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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

I predict that when China makes better and cheaper cars than the west, the west will put up protectionist barriers.

That'll be bad, because then the western car markets will fall behind.

One thing from a consumer perspective (brand perspective) is chinese cars have very bad company names eg., BYD, Zeekr, Xpheng, Geely if compared to other brands from other countries like Toyota, Hyundai, Audi, Ford, TATA etc.

Personally, I would not roam around with 'Xpheng' name etched on my car.

'007' seems like a great name though.

At least here in Australia it’s a popular option to de-badge your BYD removing the ‘Build Your Dreams’ from the back hatch.

It’s only bad if you aren’t used to it. When Japanese brands tried to break into automotive world, they sounded weird too. Xiomi and Hiawei don’t sound too different to Samsung and Nokia these days.

You kind of proved GP's point by misspelling both names. They are Xiaomi and Huawei. The fact that you misspelled them isn't surprising, as both have "foreign" spellings compared with the Japanese brands like Toyota, Honda, Nissan. X is rarely used in English, and they have paired and less common vowel pairs. Both are also not pronounced phonetically, which is also true of the the Japanese brands but the approximation is arguably closer for them. Certainly for some of the brands sounding like Amazon 3rd-party re-resellers is a big mark against them.

Lol you overanalyzed it. I fat-fingered in mobile. U is next to i and unlike Nissan or Toyota, my swipe keyboard does not recognize Huawei yet.

They’ll just come to the states under a different name.

XPeng is actually similar to Mercedes-Benz, or Ford, the brand is just the founder's name :)

I remember reading a proposed policy by the Swedish left party (old communisr party. Now more or less where the social democrats were 35 years ago). They figured that once you are already paying upwards of 800.000SEK the state subsidies were not the main concern. They wanted to cap the subsidy so that you could only get it fully for cars below 400.000SEK.

I think that is a marvellous idea.

I agree and this will also put European countries at odds. Portugal and Greece will want cheap imports unlike Germany and France that want to protect their failing domestic car industry.

Well China already makes better and cheaper EV cars than the west.

Not many are yet imported or sold in the US or europe though. Yet...

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