China's EV Boom Is Bad for U.S..Tech

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BYD sold 4.27 million cars in 2024, approaching Ford's estimated sales for the year. China exports EVs in aggregate to the Global South rather than to the EU or US.

Not really sure how well this works if China has set its sights on the "Global South"? To be perfectly frank, I'm not sure those are the customers that we in the US have "intimacy" with. We force our vehicles on the "Global South" neo-colonial style. We're typically not designing vehicles for them. At least in the US, we're designing for Asian and Western customers.

A car should be a software platform on wheels, software first, experience first, features plug and play into a modular platform. Cars should be based around common hardware platforms, from which large amounts of investment can be poured into long term, and on top of which sit different packagings to appeal to different consumers. Cars should be rapidly iterated upon and data from each model should rapidly feed back into the next model, turnaround time and agility should be prized to more quickly hone in on product/market fit.

What made Christensen's disruption thesis so revolutionary is he outlined how, even if the incumbent has full knowledge of every move the disruptor has made and is about to make, this can often not be sufficient to prevent getting disrupted because it's the incumbent's own advantages that are played against them.

eg: Microsoft couldn't fight against Google because Google's interests were in the internet getting more powerful and there were a lot of very powerful people inside of Windows who were happy to sabotage any Microsoft attempt to make the internet more powerful because it disrupted the Windows monopoly.

But another lesson I think is instructive to learn from all of this is that cut-throat competition is terrible for Capitalists but amazing for Capitalism. America, over the years, has more and more pushed the thumb on the side of Capitalists and China has clearly been observing this trend and realized how it hollows out a country and is now extremely wary.

The government has signalled a clear priority shift over the last 5 years (Jack Ma's dethronement was the first high profile move people noticed) of ensuring as many markets as they can are full of vibrant, ruthless competition as a way to build up national champions and run the disruption playbook in industry after industry.