're also working on importing an off grid solar system from china that will easily be a third of the price that we'd get from a US supplier.
One interesting thing that people don't realize with regards to the US tariffs is that a lot of goods flow through the US on their way to international markets. For a long time it has been easiest for us to buy stuff made in china from vendors such as Amazon in the US and have it shipped internationally from the US. Now with all of the tariffs we end up getting double tariffed for doing this (once when the goods enter the US and a second time when they ship to my country). As a result I'm seeing more and more people looking for ways to buy from China directly.
Hmm, but aren't they dumping cars in the market and still not selling? They're stuck with massive amounts of unsold stock, and the market isn't taking it - something doesn't add up.
We are seeing the culmination of the 50+ China industrialization project at the samme time as the West's 50+ year financialization and deindustrialization project, all to concentrate even more wealth in the hands of the 0.01%.
China is really the only country capable and willing to build infrastructure. The ban on selling lithography AND chips to China is massively backfiring. The chip ban in particular has created a captive market for Chinese chips. In 1945, American exceptionalists believed the USSR would take 20+ yars to copy the atomic bomb, if they could do it at all. It took 4 years. China will do the same thing with EUV in the coming years.
Tesla is a trillion dollar company that was created entirely by government subsidies that only continues to exist because of the tariffs and import bans on BYD in the US and much of Europe.
Additionally, Tesla is completely dependent on Chinese rare earth exports for its products.
As an example of how China uses state power, a famine in the 20th century caused China to decide that food security was a national security interest. The availability of cheap, quality food is viewed as essential and the state intervenes to ensure that continues. Likewise for housing.
Western companies seem increasingly focused on the top 10% because the bottom 90% have nothing left to eextract.
I've never seen a comment simultaneously be so right on some things and so wrong on others.
> The ban on selling lithography AND chips to China is massively backfiring
Agreed. We will be screwed once China surpasses us in chip fabs, and they will. The idea that we can get a "durable advantage" by reaching AGI a few years before China is ridiculous. Using that to justify bans that only slow them down a few years at the cost of creating a chip fab juggernaut later is folly.
> Tesla is a trillion dollar company that was created entirely by government subsidies that only continues to exist because of the tariffs
Tesla is not supported by subsidies significantly more than any other car company and less than many including BYD obviously. They also compete directly with BYD without tariff protection worldwide and in China and do well. They are worth a trillion dollars because of the potential of their self-driving software which is far ahead of any other car company's including those in China.
> Tesla is completely dependent on Chinese rare earth exports for its products.
Tesla has rare earth free alternatives. There is no urgent need for them right now but they can switch if necessary.
> Agreed. We will be screwed once China surpasses us in chip fabs, and they will. The idea that we can get a "durable advantage" by reaching AGI a few years before China is ridiculous. Using that to justify bans that only slow them down a few years at the cost of creating a chip fab juggernaut later is folly.
I’m quite sure advanced semiconductor fabs are considered a strategic necessity by China regardless of restrictions. Further, China is now getting the H200 chip…
> Tesla has rare earth free alternatives. There is no urgent need for them right now but they can switch if necessary.
There are also plenty of rare earth extraction projects coming online outside of China!
> Tesla is not supported by subsidies significantly more than any other car company
Tesla was saved by a DOE loan [1]. Tesla was kept afloat with carbon tax credits. Yes, the Big Three got bailouts in 2008. And now, most importantly, import barriers are the only thing keeping Tesla afloat.
"Tesla got some subsidies" does not refute my argument. All carmakers get subsidies. BYD gets tons! And Tesla is selling plenty of cars in places without import barriers protecting them including China itself.
As you mentioned EUV machine, I happened to read an article from a former Executive of ZhongXin, a domestic competitor of the famouse Huawei and also sanctioned by US. He said that China had no insentive to develop lithography technology including EUV until Trump blocked the sales of EUV machine in his first term. [1]
There are tons of other cases, like EDA software, etc. It used to be a bilateral business. Now China become more and more independent of the rest of the world due to external pressure.
BTW, I've been working and living in the West (more specifically , in Canada) for almost 30 years but also have access to Chinese language media. I've been watching a lot of misunderstanding or misinformation. It's less in recentl years. I have to stay way from some of the topics to avoid being downvote because misinformation believers strongly believe I'm wrong for those topics.
No two ways to look at it. Electrification is the inevitable next step for mobility, and BYD are going to be top dog. It's pretty obvious why Tesla is 'diversifying'/divesting into robotics, but Asia has plenty of movers in that space too, not least BYD. SpaceX is the only moat Elon has left.
Tbf, all moats are temporary. The moat of US 'exceptionalism' and the primacy of the US dollar not excluded. However, the timeframe isn't easy to predict.
> BYD's 2023 Corporate Social Responsibility Report initially lacked a human rights policy. However, the company later published a 2024 Human Rights Policy Statement.[67] This new policy also shows enhanced commitment to supply chain due diligence, including recognition of OECD Guidelines. Despite these improvements, the policy lacks details on battery material sourcing.
> BYD’s policies do not address gender-responsive due diligence. BYD states that it engages with stakeholders. However, it does not provide policies for engaging with communities affected by the battery supply chain or incorporating their views into decision-making processes. There is no reference to Indigenous Peoples or their rights in BYD’s reports.[68]
I don't at all disagree with the importance of these topics and I'm glad to see them addressed but this entire metric seems to be based on specific language/terminology in a company's public commitments. And this terminology seems to be biased towards a western audience. For example, the United States (a settler-colonial nation) is ofc going to have more discourse around the rights of indigenous people. Whereas the term "indigenous" isn't used very much at all in China.
I also feel like you've buried the lead here. Yes BYD ranks the lowest of the 13 brands they looked at but not by much and they also explicitly state that ALL of the brands they looked at failed to meet their minimum baselines. The report is more of a critique of the industry as a whole than any individual actor
That report is basically made up. Why would non western companies be “transparent” with western organizations? A lot of it is self reports.
This is like looking at the freedom indexes and concluding that in the US women have the freedom to walk safely at night in cities because it ranks high on western freedom orgs but not in actually safe places like China.
At the end of the day, you aren’t going to convince consumers in Southeast Asia, South America or Africa to buy more-expensive American or European cars on account of human rights. Not while they’re middle-income economies.
Are BYD proponents allowed to say that this doesn’t matter much to them, or are they expected to measure themselves by your political views because they are the only correct ones?
I don’t think anything in particular “should” factor into everybody’s choices. Some are sensitive to price, some are sensitive to design, others to autonomy, others to speed, and then, yes, some will buy depending on human rights records.
Actually, credible ESG ratings like thee ones from Sustainalytics or MSCI show BYD scoring above average for human rights governance in the automotive sector, not at the bottom
More importantly, this highlights a pattern of selective scrutiny:
- When Western companies (like Tesla) source batteries from the same regions (or use batteries from BYD or CATL), human rights concerns rarely drive mainstream criticism or policy actions
- When industries dominated by Western monopolies (eg: Big Tech's app stores or cloud services) face human rights allegations (like labor abuses in global supply chains or censorship complicity)= the backlash is often muted or just silenced
- But when a non Western competitor like BYD gains traction, human rights rhetoric suddenly intensifies, even without evidence matching the severity of claims against established Western companies
It's geopolitically convenient criticism, FUD against what threatens a western monopolistic ecosystem
You can pretty much replace BYD with any Chinese company (and to some extent, almost any company in the world) and the sentence would still make sense.
So I have mostly lost interest in the argument. Not that it is an incorrect or irrelevant argument, but none of that has really mattered.
A western org says out-group companies are at the bottom of the list of a report that is self reports and “transparency” aka trusting the companies words. Obviously their in-group companies will rank higher. That’s the entire purpose of the report.
Presumably you can't make the statement that almost all companies are below average on human rights. Mathematically at least half have to be above average.
Presumably most people also wouldn’t be particularly concerned with what the average is. If all companies have human rights records ranging from bad to terrible, surely it’s no compliment to be above average.
This. Most of the Chinese products met the definition of dumping. They over produce with suppressed wages, currency exchange rate, and government subsidies. The current generations of Chinese workers do not benefit from this. To clarify, they have top products, some are well paid. But the general trend is dumping.
I am curious when will other countries would actually start of defend their industries properly.
You don’t need to subsidize domestic companies to adjust for currency exchange rate manipulation.
The government could for example impose a tariff that covers half the difference thus maintaining an unfair advantage for Chinese companies. Thus profiting from the manipulation without placing excessive burden on domestic companies.
Agree subsidies does not seem like the correct incentive structure. But that's what the other guy is doing so I guess that's what we have to do.
In general, can the EV industry survive without government subsidies? Maybe now it can in the US.
Also not convinced EVs (as they are currently) are vastly superior to ICE cars. Not accounting for the potential for ICE cars to vastly improve if there wasn't so much vested interest. So the whole EV industry seems a bit unsustainable...
As an EV owner, and not even of a top end model (Nissan Leaf 220mi range model), the last paragraph is nuts.
If you can charge at home it’s like 1/4 the price of driving on gasoline per mile. That’s not counting the fact that it takes basically zero maintenance other than tire rotation. I think there’s some fluids you want to refresh at 100k miles, but that’s it.
Compared to a gas car it’s like a free to drive car.
It also drives better. You get used to instant full torque fast. Even an economy EV like the Leaf feels like driving an ICE sports car. In some ways it’s better since the response has no latency. When I drive an ICE car it feels laggy and mushy. Also seems loud and smelly and “steampunk”.
Recharge time and range are still better for ICE, but that’s literally the only advantage. EVs are superior in every other way: cost to operate, lack of maintenance, efficiency, acceleration, torque, quiet operation, and so on.
I’ve read a few analyses that claim that driving an EV is still better in terms of emissions than an average gas car even if you get 100% of your power from coal (very few do). This is because small heat engines suck and because gas takes tons of energy just to go from oil well to pump. A big supercritical turbine in a coal plant has much better thermal efficiency than any car engine, and oil has to be shipped and refined (very energy intensive) then post-processed then shipped again and all that counts against the overall efficiency.
EVs are just better. If the charge and range gap can close, ICE is obsolete for all but niche uses.
For almost everyone with home charging, EV’s are a substantial win even without subsidies. There’s so many little wins like being able to turn the car on to warm up in a garage without filling it with exhaust. That’s a long way from every driver, but the EV industry doesn’t need to make up every car sale to survive just fine.
ICE cars can’t get vastly better they are simply too close to fundamental limits. It’s quickly becoming a competition between hybrids and EV’s.
That's my point about ICE not innovating enough. And of course hybrid would be one of the innovations. Also it should have more electronic luxuries and connectivity to match the newly designed EVs. Hybrids would carry a bigger battery that can pre warm without engine running.
ICE itself is close to fundamental limits. But iiuc other parts like frames and chasis are not, like they could be lighter and stronger.
ICE cars have bigger mileage than equivalent EVs? Meaning you fill gas once every few weeks in 5 mins.
> EV’s are a substantial win even without subsidies
Why are they subsidized then? It is somehow better than no subsidies from the company's viewpoint.
> Meaning you fill gas once every few weeks in 5 mins.
Home charging supplies more energy with less cost and effort. It’s physically impossible for ICE cars to win here as I will park at home and stay at home for a while, I don’t need to go to a gas station and then stand around for a few minutes.
> Why are they subsidized then?
Initially it was all about helping the technology become competitive, which it has.
As to why it’s a good idea, ICE cars have negative externalities due to tailpipe emissions. Much like cigarettes burning stuff = public health hazard. Mandatory catalytic converters help, but as I benefit when you buy an EV instead of a ICE car I don’t mind chipping in for some of the cost of an EV.
The alternative of simply taxing ICE engines or gas etc would be equally effective tool, just harder to pass politically.
The negative externality of EV car manufacturing seems net worse (today) per car. Harsher chemicals, more mining, more processing, lesser life of a car and battery, less mature tech so more wastage, etc.
Tesla might be responsible but almost all other EVs are likely externalizing a lot in their supply chain.
Anyway according to Gemini:
```
In the U.S., a typical EV becomes "cleaner" than a gas car after about 15,000 to 20,000 miles (roughly 1.5 to 2 years of driving).
If your primary concern is climate change, the EV is the clear winner after about 1.5 years. If your concern is local land/human rights impact, the EV has a heavier "upfront" cost that requires better regulation to solve.
```
EV is the way to go but is it going to scale sustainably to say 25% or more of all cars? Apparently yes, with the new battery tech in the pipeline.
> Harsher chemicals, more mining, more processing, lesser life of a car and battery, less mature tech so more wastage, etc.
Extracting, manufacturing, and transporting gas more than offsets those differences. Oil refineries are nasty not to mention mid to large scale oil spills.
> EV is the way to go but is it going to scale sustainably to say 25% or more of all cars?
EV’s are already 20% of global sales, will it scale isn’t some deep question 5x current production would be completely replacing ICE cars.
Tariffs are quite different than a sales tax because they can select winners and losers in a market. Cane sugar vs sugar beets etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet
However, they don’t have to be high enough to change who wins, even small ones adjust how much foreign subsidies manipulate the market. Foreign governments should consider how much US corn syrup impacts domestic consumption for example as a separate issue from how it impacts domestic sugar production.
China’s currency manipulation has second order effects that benefits Americans. We don’t necessarily want China to stop, instead the goal should be to minimize the harm while extracting maximum benefits. A small tariff that caused them to double down on currency manipulation would be a massive win.
It'll slowly hemorrhage your industry base, and your country will end up being a giant wasteland with guarded compounds here and there, eventually. You wouldn't want that.
>> Shouldn't we be writing thank-you notes to the Chinese tax payers who so graciously subsidies cheap cars for us?
I'd write a BIG thank you note to the Chinese taxpayers if they could send a direct cash payment instead, so I can use it towards my next EV purchase (of my own choosing).
Otherwise, I prefer not to participate in China's predatory pricing tactic enabled by illegal export subsidies to undermine foreign competitors and distort global market.
>> I'm fairly sure the subsidies are perfectly legal by local laws.
Sure, China's NEV subsidies are illegal and that's why Chinese EVs should stay in China. Too many folks still don't understand why Chinese EVs are countervailed not only in the US, the EU, Turkiye, Canada, but also why China's ally countries such as Russia and Brazil are imposing restriction on Chinese EVs (or the legal basis).
>> In any case, feel free not to buy goods you don't like. No one is forcing you to buy, or are they?
Sure, but no point in marching around virtual-signaling as if Chinese EVs and illegal subsidies are pro-consumer.
It's been 20 years, most industries PRC value engineers to outcompete west stays cheap, because they're not dumping, they structurally bring cost down. The current generation of Chinese workers overwhelmingly owns a house, makes above median PRC wages, meanwhile RoW consumers, most without rivalling industries, benefit. Like at some point PRC dumping starts to look like cope, they ain't dumping, their competitors in other countries, who get plenty of subsidies, just ain't using it to compete.
> They over produce with suppressed wages, currency exchange rate, and government subsidies
I mean, so does Germany.
Technically, the USA only has the massive subsidies part since the IRA came to be but they also have tariffs so, not doing too bad distortion-wise.
At this point in time, pretty much everyone is already defending their industries. China is just playing its cards better than the others and with a head start when it comes to EV.
Tariffs aren’t the same thing as suppressing wages, overproduction, government subsidies, and managed currency to prevent deflation.
In the case of the US with respect to China they are mostly a retaliation to the above anti-competitive practices.
But I hear you on who is playing their cards better. I don’t think China is playing theirs very well. They pissed off both the US and EU, and even Mexico is enacting tariffs on Chinese products. American and European countries are taking action to stop Chinese anti-competitive practices. Nice factories you have there, too bad there’s nobody to sell those products to.
I also don’t know what you mean when you say for example the US and Germany are suppressing wages. I’m interested in what you mean by that specifically.
> They pissed off both the US and EU, and even Mexico
I'm sure they are in shamble knowing they made their main rival mad.
Apart from some moderate posturing to appease the US and a bit of moderate protectionism, the EU is still very much a trade partner however. A casual look at all the new Chinese brand factories in Hungary probably tell you everything you need to know.
Meanwhile they dominate the South American, African and South-East Asian markets.
> American and European countries are taking action to stop Chinese anti-competitive practices.
