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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

The median new car price is around $50k and you can get new EVs well under that amount. If we weren’t in a trade war, BYD would sell you an EV for the same price as the cheapest ICE options.

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BYD (but not only) is heavily subsidised by chinese government.

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/06/13/what-brussels-...

https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/news/chinas-massive-sub...

Sure, but they’re hardly the only manufacturer for whom that’s true (e.g. Tesla) and from a consumer’s perspective they might care more about their personal budget. Moreover, if we’re going to avert trillions in annual GDP losses due to climate change subsidizing electrification seems like a good idea.

How are Tesla subsidized by the government?

You know that $7,500 tax credit people got for buying their products? That’s the most obvious one but the bigger one is the carbon regulatory credits: governments require other car manufacturers to buy credits to offset their high-pollution vehicles, and since Tesla doesn’t make any of those they can sell something like half a billion dollars of them per quarter as pure profit. This has been most of their profitability in some quarters.

> You know that $7,500 tax credit people got for buying their products? That’s the most obvious one

The same tax credit applies to qualifying vehicles bought from any automaker. This has nothing to do with Tesla.

> the bigger one is the carbon regulatory credits

Again, every qualifying automaker can do exactly the same thing.

> China gave BYD $3.7 billion to ‘win’ the EV race.

That amounts to $1k per vehicle, way less than EU or US subsidies.

https://electrek.co/2024/04/12/china-gave-byd-an-incredible-...

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