Wan Gang pushed China to leapfrog the West in electric vehicles
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It took the Koreans over 40 years to finally achieve competitiveness and quality. The road for China will be even tougher.
It's now a matter of 'when', not 'if' in China's case.
Here in India, we get random murmurs about EVs from the government, but no concrete action. There is just a single crappy EV model on the market, no charging network, and no infrastructure investment
It is good for the world that growing china uses new electric vehicles instead of gas guzzlers. But, the article fails to corroborate how the Chinese would be able to even compete in the global market. True, the Chinese already has the Chinese market. Considering the way their government works, that's a easy act.
Comparing indigenously built electric vehicles from China with globally acclaimed engineering prowess of Tesla is just silly at this point.
Are the Chinese cars superior to a Tesla in any way? (No details)
Are they better quality than Tesla in any way? (personally, I would be very skeptical)
Are they safer? Teslas keep scoring the best in crash tests. I can't find any data on Chinese cars..
When they start competing genuinely on technology, perhaps they may warrant a serious comparison. Not now. They don't deserve it.
FWITW: I sincerely hope that China's EV industry rises to world level of engineering, safety, and all other things attendant to that. Preferably with with knowledge and expertise not borne from forced IP transfers and other shady/nefarious things. L
It is best to say, that now that picture being presented to the reader is the future that China has lost with coming of Xi, the revisionist clique, and other back-from-the-dead political fossils.
But for commuter boxes on wheels, I see no competitor coming anywhere near to BYD-Donfeng budget EV duopoly
The one thing that makes me wonder if they can make really good electric cars is the software side. Japan fell from the throne in consumer entertainment hardware as they didn’t do software well. They still don’t. I think electric cars is a lot about software and batteries. Can China do really reliable, trustworthy, user friendly software? Without it I predict their cars will struggle.
You should try WeChat, the most popular Chinese chat application. Apart from the legally-mandated spying, it's super user-friendly, and quite lightweight compared to the likes of MSN Messenger, Skype, Facebook messenger and Slack (uses only 10s of MBs of ram).
On the other hand I would probably pay more for dumber tesla. Not connected, not self driving etc etc. Cars are too full of software. I don't want Playstation on wheels.
I've found this to be strange. Japan has produced some of the best video games over the years, especially in the early days of the industry. Games are some of the most complex pieces of software to create, with their extensive math and real-time requirements. It's never made sense to me how they didn't come to conquer the software industry in general.
I used to assume there's a whole world of quality Japanese software that never made it to the USA for lack of internationalization or something. But nowadays with everything open source, I can't point out any particularly visible/noteworthy Japanese projects or developers.
It's odd.
English can be easily typed with a keyboard and stored in a 7 bit character. This meant the early computers could still store a reasonable amount of English, and were accessible to people straight away.
Kanji on the other hand is exceedingly complex. Computers had to get much more powerful before the systems which allowed typing and reading it worked well. The barrier for entry was therefore much higher for the average person.
developers in the Japanese market therefore focused on the areas of computing which didn't require written language - video games.
However, the Chinese alternatives are cheaper, and in most markets that’s all that matters.
They just need to make a “good enough” electric car that’s cheap, and they’re all set.
You could question if it is accurate for sure, but from this comment it appears that you have not even read the very first paragraph of the article.
"At this year’s Beijing Auto Show, a retired Chinese bureaucrat bent down to run his hands over the hood of a sleek sports coupe billed as the world’s fastest battery-powered car, and he smiled like a proud father.
In a way, that’s exactly what he was. Two decades earlier, Wan Gang persuaded China’s State Council to throw its vast power behind the risky, unproven technology of electric cars. He advocated using government money, including subsidies, to help create a world champion industry that would surpass Western automakers. That coupe he was admiring at the April auto show? It was built by homegrown NIO Inc.
Elon Musk made a name for himself promoting new-energy vehicles, but when the history of the electric car is finally written, Wan may loom larger. Chinese drivers buy one of every two EVs sold, and the global auto industry is pivoting to adjust. It’s a revolution fomented by Wan, a former minister of science and technology whose achievements are even more extraordinary when you consider that he never joined the Chinese Communist Party. "