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Comment by VBprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

Don't know where you are from but in the UK MG are outselling a whole bunch of the big car makers. I think possibly even the 3rd biggest by sales volume at the moment.

The age of the Chinese car is coming. I think in the transition to electric cars they are going to take a big chunk of the lower end of the market. I get a feeling this is why a lot of mid market brands like Mazda and Volvo are trying to push into the upper end of the market.

Cars like the MG4 are getting rave reviews for example.

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Cheap shit outsells expensive stuff. News at 11

Japanese cars were cheap shit till they took over the world. Korean tv/devices were shit till they took over the world. Same is going to happen with China made stuff.

Were japanese cars cheap or did the oil crisis give them a foothold?

Both. The important thing is that in the beginning they were considered inferior to American cars in all relevant respects, so they were not taken seriously. The oil crisis happened to highlight one of their key strengths and accelerated their adoption. But it’s highly likely the same end result would’ve eventually happened anyway because the incumbent American automakers were unwilling/unable to respond to the threat for several decades.

Exactly, Korean cars, Taiwanese semiconductors, and Brazilian jets are also good examples. Seems like GP is not yet acquainted with Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation.

I drove both the ZS EV and MG4 and neither one felt like "cheap shit". In fact they felt more premium than some more expensive EVs - and you could see a lot of parts from VW, which shouldn't be surprising as VW is part owner of SAIC.

I leased a MG ZS EV recently and was quite surprised at the apparent quality. Sure there were some cheap-feeling bits like the glove box and panoramic roof shade, but generally it felt solid, felt we'll put together, and drove reasonably nicely (corners were not it's best bits, but otherwise pretty good)

The self driving features were utter shite though

OTOH the MG3 (1.5L ICE) is a piece of garbage. The engine vibrates/rattles like an old tractor. The 4 speed transmission revs like mad at the slightest incline before going up a gear and almost stalling the engine with the huge jump in gear ratio, and causing heaps of knocking until the engine crawls it way above 2.5k RPM only to do it again with the next gear.... The suspension was horrible again, much too soft making the whole car bounce up and down long after hitting pot holes (I'm taking seconds.) The interior quality was quality was okay for the price of car but definitely very plastic-y. Seats were like seats on LCC planes. Good thing it was only a rental.

The MG3 has absolutely nothing to do with the ZS EV and the MG4 though - it's based on an ancient platform that was made long before SAIC started putting money into MG and into their electrification. While I'm not surprised your experience with the MG3 was poor, I don't see how that's relevant to their current EV vehicles.

The one thing which made the MG4 feel cheap to me was the dash board. It looked to me like it was using programmer graphics, waiting on the design team to decide how to make it look nice. Mismatched icons and text sizes everywhere. Someone said shipit and they went to production.

Other than that it was a fun easy to drive little car.

> The age of the Chinese car is coming.

Globally, I'd say Japanese cars had a pretty good run.

However, they — Honda and Toyota atleast — seem to be hesitating with the EV transition. It's not like they don't have the engineering prowess.

Japanese engineering has always fascinated me. It seems to be both revolutionary and conservative at the same time.

Because good process design doesn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Like how Toyota was the only car maker able to keep going through the silicon shortage because they recognized the limits of lean manufacturing and that chips are not commodity items, as much as we like to think of them as one. So despite having everything that was a commodity as JIT lean manufacturing they still kept a massive stockpile on stuff that might become hard to source on hand.

TIL, thank you. A bit more about Toyota and silicon shortage: https://www.autoblog.com/2021/03/09/toyota-how-it-avoided-se...

There's a limit to what they could handle. They're hit by the shortage like everyone else now.

Volvo is bought by the Chinese

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