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Comment by iambateman | Hacker News Reader

"The Chinese government wants to wipe out American automakers by introducing competitively priced cars" is a PR scare tactic.

It's exactly what I would say if I were a PR person trying to figure out how to protect my company's interests.

Cars are imported from all over the world, and so long as they meet American safety standards, I think they should be.

Also if I could buy a safe, new EV for $10,000, no matter how small, I would do it tomorrow. Just because Americans have never purchased small, affordable cars _en masse_ before doesn't mean they won't in the future.

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Historically cheap Chinese cars have done VERY poorly in crash tests. for 10K its probably a piece of plastic which folds killing the user in every crash over 35 mph.

It's hard to dig up exact figures. It looks like China has around 500M drivers averaging 10,000 vehicle miles each and annual traffic fatalities of 250,000.

This suggests the death rate per billion vehicle miles is about 13 in the US and about 50 in China.

https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202212/08/cont...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... note death rate is herein per billion vehicle km which I have converted to miles

https://gitnux.org/average-annual-mileage/

In terms of saftey ratings, BYD do very well in the Euro NCAP ratings. 5/5 for all their cars in the European market, including the small Dolphin car[0]. This doesn't include the Seagull though as they don't sell it in Europe yet.

[0] https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/byd/dolphin/50011

> Just because Americans have never purchased small, affordable cars _en masse_ before doesn't mean they won't in the future.

I'm guessing you weren't around in the 80s?

> so long as they meet American safety standards, I think they should be

The question is to what degree those standards were written for safety versus protectionism, and to what degree any other market cares about them.

I agree that that question is important but I view it as separate.

I know nothing about car safety, so I have to take the recommendations on authority that they are necessary.

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