Personally, as a European, I would really appreciate if American started by stopping their own anti-competitive practices. It's objectively worse than what China is doing.
> I also don’t know what you mean when you say for example the US and Germany are suppressing wages.
Germany is suppressing wages. They have been doing so since the 2000s. It's indolore for them because their money can't appreciate as it's anchored by the rest of the union. It's terrible for the other members however especially considering Germany doesn't reinvest their surplus in the union.
> Apart from some moderate posturing to appease the US and a bit of moderate protectionism, the EU is still very much a trade partner however. A casual look at all the new Chinese brand factories in Hungary probably tell you everything you need to know.
The US is still a trade partner too, but this will change to a varying degree (as it will with the EU) over the next 5-10 years as both blocs move away from Chinese imports. You really nailed it though with your comment - China has to build the factory and staff local Hungarians precisely because the EU will continue to mandate that to continue to sell products in the market factories and jobs will have to be created in the EU.
The EU is extremely protectionist. As is China. Much more so than the United States. A lot of folks look at tariffs and then think the US is protectionist but that’s not the case, more so it has been very friendly toward the exact anti-competitive tactics that the EU and China have engaged in until only recently. To be clear the US of course has its own protectionist policies like the Jones Act, but it has been a much more easy country to do business in and much more tolerable to losing factories and such.
> Personally, as a European, I would really appreciate if American started by stopping their own anti-competitive practices. It's objectively worse than what China is doing.
It’s not. But these comments are boring. aS ‘MurICAN EuRope SHOuld PAY 4 defEncE. That’s what these comments sound like. It feels good to say, and it makes you feel like you know the real deal, but it’s such a banal thing to say that it’s barely worth saying.
“America shouldn’t pay for Europeans defenses”
But but here is all these ways it benefits you too, and of course we should pay more to meet it obligations but.. and… we all agree on this… and we help you with your international endeavors and we stand by you on trade, and you can count on us and… … yes but..
“America is the same thing as China’
But but no we’re not, we have a shared history, and… but despite the current admin we also uphold international law… and yes… but… look… we have your factories making your cars here in the US and we sell you software… and … but..
When you shoot off one line sentences that feel good, you miss out on actually interesting and productive conversations.
> The EU is extremely protectionist. As is China. Much more so than the United States
Well tried but no, not even close. Presenting tariffs as a tit-for-tat is Trump government propaganda. It's baseless however and as connected to facts as looking at the trade balance for goods while ignoring services.
> It’s not. But these comments are boring. aS ‘MurICAN EuRope SHOuld PAY 4 defEncE.
It is. Nice stawman with the irrelevant parallel by the way.
America has an aggressive subsidies program targeting European industry (IRA) and high tariff on key part of the export chain notably steel. And I'm not even talking about the political meddling and threat of invasion by your government.
China is honestly a significantly more reliable trade partner at this point.
It depends, but in the case of China it’s producing Temu stuff (electronics that fail immediately, t-shirts that dissolve when washed, &c.) because they need to 1. Run other companies outside of China out of business, 2. Keep people employed even if what they produce is worth less than their labor and energy/materials input.
People like all sorts of dumb things. Temu and these cheap crap products have a lot of problems, and quality is only the tip of th4 iceberg.
> Why?
Are you asking why they’re doing it?
> Why don't they have them do something with positive utility, like sweeping streets or providing elder care, or a myriad of other jobs?
They do, but they need people to be working in manufacturing facilities too, otherwise the gig is up. You can’t have millions or tens of millions of people sweeping streets all day - better to give them the illusion that the future is better by having them build and ship products.
> People like all sorts of dumb things. Temu and these cheap crap products have a lot of problems, and quality is only the tip of th4 iceberg.
If people are buying it voluntarily, who are we to judge?
Ice cream also only lasts a single use and is gone afterwards, and no one complains.
> Are you asking why they’re doing it?
Sorry, I should have quoted more.
> because they need to 1. Run other companies outside of China out of business,
Why do they 'need to' run other companies out of business? What need do they have?
> They do, but they need people to be working in manufacturing facilities too, otherwise the gig is up. You can’t have millions or tens of millions of people sweeping streets all day - better to give them the illusion that the future is better by having them build and ship products.
Maybe. Sweeping streets was but one example. There's lots of other positive utility things to do, even in manufacturing.
How does German gov't subsidize their automakers' overcapacity? Their EV subsidies aren't/weren't exclusive to domestic EVs or EVs using certain domestic part. No issue with subsidies that are equally available to all eligible producers, domestic or foreign.
This is unlike in China where market access and EV subsidies were conditioned on forced tech transfer since 2011 -- for which China was litigated before the WTO (see WT/DS549 China - Certain Measures on the Transfer of Technology). Or worse, conditioned on using local batteries made by local battery "champions," CATL/BYD/etc only to funnel all NEV subsidies back to the local battery industry and undermine foreign competitors. In other word, no NEV subsidies to any EV with foreign batteries to protect local "champions." This practice is also illegal under Article 3(b) "Prohibition" of the WTO's Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM) Agreement.
>> Technically, the USA only has the massive subsidies part since the ...
Biden's IRA subsidy ended in September. And let's realistic, the IRA was a weak and short counter measure against China's illegal practices past 15 yeras.
Claiming western companies are better because a western org said so based on self reports and western reporting is also weak sauce. “We investigated ourselves and found we are fine and our out-group isn’t”
Why focus on BYD, China as a whole is effectively a totalitarian state that locks up millions because of their ethnicity and disappears or executes people who disagree with the government. They are also territoriality aggressive and routinely use trade as a weapon to pushing states that stand up to it.
Buying anything from China is supporting that regime.
While it definitely attacks threats and has perpetrated plenty of unjust deeds, it also is responsible for the food security of much of the world. It has lifted more people out of poverty than any other party. It has brought poor nations to the point of industrialization.
The US has been a far greater force for good in the world than evil.
The leadership changes frequently, so it's hard to point to any single responsible party. It's democratic, so its institutions are subject to scrutiny. The free press sheds light on corruption and rule breaking.
Despite changing immigration narratives, the US has been an early and strong proponent of multiculturalism and welcoming people.
With declining US hegemony, the world is likely to become a much more dangerous place. We'll see more economic strife, more war, higher costs, greater tensions.
but at least we will have alternative energy sources in Solar, wind, batteries and probably a Nuclear renaissance which might reduce the incentives on fight for Oil & Gas even if the fights move to other resources
Food (eg. protein, fisheries, etc.), water (eg. dams), materials (eg. rare earths), land, strategic geography, trade, labor, security, political upheaval, power struggles, sectarian violence, terrorism, religion, historical claims, climate, etc. etc. etc.
Under a single global order, disagreements were normally put aside to participate in global trade. As we begin to move to distributed trading blocs and factions, many of these disagreements will boil over. Parties won't step up to stop them.
China is doing really well in solar. Both domestically and globally, because they are providing cheap solar panels to the rest of the world. (Well, apart from those idiots with tariffs to 'protect' them from green energy.)
Putting people in prison for weed, something China does as well, is not the same as imprisoning people for blog posts (something China does the US doesn't).
Firstly it's not relevant to a discussion about China's behavior.
Yes the US under Trump has become increasingly authoritarian, but besides being not as oppressive as China, the US remains a democracy and there is a chance to vote bad people out of the White House and more importantly reverse the direction of the country.
Your description of China as authoritarian and repressive is largely accurate, but the conclusion you draw from it is far too binary and ignores major parts of reality on both sides.
China’s system has produced outcomes the US cannot come close to matching. In a few decades it lifted hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. It built nationwide high speed rail, dense urban transit, modern housing, and large scale infrastructure at a speed the US has not achieved since the mid 20th century. Many Chinese cities are cleaner, more connected, and more functional than American ones. Long term planning, industrial policy, and state coordination have delivered tangible improvements in daily life for a huge share of the population. Those are not propaganda achievements. They are measurable.
China’s downsides are also real. Political dissent is not protected. Surveillance is pervasive. Ethnic repression, especially in Xinjiang, is severe. There is no internal mechanism to safely challenge the regime when it abuses power. Prosperity is conditional on alignment. When the state decides someone or some group is a problem, there is no lawful way to resist.
Now look honestly at the US. The US has political freedoms China does not. Speech, courts, elections, civil society, and the ability to oppose the state without being erased are real advantages. That matters enormously. But the US also has a long record of extreme violence and moral failure. It slaughtered millions abroad in wars like Vietnam and Iraq, often based on lies. It overthrew governments, backed death squads, enforced sanctions that killed civilians, and built a mass incarceration system that destroyed entire communities. At home, it tolerates deep inequality, decaying infrastructure, and political paralysis. It cannot build basic transit or housing at scale, and millions live worse materially than citizens of far poorer countries.
So if the standard is “this regime has blood on its hands,” then the US fails that test as well. If the standard is “this regime produces good outcomes for its people,” China clearly succeeds in ways the US does not. If the standard is “this regime allows its citizens to challenge power and correct abuse,” the US is better.
That is the real comparison. Different systems optimize for different things and fail in different ways. One is not a moral fairy tale and the other is not a cartoon villain.
That’s why “buying anything from China is supporting evil” is not a serious ethical framework. Global trade does not map cleanly onto endorsement, and the same logic would implicate participation in much of the modern world, including the US led order that produced enormous suffering of its own. A coherent position is to argue for strategic decoupling or limits on state coupled firms. A black and white call for regime destruction or moral purity ignores both China’s real achievements and the US’s very real crimes.
Once you include the full ledger, the issue is not good versus evil. It’s tradeoffs between flawed systems, not a simple moral referendum.
It’s also worth noting that these are largely macroscopic, state level critiques. For most people living ordinary lives in China, many of these issues are not directly salient day to day, just as most Americans do not experience US foreign policy atrocities, coups, or wars as part of their daily existence. People judge their country primarily by stability, opportunity, safety, and whether life is improving, not by a moral audit of state behavior. Viewing China solely through its worst actions is no more complete than viewing the US solely through Vietnam, Iraq, or mass incarceration. Both perspectives flatten lived reality into ideology, and both miss why citizens of each country can hold nuanced, even positive, views of systems that are clearly flawed.
You really owe it to yourself to visit (or if possible live in) China for a while to see this other perspective.
All the westerner can conclude from any of this is that we aren't doing free market capitalism hard enough yet, unfortunately.
The only thing left standing is this iron curtain through which we are allowed to perceive china, which let's us fantasize about how repressed they are and oh how free we are. We have nothing but lies left to hold on to.
Also it's worth noting throughout history, the incumbent world power will have clashes with the up and coming power to the throne. A lot of propaganda will be dispensed from both sides. Be critical of such information lest you become a useful idiot.
You missed the part where we chose to move all of our industries to China to save money, exploitation was always part of the plan, it's just that people who came up with that genius plan didn't account for the fact that China would develop and want a part of the cake too
The European Union can't fight everyone at once - we need partners, hence trying to mend fences with MERCOSUR, toning down the struggle for human rights in China and tolerating India's authoritarian drift. For now the utmost priorities are defeating Russia and achieving actual strategic autonomy by decoupling from the traitorous USA. So yes, better BYD than Tesla.
Seems like there's an attitude of "If letting BYD sell in Eurozone hurts Tesla, it's good" because people hate Elon so much. However I think the loser from that is going to be all the European legacy automakers who will have to try and chase the high end market to survive.
If Russia wanted to invade Ukraine, it wouldn't matter. Ukraine isn't NATO.
US was involved in Bosnia and Kuwait. If they pleased they would be involved in Ukraine. But US got the fascist mind virus.
It WAS US policy to play the protector role for EU and other West Aligned nations. Such that they traded with US and bought weapons from the US. If US pulls out, they will be replaced by other players in the game.
What other players in the North American Treaty Organization are you thinking of that are waiting on the benches to pick up the slack? We're looking at the same world map, right?
As a European (but from Norway, so not entirely beholden to the unelected EU overlords) how in the _world_ do you get to the mindset that the _USA_ are traitorous!? How does this happen? Is it spending so much time online on social media in bubbles where you get convinced of drivel like this?
The actions and words of the current US Administration are explicitly anti-EU and anti-NATO.
The publicly released sections of the latest US National Security Strategy and sourced comments indicate that the US is looking to interfere in EU solidarity and its actions around Greenland are specifically anti-NATO, which is an alliance based on security of internationally recognized boundaries and resolution of disputes by peaceful means.
Members of NATO can't rely on the US commitment to the alliance, and members of the EU can't rely on the US commitment to their own political arrangements as democracies.
The trade war that the US has with its immediate neighbors also shows that even agreements made by the previous Trump administration (USMCA) are not binding on the US.
Why should anyone trust anything that the US says?
They’re anti-unelected tyrants in Brussels. So am I as a Norwegian, and we’re not full members. They’re anti-censorship, something that’s rampant in the UK and Germany among others. They’re for the _core_ principles of the EU
The trade “war” is pressuring without kinetic force, yes. And our populations need the help, because our governments are spineless.
This discussion will proceed as follows: you will present a laundry list of examples, and if I answer NO to any of them, you win. It will play out as the illustration of the fallacy of all or nothing: if I am not 100% pure, then I am 100% wrong.
What you will fail to understand, is that in the real world "doing the best one can" still has an impact. So I might not answer 100% all of your questions, but it doesn't mean my decisions don't have any impact. The absurdity can be illustrated by rewording: "if we can't prevent all crime, we should stop enforcing it", or "if you can't feed all the hungry children, we shouldn't bother feeding any".
Unfortunately for you, I will not play your purity test game so that you can feel smug, but I will say that I do my best and I pay attention, and whenever feasible I vote with my wallet to buy from or invest in companies with stated goals that align with human rights, and I will feel disappointment over not making the "best possible choice" at every opportunity, but that will position me to do better next time. Because perfection is the enemy of progress.
Likewise with the rise of "Global South" especially China I'm glad that this aberration would lose more meaning as the time goes. Might as well decide things based on daily zodiac.
What didn't you understand? The point isn't whether I do specific thing A or specific thing B, the point is that when I can I do the best in the situation to improve the average. The specifics don't matter. It is the overall impact. OP is playing the "debate" game which is about winning, and not about the issue itself. It is because OP doesn't care to understand, they just want to score points, hence their desire to focus on specific instances.
Had OP said something like "How can you make an informed decision congruent with your ethics when so many ubiquitous companies violate human rights?" that would have been a genuine question. Instead OP said "Tell me why you don't do X" and behind that is "because I win." That's arguing from bad faith (a polite way to describe OP).
You said AMA, he asked a very simple question. You can not answer that very simple questions. He wins because he is almost surely correct in his assumptions about you, not matter how much you weasel around it.
I'm sorry you don't understand my answers. Like, at all. Maybe calm down and re-read my responses when you have a clear head? It's all spelled out multiple times.
I mean you did ask people to ask you anything... :)
Though let me approach this from a more good faith angle, what are the steps you are trying to do to make better purchasing and consumption decisions?
I understand your point, it isn't all or nothing. I do try to make better decisions in regards to products created with blood, though I often falter, I use a Google phone, no idea how many children had to extract rare minerals for it to be created, and I buy cheap hardware from China and that's a whole other deal. However I avoid Temu and Shien, I don't eat meat due to the industry and carbon impact, I almost never use single-use and disposable plastic items to lower consumption in general, I avoid cars, almost always taking public transport, and regarding Fairphone, I am definitely eying them for a future phone, though right now there were some downsides that I couldn't take (for now, phone progress is slowing down, making it easier for them to catch up, hopefully soon). I don't do enough, and a lot of my decisions are based on climate impact and not human rights, I know, so, it'd be great to hear your thoughts!
Well, seeing as you're not even responding to me, just previous people you've interacted with I guess I can't really say much.
But I will say that I ask specifically about the Fairphone because I've met many ethical, anti-capitalist, humanitarians, vegan, etc etc people who still don't apply any of their morals to the purchase of their cellphone and won't own up to it. I always found it an interesting piece of consistent dissonance.
Like many sibling comments, many companies are on a range that is on the bad side. There is a part of EV supply chain that is particularly bad and that is for all companies.
But what about the environmental costs that are being externalized? EV car production is likely worse or equal to ICE car production at each step. And the only arg seems to be that some day all EVs will be powered by solar/clean energy somehow.
