Post-Xi China isn't really about internal competition. More likely they're hoping to replicate Tesla's IP. (Tesla, in turn, bets it can gain more from selling in China than the IP it will lose in domestically-fabricated components.)
Ehn, everyone seems prone to short term thinking.
I don’t see why Tesla can’t do the same as the more upmarket brand.
Have any of the Chinese companies come close to designing something as nice as any of the Tesla cars?
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/30/automating-intelligentl...
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/d8un7f/tesla_i... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/d7i0vk/lg_chem...
Some of them are state-owned, but the two largest electric vehicle manufacturers in China are not. In descending order of revenue from electric vehicles (source: [1]):
* BYD (a publicly traded company, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange)
* Geely (also traded on the HK Stock Exchange)
* BAIC (state-owned, sells a lot of plug-in hybrids)
* SAIC (state-owned)
* JAC motors (state-owned)
BYD and Geely's combined electric-vehicle revenue is significantly larger than that of BAIC, SAIC and JAC (combined). The electric vehicle market in China does not appear to be dominated by state-owned companies.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-20/electr...
Instead of vague statements about everything in China being state controlled, how about some actual facts? What, concretely, does this control entail? How does it function?
Party members "inspecting" facilities, demanding access to records, issuing whimsical and unappealable orders, et cetera.
I'm trying to understand just how you imagine things work in China.
Sept 23: "China Boosts Government Presence at Alibaba, Private Giants"
"The government of one of China’s top technology hubs is dispatching officials to 100 local corporations including e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the latest effort to exert greater influence over the country’s massive private sector."
“They might be checking whether the Communist party units are working effectively within the companies,” said Paul Gillis, a professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. “While China legitimized capitalism, the level of government influence was never intended to disappear. Occasionally private entrepreneurs forget about this and are reminded of it.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-23/china-ste...
1) Is demand outpacing supply? Yes? Great, therefore...
2) The more cars we can build, the more money we make
3) The more EVs on the road, the more demand there is for Teslas.
That’s about it. That leaves them with two opportunities: A) scaling manufacturing, and B) encouraging EV adoption. That’s part of why they spend so much effort making the cars appealing, super fast, etc.
They can self sustain a virtuous cycle with just A) but if they scale manufacturing enough B) will eventually matter.
They want China to steal their IP. They also want China to help them build factories. It’s really a win-win for them.
- the forced induction of heads of companies into the CCP under threat of corruption charges
- the historic use of the Army as a flexible labor force
- the CCP picking winners and losers in industries
All back in 2012, before Xi became premier.
Anyone can make an electric go-kart. Making a performance electric car that will be on the road for 150,000 miles is hard.
And they've been correct for the past ~six of those years? The only reason people buy iPhones today is walled garden capture and brand identity. None of the technology is superior to what Huawei or Samsung or even Motorola is selling.
Can you expand on what you mean by "the technology"?
I'm not saying there aren't small differences. The secure enclave is very nice, and I understand that for audio creation it's significantly better than Android phones.
But these advantages in some niches (and disadvantages in others, like cost, storage, display size etc) are not sufficient to say that "the technology is clearly superior". It's not, it's just different.
Their CPUs are 3 years ahead at least.
They have proprietary low power, high reliability Flash memory tech.
They have unique 3D scanning face identification tech and secure ID data storage.
They have far superior battery life for the battery weight.
The camera systems are best in class, I would agree several other phones have camera tech and software that is close enough for most people, but not for everyone.
They have Samsung made screens that even Samsung can't use, some of the tech and QA process is proprietary to Apple.
Also the sensor precision and calibration is considerably better on iPhones than Android phones and highly consistent across models. There's a photo of a bunch of phones showing their magnetometers, with all the iPhones pointing in the same direction, and the Android phones pointing all over the place.
The brand new Apple A13 CPU beats e.g. the 2018 Snapdragon 855, fair enough. But benchmarks have already leaked for next years Snapdragon 865 (e.g. for the Samsung S11) that beat the A13 again. So far from "3 years ahead", they appear to be very much equal, just being launched in alternating years.
And why should they not be equal, when they are produced by the exact same manufacturer (TSMC) using the exact same 7nm process and have basically identical physical constraints on cooling, footprint and power budgets? Ain't no arguing with physics.
Their camera systems have lagged behind other maker's flagships for several years. You don't have to take my word for it; here is a quote from Austin Mann's recent review of the iPhone 11 Pro:
> Many of us iPhone photographers have watched as other phones like the Pixel and the Huawei P30 have passed us in low light performance.
I gather from his review that the iPhone 11 Pro is now on-par with the Huawei camera flagship.
When was the last time you heard of the flash memory on anyone's phone failing? I have a LG P500 from 2011 that the kids literally throw around in their toy box, that still boots and works just fine.
Modern day screens are far beyond what the human eye is capable of resolving. Pick up a $200 Motorola, and you need a strong magnifying glass to even make out the pixels.
The iphone has the best mobile processing chips and it's not even close. The intel modems they use are inferior to qualcomm's modems, but "commodity or worse" is a bizarre take.
Software, brand, and culture play much larger roles than a milquetoast smartphone offering. What’s this chip that customers are raving about? The only points of continually tweaking the hardware are to shorten the lifespan and remove the ability to customize and repair it with any real scale.
BYD with their tiny battery packs
It's freaking heavy at 2t. It's not that small or aerodynamic. It's battery pack is definitely behind leaders in net capacity.
What makes it run that long is that they don't overprovision the battery that much, so much more of those 60kwh is available for driving.
In addition to that, BYD uses PM BLDC motors that are better than induction motors at doing regen at low and very low speeds, which is much more important for city driving.
Add to this that their battery and electronics can take more regen current, and do it more efficiently.
there's a reason they overprovision. the battery is going to wear out way sooner than their competitors.
The biggest downside is its lower specific energy, but it is compensated by all of things above, so the net capacity and energy density comes close to other chemistries. However, working around all of those "sharp corners" requires a very different engineering approach from mainstream EVs. So that's a second point. Competitors largely don't bother going deep with engineering.
The engineering philosophy there is much closer to their electric busses. Much more manufacturing conscious, with a lot considerations for commercial use.
They think of heavy users who will use the battery for 2k+ cycles with minimal service, and go through multiple battery packs through the life of a vehicle.
So with all that said, I wonder if they are on to a good idea. There is so little maintenance on these EVs that the occasional battery swap might be fine, cost-wise. You could even sell it upfront in installments -- new battery after x years.
I agree Tesla was allowed as part of their benefit. I don't think Tesla benefits any of those Chinese automakers. No one wants a competitor. Sure, Tesla would help the crap companies die faster and force the rest to adapt to higher standards. But I think the real intention is for Chinese consumers to benefit from a superior and less polluting product. They are aggressively environmental nowadays afterall.