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Comment by EA-3167 | Hacker News Reader

It's worth saying that the price gouging by BYD has reached the point where their own government is publicly scolding them and telling them to stop, so I'm not sure if BYD is a model of anything we want to be following.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chinas...

I think you're also glossing over the impact of Musk's disastrous foray into politics, his Tweeting, and his Nazi salutes.

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I've never heard of pricing a product too low called "price gouging" before.

Well, it can be tought as self gauging. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Dumping would be the economic term for flooding a market with underpriced goods in order to drive out domestic competitors. I don't know if that's what they're doing, but it does seem plausible, though it's hard to imagine that Tesla's prices would be competitive either way.

I'm not sure that applies in this case either, as dumping is selling abroad below cost but charging a fair price in your own domestic market. This case seems to be the opposite - trying to win the domestic market by selling at a loss, and hoping that they can make enough profit on the export market to survive. Presumably this strategy only works if all the domestic competition goes bust before you.

In Chinas case the term would be overcapacity since it applies to the whole sector not just BYD.

Hopefully, they'll work harder to export. Global light vehicle sales are ~90M units/year, there must be a market somewhere for these BEVs where they can at least break even, and as long as they can break even they can continue to ramp manufacturing capacity.

There are on-going EU-China talks about this topic, but currently looks like a wait-and-see approach till after the Trump 90 day deadline.

Other than that idk.

The solution would be to increase wages/less working hours/less financial repression in China so that they can buy the cars they produce...

Why? China should print as many EVs as they can for the world. Protectionism should be expected in countries with domestic auto industries, but most of the world does not produce light autos yet needs them. The solution is not more demand in China, but more supply to crowd combustion vehicles out of annual global vehicle sales.

Agreed, but the Chinese want something of somewhat equal value in return nontheless. And the Chinese appetite for Sri Lankan treasuries might be limited.

They also at least need to pay for inputs and if it is only crude oil.

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