You're severely misinformed if you think the cradle-to-grave footprint of BEVs is higher than ICEs today. Feel free to pick the study of your choice. They're pretty unanimous at this point and the comparison isn't particularly close. Here's a particularly comprehensive study from Argonne:
I bought BYD stock in 2025 before split in the hope that their market dominance will translate to great returns. The stock has pretty consistently traded down since then. Meanwhile Tesla stock soared purely on the air coming out of Elon’s mouth.
Auto manufacturing is low margin and capital intensive. BYD is valued as an auto manufacturer. Tesla is not.
Even all of that aside, the idea that foreign investors will be allowed to meaningfully participate in the upside of Chinese companies is questionable. Every Chinese company is one recapitalization away from zeroing out the common stock owned by foreigners. What are they gonna do, sue in Chinese court?
For quite some time, Warren Buffett was a BYD investor via Berkshire Hathaway. If you tried to get into EV stocks after the Tesla exuberance started, you were already mostly too late.
> The filing by Berkshire’s energy subsidiary recorded the value of its BYD investment as zero as of the end of March, down from $415 million at the end of 2024.
> Buffett’s company began investing in Shenzhen-based BYD in 2008, when it paid $230 million for about 225 million shares, equivalent to a 10% stake at the time.
> It began selling those shares in 2022 after BYD’s share price had risen more than twentyfold.
This is fascinating, because from what I've heard, Warren Buffett did not favor tech stocks. Does anyone know what gave Buffett the faith that this company was a real deal?
It was Charlie Munger who became enthusiastic about BYD after learning about it from investor Li Lu, leading him to convince Buffett to make Berkshire Hathaway's $230 million investment in 2008.
I think this was mostly a Munger pet investment, he had an extremely high opinion about the CEO and could see he was delivering on his goals one after another.
Berkshire was never tech investor. They looked for solid manufacturing with good price and potential to scale like manufacturing. Not everything is tech and you can still grow without being tech.
> BYD is valued as an auto manufacturer. Tesla is not.
This in no way addresses the accusation that Teslas valuation is built on nothing. BYD also has self driving software. So what exactly does Tesla have that is not cars and batteries?
The ludicrous humanoid robots with dubious use cases? That’s not it either because the stock was absurdly high before that was a thing.
I have never seen a better example of how arbitrary and irrational markets are than Teslas valuation.
Isn't BYD a VIE? Most "internet" (ie tech) companies in China cannot legally be owned by foreigners. And what you get is some proxy based in the Cayman Islands that is circumventing Chinese law. Not something I'd touch with a ten foot pole.
You misunderstand - that doesn't make any difference. Foreigners cannot legally own internet stocks. Of course the Chinese government doesn't care if foreigners purchase internet stock proxies. It's a great deal for them.
If your hypothetical happens, yes.
China has been working hard to turn domestic investment away from housing. A trustworthy domestic stock market is key.
* The Shanghai and Hong Kong stock market seems to have improved regulatory enforcement. I have no way of measuring this...just stories from others.
* Over the past 10 years the China gov pressed on with building more housing in part to dilute value. Each year they have warned that houses are for living, not speculation. Last year, they dumped a huge amount of cheap lending into the market to provide movement...warning this is the last step...a month ago the 2026 gov priorities list removed protecting the housing market...first time in modern history. Expectation is the next two years will see realized losses in property. It would be a huge mistake if the gov hasn't ensured regulatory enforcement of other segments have not reached maturity for the retail investor. We'll see...
* As for civil courts, over the past 20 years I've run into quite a few stories from friends and business colleagues that needed to go to China court. The stories are similar to what you may hear in the US. No one suggested the court/process itself was dodgy/unfair.
> No one suggested the court/process itself was dodgy/unfair.
for civil disputes, i am sure they are.
For disputes between the gov't and you, i highly doubt it. Is there a single instance of the gov't being sued for a policy that was meant to be political in nature affecting the supplicant?
Even someone like jack ma is unable to use the courts to obtain any justice - his Ant Financials IPO was shut down for political reasons, and he was reeducated. There's no such thing as due process in china.
Name me a single country where a rich person goes against the government and wins? You just don’t see it happen much in the US because the government is run by rich capitalists, but pretty much every country is the same.
It happens all the time here. Wealth isn't even a precondition, but indeed, one needs time and/or money. It helps being organized with other people to share the burden. Over here we have also got the ombudsman.
It is a matter of degrees. The harder it is for a poor individual to be done justice against the government, the weaker the rule of law. On a tangent, parties that play the horn about "law and order" usually mean "rules for thee but not for me".
Not sure where here is for you. But anyway, even if you can win a battle you can’t win a war. If a government wants to do something, it will regardless of how any individual person, rich or not, feels about it.
It just so happens that most western “democracies” are run by rich people, so they can avoid all that unpleasant business by just running the government in the first place.
I would say that’s an extension of the idea that rich people run the US government, which runs global organizations such as the world bank, which runs these ISDS courts.
China is just big enough to be able to ignore these global orgs.
Now try to win a case against the interests or connections of a high ranking official in China.
"Law and order" is not equal to "the rule of law". Both China and the US ascribe to the idea of "might makes right", which is in essence an organized form of lawless state. It is conceptually the same as in criminal gangs, only with vastly better optics. That is why anyone not in power should strive for a rules-based order, for their own best interest at least.
Not sure why you think China is Orwellian and the US isn’t when ICE is literally kidnapping people off the streets. Wake up mate, the Orwellian is coming from inside the house.
European governments regularly lose cases brought by individuals in both domestic and European courts; below are some well-known examples across different countries and legal issues.
E.g.
Broniowski v. Poland (ECtHR, 2004)
Doğan and Others v. Turkey (ECtHR, 2004)
Hirst v. United Kingdom (No. 2) (ECtHR, 2005)
Scoppola v. Italy (No. 3) (ECtHR, 2012)
KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland (ECtHR, 2024)
These judgments show that individuals and civil society groups can hold European states accountable for violations involving property, voting, asylum, climate, and broader rule‑of‑law issues.
They often lead to legislative change, financial compensation, or policy reversal, and many are used as precedent by lawyers and activists in new cases across Europe.
I’m not a lawyer, and many of these cases are not famous enough to be reported on in a format easily understandable to a layperson. I’m also not going to read through case resolutions to respond to a hacker news comment. I did take a cursory look at the examples you wrote though.
I will admit that my original statement lacks nuance, which makes it easy to nitpick.
Having read some of your cases though, a pattern emerged: it’s usually supra national organizations adjudicating these cases, and the nations are not bound by the rulings.
For example, in Hirst vs UK it was ruled that it’s a violation of human rights to deny prisoners the vote, and yet the UK government deliberately ignored that ruling and as a result prisoners still can’t vote in the UK. Not to mention that when this case was brought up in a UK court it was dismissed.
Hirst v United Kingdom (No 2) (2005) ECHR 681 is a European Court of Human Rights case, where the court ruled that a blanket ban on British prisoners exercising the right to vote is contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights. The court did not state that all prisoners should be given voting rights. Rather, it held that if the franchise was to be removed, then the measure needed to be compatible with Article 3 of the First Protocol, thus putting the onus upon the UK to justify its departure from the principle of universal suffrage.
There are numerous examples of citizens winning court cases against the government.
Take the just the uk, three examples:
Anti‑protest regulations (Liberty v Home Secretary)
Air pollution litigation (ClientEarth v UK Government)
Rwanda asylum plan (AAA & Others v Secretary of State
Windrush - Members of the Windrush have repeatedly challenged the Home Office over wrongful detention, removal, and denial of rights, leading to government admissions of unlawfulness and an official apology in 2018.
Your claim is false. The world is not the same the world over, civil liberties are better in some places than in others.
Prisoners still can’t vote, people are getting arrested for peacefully protesting holding signs, and the Rwanda ruling was overruled by parliament and the only reason the plan was stopped is because the PM changed.
> Each year they have warned that houses are for living, not speculation. Last year, they dumped a huge amount of cheap lending into the market to provide movement...warning this is the last step...a month ago the 2026 gov priorities list removed protecting the housing market...first time in modern history.
Perhaps one of a few genuinely positive policies which only China can do. Meanwhile western countries will rather stab their economies to death than accept even just stagnating real estate prices.
>> No one suggested the court/process itself was dodgy/unfair.
Not sure where this is coming from. The EU recently just won a WTO dispute[1] against China that prohibited patent holders (often EU companies) from pursuing or enforcing patent infringement cases in non-Chinese courts -- it violated several provisions of the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), including Articles 1.1, 28.1, and 28.2.
Foreigners generally view the Chinese court system with significant skepticism, primarily due to a perceived lack of judicial independence from the ruling Communist Party (CCP), opacity, and the use of the judiciary to serve political goals.
1. DS611: China – Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights
The future of the Chinese economy depends on being able to access the global capital markets, which means that by extension, its future depends on foreign investors being demonstrably "allowed to meaningfully participate in the upside of Chinese companies".
Funnily enough, the future of the Chinese economy depends on being able to access their local market. The chinese people save too much and aren't buying their own products
You are right that getting Chinese households to invest in the domestic (Shenzhen, Shanghai, Hong Kong) stock market is also a key goal that they're rolling out incentives for.
> The chinese people save too much and aren't buying their own products
Nonsense.
Total Retail Sales of Consumer Goods went up 4.6% in the first 11 months of 2025. That is the number with spending on automobiles excluded. A total of 24 million cars were sold in China in 2025 with vast majority being Chinese brands. If 24 million car purchases a year is "aren't buying their own products", then car industry doesn't exist in the US.
In the combination Keynesian Beauty Contest[1] and casino that passes for an equity market in the US, everyone knows that Tesla is ugly as hell, but everyone also knows that everyone knows that it will get votes, so the show goes on.
Anytime China targets an industry we get a situation where basically every major city has their own brand that they're backing. There's a lot more competition in China compared to western markets that tend to be dominated by a few major players. There's over 100 EV brands in China today, e.g. BYD (Shenzhen), NIO (Hefei), GAC Aion (Guangzhou), and SAIC (Shanghai)
There's been a lot written about China's "Fiscal Federalism"
Most of those pronounces have greater than 50 million people. Anhui has 60 million, guangdong has 127 million. Shanghai only has 26 million people as a city. The federalism exists because the numbers China is working with are huge. It’s not some small podunk town in North Carolina deciding to make cars, it’s a province on par with that have a populous country. We can’t judge China based on a much smaller scale of US states and cities.
The Chinese provinces and cities are competing aggressively with each other, both the local governments who provide cheap loans (largely funded by profits from other corporate loans, as China has much lower income taxes than the US) and companies also compete aggressively for dominance both locally and globally.
In the US you usually have 2-3 giant companies who are pets of the federal government and get tax breaks and subsidies if they make 'jobs' in particular states, particularly where useful congressmen live. It's a far more centralized market even though it has little direct government capital investment.
Old legacy companies being propped up in the name of national interests while they slowly become more and more detached from the global market.
On top of that China allowed heavy investment in infrastructure and real estate instead of interfering in it, so everything from property to energy costs are cheaper. Making cost of doing business cheaper.
Those giant companies in China are supported by the cities/provinces. It is just that they are comparable to not even small countries, the central government doesn't need to create champions for consumer goods, more local governments can do that just fine. SOEs are also mostly zombies in China, it should be very telling that BYD is not an SOE; we aren't even talking about any of the SOEs FAW Group, Dongfeng Motor, Changan Automobile, SAIC Motor, BAIC Motor, and GAC, who are still more known for their JVs.
They usually go through a major, government driven consolidation phase to establish a handful of national champions. I would bet we’ll see the same in EVs. This ensures scale by which they can dominate the global industry-an explicit target of the CCP.
Very good point. People often ignore how important monopolies are to high stock prices. A monopoly can extract more wealth from the market than if there's strong competition.
A competitive market destroys revenue potential, essentially forcing companies to constantly reduce margins or innovate. Both of which are very good for the consumer, but these companies need to run harder to stay in the same place.
I've heard that for example, NIO is facing fiscal troubles, since their business model was that they sell somewhat nicer cars for more money, however everything they come out with tends to be quickly incorporated by the competition at a lower price point.
I also want to add that this internal competition is why stories about huge government subsidies is bull - there's a huge amount of domestic competitors at each other's throats, and the Chinese government certainly doesn't want to pick winners, so the only way to subsidize cars is to subsidize demand, which means that all those subsidies are available to foreign companies doing business in China.
Possibly, I'm not very familiar with the US history. But this is a recurring pattern in China as well. It's called the "shakeout phase" and we saw it with bike sharing as well as the solar industry. Every industrial sector backed it own company and after a few clear leaders emerged there was a massive consolidation phase. This is a purposeful effort by China and is driven by specific policies, increased regulation, and reduction in cheap financing options. It's essential for them to minimize subsidization and combat involution or counterproductive competition. It's also why you should always ignore articles critical of china's "overcapacity". Overcapacity is a planned phase of their economic strategy to capture an industry. And, so far, it's been quite effective
I have no doubt the same will happen with EVs. But that's another reason to hold off on investing in any specific Chinese company rn.
How they do financial bailouts by printing their own debt-free money and having fine-grained control of the banking system is also something that the west doesn't do.
Non-performing loans of state-owned entities get bought by asset management companies (AMCs) with AMC liabilities. People's Bank of China liquifies AMC Liabilities so the banks keep lending.[1] AMCs often then can't pay because the state-owned entity isn't able to pay on the loan it bought. They then get bailed out by the Ministry of Finance, but the actual source of funds inside the government is difficult to discern [2].
I am a China perma bull and a panda hugger but most of my money is in the US.
US capital is the completely dominant center of global capital and it will be so for decades to come. Ultimately this will flip too as China becomes the global economic center but I am not quite sure what it will look like and I don't assume the process of capital allocation will be exactly the same as it is today in the US-system (there may be more state directed investment, more bank lending, perhaps less public speculation, or even novel financial structures).
That said - Chinese stocks had a good year in 2025 and are currently on a run - and there is certainly a lot of value there.
> Part of the reason that China’s stock market trends sideways is that everyone’s profits are competed away. Big Tech might enjoy the monopolistic success smiled upon by Peter Thiel, coming almost to genteel agreements not to tread too hard upon each other’s business lines. Chinese firms have to fight it out in a rough-and-tumble environment, expanding all the time into each other’s core businesses, taking Jeff “your margin is my opportunity” Bezos with seriousness.
BYD does not make most of its revenue on BEVs. It is mostly batteries and more plugin hybrids than BEVs and they lose money selling BEVs (less than almost all other electric car makers though). Tesla make only BEVs and make a profit doing so (the only? large maker to consistently do so).
Tesla was only profitable the last few quarters due to selling their carbon credits to other companies. They'd have lost money otherwise. And since Trump basically did away with that, Tesla is no longer a profitable company now.
Can you even own Chinese stock as a foreigner? I thought Chinese 'stock' was essentially 'IOU's held by a foreign third party who holds it on your behalf. I would not trust a significant amount of money to such a scheme.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
But as another comment pointed out, they have tons of debt, and TFA states that their "revised" target was revised downward, meaning earlier stock valuations were priced for higher sales.
Chinese stock market is very different than US. In US you have like 62% of Americans reporting owning stock (including via mutual funds/retirement accounts) and in China, it's single digits participation.
And China's market is famously retail heavy one, there were some studies showing that Shanghai Stock Exchange retail trading is 80%+ of volume vs ~10% in the US.
There is less hype and they are also not affected as much as US if stock goes down or stays flat.
The Shanghai stock exchange is still too heavy on insider trading, and consumer investors feel it is more like gambling than investing. Like, you could wager some money on a mahjong game, or you could blindly pick a stock and hope you can get some money by riding in the wake of a connected insider trader.
If you just want to invest money, there is real estate or investing in a family member’s business. Pensions and other institutions in need of safe (in aggregate) investments won’t go near the SSE yet.
China is doing more things right but still has a long way to go on other things.
> The Shanghai stock exchange is still too heavy on insider trading, [...]
What does that mean?
Insider trading is good for the function of the market: it makes sure information is reflected in prices sooner, benefiting the general public.
> Like, you could wager some money on a mahjong game, or you could blindly pick a stock and hope you can get some money by riding in the wake of a connected insider trader.
If you are a clueless retail investor, buy a low cost index fund. Why would you be picking stocks?
