An influx of Chinese cars is terrifying the West
economist.com
economist.com
If BYD shows up stateside with a 25-50% discount over Tesla and other premium manufacturers for similar quality and features (like they do in Australia and elsewhere), I will be first in line.
> According to myVW (formerly VW Car-Net): my current subscriptions (that were prepaid by VW at time of ID4 purchase )-
> Remote Access (myVW) is a subscription that expires on 3/17/2026.
> Plus Nav (VW native navigation and traffic) is a subscription that expires on 4/23/2024.
> Plus Speech (IDTalk) is a subscription that expires on 4/23/2024.
That's exactly the point of the grandfather comment - bullshit subscriptions inside western cars are now everywhere.
1. https://www.vwidtalk.com/threads/did-you-know-prepaid-vw-sw-...
Edit: at least my heaters and massage chairs aren’t on a subscription like BMW.
https://www.manlybatteries.com/info/why-byd-insists-on-using...
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/china-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/05/how-byd-grew-from-a-phone-ba...
The quote above is just the first thing that came up when I Googled the average cost of a new car in the U.S. (article was from May, 2023).
I welcome any disruptive force that brings that down back into the troposphere.
I noticed they aren't available in the USA but they are taking off where they are available.
[0] https://brazilian.report/liveblog/politics-insider/2023/10/0...
- First and most important for an EV: It needed a lot of energy, 25 kWh per 100 km at 120 km/h on the highway at 10 degree Celsius. Combined with a pretty small battery it was annoying how fast you lost range.
- It warns you (via voice) as soon as you hit 120 km/h, every time you go below and reach it again.
- If you activate the Automatic Distance Control it will warn you (again with voice), every time you activate it.
- It was cold in the car, even with temperature set to 26 degree Celsius. But the heating was working when the car was not moving but in ready mode.
- Slow charging speeds, 70kW max.
- If you unpack your car and leave the door open, it will warn you with voice output, that the key is not in the car. All the time, without any pause, a hundred times. Highly annoying.
- A lot more annoying things the car tells you to do, all with its voice.
So all in all a pretty horrible experience, if other Chinese cars are similar, they will not make a dent here in Germany, even with their lower price point.
Will prices for rent etc go down?
EDIT: I tilt towards rural/low density areas. Understand the cosmopolitan desire though.
Not yet sure about Barcelona.
This chart (click on max) seems to say the opposite:
https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/rent-inflation
And from what I hear, the real rent inflation (on the free non-subsidized market) has been even higher over the recent years. Like 7% per year.
CFC & management and control rules will make any company owned by you essentially a German company and you’ll have to be rectally examined by Finanszamt quite often.
When in Germany, do as the (successful) Germans do.
Germany has a lot of human capital, experienced and well educated workforce, but a lot of it got sucked into the car industry, because it was so profitable until now. I hope that with the car industry sunsetting, hopefully we'll see new innovative companies spring up.
So no Dacia Spring, which is one of the most popular EVs in Europe, because of its low price and no-nonsense design. Nothing from BYD either. As for Tesla, only the Model Y (made in Germany) is eligible.
Or you can ignore all of that and have people driving cars 10k EUR cheaper than competitors, but when they will experience minor breakage or fender bender, their cheaper (but still expensive) car will become a 2-3 tones brick on the side of a road. Not good for PR and future of your brand.
It's just wild how leather seats + 50% faster acceleration = 30,000 extra dollars.
Anyways the margins are nuts and we're due for some disruption and real competition for real features. Call me when a car washes itself.
https://www.dw.com/en/do-germans-fear-chinese-electric-vehic...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/adventure/red-li...
There is no theoretical reason why Chinese manufacturers cannot attain the same quality level over time (maybe even short time) as everyone else.
And Korean (e.g. Hyundai, Kia) in the 80s and 90s
Chinese manufacturers can build to any standard of quality, the key being you have to be ready to pay for it which most companies aren't, which is why Chinese manufacturing continues to keep the rep it does: they'll build you a widget worth $0.50 or $50.00, but everybody only wants to spend $0.50 and then they complain when they get $0.50 worth of widget.
