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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

China is known to scale out in the low end market without having a strategy to go upmarket.

Reading this article I honestly got the opposite impression. China is hopelessly behind Japan in both high end machine tools and robotics.

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I take it you haven't seen any Chinese cars lately. Particularly in the EV space they're demolishing the competition in price and quality, and a huge part of that is thanks to automation with the robots described here.

Check out eg the Xpeng G6, which delivers an Audi ride but undercuts the Tesla Model Y on price:

https://www.xpeng.com/g6

And the 2025 xpeng g6 is so much better than previous model, 5C charging battery, better ride, even better energy efficiency, better looks, better interior design, 30% of car parts are updated. And they delivered this update 2 years after the first model, when normally it takes other companies 5 years for an upgrade of this size. They have positive margins on a 17-20k RMB, 270 miles+, 350KW charging, FSD like autonomous driving EV, even though they have to price it this low due to ultra-competitive market. They can't do this without Chinese supply chain. Speed of iterations, innovations, fast time to market, efficiency is this all about.

China creates the most high end drones and 3d printers, and my Hisense TV is better and cheaper any of my Samsung's. This is from personal experience of things I have purchased.

China is definitely growing quickly. At the trade shows I go to where some of the robots in the article are presented, Chinese companies have become quite prominent in the last few years when they were completely non-existent 10 years ago.

It "was known" in the 60s that Japanese electronics and cars were inferior in design and quality. Chinese products are going through the same trajectory.

This "is known" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. "Is known" 15 years ago, perhaps. Things are changing rapidly.

China has multiple 100% indigenous fifth-gen fighters man. They have domestically designed and built nuclear reactors. They have a 100% indigenous space station.

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