Prices are not an end to themselves. Prices are useful because they tell you how much something is worth. If you're trading against somebody who has more information than you, than you are probably losing money, since they wouldn't be making the trade otherwise. Yes, insider trading means that prices will converge on a more accurate value faster, but in the interim anyone trading on the stock is getting screwed. Insider trading is not good for anybody but insiders.
> If you're trading against somebody who has more information than you, than you are probably losing money, since they wouldn't be making the trade otherwise.
Trading while having more information than someone else is perfectly legal.
That's a spicy meatball. And also very stupid, but I admire the lack of foresight it takes to advocate for insider trading. What's your next hot take? Can i suggest 'Epstein did nothing wrong'?
the OP isn't wrong about insider trading - it's just that it lacked the crucial bit about being _transparent_ about insider trading.
Current insider trading laws are about _preventing_ it (but it still happens). This makes it so that insiders who do trade and get away with it make bank, but this does little to benefit the over all market information equilibrium.
What needs to make insider trading "good" (instead of bad), is to make the insider's trades 100% transparent and instant (instead of the months of SEC filing currently needed before it becomes public info). Doing this will ensure that insider's trades immediately gets reflected and copied/arbitraged against, and will allow the price of a stock to reflect information not yet released but is acted upon by insiders.
Insider trading is already perfectly legal (by US law), if you do it with consent of your company. So the rules are not about protecting the public at all.
That isn’t true at all. You need to take your insider trading again (every bigcorp makes you do it) and learn what insider trading actually is, and why it is illegal, and why you’ll probably get caught. I’ve heard too many sad stories where immigrants from a country with looser laws came to the USA for very high paying tech jobs, and throw them away for just $100k of insider trading gains.
The company is allowed to trade on their insider information. That's perfectly normal and legal.
When Warren Buffett decides that he wants to buy stock in a company, he knows that if this became public, the target company's stock would go up. Nevertheless, he's allowed to trade on this insider information (about himself!) without informing the general public first.
> You need to take your insider trading again (every bigcorp makes you do it) and learn what insider trading actually is, and why it is illegal, and why you’ll probably get caught. I’ve heard too many sad stories where immigrants from a country with looser laws came to the USA for very high paying tech jobs, and throw them away for just $100k of insider trading gains.
That's true but also entirely irrelevant to my point: in these cases the company does not consent to the employee using the information. And, yes, that's illegal.
Insider trading law in the US is about breaching fiduciary duty. If the company consents, there's no fiduciary duty that was broken. (But the conditions are more complicated. So let's go with the simpler example of a company trading on its own secret, insider information.
It's a fun little legal Gedankenexperiment to craft the conditions that make what would otherwise be insider trading legal in the US. But as you suggest, it's not very relevant in practice, because they all require the company's consent, which you normally don't get. Matt Levine sometimes likes to write about these sorts of things in his 'Money Stuff' newsletter.)
Insider trading consists of an individual who is an insider to a company that is publicly traded, trading stock in that company on information they obtained as an insider.
> When Warren Buffett decides that he wants to buy stock in a company, he knows that if this became public, the target company's stock would go up.
Warren Buffett is not a publicly traded company, and in this hypothetical he is buying stock in another company, which (by assumption) he has no insider information about.
> Insider trading law in the US is about breaching fiduciary duty.
This is false. It's about protecting traders. This is why it applies specifically to publicly traded companies. If it was about protecting shareholders (from what?) then it would apply to all companies.
> Insider trading consists of an individual who is an insider to a company that is publicly traded, trading stock in that company on information they obtained as an insider.
No, that's not true in US law. It doesn't have to be the stock of the company you work for to get you into insider trading trouble.
> Warren Buffett is not a publicly traded company, and in this hypothetical he is buying stock in another company, which (by assumption) he has no insider information about.
Well, that's why your definition is wrong.
> If it was about protecting shareholders (from what?) then it would apply to all companies.
Huh, what? You don't have a fiduciary duty to people you don't work for.
> The rationale for this prohibition of insider trading differs between countries and regions. Some view it as unfair to other investors in the market who do not have access to the information, as the investor with inside information can potentially make larger profits than an investor without such information.[2] However, insider trading is also prohibited to prevent the directors of a company (the insiders) from abusing a company's confidential information for the directors' personal gain.
Clearly not true. In 2020, the SEC fined Andeavor for buying back its own stock while negotiating a potential merger. The duty is to affected shareholders and the integrity of the market, not the company.
Don't know how you got this from Matt Levine. Isn't his catchphrase "Everything is securities fraud"?
> Clearly not true. In 2020, the SEC fined Andeavor for buying back its own stock while negotiating a potential merger. The duty is to affected shareholders and the integrity of the market, not the company.
No, no, you can still construct scenarios where it's legal. But yes, buybacks are especially heavily regulated. And yes, you have a fiduciary duty to shareholders. (But not to the 'integrity of the market'. There might be some duties and vague laws there, but it's not a fiduciary duty.)
In any case, what specifically are you referring to that's "clearly not true" in my comment? I constructed some examples that deliberately avoid a company (or an employee of said company) buying their own stock.
> Don't know how you got this from Matt Levine. Isn't his catchphrase "Everything is securities fraud"?
He has more than one catch phrase. The relevant one here is that insider trading in American law is about misappropriating information and fiduciary duty. Which he contrasts to French law amongst others, which is about fairness and a level playing field.
However, regulators in the US often want to spin the rules to be about fairness, but courts so far mostly disagree.
One example he brought up was: suppose you work for Bank X and you take the train in the morning to work. You overhear an employee of Bank Y talking about some deal on the phone (and that other guy doesn't notice you). You have no fiduciary duty to Bank Y.
By French law, you couldn't trade on the information you gained.
But by American (and UK law, where the example was from) your fiduciary duty to your employer, Bank X, might even compel you to use the information to their advantage. Especially if you were on company time when you overheard the conversation.
The company ultimately being the shareholders. Hard to imagine a scenario where allowing an employee to trade on insider information would benefit the shareholders.
Any dollar you get paid as salary is a dollar less for the shareholders. Yet, paying people dollars is still a common practice.
Paying people in secrets isn't different in principle, only in degree.
However I agree that the scenarios where this would be useful to shareholders would be a bit weird, but it's just a Gedankenexperiment where we assume that for some reason the shareholders already think this is a good idea.
It's a made up rule to try and make things fair, which life famously is not. The Middle East financial system has no laws against it, making it a cultural difference.
Epstein is good for the economy because it ensures politicians get goods before they would be considered market ready allowing for policy to be created proactively. /s
The explanation that I'm finding more and more compelling is that this is because there's actual competition in China, whereas in the west conglomerates have been able to carve up the market into fiefdoms and feast, with increasing amounts of cash that they can funnel into dividends and buybacks.
From the NA vehicle POV it doesn't look healthy. Stocks of the major auto makers have done well this year, while product gets more and more expensive and limited. Barely seems possible to buy anything but a F150like anymore.
Western corporations optimise for share price. The way to do that is by pulling strings at the government level to block your competitors and by getting nice tax breaks; not by having the best product for the consumer.
China and Chinese companies still want to shake off the "China means bad quality" image, so they actually want to make a great product at a good price for the consumer. To-the-moon share price growth doesn't happen by giving your customers a good deal.
Also the CCP doesn't want corporations forgetting who calls the shots, so there is some internal pressure keeping things less "frothy" than Western markets (where most governments are running scared of the big global corps).
It's not so much that the broader market is rigged. It's that every major industrial hub funds its own player: BYD (Shenzhen), NIO (Hefei), GAC Aion (Guangzhou), SAIC (Shanghai), etc. It might seem "rigged" to a westerner because it's so subsidized but China has a LOT of industrial hubs and therefore a lot of competition.
The US also heavily subsidizes EVs but the subsidies mostly only go to one company. Just take a look at the mind-boggling amount of subsidies we've given to Tesla both federally and on a state-by-state basis. Nevada's almost 2$ billion being the most blatant https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc
> Twelve are the factors related to four key aspects of the economic environment that are graded from 0 to 100 and averaged to determine a country’s score: rule of law (and related sub-categories: property rights, government integrity, judicial effectiveness); government size (government spending, tax burden, fiscal health); regulatory efficiency (business, labor and monetary freedom); open markets (trade, investment and financial freedom).
The US allows much more tax dodging than Singapore, for example. Try not paying your taxes or violating any other law in Singapore any time, if you want to find out.
I know little about stocks, but I've heard China doesn't allow shorting stocks and many other "advanced" stock products/instruments. You can buy, sell and trade stocks, and nothing else. They also audit to ensure stocks are not oversold/traded (e.g.: selling stock you don’t own in the hopes you’ll obtain some in time to fulfil an order).
You could say that about the Chinese stock market in general. Neither the SSE Composite nor the Hang Seng correlate all that well with Chinese GDP growth.
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
Also, their market position has already been factored in by market participants with multiple orders of magnitude greater capital and access to information about the company than you do. Thats not to say the market valuation is accurate, but it does mean that you guessing which way the market has mis-valued the stock is a coin flip.
BYD's self-driving is free and much more widely available. Not to mention it uses LiDAR. I'm not gonna get into whether or not their God's Eye is better or worse than Tesla's FSD but it's at least widely acknowledged that they are at least comparable.
Tesla is also not very transparent so it's hard to cite statistics but a recent study found that Tesla had the highest rate of fatal accidents of any brand in the US
For the major part BYD sales performance is dependent on government subsidies in the country where they sell three quarters of all the cars they produce. That is a high risk factor investors don't like.
My guess is that Tesla is doing better because FSD has improved significantly over the past few months. Even with that, most of the recent increase has been them regaining the valuation they lost earlier this year.
There is still the law suite about FSD and the old hardware.
There is still Elon the hitler Musk Oligarch who wielded a chainsaw.
There were plenty of FSD videos last year and the year before showing that FSD is working. The question is still, is it working good enough, and what will be the business of a robotaxi.
The Taxi market overall is not that big, competition is hard and the most critical thing is peak demand.
In parallel random people believe tesla will wipe out the whole taxi industry + private cars tomorrow. Ignoring competition and everything else.
Aaand as an edit: When it finally works, people will tell you "told you so look at it, FSD works" yeah really? Of course it works but it was promised from Musk that 2020 all these Teslas will drive autonomsly. Its 2026
The performance of V3 and V4 have improved significantly. I use them daily, more V3 than V4.
It's partially about fully automated cars, but that's barely started. IMO, it's more about them as ADAS now.
And it's not just about whether anyone else will catch up in terms of automation/ADAS, it's about whether anyone else will catch up in terms of manufacturing+automation/ADAS.
Edit- And yes, Elon acting like that doesn't help, but Tesla isn't Elon.
Elon is Tesla. He owns 10-15% of it and the last vote for his trillion payout thing shows what this means.
And there has never been a person like Elon, interfering in german election, USA election etc. and being the posterchild for companies.
In what timeframe did V3 and V4 improved for you? At least for me, even FSD 2023 videos were quite impressive.
Nvidia has its own platform with ML based training. Im pretty sure car companies can and will just use them if necessary. Besides that, left and right other companies are working on it, i saw an xpeng driving autonoms through the city and it worked very well.
I think his decisions have been helpful in the past, especially compared to half-hearted attempts at EVs by most of most other large manufacturers, but only time will tell if his current positions will pay off. At least the new compensation is performance based. If he can't deliver, he doesn't get paid.
V3/V4 have significantly improved in the past few months. I use one, the other, or both, daily, more V3 than V4. They are well ahead of where they were in 2023.
I'm sure Nvidia and others will eventually catch up, but they have to catch up in terms of auto manufacturing/use, inference/training/sensor hardware manufacturing/use, fleet training data, etc... simulataneously.
Xpeng driving autonomously is great, and shows they are catching up at least in a specific situation. They may be catching up in the aggregate, they may not be. I agree that a Chinese manufacturer has the best chance to catch up overall.
In general, I think it's about whether a distributed, lower-compute/sensor with higher-data/training approach like Tesla/etc have will beat a more singular, higher-compute/sensor with lower-data/training like Waymo/etc have.
Distributed has been able to offer better ADAS at a lower cost, but singular is winning at fully autonomous driving. If distributed can catch up in terms of autonomous diving while continuing to improve ADAS, distributed is done. I have a hunch that's a part of why there's so much demand for DRAM/etc...
you take Elon out of Tesla and you will end up with Ford, $13-16/share
> At least the new compensation is performance based. If he can't deliver, he doesn't get paid.
Unfortunately, with Elon and TSLA, this is not the case. He just has to promise he will deliver in some imaginary future (as he’s been doing for more than a decade) and he’ll be handsomely rewarded
Market cap he’ll hit by President’s Day after few tweets about some amazing thing that is coming “by June” (year won’t be specified) and operational goals he’ll fudge with some “orders” from his buddies which will never materialize
Elon ain't magic. The first tranche alone requires another $1.2+ trillion in market cap.
He might have been able to push prices up to +/-10+% when Tesla was smaller, but I doubt he could even move it 5% these days.
Have they faked their current sales? How are they going to fake future sales?
It's clear you're not a fan of Elon or Tesla, but they'll have plenty of opportunities to mess things up themselves like any other company. There's no need to speculate about trillions in fraud and millions of fake sales.
If they hit the targets, he gets equity, if they don't, he doesn't.
I could give you many reasons. I see where you went wrong, here are some to think about:
- next time don't just look at stock value and volume. Look at cashflow
- Consider that most investment volume comes from institutional investors in Wall Street, not in China. Even Chinese investment is routed through NY, Singapore, UK, etc, with the slight exception of Hong Kong.
- Consider geopolitics before investing too. Trump really went all-in in tariffs that basically geofence EV business to american brands.
- The hope for BYD is in EU and UK markets. EU has also been extremely harsh to welcoming BYD and protectionist of their (German) auto makers. This hasn't avoided BYD entering the market, but also has stopped them from shipping en masse. Might change.
- BYD is not a competitor to Tesla. BYD market is the low end market mostly. For example, what today in EU is Dacia (1st or 2nd best seller by number of units). Tesla on the other hand is purposely set up as a mid-high seller. It is too expensive for the cheap segment of the market (10-20k) and is well below luxury vehicles. Different market segment, also better margins in that segment.
- Auto industry is cyclical not defensive. In times of economic uncertainty like today, if you want a solid investment you should look at defensive not cyclical.
- Generally it is a bad idea for retailers to invest in Chinese HQed companies due to the complex geopolitics that surrounding the stock. For example, you have severe limitations in stock market products and they have tight regulation, unlike the US where you have a free-market.
- Consider the market of derivatives. Very different market of futures in China vs the US.
- Tesla is also a self-driving company and robotics company. It would be better compared to XPENG than to BYD.
- Tesla owns the EV market in North America. Period. This is the reality today.
- On top of all that yes the stock is hyped up. But you should know that and invest with that in mind. Being full blown rational in an irrational market will not work.
> - The hope for BYD is in EU and UK markets. EU has also been extremely harsh to welcoming BYD and protectionist of their (German) auto makers. This hasn't avoided BYD entering the market, but also has stopped them from shipping en masse. Might change.
The way this will change is Chinese companies opening factories in the EU. BYD is opening one in Szeged, Hungary soon.
The Chinese economy isn't set up to endlessly create value for the capital-owning class, so you are never going to profit off of Chinese companies and stocks in the way we are used to in the west.
it make sense with geo politics, governments started slowly using same playbook, banning chinese cars anywere possible because of real risks of espionage etc.
> I bought BYD stock in 2025 before split in the hope that their market dominance will translate to great returns. The stock has pretty consistently traded down since then. Meanwhile Tesla stock soared purely on the air coming out of Elon’s mouth.
Interesting take there. Tesla Model Y is the #1 best-selling car globally in 2025 for the third year.
Meanwhile, your BYD is bleeding from real price wars and demand slumps. Tesla's valuation? Still baked in autonomy, energy, and AI upside not just car volume. Calling it "air" while hyping your own wishful dominance is nothing but peak projection.
Toyota RAV4 seems to be the best selling car globally in 2025, not model y.
Overall tesla models looks dated, quality is not great, ongoing safety issue with underwhelming responses, competition on the ev segment is just better on many points now.
> Toyota RAV4 seems to be the best selling car globally in 2025, not model y.
The data you're referring to is from Oct 2025 we're talking about the entire 2025 CY here.