However, I would like to know why the BYD vehicles are so much cheaper. Are their workers being paid enough to live? Are they cutting corners in manufacturing? Is this a case of simply vertical integration providing dividends, or are they being sponsored by the Chinese government, and if the latter, why? Is it because they don't have dealers, and if so, is that a good thing? People rag on dealerships all the time and there's plenty of good reasons to hate them, but they do have upshots too. My dealership of choice where my salesman of choice works is one of the few places I'm fairly comfortable that I'm not going to get put over a barrel as soon as I sign. That relationship is hard to find these days.
I'm all for cheaper cars, absolutely. Prices in the states especially are fucking ridiculous. But I also am cognizant of what "X but cheaper" usually means. It usually means one or more of the following:
- It's built by slaves (or near slaves)
- It's stolen from the global south
- It's of shit-quality
- It will show me ads
I don't think that's quite the case. Instead, I think the people complaining at receiving the $0.50 widget complain when the (now-broken) widget was in a $1000 gizmo, which used to include the $50 version before cost-optimization.
It's a market for lemons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons), only with general, notionally durable goods. Build quality is opaque and liable to change without notice, whereas price is obvious.
It's not that it's that much cheaper for what you get, it's that you can actually pay less for the smaller product, which is harder and harder in the US because they're simply not offering them.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/uaw-le...
You do not need to be a slave; it's enough to accept that the living standard comes with a cost.
The Chinese can build a safe car if they're required to do so.
I think in this context people are more referring to country of origin in terms of culture, engineering, and operations. Not just the financial side of the fence.
Of course they will build a safe car, because they definitely will be required to do so; the law is there, and the local car industry are sufficiently powerful and capable to act as an effective watchdog ensuring that all the requirements are enforced for their Chinese competitors.
I think my next car is going to be from 30-40 years ago, not something new.
It is terrifying American auto executives in their Grosse Pointe estates. They are afraid of losing their oligopoly.
What a confusing article overall. Clearly the author was trying to make a nuanced argument about free trade, but then the editors had to put their trademark political spin on it, with the result that the headline undermines the central thesis.
I'd recommend a diverse media diet that complements mainstream Western media (Reuters, AP) with non-Western English mainstream outlets like AJ, SCMP, CGTN, RT, TRT.
State/oligarch controlled media is only harmful if you think it is objective truth and not propaganda. This applies to RT, CGTN but also to Reuters, AP, Wikipedia.
We actually live in a very rich+diverse English-language media landscape, which "reputable", low-signal, vibes-based tabloids like The Economist, The Atlantic, etc. do not represent well.
I read BBC and think, "this is how the British elite think / want me to think".
If they both agree on something mundane, like Chinese EV exports, then it's almost certainly fact-based journalism.
If they disagree significantly or use emotional appeals, I look for the primary evidence to better understand who is in the right.
Everyone consumes propaganda every day, but it takes work to see through it. It is a form of ideological cope to pretend that RT or CGTN has significantly more misinformation/propaganda than NYT or BBC, and therefore we ought to rely on the latter while totally ignoring the former.
Really? There's a lot of reasons to expect it to be true. The NYT and BBC, while imperfect, have guard rails like independent trustees and a commitment to impartiality. RT is a dictator's tool, populated by his flunkies. Most people would think RT's news quality is significantly worse.
But that's not true. Despite all of their faults, NYT and Fox News are not under direct editorial control of the White House, whereas the RT (and all other media in Russia) is directly run from the Kremlin. Every morning starts with a meeting where the editorial boards receive latest talking points from the Kremlin, and their freedom is only to choose how they phrase them, if even that. RT is a government-run project to warp perceptions; NYT and Fox aren't.
And public broadcasters like PBS or DR in Europe aren't even affected by ownership and financial factors, like one could blame the corporate media.
Wrong. Sometimes so biased that they are fully flat. Got caught over and over again. Including things comparable to
> Every morning starts with a meeting where the editorial boards receive latest talking points from the Kremlin, and their freedom is only to choose how they phrase them, if even that.
