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Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

Living in Shenzhen, it feels like probably 80% of the taxis are electric already. Due to government subsidy the blue electric BYD cabs are more spacious, cheaper (no 2元 fuel surcharge), newer and cleaner than the older red cabs, which are generally clunky dirty squashed VWs. However, the drivers pay more to buy them even with subsidy, and you need a conventional ICE vehicle to get out to the factories in Dongguan, or to cross the border to Hong Kong.

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I wounder how it would effects the earning of those taxis drivers? Can switching to electric cab increase their income?

It will be really great too see their income (Not just financially) increased by switching to electric vehicles. Because that could give people stronger motive do to this kind of switch than government subsidy.

A taxis company in our city renewed their cabs recently, unfortunately they picked rather old cheap tech cabs that burning petrol + natural gas. If Shenzhen's taxis companies and drivers can receive benefits from such, everybody will eventually follow the trend.

Shenzhen taxi drivers are, to my mind, getting noticably worse at navigating. When questioned last month, one explained that the old drivers got out of the taxi game and purely drive didi (local version of Uber) as it makes more money. The current crop of drivers are mostly new to the game.

Shenzen / Hong Kong will be the next Silicon Valley.

it already is

It already is, but with a lot less bureaucracy. People get things done much quicker there

Yeah, it's easy to get things done fast when you can completely ignore the collective intellectual property rights and trademarks of whole countries, and steal designs and manufacture counterfeit goods wholesale!

Hong Kong maybe. The great firewall is really the party shooting itself in the foot.

The Chinese market is big enough to build very successful companies that never need to cross the firewall to provide their services.

Correct, you have a 1 Billion+ market for your goods & services. In addition, look at Tencent and Alibaba, I believe they are offering services outside of China just fine.

The Chinese market has to deal with obnoxious barriers to starting a business and competition from government backed giants (tencent, alibaba). So long as the party shoots itself in the foot it will never replicate Silicon Valley.

Second time mainland China business founder here - foreigner. As everywhere there are barriers. However, I would say that in China it is not that hard to get going all told. While foreigners cannot really sole trade and there remain linguistic and cultural barriers, low initial capital requirements, a non-litigious environment, relatively relaxed licensing and a reasonably transparent and predictable visa system are big pluses versus the US. These days, the VC environment is also solid.

Beijing and Shenzhen are already considered “SV” of China. HK? Far from it. The governement has very little push and clues to make HK a SV.

No. Hongkong now has no chance for that role, and compared with mainland companies there are not much successful Hongkong companies.

Hong Kong might have the education, but its market is too small to make any VCs interested.

Shenzhen is going whole hog with public transit seems they're opening a couple of subway lines every year at the moment

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