> Overall tesla models looks dated, quality is not great, ongoing safety issue with underwhelming responses, competition on the ev segment is just better on many points now.
That's your uninformed biased opinion. If it were even remotely true, the Model Y will not be the world's best selling car for 3 years in a row. Math and sales numbers don't lie.
You cannot deny that Tesla has not been selling as well as other EV manufacturers. You also cannot deny that Tesla has took a heavy beating internationally.
Tesla valuation is not baked in anything, it's entirely hype about potential, and has absolutely nothing to do with automation, robotics, AI, energy. It is largely betting that Elon Musk will do well, not that Tesla will do well. It might as well just be called EM.
> You cannot deny that Tesla has not been selling as well as other EV manufacturers. You also cannot deny that Tesla has took a heavy beating internationally.
What other EV manufacturers are you even referring here? Do you even know the top 5 EV manufacturers in terms of global sales?
You are clearly clueless about the current state of EVs. I'm willing to bet you haven't even driven or owned a Tesla or BYD. So you're uninformed at best.
All I know is I'd never buy a Tesla. Having seen them up close, the quality control is clearly not priority one. Unacceptable for a vehicle at that price.
> All I know is I'd never buy a Tesla. Having seen them up close, the quality control is clearly not priority one. Unacceptable for a vehicle at that price
You must be trolling. 'Having seen them up close' isn't a serious basis for an opinion on an any vehicle. Take a proper 24-hour test drive and then talk about build quality.
Purely on the air coming out of Elon’s mouth as well as the 1 million cars sold world wide, 165 successful Falcon 9 launches and 9 million Starlink subscriptions
SpaceX’s success have no bearing on Tesla. And Tesla’s sales for the year are down for the second year in a row. Hardly a logical reason for the stock to go up.
> And Tesla’s sales for the year are down for the second year in a row. Hardly a logical reason for the stock to go up.
If the market originally expected and priced in an even bigger decline, the stock would logically go up. Because of all the possible anticipations stock price movements are hard to understand, even in retrospect.
I think he's implying that SpaceX's success is evidence that Musk can possibly deliver on the robotaxis and Optimus forecasts, thus justifying TSLA's multiple. I for one am skeptical.
> "Hardly a logical reason for the stock to go up"
Surely this can't be a serious nor a logical statement so I'll have to assume it's a joke or engagement bait. Here are 3 that I can think off the top of my head.
1. Robotaxi TAM: Tesla's already running unsupervised Robotaxis (no safety driver) in Austin tests as of late 2025, with plans to expand cities in 2026 — that's not vaporware, it's early scaling of high-margin autonomy.
2. Cross-country FSD milestone? Legit: A Tesla owner just nailed 10,000+ intervention-free miles on FSD v14.2 coast-to-coast in Dec 2025, including parking and Supercharging — verified via telemetry.
3. Model Y #1 for 3rd year? Tesla proudly claimed it in their 2025 recap as of the latest DEC 2025 data.
Stock still up ~11-25% in 2025 despite EV headwinds and ending of EV credits because the market prices in future upside: autonomy software margins, energy storage boom, Optimus, and robotaxi fleets. That's logical valuation, not "no reason."
Dismissing all that while cherry picking doubts is at best nothing but drivel.
Nice. Now take the car sales out of the vacuum and let’s see how great sales look year over across the world. Now let’s factor in how Elon’s government ended subsidies for electric cars. Should I go on?
This is certainly alarming for US auto manufacturers. Tesla is the only successful EV car company which is able to somewhat compete with BYD, but for many it is hardly an option because of it's leadership.
That's to say nothing of the cost. Assuming there were no extraordinary tarrifs on China/BYD, the entry-level offering would be in the $10K range which is about 1/4 the cost of a base Tesla Model 3.
In my country over last 5 years the majority of new cars now from China, it happened so swift. I still think that Japan cars are the best, but it's hard to justify paying 2x and getting inferior (in terms on features) product, while reviews of new chinese cars are largely positive.
Interesting thank you. When I was there in 2012 or so I was surprised to see a huge number of small Daewoo branded cars, a long extinct brand in the west. Small getabouts seemed very popular. That was a long time ago I know, but I imagine some of these cheap Chinese small models are filling that segment now?
If you only travel to North America and Europe you’d never know but I went to South America and India and the former mostly had Chinese cars and the latter had big ads for a BYD MPV everywhere in Bangalore.
So the Chinese car makers are popular outside the West. I drove a couple of Changan cars and they weren’t even as nice as my Subaru in terms of handling but they functioned well as cars.
Can confirm. Colombia based, a year ago I had my first Uber trip in a BYD, now I would guess about 10% of my journeys are Chinese EVs. It's impressive how fast they've caught up and mostly surpased their competition. If the Japanese took 20 years, the Koreans 10, then the Chinese have done it in 5.
They've suddenly all appeared in Australia too - we had BYD for quite a while and brands like Volvo and Polestar (owned by China's Geeley), but suddenly we have Leapmotor, Deepal, Omoda Jaecoo and Geeley themselves (just the ones I can think of, probably others) having all appeared on our market in literally something like six months...
BYD is very much present in the UK (Telsa still seem the most common, but BYD are getting close), it must be the same in mainland Europe unless the EU is blocking them more aggressively. The Ford dealer down the road from me turned into a BYD service centre in the last couple of months.
> BYD has overtaken Tesla in overall European registrations for the first time in 2025 (BYD outsold Tesla across EU + EFTA + UK in several months)
> Across EU+EFTA+UK in October 2025, BYD’s registrations (~17 470) were ~2.5× Tesla’s (~6 964), and YTD BYD’s total (~138 390) was closing the gap on Tesla’s (~180 688).
Still not as strong as in other markets. In Finland, BYD is not even in top10:
- 1. Skoda Enyaq (~1614 units)
– 2. VW ID.4 (~1582)
– 3. Tesla Model Y (~1516)
- Other brands include VW ID.7, Kia EV3, Volvo, Audi, Polestar.
They also migrated 100s of millions of mopeds to electric bikes and shipped new ebikes over the last 10 years. That enormous scale no doubt fed directly to battery technology and assembly techniques that help with cars. Many Chinese don't own cars. (That's changing fast).
Legacy automakers EVs are just ICE cars with the engine swapped out. Whereas BYDs, teslas etc are a ground up rethink, vertically integrated with battery manufacturing and software.
Classic innovators dilemma - it seems to be almost impossible to align incentives inside legacy auto to do the necessary revolutionary change. Every individual and sub group are internally invested and short term focused on their legacy frames, drivetrains, layouts, electronics, software and supply chains. That’s why you keep getting offered the same car, but now as a sub par EV. So they will lose, because they can’t adapt.
They are getting a lot better in the drivetrain at least, watching videos of teardowns (like Munroe Live) - a couple of years ago a lot of the legacy car brands were using OEM motors and inverters etc. from companies like Bosch, but the newer models are getting a lot more advanced. Probably Lucid had the nicest motor and electronics package and everyone seems to have converged on motor windings a lot like theirs (including Tesla and the legacy brands).
But there is still a lot to be desired in legacy EVs, but generally at least some of the brands are slowly moving in the right direction.
point taken on the motors. But perhaps drivetrain was the wrong word for what i was trying to focus on - perhaps "platform" is closer? As an elaboration - the legacies are still proudly talking up their upcoming "unified platforms", that allow them to build models in a single factory and interchange ICE and EV powertrains in the same model based on demand. Same cars in everything but drivetrain.
That's the sort of thing that sounds great to a legacy incumbent (yay think of the reuse!), but inevitably leads to building bad EVs compared to the new companies who are building reimagined EV-only platforms from the ground up. Handling, suspension, range, battery integration, software are always going to be better in an EV-first design. The incumbents are trying to have their cake and eat it too - building EVs, but not cannibalizing their main ICE profits.
> the legacies are still proudly talking up their upcoming "unified platforms", that allow them to build models in a single factory and interchange ICE and EV powertrains in the same model based on demand. Same cars in everything but drivetrain.
I still remember when ford was _super_ proud of their ability to push OTAs to their mach-e mustang and lightning. This was in 2020, not 2010 when it would actually have been considered innovative and cutting-edge.
> So, they will lose. Its their kodak moment.
Agree. It's only a question of how many years the decline is stretched out over. We'll learn a lot about the long term viability of US auto over the next 36 months as slate/teleo/scout start to ship.
well they were a battery company first. I cant know for sure but i presume they bought the ice car manufacturing lines always with the intention of going fully electric over time.
US dealers and manufacturers have no financial incentive in promoting and selling EVs. They can’t survive on fixing window chips, rotating tires and occasional bodywork alone. It’s a huge industry with long tentacles.
And when they do or did have incentives, they were not passed on to the consumers. My 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 had a $57K sticker. That’s not what I paid for it and cheapish leases are aplenty- but - when the federal $7500 credit expired, they simply dropped the MSRP by that much if not more. BMW and others are pursuing the same strategy in the states. The car was never worth near that much to begin with. They were and are jacking up prices and pocketing the change.
Decades from now we're going to look at the oil patch lobbyists as the villains that killed countless jobs in NA and enabled China to take over whole industries.
You had some politicians like Justin Trudeau that tried to create a frame work that would guide and advantage capital toward investing in innovative green technology and future jobs, but then politicians saw the advantage in politicizing and opposing everything and they tore this all down.
Now China has continued to move ahead meanwhile NA remains at square one with increasingly backward technology, with no incentive to change.
Japanese engineers disassembled a BYD vehicle said BYD's E-Axle drive system was so advanced it would take them 10 years to replicate it. BYD's blade batteries are also a major competitive advantage.
The problem is that few people in "the west" wants EVs.
It's basic supply and demand - the sales are tanking, and without subsidies nobody will buy them, and the car companies are realizing that.
A few models (Teslas, for example) do okay with the upper class, but the lower and middle class can't afford them, don't have anywhere to charge them, and have to drive too much to depend on them.
Even in a trendy, wealthy city like Boulder, CO which is all about saving the environment and going green there isn't nearly enough charging capacity for everybody to use EVs.
An EV is better than no car at all, but they're a downgrade from an ICE in most cases.
The "west" doesn't want expensive EVs. The most popular (or the second most popular) EV in China now costs $5000 for the base model. And for $15k you can get a very reasonable car.
Beefing it up to the US/EU safety standards and even accounting for higher labor cost, it would be around $20k. I'm pretty sure consumers would be quite interested in something like this.
It depends where you live and your driving distances. The US is the worst case for EVs because of longer driving distances and cheaper gas. I plug mine in at my own home so I never have to stop to fill it up a tank which is really nice. A renter might struggle to find anywhere to charge though. ICE is horrible to drive in comparison. They are noisy and lack torque and lots of moving parts need maintenance.
For sparsely populated areas or city to city driving plug-in hybrids should bridge the gap and allow people do most driving on electric and get the benefits of EV performance.
EVs are a superior car if you have a private garage and rarely take long trips or have multiple cars so you don’t need the EV for trips. Great for suburban living, which is where most Americans live. Never having to go to the gas station is legitimately a game changer and it’s worth swapping to EVs for that alone given you check the 2 boxes. Then you consider the better torque and lower noise and easier maintenance and it’s a no brainer.
Boulder is not a great EV town because everyone road trips all the time. 70% of Americans live east of the Mississippi where road trips are less common.
Eh not sure why OP chose Boulder, it is a great EV town. I commute into Boulder in an EV every day I need to be in the office. I almost exclusively charge my EV in Boulder at the office. The proportion of EVs I see driving in and out of Boulder is very high.
I also road trip around Colorado in my EV and it works great.
Consumers in the US haven't actually been given a chance to show what they "want". The cheap EVs have been kept out, of course the $100k ones arent selling that well. Remove the tariffs and import restrictions, and then people will show you what they actually want!
> An EV is better than no car at all, but they're a downgrade from an ICE in most cases.
Totally disagree. ~70% of americans live in single family homes. If you can charge at home which they can, and you dont have some edge case super distance driving needs, EV is better in every way.
> US/EU automakers are still struggling to offer anything barely competitive.
Imagine yourself being one of the top management guys in one of those legacy car makers, you've spent your entire life building what you "earned" in that company...Suddenly the company tells you that you will be sidelined so more resources that once thought to be under your control can be allocated to an EV project so you can be further marginalize in the near future. what will be your reactions? You offer to help in the project (by building junks with your legacy understanding on cars) or you do anything possible to sink that project.
The result is the same - your legacy carmaker company is fxxked.
It is not like just US/EU legacy automakers struggling to offer anything competitive - Chinese legacy automakers that have been in the exact same market for decades with direct access to the exact same supply chain and government subsidies are suffering from the exact same problem. It is not about regulations, market access or subsidies. It is just human nature.
I don't believe the West can sustain its lead. The US became rich by being the worlds manufacturing powerhouse in 1900. Over time, they grew comfortable, developed a massive upper class, and pivoted toward service and 'knowledge' jobs. They outsourced production to China or simply allowed China to take it over.
Germany and the EU followed a similar path. We know how to build machines and industrial products; precision and detail are our stereotypes and trademark. However, we also grew comfortable, focusing on services and high-level strategy while we did not invest to fix energy prices, raw resource dependencies and labor/automatisation.
How long is China looking fo resources in Afrika? Despite China being huge and having plenty of?
China overtook Germany as the leader in industrial exports in 2018, and now in 2026, the gap is already to broad. China has mastered machine building, controls the entire supply chain, and possesses modern technology; all while maintaining lower labor costs and a massive workforce.
Even if the USA and Germany try to avoid Chinese products, the rest of the world will not. We are entering a new era: the mass production of affordable, precise machinery globally, powered by China. If regions like Africa buy their solar, wind, and batteries from China, their entire energy grid and the machines running on it will be Chinese. They will look to China, not the West.
For example, a German company making weaving machines recently noted their price must be €60k to stay profitable, while a Chinese machine of the same quality costs only €20k. Once technology reaches its peak, differentiation is no longer possible to justify higher prices. The car industry is next; cars are becoming a commodity with shrinking profit margins. This shift will make China incredibly wealthy over the next 20 years.
And it wasn't even out of the blue. The shit was written on the wall and despite that what happens? We in germany discuss bureaucracy, if we should change our energy grid, IF investments in cheaper energy is reasonable etc.
We can’t even build our own infrastructure anymore. Look at the SuedOstLink disaster: while China builds massive 'Super Grids' in record time, Germany has spent over a decade and billions of Euros just arguing about a single power cable. Because we are stuck in bureaucracy and 'Not In My Backyard' protests, our energy costs are skyrocketing, while China doesn't care but still beats us in renewables.
It’s the perfect example of a society that has become so comfortable it has forgotten how to actually build the physical foundations of its own wealth.
And adding on top of all of that: AI and Robotic progress is fast, so crazy fast than when its here, we might have solved the other issues i mentioned...
Every car maker selling cars in the EU needs to comply with EU laws.
That's why Europe is mercifully free of Cybertrucks: they can't legally operate on roads within the EU, because they don't meet the safety requirements (one of your "little things").
They only had to comply with EU laws when they were already a big player in China. EU manufacturers need their new vehicles to be compliant on day one. That is, if they want to launch in the EU market first. Audi recently launched a China-only car (AUDI E5 Sportback).
I visited China recently for 3 weeks. They have really nice EVs, got to ride on a bunch of different brands/models just by using DiDi (equivalent to Uber there).
They also have them on display on shopping malls, for example on Huawei and Xiaomi stores.
Xiaomi makes HVACs and washing machines as well, so we aren't really comparing apples to apples here. I think chinese companies trend toward the conglomerate model of South Korea and Japan (e.g. Samsung used to make cars), which isn't really a thing in the US.
They have their own internal market, which now has a middle class equal in size to the entire US population.
They have all of Asia, with a market of another ~2B, and a completely undeveloped market in Africa of another 1B people.
That's part of what the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative is, an industrial policy to establish trade links and infrastructure dependencies across the world that uses Chinese direct FDI and industrial policy to establish new markets for their own industries.
Which is exactly the same policy that the US adopted as part of the Marshall Plan and its use (up until 2025) of soft power to promote US FDI across the world.
It's the US that is dependent on a defense industry and foreign sales for its industrial capacity.