Though more indidrectly and subtle, but at the end of the day it amounts to the same shit, just (implemented) different.
Wow. Western Liberalism & IR Realism are now Russian conspiracies. I don't know what to say except this is essentially NSDAP rhetoric.
b) because it requires significant resources to operate/contract an astroturfed influence campaign on Wikipedia, especially if you want to control the "objective" narrative on hot political issues.
> Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov believes there is neither freedom of the press nor freedom of expression in his home country. "The history of independent journalism is over, [it's] finished," the 61-year-old said on September 11 at the start of the first Hamburg Press Freedom Week. The editor in chief of the Novaya gazeta newspaper, which is banned in Russia, told Germany's NDR public broadcaster that, since he still lives in Moscow and will return there, he can only say in Hamburg what he can also say there, and "in Moscow, I can't talk about anything anymore."
I think that there are two dangerous assumptions going around:
1. That you must "dig" for good information. Meaning that all large media orgs can be dismissed out of hand for no other reason than being large. The more you dig the closer you are to the truth!
2. That Western media can never understand, study, or discuss non-western subjects.
All I'm advocating for is healthy skepticism and having a diverse media diet.
Since the latest crackdown, the entire Russian public sphere has become performative. You have a wide variety of discussions shows, but all their guests are pre-vetted by the Kremlin and all they do is reiterate official talking points. Officials hold press conferences, but all questions and answers are pre-agreed. The country has thousands of newspapers and radio stations, but they only repeat the same central messages from the Kremlin instead of expressing the ideas of their staff and collaborators.
It is astonishing, really, how the public exchange of ideas has ceased in such a short time and how the entire society now willingly accepts a fake reality just like in Brezhnev's era.
I perceive that as not much different from the few German media I still occassionally watch. Since at least a decade, actually.
And I've got grumpy about them much earlier, tossed my TV in 1996 already. But wasn't even so bad then, as it is now.
Edit: I also like their "Question more!" Just for the hell of it.
Yes!
Question all the shit the suckpuppets are bubbling out.
All the times.
In this country (USA), an EV is a ball-and-chain over how many miles until you go before a recharge for hours.
In China, its 3 minutes to SWAP a battery. You know, the solution the manchild in charge of Tesla said wouldn't work. And here it is, working in USD 12k ev's.
https://www.scmp.com/video/scmp-originals/3168635/chinese-sm...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anXQfRuAkZw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoBeXHYdO0Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTsrDpsYHrw
But hey, look at the "bright side" - we now get $7500 off cars that start at USD 70k for EVs. Real 'deal'.
Maybe the timing is much better now that the EV design has settled a bit. Looks like Nio got to a good number of stations so far [1]
[1] https://carnewschina.com/2023/10/20/nio-built-2000-battery-s...
For a majority of people, I think most trips aren't long enough to require battery charging/swapping. Charging happens in between your trips when you don't need the car anyway. I travel regionally for work, but even on days that I spend a lot of time in the car my journey may only be 200-300 miles, punctuated by meetings and project work.
This system does appear to have advantages for vehicles that are being driven continuously, like taxis, delivery vehicles, or long haul. I think the capital expense for a complicated apparatus like this might be justifiable if you can amortize it across a fleet of vehicles. One drawback may be that if this complicated equipment breaks, you are in a pickle unless you have access to another battery machine.
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-> You know, the solution the manchild in charge of Tesla said wouldn't work.
Disappointing personal opinion unnecessary to your point.
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Edit: Another drawback may be technology lock in. If battery swap stations only service one brand of car you could look at them as having a reduced utility compared to an industry standard battery pack design. This is not an insurmountable problem, but worth consideration from an economic efficiency perspective.
The competition operates on the thinnest of margins: utility electricity prices and gas stations. Swapping is just a crap market to get into.
Note: please people don’t shares stories of how you drive for 20 hours without stopping, I hate being reminded about the habits of some of the people I share the road with.
Does this sound like a respectful opinion? Or one that desperately wants my click? I'm not reading this.
But in general, I will vote to keep my QoL. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with import tariffs if required.