That's why the US defense budget is 50% of the total and over USD1T/year and is why the US is demanding that NATO nations buy US defense equipment.
Yeah, there are some theories that state that WWI and WWII started because of over production and the search for new markets (I saw a video recently mentioning some books, including one from Lenin), so you might be in to something
Hybrids and EV, at least in Spain both are quickly becoming popular, even with tariffs. Probably helps that our government still gives people ~3K EUR if they go electric.
It varies by company. The companies that participated in the audit generally got hit with a 17% tariff, the ones that didn't, 34%. (oversimplified).
Either way I phrased my original comment as a question as I'm not sure whether to consider 17% or 34% as "high". It depends on perspective. Both are painful, but neither are high enough to completely kill trade, like 100%+ tariffs do.
I'm not choosing sides here but if telecom equipment from e.g. HuaWei is not allowed on US/EU markets because of national security concerns, then should we allow cars?
Why not? We allow pretty much everything else. Appliances, consumer electronics, car parts, batteries, etc.
The one and only reason to not allow Chinese cars is to try and protect domestic auto industry, but considering how expensive and mismanaged domestic auto production is I don't see that as a good excuse. They won't die because they can't possibly compete, they will die for refusing to compete because they want higher profit margins now rather than bulk sales and good public perception 10 years down the line. They would rather fuck their future and bet on a bail-out than dare try making bulk cheap cars again with a bit lower margin.
Hell GM paid Toyota to come teach them how to make cars cheaper and better and build matrix platform cars in their factory. And what did they do when that happened and cars started rolling off the line? They complained that Toyota didn't produce them them in the same manner they would have, and then closed the plant down. Meanwhile Matrix platform cars like the Vibe are highly sought after on the used car market because they were known for reliability and ease of maintenance.
If we were actually worried about security, we would be doing FAR more than merely disallowing HuaWei products. Its like living next to an active volcano in a forest fire prone areas inside a log cabin and then screaming about how dangerous it would be to allow matches be sold in stores due to arsonists.
You don't allow chinese cars because those assembly lines can be converted to make tanks or other war vehicles if needed. Substitute industry and product as needed
I don't believe for a second that modern automotice production can easily be changed into manufacturing anything besides consumer grade vehicles. Auto plants aren't full of generalized lathes and mills anymore and a large part of their supply chain is based in smaller factories making the the more complicated parts. It takes them up to two years just to switch from one consumer vehicle to another, not to mention a completely new vehicle unlike anything that has been built in those plants for over 80 years if ever.
It would be a long switchover, but a large building and local skilled labor are important/useful. The jigs can't be reused but the stations with new jigs can be used.
Um, this is exactly what happened in the previous wars. Even modern ones. Auto plants are full of general purpose robots. They can make military stuff with some relatively low-cost changes.
There's something about showing up to fight the previous war. Tanks were scary from WWII to Desert storm, and still are to me, as a civilian. But militarily are they still? I have no idea what I could to do fight against one that magically showed up in front of my house, but Ukraine War videos suggests the age of tanks has passed. They're still something you'd need to make, but more important it seems is the ability to make tiny electric motors for drones and injection molding for plastic fans, and some 3d printing. You'd want a manufacturing base that was able to make cellphones, not tanks.
Looks to me that flexible industry is the new super-weapon.
That means standard components, flexible robots (3d printing are some, but there are many kinds), low retooling time. And yes, nothing at all like a car factory.
This just doesnt work. The days when the same line producing cars can be turned into production of tanks has long been gone.
Basically the same manufacruting line cant be even used to build cars on different platform than intended.
Example: a lot of car manufacturers have left Russia in 2022 and most of capacity used for cars is just stay rotting. Even used facilities are only utilized for semi-knocked down assembly.
This is a national security concern but in a different way. It's about the de-industrialization of America. Palmer Lucky talks about this and how China's goal is to make sure America can't build anything. Once that happens we can never win a war against them.
If that's really the goal, would it make sense for the government to subsidize cars with military money? Because otherwise, car buyers are basically subsidizing national defense by buying overpriced cars.
To build things you also need a lot of people with education, know how and experience. You cant just bring low-wage workforce and expect to compete with China.
Let alone that to provide same quality of living to average chinese worker as they have in China their salary in US will have to grow 5-6 times.
> Let alone that to provide same quality of living to average chinese worker as they have in China their salary in US will have to grow 5-6 times.
That's Baumol's Cost Disease, a symptom of not allowing massive amounts of workers in. The solution is to let them in, something like how UAE or Hong Kong does it but even more.
Most people don't want to do that. That's a choice they made, but they must live with the consequences and stop complaining.
> To build things you also need a lot of people with education, know how and experience.
Let those people in too as guest workers. There's millions of people that know how to build housing, do surgery, and so on, but they're not allowed to do it.
Not just because of the assumed security issues (good point though).
But even w/o these,
- I rather have some European or American conglomerate gathering unnecessary data about me driving, than just hand it over to the Chinese state
- Buying Chinese means destroying our own base, as this market has been actively stealing IP for decades (BYD or Xiamoi just being copycats of Porsche); good luck winning piracy cases in Chinese courts
- unfair financial restrictions for redeeming returns on foreign investments fueled much of China‘s growth - and still persist
- western/asian manufacturers are de-facto not competing with mere manufacturers but the Chinese state itself since (almost?) all Chinese manufacturers are State-Owned-Companies
Now that is not to say that China‘s rise is not commendable and deserved, it is indeed. I‘m rather arguing for playing the same game as they are.
The part I don't get is, why shouldn't Western companies be able to out-compete the Chinese state at mass-producing cars?
My whole life, I only heard about how much better private companies are than governments at making products. How could we be suddenly behind?
OK, Xiaomi and BYD are state-backed private companies. But what advantage does the state-backing get them, exactly? How is it better than the familiar state-backed advantages western companies have (like regulatory capture, tax breaks, tariffs, or TBTF bailouts)?
The Chinese government can subsidize them. But that's just moving zero-sum money around; it might give them a boost in cars, but it must come at a cost to semiconductors, robotics, solar energy, raw materials, defense, or other things like that.... in theory at least? So why does it feel like they're somehow subsidizing every sector at the same time?
People misunderstand how Chinese subsidization works. It's at the State not Federal level and States compete internally between themselves. So they still have a competitive action driving forward progress, while China the country wins regardless for exports.
I thought private business competing in a free market would always out do a centrally planned economy with state owned enterprises.
We've been told that in the West since Reagan, when we decided to forget all the advantages of a Keynesian economy.
So the actual concept of having an industrial strategy was and is considered against all economic orthodoxy in the West.
BYD is not a "copy" of Porsche, they hired European designers, Xioamoi made mobile phones before they started making cars.
The problem of China appropriating intellectual property has been known for decades, but access to the market was considered more important. The governments and industries could have decided that the market was less important and stopped transferring technology, but they didn't.
Chinese IP has been developing on its own at an accelerated pace now.
Most of the technology in Western vehicles is using chips built in Chinese or Taiwanese fabs and if China wanted to subvert the vehicle supply chains in EU or US, I'm sure they could.
BYD owns their own fleet of car carriers for export, with the capacity to have ~30k vehicles shipping to other markets at any one time on their vessels. From this piece:
> BYD Deliveries outside of China hit 1.05 million in 2025. The company has set a goal to expand overseas sales to between 1.5 million to 1.6 million units in 2026, according to a Citigroup Inc. report in November that cited a meeting with BYD management.
Edit: The debt is irrelevant, China isn’t America. They’ll nationalize and inflate away any institutional debt or wipe it out, but still have a third of the world’s manufacturing capacity. Tesla exists on vibes, Chinese EV makers build, for example. jmyeet’s comment mostly nails this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46456020
China has a huge deflation problem that they export to the world via cheap products. They have a lot of capacity and not enough consumers. So in China, an unstated mild Keynesian approach makes sense. They can sweep debt under the rug and take in inflation from net debtor countries
Only a capitalist high on stocks can convince you that falling prices are bad. I, for one, welcome these falling prices. I thought inflation was the problem?
> They’ll nationalize and inflate away any institutional debt or wipe it out
This is just the reverse, actually, China isn’t afraid to go so far as to jail CEOs. There is no such thing as too big to fail in China, and all the Chinese domestic companies know it. The bailout playbook is a western thing.
China has been performing debt swaps with local governments to clean up their balance sheets [1], so used as an example. Agree with all of your comment. People make the mistake that China plays by artificial US capital market rules around profit and debt; they do not. They optimize for physical world success, not line go up.
Yes, exactly. Just as in the US, when an enterprise gets wiped out and recapitalized, all of the physical assets remain. In China’s case, they are the backstop of last resort, and will always recapitalize according to their nation state planning and target outcomes. They allow companies to operate the assets as long as the Chinese government is willing to allow it, but they remain assets of China.
> There actually literally is a free lunch. Debt owed to the government by itself isn’t real.
False.
It may not be the same as debt owed to other parties, but not paying it still has consequences for things like money supply.
Otherwise, why would the government not just lend endless amounts of money? Even the Chinese government knows they can't do that.
> It doesn’t matter how much you think China is in trouble financially, at the end of the day they still manufacture a third of everything in the world.
Their output doesn't really matter when it comes to their financial situation. You can produce a lot and still be in trouble. And it's not me that is calling out China's problems, China is talking about it as well.
I never said anything about lending infinite money, don’t straw man me.
The constraint is on real resources, which China has plenty of, regardless of how much debt they have.
The financial situation is an accounting detail. China could decide to write off all debt it owes to itself tomorrow, and literally nothing would change.
> I never said anything about lending infinite money, don’t straw man me.
You did say...
> There actually literally is a free lunch. Debt owed to the government by itself isn’t real
Which I think is reasonable to interpret as lending infinite money.
> The constraint is on real resources, which China has plenty of, regardless of how much debt they have.
I'm not even sure what you're saying here. Constraint on what? Money? Economic growth?
Assuming you mean money, it doesn't make much sense. Ok, China has lots of real resources. In order to pay down debt, they need to turn those resources into money. They can certainly create the supply, but they also need demand.
It's like Canada saying they have infinite resources in their timber. "We'll just cut down the wood and sell it". Well there isn't infinite demand for timber, so in fact, having a lot of resources doesn't mean you have endless money.
> China could decide to write off all debt it owes to itself tomorrow, and literally nothing would change
Absolutely not true. Look at the real estate developers. China is working hard to get them out from under the crushing debt they have. If, as you claim, they could "write off all debt, and literally nothing would change", why didn't they.
The answer is that China is mostly a market economy. Writing off debt has massive consequences bothing domestically and internationally.
This is the trade off China made when relying on the free market for growth. If they want to leverage the free market, then they are held to the free market's rules (which they are currently dealing with).
Can you imagine a world where a government could spend infinite money without any problems? If you can’t, then why would someone else think that? If you thought my understanding of macroeconomics was different from yours and you were genuinely curious, it would have been a good idea to start by asking questions. Or if you thought I was an idiot you could have just ignored me. But you chose to assume an obviously ridiculous premise to my comment and reply based on that. That’s the definition of a straw man argument.
If you still care to know, the constraint on government spending is real resources (and whether they can be usefully utilized of course).
I don’t know about the real estate situation in China, and I don’t know if it was financed by private debt or public debt, so I can’t comment on it.
That debt issued by a central bank to its government to productively utilize real resources is not inflationary and not really “owed” to anyone. It’s an accounting detail.
In response to you saying that there is no free lunch since debt is always owed to someone.
> That debt issued by a central bank to its government to productively utilize real resources is not inflationary and not really “owed” to anyone. It’s an accounting detail.
This sentence doesn't make sense. "Debt issued to it's government"?
I presume you mean government debt issued to the central bank, whereby the central bank prints new money as a part of the loan?
It absolutely can be inflationary (see US inflation during Covid) if the money eventually makes it into the economy (e.g. by paying workers).
And yes, debt is always owed to someone. Whether that someone is the central bank doesn't mean it's a free lunch - not paying back the loan has consequences to the economy.
From the outside, it appears that "upset the regime" includes "cheating your way into profits".
That said, it's very difficult to be sure if what I see from the outside is propaganda. Or rather, it is always propaganda even when it's true, and I can't tell how much of it is China's own self-promotion vs. other people giving negative propaganda.
I'm saying from the outside, it doesn't look like that. That's a much weaker statement, as should've been obvious from what I went on to say about propaganda.
Even with the sub-heading "It's legal, and that's the problem."*, and even though this kind of cheating is broader than this reply chain from "There is no such thing as too big to fail in China", this is absolutely within bounds for what I asked for :)
* and the not-proof-read AI generated image, that never helps…
There's ways to invest in stocks that are not cheating, for example.
Or, you know, they might have done what I myself am doing right now and be landlords. That's not cheating. Or at least, I don't think it is, I don't know what the Chinese government considers it to be, what with communism and all.
For this context: cheating is in the sense of "large bets where the cost of failure will be paid by the state and yet they get to keep the profits in the event of success": I think that if any of them have made such bets, those bets have paid off. I think that if any such bet had been made and failed, it would have been noticed by people outside China.
As I said:
From the outside, it appears that "upset the regime" includes "cheating your way into profits".
Key parts: "from the outside", and "appears".
In the event they make a bet and it fails and we spot it, that specific chain is what would make it cease to "appear" to be so "from the outside".
A car transport holds thousands of ships. Therefore requiring temporary storage for thousands of cars is normal.
Even if you count the massive "hidden debt", BYD's debt load is still a small fraction of the big car makers, many of whom hold over $200 billion in debt.
Dumping notwithstanding, BYD is still selling cars into the Australian market in enormous numbers. Four of the top ten EVs sold this year are BYD, as are the top two PHEVs.
If you account for the fact that Australian market Teslas are built in China, then China is producing 8 of the top 10 EVs.
Which is direct evidence for what would happen if they were allowed to sell fairly into the US and Europe. The future of cars is Chinese, the US automakers can’t survive on protectionism forever
A friend of mine works in the chemical industry in Europe. One reason European producers are currently facing challenges is that Chinese producers are dumping chemicals into the global market at heavy discounts.
The underlying cause of this is that the Chinese housing market, which previously absorbed almost all chemicals, has effectively stalled (Evergrande, et al.).
I wonder whether we're observing a similar effect in the automobile industry as well.
Yes, but causality is backwards: the Chinese housing market stalled because China took the debt punch-bowl away from housing and gave it to the industrial sector.
It's also worth mentioning that loan subsidies play a bigger role in Chinese capital markets: Chinese industry is largely capitalized with state debt rather than private debt/equity or public markets. Zooming out, as a response to Trump's 1st term tariffs China went on a big autarky push by redirecting its citizens' and companies' deposits into a loan bazooka for the industrial sector. We are now seeing the fruits of that. The big questions have to do with (true) profitability and (true) balance sheets: can the new industries service their debts well enough for the government to hold face?
Are they actually dumping, or extraction/refinement of materials is actually much cheaper in China, so it feels like dumping?
Frankly, I don’t mind it, because western companies should also engage in this behaviour, if they can. Sell physical items for cheaper than it takes to produce them! They’re doing it with services and etc. anyways, might as well do it with physical products too.
Dumping notwithstanding, they're still selling cars into the Australian market in enormous numbers. Four of the top ten EVs sold this year are BYD, as are the top two PHEVs.
You write and I quote: "Meanwhile they are dumping thousands of cars"
Your own link to proof your quote says: "Hundreds of cars alleged to be illegally stored at a NSW fun park"
I think EU/NA residents are a little naive on how much Chinese cars are dominating the market. Chinese cars don't sell just in China. They utterly dominate globally outside of EU/NA where they face extreme tariffs. To the point where certain cars that you'd say were American (eg. Tesla) actually make most of their cars in China.
Right now around the world in non EU/NA countries Tesla's a bit on the nose. All Tesla's in Australia are Chinese made regardless but it's then a choice of Chinese made Tesla vs Chinese made BYD and the BYDs are by all reports excellent cars.
PS to Canadians: You could be paying ~50% less for the same car, even same model to same model by allowing Chinese made cars in and it'd help you screw over a country that threatened you.
Correct, in every thread about BYD or other car manufacturers people seem to forget about the other 7.5 billion people in the world outside of the US and Europe. Sure the US' broken dealership laws and red-scare tantrums will stop these cars selling there, and in their economic satraps, but for the global majority countries there's no such barrier.
Your entire comment reads a bit like an ad for Chinese cars, conveniently omitting the damage these automakers are doing to the global car industry by dumping cheap supply wherever they can to secure market share, all enabled by heavy state subsidies. [0]
> PS to Canadians: You could be paying ~50% less for the same car, even same model to same model by allowing Chinese made cars in and it'd help you screw over a country that threatened you.
Because given the chance, China 100% would never do the same (or worse).
> dumping cheap supply wherever they can to secure market share, all enabled by heavy state subsidies
Assuming for a moment this is more true for China than for other countries. Why would the average Canadian prefer to pay more for their next car versus having a similar car subsidized by the Chinese taxpayer? Most Canadians do not work in the auto industry. Further, the protectionism practiced in the EU/US/Canada is not likely to be successful long-term, meaning those auto industries are doomed.
Best path forward is to let in competition, make the domestics stronger, and let consumers get cheaper cars in the meanwhile. Provide some additional temporary support if necessary. (This is more or less how the US absorbed Japanese and then Korean cars.)
To compete with China in the ”open market” now, Canada will need:
- 25 years of investments in infrastructure and education in STEM and manufacturing
- Targeted state subsidies of chosen branches, which will require
- transition to at least partially planned economy, which will require
- at least partially transitioning to some form of dictatorial governance
- increase population at least twofold (you need multiple multi-million metro areas to support large high-tech clusters)
- devaluate CAD about 2x and accept about the same drop in local purchasing power (which likely will happen anyway, but could be not that harsh and fast).
China at the moment has like 10x advantage in industry ober Canada, it’s impossible to compete. It’s like saying that your immune system must be able to handle bubonic plague, so let’s just inject the body with the pathogen and let it adapt without any external support. A noble idea, but you’ll likely die in the process.
- Also a much larger population to create the labor pool necessary.
I was speaking mostly about the Western bloc of countries (EU + USA & Canada) that have their heads in the sand. As a semi-unit, they already have most of the pieces necessary to be competitive.
The auto industry is a shockingly high percentage of the Canadian economy, somewhere around 10% of GDP. Direct auto manufacturing roles are themselves about 1% of jobs nationally. If we start counting everyone involved with the sector, it's >5% of people in Ontario. It's not a winning political move to make all of those people unemployed.
Let's be real, if Trump wants to reshore US auto factories from Ontario to Detroit, as he has stated explicitly, Canadian politicians can't do shit, USMCA be paper after all. Right now CAN just waiting for term to blow over and hope there's no Trump3. But ultimately if CA auto is going away / shrinking to irrelevance, at some point winning political move is to give masses cheap cars.
I feel like closing off access is a bad long term strategy. Instead of being forced to compete and match or outmatch competition Canadian manufacturing can get complacent and lean on restrictions. But the whole thing feels like a ticking bomb.
I mean you don’t have to go off vibes - this has historically happened in every protectionist industry. The protected companies make a worse and more expensive product
The Chinese tax payer isn't voluntarily helping you though, it's China's forced resource extraction from its own citizens (wage and QoL suppression), to maintain a stranglehold on global manufacturing. Everybody (except your specific car purchase) would be better off if they used these resources domestically. Do you think they'll ever want payback? if not from you, then from the next generations.
When you start presuming that the cause of this is that China is evil and wants world domination, let me remind you that it's the propaganda getting to you.
China had a mandate to contribute to climate action goals years ago. Their government sponsored that growth. Now their companies need to make a profit and selling overseas. It's simple free market forces.
it's not like cars are necessities like food. and i doubt these companies are unprofitable - the chinese govt has no incentive to provide the world with free cars.
It's shocking how (presumably) free-market maximalists on HN, who usually tout the benefits of competition look at Chinese EVs and go "These low proces can't be due to competition and innovation. It has to be government intervention". Domestic competition in China is red in tooth and claw, while car manufacturers in the US manufacturers innovate on buyer financing.
I'm not really seeing the issue with this. Capitalists will tell you this is a good thing because consumers will benefit, or is that only capitalism if it benefits the American elites?
Why should I care that the CEO of Ford is struggling when he pays his workers so terrible? If they want another government bail it, we should just nationalize the industry and implement workplace democracy for the staff so they can be accountable to the workers + people in some fashion.
But yeah, it's sad seeing the demise of US liberalism but what do you expect when the last 50 years was naked imperialism for corporations while denying any social responsibility for the country?
> They utterly dominate globally outside of EU/NA where they face extreme tariffs.
Even inside of EU, seemingly BYD have reasonable prices, especially compared to their EU competitors. I'm an current Audi owner in Spain, who is currently very close of getting a BYD DM-i Touring, and compared to what I would get from Audi for the same price, BYD still offers a lot more in everything except "nice steering feeling", at least from what I've gathered from my test drives.
Even inside of EU, seemingly BYD have reasonable prices, especially compared to their EU competitors.
This will usually be the case, because domestic manufacturers raise prices once tariffs (import taxes) on foreign manufacturers are imposed.
This is also why import taxes are so hard to eliminate once they're introduced: domestic manufacturers get used to the gratuitous revenue cushion, and the government gets used to the gratuitous tax cushion. Meanwhile consumers wonder why everything has gotten so expensive.
As a long term BMW driver instead of Audi I have the same. I'm swapping one of my two BMWs for a Model Y Premium. Also tried the BYD 7 but the Model Y felt nicer to drive and with more space.
The BMW iX1 is disappointing in range, interior luxury and power. It's below an older 6 series (that I'm switching from), and much less powerful than a Model Y AWD. No idea why BMW thinks they can price it like they do. The other option was the BMW i5 Touring but it's more expensive and feels "old" already.
There are lots of choices that go into choosing a car, not just feeling of the steering, although it's very important (for me at least). Not to mention I'm not the only person in the car, and the passenger experience is important too. Almost more importantly, the BYD I'm looking at have AC inside of the seat, which if I want to have a new Audi with that, it's a big price change, and with BYD it's a smaller change. Same goes for many features between them, which makes it look like if you want the same amount of features in an Audi as I'd get with a BYD, you're looking at almost double the price.
> PS to Canadians: You could be paying ~50% less for the same car, even same model to same model by allowing Chinese made cars in and it'd help you screw over a country that threatened you.
The sheer irony of an Australian saying this! I mean you’re in danger, dude!
It's like the 1970s all over again with how the US Big 3 makers are facing an existential threat held at bay only by protectionism. They're going to have to learn to compete yet again.
Did they ever learn to compete then? The only thing that protected them then was that Japan was a US “ally” and could be “persuaded” to go along with protectionism. China has no such need.
I would argue that the 70s were a trial run for whats happening today but instead of becoming more competitive the automakers focused on lobbying for Government help; a playbook that won’t help them today.
And even more stupidly, traditional American carmarkers are discontinuing EV models and shutting down factories JUST when they finally had an edge over their japanese competitors.
ford in particular seems to only ever give up on everything. they couldn't compete on compacts, so they killed the focus and fiesta. they couldn't compete on EVs, so they killed those too. next thing you know toyota will start carving away at the F-150's market share and they'll kill that, too.
Probably not the correct way to see it, but compared to new car makers like Tesla, BYD, Xpeng and so on, Ford seems not doing anything. The formers invest heavily on softwares, robots (in house or funding external cos), ADAS, remote sensing etc. I don't see giant legacies doing the same.
Ford's only move seems to be to form "skunkworks" teams, like the one that produced the Mach-E (not a bad car), and they started another one recently. But if the output of that is a single model and not the entire future platform direction, it seems like the wrong approach to me and it's more highlighting a symptom of the majority of the company being rotten.
honestly it really does seem that way. the impression I'm getting is farley just wants to make as much money as he can off of whatever's left of ford and leave. I mean, what kind of leader goes "wow I drove my competitor's car and it's freaking great, I give up!"?
compare this with toyota's CEO. they easily could've just coasted on corollas, camrys and RAV4s forever. nope, here's a new beastly supercar on the way!
> Did they ever learn to compete then? The only thing that protected them then was that Japan was a US “ally” and could be “persuaded” to go along with protectionism. China has no such need.
Oh, indeed. I was attempting to be generous, but it's arguable whether they deserve that generosity.
> I would argue that the 70s were a trial run for whats happening today but instead of becoming more competitive the automakers focused on lobbying for Government help; a playbook that won’t help them today.
We're still paying for this today with the so-called "Chicken Tax" (and all of the other crash and emissions regulations) that has deprived us so many good Japanese trucks over the years.
Outside the purely electric vehicles (where I believe Tesla competes very well, where is BYD at with FSD?), is there a Chinese equivalent to:
- The upcoming EREV (mostly electric extended range hybrid) F-150 truck? This is expected to have ~700 mile range, and of course no charging hassles. It’s main advantage over the now defunct Lightning will be towing range.
- The Chevy Corvette Stingray? Say what you want, but the high end ICE sports cars have an appeal of their own…
I believe the USA still has an edge in some areas of the market.
> - The upcoming EREV (mostly electric extended range hybrid) F-150 truck? This is expected to have ~700 mile range, and of course no charging hassles. Its main advantage over the now defunct Lightning will be towing range.
Interesting question. Maybe this is the niche where existing auto makers can thrive though if China automakers have a blind spot to outdoors enthusiasts where range is more important.
The problem is that no one really needs or wants this outside of NA, Australia, maybe Russia and Africa? But there is a market.
Range anxiety and towing is a niche problem and companies will get rich selling the next Toyota Camry/VW Golf for the median consumer.
EREV is niche on niche and that's sort of where I expect the NA market to be going under the NA auto makers. We're going to have this protectionist wall where we have these bizarre (increasingly ICE dominated) market while the rest of the world moves on.
> Interesting question. Maybe this is the niche where existing auto makers can thrive though if China automakers have a blind spot to outdoors enthusiasts where range is more important.
The whole EREV trend actually came from China (and if you look at reporting from Chinese car shows, outdoorsy/cross country stuff is all the rage right now). But the EREV sales seem to be falling off, maybe because the masses have overcome range anxiety (and the charging networks have been built out).
> EREV sales in China increased 218% year-over-year in 2021, 130% in 2022 and 70.9% in 2023. In other words, growth has been tapering off for the last few years.[1]
Couldn’t agree more. And the niche market will only hold on because of protectionism. If the US let in the wave of cheap EVs that are coming, people would buy them - suddenly noone is going to care about “range anxiety” when you can get a 20k ev that does 300miles.
American car manufacturers don't play to their strengths e.g affordable sports cars - Chevy Corvette Stingray | Mustang GT how many are sold in foreign markets
the Bronco could make a killing in Africa but is it sold there NO. I understand here in the states the 4runner has no competition - yet ford wants to kill it using the Bronco. Why not use the Bronco to kill the land cruiser in markets where people default to a Land Cruiser / Fortuner and force Toyota to play defense.
E.g in Africa certain markets Ford started selling the Ford Ranger Raptor and they're making a killing - and actually starting to cause Toyota to compete and not bring their usual stale cars.
However Chinese have brought their A-game too - Tank 300, BYD Shark etc
There is no way that a land cruiser owner in Africa will ever consider anything made by Ford. That's like blasphemy. The LC has decades of proven reliability, that the bronco needs to compete with.
It's true, the Ranger is immensely popular. But Ranger owners and LC owners do not see eye to eye and you'll have a tough time convincing the LC owner to change allegiance.
For South Africa specifically, the Ranger is about as large as you can go in terms of personal vehicle, before it becomes a serious hassle. Our infrastructure does not really support bigger cars. How does the bronco compare with the Ranger size wise?
Lastly, the Ranger is built in South Africa, I think Ford knows and understands the Southern African market very well.
I'm not sure about BYD, but other car makers have FSD that works like Tesla's FSD, and in some cases it even outperforms it. Here is a test from a few months ago:
> - The Chevy Corvette Stingray? Say what you want, but the high end ICE sports cars have an appeal of their own…
The world is moving to EVs, ICE will mostly be collectors cars in 20 years in developed countries. As to Chinese sports cars Xiaomi SU7 Ultra: "June 2025, an unmodified SU7 Ultra (with a maximum 1,139 kW (1,527 hp; 1,549 PS) power) lapped the Nürburgring in a hair under 7 minutes, 5 seconds. It is not only faster than the fastest Tesla Model S Plaid and Porsche Taycan versions, but also faster than a Rimac Nevera, one of the most high-end and expensive electric sportscars."
"It achieved a maximum speed of 496.22 km/h (308.33 mph) at Germany’s ATP Automotive Testing Papenburg, making it the fastest car in the world and breaking the record previously held by the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ at 490.484 km/h (304.773 mph)"
>I'm not sure about BYD, but other car makers have FSD that works like Tesla's FSD, and in some cases it even outperforms it. Here is a test from a few months ago:
From what I can see, Tesla did not passed every test scenario, but it passed most of them (so it won): 5/6 in the first table (highway test) and 8/9 for the Tesla Model X in the second table (urban test), the two Chinese cars placed second and third with one less passed test than Tesla (7/9), while the Tesla Model 3 passed only 5/9. Interestingly, both Chinese cars passed the test that Tesla failed. Considering Tesla has millions more miles of driving data and more years of development, it seems like it's only a matter of time (with more data and iteration) before the Chinese cars pass the rest of remaining tests, which is great because competition is healthy.
Setting aside the performances of similar systems, the more fundamental question is why is this even important to Chinese carmakers?
1. They are shutout of the U.S. market with tariffs from both parties, that doesn't seem likely to change.
2. Self driving systems are far more difficult to work well on the roads of Europe, Asia or Africa. The kind of wide roads and planned development only exists in U.S, Canada or Australia. On top of it the issues with weather handling are still on-going problems.
3. Labor is not near as expensive as in the U.S. in the rest of the world (dollar is expensive) so automation ROI is not as attractive given the costs.
Tesla was a third of the new car market in Norway last year, but most people buy without the FSD. I don't know anyone that drives around using FSD as anything other than a gimmick or glorified lane assist.
You can't compete if you have minimum wage and immigration restrictions. The labor market is far too costly compared to what Chinese companies have access to.
Like BYD, there's nothing stopping GM, Ford, and other manufacturers from opening factories anywhere in the world and employing the locals at a discount. They certainly did that in the past. But that's not leveling the playing field because their products are simply lacking. Too expensive to make, too inefficient. That's fixable but it would require investment and right now the US car manufacturers seem to want to invest less instead of more. It's hard to see how they would catch up. Ford is currently doing the pragmatic thing which is partnering with other companies to produce cars for the international market. VW and Renault in the EU, various Chinese manufacturers in China. US models are a non starter for those markets.
The Chinese are actually investing heavily in robotics and automation. They rely a lot less on cheap labor than you seem to assume. And their production is going global as well they are building manufacturing plants on most continents. They are opening plants in Europe and South America. BYD factories are state of the art.
What do we know about onboard telematics for these cars? It's safe to assume that like all modern cars, extensive telemetry is stored and sent to the mothership (in China) and third parties. There is probably a way to mod the car to take it off the grid but I wouldn't even consider buying one before knowing it can be done reasonably painlessly.
It would be unlikely that Chinese EVs send anything less than western car manf. back to base. So you can safely assume that minute by minute data is sent back and sold to companies like Inrix.
Tesla's privacy policy [1] suggests you can (by disabling connectivity all together), although it does break some features:
> Opting out of vehicle data: Connectivity and performance is a core part of all Tesla vehicles and why some customers choose Tesla, allowing for advanced features and an enhanced driving experience. By default, Tesla provides this seamless experience while protecting your privacy. However, if you no longer wish for us to collect vehicle data or any other data from your Tesla vehicle, please contact us to deactivate connectivity. Please note, certain advanced features such as over-the-air updates, remote services, and interactivity with mobile applications and in-car features such as location search, Internet radio, voice commands, and web browser functionality rely on such connectivity. If you choose to opt out of vehicle data collection (with the exception of in-car Data Sharing preferences), we will not be able to know or notify you of issues applicable to your vehicle in real time. This may result in your vehicle suffering from reduced functionality, serious damage, or inoperability.
I don't know if anyone has tried this.
There are other EVs where it's easier, but it's not something typically featured in the main marketing material.
Regarding eCall (emergency) functionality, "Under EU rules you have the right to use a third party service (TPS) eCall system in addition to the standard 112-based one" and "Any TPS eCall system must: [...] allow the owner of the vehicle to choose between the 112-based eCall and the TPS service" - which also means manufacturers can't force you to use "their" TPS that probably has different privacy trade-offs.
I would buy a BYD if the communist US government didn't ban them for being overly competitive. I rented one of these in Mexico last year and it was nice and affordable at 35k with the performance of a model S.
meanwhile my BYD stock didn't go up... Hope 2026 this will change.
For China, this is ultimately a good thing. BYD employs a large number of workers and has factories in many developing countries such as Brazil and Central Asia..., creating numerous job opportunities. Many of BYD's factories in China are located around non-first-tier cities, where workers may earn only around 5,000 to 6,000 yuan. However, considering China's extremely low cost of living and deflation, this salary is sufficient to support a family and drive more consumption in the market.
The stock market is forward looking. If people already expected that BYD would sell 4.6M vehicles in 2025, it was already accounted for in the stock valuation. For the stock to go up in price, they need to do even better than people expect.
If you had to pay US/EU prices for a Tesla vs BYD you'd go with BYD no question. But the majority of Teslas are made in China and when put a Chinese made Tesla alongside a Chinese made BYD it's a coin flip.
So as an Australian I'd roughly rate them the same with BYD high end matching Tesla's high end and BYD having a low end that Tesla doesn't compete with (the Atto which is ~USD $15000 for a small electric hatchback has no Tesla equivalent).
The point is the difficulty of the comparison. They are tariffed in the EU and NA to the point of near inviability so I don’t see that as a valid comparison. Outside the EU and NA they are Chinese made cars.
So basically you either compare current NA/EU Teslas to a hypothetical untariffed BYD (I don’t think this is fair) or you compare Chinese made Teslas to BYDs (which of course leads to similar prive perf ratios).
Ok, but "where the rubber meets the road", I've seen 0 BYDs in the wild in the US, including a recent 1,800 mile trip half way across the country. Earlier in 2025 I took a trip to Scotland and they had 2 dealerships I saw and I saw a couple of them on the roads.
BYD Sealion 7 is better than a 2025 Model Y Standard and worse than a Model Y Premium in terms of ride quality/suspension and driving dynamics.
The interior is more taste dependent, but the Model Y Standard is clearly a low budget version (with fabric seats) that's below the BYD. The Model Y Premium interior and seats felt higher quality to me, but it has a more minimalist design while the BYD has a more traditional setup with a screen behind the wheel.
The Tesla screen/app seem more responsive and premium. Also above for example VW where things are often sluggish and don't feel as well designed from a UX perspective.
Do these Chinese cars last over 5 years? I remember that it was a long hard path for Kia and other Korean car companies to catch up to the Japanese car quality.
What's facinating to me is the lack of software comparison in comments. Lots of comments where people compare driving noise, material quality, price to Tesla and other brands. Sure it's important to some, but its like comparing apple vs android watch by how the leather strap feels on each device.
Anyone has experience with BYD over-the-air-updates? Do they release updates often? Are there any serious bugs like with Lucid air? How does the software compare to Tesla?
Although I agree that software is an important aspect, a car mostly exists in the real and physical experience of the vehicle to me. The software situation is going to be the least of your average persons concerns I would have thought.
Interesting point of view to consider however, I hadn't really thought of there being people who look at their car as mostly the software.
They are behind on software. At least my Tang EV isn't at the level of Tesla. Among the Chinese EV makers that sells significantly outside of China I think NIO and XPENG are the more software oriented ones.
Xiaomi is preparing to enter global EV market, and their software looks absolutely amazing. You can see it in MKBHD's video around 5 minutes mark https://youtu.be/Mb6H7trzMfI
Yes! I’d really appreciate a comparison of Android Auto/CarPlay support, overall responsiveness, and especially the user-experience side, like whether you can permanently turn off beeps and warnings, and how usable (or annoying) the smart features and alerts are.
The average believer in orthodox economics tends to forget that for all practical purposes customers and workers are the same entity.
China understands that and they prioritize employment over consumption (of course, not having the printing press for the world’s reserve currency kinds of force their hands into it).
America’s deindustrialization and financialization went too far. Consumption levels and waste are well out of any sustainable level. An adjustment would have to happen and Trump’s tariffs are just a desperate attempt to restore American Industry (with scarce chances of success).
It is not like China is an enthusiastic adopter of free trade. They notoriously never played by the same rules in terms of market access, exchange rates, subsidies and trade barriers. It is utterly stupid to open your market to china without reciprocity, and this is what the west has been doing for decades making baking and investors richer while completely decimating what was once a thriving middle class.
Even the racial issues in the current times are heavily linked to this. The fall of Detroit was felt disproportionately heavier by the blacks, Wall Street basically took the ladder from the feet of a rising blue collar middle class of blacks.
I sincerely don’t give a fuck if we can’t buy cheap BYD cars.
This will likely be downvoted, but my opinion is that the "success" of BYD (and other chinese EVs) in the West is a massive failure of policy. We don't allow Huwawei (etc), so why are we permitting Chinese cars?
Money spent on BYD is money flowing out, eventually, to china, and not flowing into the local or near-local economy. Local garages are shutting due to lack of demand, forecourts are closing, sales jobs are closing, far less money is spent on maintenance (which supports local jobs and local supply chains), less consumables are replaced, factories are shutting, and the entire supply chain for these cars is outside the west.
And all of this is being celebrated as "green" or low carbon - it is not, whatsoever, anything of the sort.
And yet people seem to be buying these things in their droves, and then also complaining that economic times are tough.
The painful truth is the west has the ability to replace these cars, but has looked on by as China came in and cleaned up, and didn't do anything about it.
These cars should be subject to 1000% import tax, and eventually banned outright.
> Local garages are shutting due to lack of demand
I cannot book an MOT or regular appointment in "local garages" because all are booked for weeks ahead. I don't think your statemenet is anywhere near being true.
Selling that many cars despite intense competition at home and trade barriers abroad seems the more natural way to express that story.
They instead focused on how in evil communist China you need to continue to make better cars than rivals in order for your business to succeed and grow.
What a strange system they have over there. If only they were capitalist like the US and being an incumbent connected to the regime was all you needed to keep extracting money from the population despite product stagnation.
1. BYD has rapidly surpassed many western companies in terms of product quality / desirability
2. Chinese automotive industry is a strategic threat to Western military capabilities. If they are successful in usurping European / American auto manufacturers, it will be a death blow to an already hollowed-out industrial base that is critical to any sustained military engagement.
So, yes, western companies have stagnated, and yes, the West needs to keep these dinosaurs around through subsidies (which Chinese manufacturers also receieve from their regime).
Re #2 -- locking Chinese vehicles out of the market will also lead to the downfall of our industrial base over time. In general, Americans (including those who work in US manufacturing) do not understand that Chinese vehicles are very competitive. At some point, those vehicles are likely to surpass domestic capabilities (they are already there viewed through a price/performance lens).
All of this is down to the simple fact that essentially no American has ever driven a Chinese vehicle and does not know anybody who has. They are not even getting secondhand reports. This is worse than the '80s when the Japanese makers arrived in the sense that in the '80s everybody could see the quality of the Toyotas and assess quality/performance for themselves. It's much worse to not even know how good the competition is.
From a business standpoint, it's especially bad for the domestic industry because the majors actually do need to be competitive in fast-growing regions like Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It's not a viable strategy to depend on protectionism at home while ceding countries where most people live.
Everyone's take on the 1980s has been perverted by an internet viewpoint written by a bunch of weeb fanboys projecting the state of the car market in 2006 onto 1985. The actual cores components of the cars themselves are basically within spitting distance for Japan vs Domestic. These were not high quality cars. They were all low quality cars. But Japan was making the king of low quality cars that people wanted. (And by 1990 all these early 1980s platforms from all makes were all comparatively trash).
In the late 1970s early 1980s if you tried to buy a compact american car it was like buying the burger at a fish restaurant or the vegetarian option at a steakhouse. It was there to check a box. It wasn't well thought out or a core product they gave a shit about and they were almost always last to get any innovations. You want power widows AND an automatic, sorry we'll have to special order that, we don't stock those on the lot.
In contrast, the Japanese gave a shit about those product lines. So someone making "In better times I'd be buying a bigger car from Chevy" money could go to them and get something configured how they wanted without being told no a bunch of times and the sales guy trying to get them into something bigger car didn't want like would happen at the Chevy dealer. Toyota or Honda or whoever literally didn't have those products to upsell you into. Yeah I guess they could sell you a landcruiser but people didn't buy SUVs then. That would be like trying to sell an Econoline to some rich woman who's shopping for a 3row Landrover.
At the end of the 1980s the domestics were basically back with their own new "modern" FWD platforms (e.g. Taurus) and new larger stuff (minivans, midsize SUVs) which made money hand over fist for 10yr or so. The Japanese were basically on the sidelines for all of this. Like yeah they had the 4Runner and Pathfinnder and Passport and stuff but no amount of 2020s fanboyism is gonna make those sales numbers any less of a joke. What the Japanese did do very well though was give a crap about their smaller cheaper offerings, Rav4s and CRVs and small and midsize sedans which the domestics neglected. So when the SUV craze came to an end with the high gas prices and bad economy of the mid-late 2000s they were there ready to be bought. And it's this great success from the mid 2000s that every idiot on the internet seems to want to project back into the 1980s when the 1980s were far different.
Also, the U.S. auto makers had a well-deserved reputation for building unreliable vehicles, probably exacerbated by the phase-out of lead from gasoline, while Japanese vehicles were easily exceeding 100,000 miles without any significant breakdowns. This provided a tremendous advantage to Japanese makes and proved extremely attractive to American customers.
You're generally agreeing with me? You're making an argument that American makers improved by exposure to Japanese makers, and yes I am suggesting they also need exposure to Chinese makers for the same reasons.
> Japan was making the king of low quality cars that people wanted
This is China today, except by all accounts they are simply inexpensive and not low quality. Your bit about buying a compact car in the 80s has echoes in American automakers largely exiting the market for cars. (IIRC it's only Tesla, Lucid, the Mustang, and a couple Caddy models remaining.)
The main point is that in the 80s we could all see for ourselves Japanese cars. We could talk to people about how they liked them. People working at Ford could drive a Honda and figure out how to compete against it. That laid the ground for the resurgence of the American makers. Protectionism is depriving the automakers of this opportunity to retool to compete with the Chinese.
>You're generally agreeing with me? You're making an argument that American makers improved by exposure to Japanese makers, and yes I am suggesting they also need exposure to Chinese makers for the same reasons.
Partially. I agree on the economic lines. But disagreeing on the oft circle jerked quality bit.
These were not "high quality" cars even in their day nor were they "higher than the competing product" on any non-subjective axis (the Japanese and europeans did make very different decisions than the americans on some preference based things though). By "low quality" I do not mea low value. I mean low end. These were not designed to be "nice" cars. They were built to a price. These were not cars you got into and said "man, everything I touch feels solid" and "this is a pleasurable driving experience". They got called tin cans for a reason. They were inexpensive compacts and midsize vehicles but what they got right was they nailed the contribution of attributes everyone wanted and so they sold very well.
I absolutely agree that exposure let the other OEMs get better.
If the US had a competent government they would react by pulling the same playbook as China to compete. Heavily subsidize and incentivize production of EVs by new companies to replace the rotten core of existing US automakers to produce price competitive and quality competitive vehicles, then let the old guard burn down.
Subsidizing the rotten core of corrupt US automakers will not produce a new or functional industrial base. It will simply maintain the illusion of an industrial base until anything of importance needs done. But that’s basically the MO of any “mature” industry in the US.
What you’re proposing is basically the EV subsidy, which got gutted because Americans got pissy about lifting a single finger to benefit anyone slightly more fortunate than themselves
No it got gutted by Americans that were tragically fed a constant diet of misinformation as to the actual policies of the GOP. EVs still poll very well in the US and so does combating climate change.
we keep saying these things while industry-after-industry gets disrupted by the chinese
Next industry to be disrupted is housing, because seemingly the entire western world has is not even trying to provide housing (a necessity) to everyone.
Housing in the US is labor constrained. When I talk to GCs, subs, etc., they'll say that materials a bit more expensive, and labor is a bit more expensive; but what the complain about — and this can be for hours, if I get one going — is the complete lack of labor in all trades. This isn't a new problem; the "old hands" (GCs in the 60s and 70s) noted the labor drop out even 30+ years ago. The only saving grace we had was a strong trade force incoming population (immigrants); but, we've cut that off.
It wouldn't surprise me if our industry is also labor constrained? I know my brother had a machine shop to make aftermarket titanium parts for (motor)bikes, some cars, etc. He had a policy of nonstop looking for new machinists, even if he was fully staffed, because a machinist could just wander off at any time. With only 4 employees, he could find himself at at 25–50% loss of ship time in just a few days, at any time. It's not even like the machinists were getting more money. They'd just leave, because the new shop was 5m closer than his.
Fixing the labor pool issue is a decades long issue. More money in that pool won't fix things. I don't even know what's going on. Maybe I can just blame modern financialization for the issue? That seems easy, if wrong.
But, for sure, the complete lack of social safety net for labor can't be helping. Maybe if we guaranteed child care, 100% round-the-year safe spaces (we could use the fantastically expensive schools which are empty 75% of the time?), 3-free-meals-per-child, and free education through an associates degree? None of those are particularly expensive, even at the national scale.
In my 2+ decades in the trades, the biggest problem is low pay and shitty bosses. Trade unions are absolutely packed full of people wanting to join them because they pay better, have more training, and offer paths towards advancement/pay/benefits over their hiring wage. But outside of the unions people pay crackhead wages then wonder why only crackheads want to lose 20 years off their life and wear out their body for customer service wages despite having a specialized trade experience and skills. Everyone who works in the trades also knows its a boom and bust cycle and they will get the shaft as soon as it is convenient for their employer which isn't a significant risk in many other industries and jobs.
And things get confused more when people only look at the top inflated wages for trade workers in the most expensive cities in the world, completely ignoring that most trade workers can't afford to live in those places and commute into the cities for their work and they almost never actually get offered the kind of wages that are advertised.
Real income in trades is up; that doesn't mean it's great pay, just up. Real housing costs have greatly outpaced that. It's the crazy post-2000 low interest boom-bust cycle that's wrecking the housing trades as a functional job. Trades are hugely oversubscribed during the boom, and the busts are too long to maintain the labor force.
If we want to build housing, we'll need a stabilizing force for that. I don't see a way to make that happen outside of govt intervention.
Chinese party members reading this thread, please get into modular housing construction in a form that can be shipped to the USA and acceptable to the average person (so not mobile home/trailer park style stuff).
If you hit us with sucking funds from the housing market you will gut our economy even more, and there is zero support in the US to protect homebuilders right now when the two younger generations can't afford their product. If you offered a bad ass modular housing system that could quickly/cheaply build decent homes (current US Spec grade or higher) that might get really interesting.
NIMBY would block it. Thats a big problem in the states where anyone would really want to live. Even now after states like NJ ram condos down the throats of old ridgid towns, they haven't given up and are trying anything and everything to stop further development. Its a system build on greed of existing homeowners just trying to offload their properties at maximum profit when they retire and holding back progress until they do so.
I don't think many here realize how many Chinese EVs are sold globally.
In Europe Volkswagen group dominates EV sales by far, but Chinese competitors are taking lots of the other spots. Jaecoo is one that recently has been spreading everywhere.
It should worry plenty that Europeans are gonna buy Chinese cars with their huge amount of tariffs even when they end up priced similar to European or US offerings.
I was recently surprised by an Italian YouTuber doing the "stans" tour of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and these countries were ultra filled with Chinese EVs. There's no chance anything sells in any similar way.
Not gonna lie, I was very jealous at the fact they could get such great cars in the $ 10/20 k range.
I hate these nationalistic socialist tariffs.
They only make local producers less competitive (as they are protected from competition) and at the same time erode your own exports.
The number of BYD on fire videos, and examples where the tires simply fall off because they don't use enough metal in the suspension. Makes me scared to be anywhere near one of their vehicles. please keep them out of the USA for safety sake. That's 4.6M state sponsored vehicles that should not be on the road. Don't forget the chinese gov'ts ability to lock you out from driving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWzbq-Q_oTc
