We don’t see BYD cars in the US or Canada very much yet because of tariffs. But head down to Mexico and they’re everywhere. The Chinese EV automakers are crushing it.
Rent seeking is industry suicide. It feels like it helps, but it’s not solving the real problem.
On another level, it would be game over without them. For example, US shipyards would simply stop existing without protection. There is no management strategy or measure they could implement that could compete with Asian shipyards.
So the question is more about what part of means of defense you outsource. And what parts of means of defense are outsourced by your enemies.
You don't want to base your defense on inferior shipbuilding capabilities, do you?
So if someone says "national security" is above economic interest of US, I would say these people mean _their_ economic interest is above economic interest of US and use both terms as a cover.
There are clear national security reasons for the government to prop up shipbuilding and semiconductors.
Are you saying countries without shipbuilding facilities or not producing semicondutors are being conquered and their citizens being slaughtered?
I'd say that is fear mongering done by the people doing business on "national security".
Yes that is a clear risk. For most of human history, powerful leaders have unleashed violence on their neighbors to increase their wealth and prestige. For about 70 years, the cold war balance prevented very catastrophic wars between powerful nations but we now seem to be having an atavistic throw back of powerful nations being led by expansionist leaders. You either need to create your own manufacturing capacity or be at the mercy of others.
The United States is the greatest power the world has ever seen. While the oceans protect us, the truth is that even the White House was once burned down in a war.
There are no customers who want an oil tanker built in the US. Or Europe.
Nah, that doesn't add up. US needs _ships_ and SOTA military equipment to make sure that any military conflict is as short as possible (ie. US wins). Losing money on unused production capability does not make sense because in case of prolonged conflict there is time to build the capability (as it happened during WWII).
In reality, what you call "prolonged military conflict", is nothing more than normal international competition. One could even argue US is in prolonged military conflict since WWII. In which case making rational decisions based on hard economic criteria (ie. not losing money) is the key to success.
OTOH still strategically it’s not great. As the Asian companies have an actual market, this will lead Asian manufacturers to have better ships than comparable US ones.
In a vacuum, I don't hate the idea of paying people to switch to EV's who can do it, but the problem is especially in America, those benefits are going not to working class people who really need new cars (and who's cars are the most environmentally problematic) but to solidly upper-middle class buyers of incredibly large and impractical EV's which are either sports cars or suburban panzers, that rip through tires and consume vast amounts of lithium for their enormous battery packs, and beat the shit out of our already deteriorating roads.
Additionally we're finding that EV's have a major, probably unsolvable issue: they age much, much faster than ICE vehicles in one particular area: the battery. EV's have the same problem as cellphones effectively; their cells deteriorate with use, and unlike used ICE vehicles for which parts are widely available and usually cheap, it's not even remotely economically feasible to repair this issue. Replacing a battery costs so much you might as well just replace the entire car.
- they're not much that much heavier, class-for-class. Substantially lighter than the ridiculous ly oversized trucks that people buy for suburban use.
- Theres nearly infinite lithium in the world, depending on economics of extraction. new battery chemistries dont even use lithium.
- battery degradation hasnt turned out to be a big issue. Real world tesla data shows ~80% capacity at ~300k miles, which is approaching EOL for a car.
working class people cant buy cheap EVs because the US keeps cheap EVs out of the market with import restrictions, tarriffs and legacy manufacturers that refuse to adapt and offer a product people want. EV sales "cratered" for the same reason. Meanwhile, EV sales in the rest of the world are accelerating fast.
EV's just shift the energy burden from the fossil fuel industry to the power grid. It's not a fix, it barely qualifies as a band-aid.
> EV's just shift the energy burden from the fossil fuel industry to the power grid
Thats actually great! even if the electricity comes from 100% fossil fuels we would still reduce vehicle emissions by ~60% (ICE are only 20-30% efficient). And then of course grids are getting clean fast with the scaleout of renewables, which is accelerating rapidly worldwide. We will see 100% emission free personal car transit in my lifetime (somewhere, in whichever country gets to a net zero grid first). Thats exciting!
> even if the electricity comes from 100% fossil fuels we would still reduce vehicle emissions by ~60%
That emissions number is only looking at what comes out of the tailpipe, which isn't the full story. You have dust coming off the brake rotors, plus and much worse, the particulate from the tires as they wear down, and on that front, EV's are actually notably worse because a dead battery weighs as much as a full battery, a condition not shared by an ICE vehicle, and EVs do trend heavier on curb weight which means they go through tires faster and roads too for that matter.
Additionally, in cold climate areas, EVs end up spending a decent portion of their stored energy heating both the passenger cabin and the battery itself, and by constrast, heat is basically free from an ICE thanks to how it operates.
Like, if you live in an area with charging infrastructure, and the limitations/challenges of an EV aren't an issue for you (which to be clear, a LOT of people fit that description!) then by all means, get an EV. They are better, broadly. However if you have an ICE vehicle that is largely doing fine, is reasonably modern and well maintained... then it's arguably much greener to not buy a new car at all and just keep running the one you've already got. Better for the wallet, too.
> We will see 100% emission free personal car transit in my lifetime (somewhere, in whichever country gets to a net zero grid first). Thats exciting!
I have a lot of doubts, but hey, that will be some delicious crow to eat if it turns out true. I love cars, both electric and ICE, all their issues aside.
Does it not bother you that over 60% of the energy in gasoline is wasted as heat into the atmosphere? Of which a small amount is captured to heat the cabin in cold weather?
Massive massive improvement, that’s not greenwashing imho.
(Something that is greenwashing is PHEVs, they have proven to be mostly a lie in practice)
Oil subsidies are so interwoven with the way the US works that this is easy to miss in these discussions, but if not for these subsidies ICE vehicles would be much more expensive:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/09/fossil-f...
tarriffs are visible protective regulation, China protects its domestic markets through different type of regulations for decades.
- does product have higher quality?
- is it cheaper, given there is no proven reliability track record for Chinese automakers, meaning maintenance cost could be very high
- if production is subsidized by government incentives or cheap labor, Chinese consumer pay high price, its just money flows on other channels
still don't understand why this is going to hurt US car manufacturers. Have the Japanese auto imports improved the US auto industry past 40+ years? Is Ford or GM more competitive? The US automakers are highly competitive in large vehicle/truck segments, protected under the Chicken Tax past 60+ years, but they barely have any presence left in small, cheaper segments dominated by the Japanese and Koreans. Farley recently said Ford has shifted its focus from affordable, mass-market cars because it couldn't compete against the Japanese/Koreans.
Just not convinced that allowing autos from another auto industry built on forced joint venture/tech transfer, illegal (export/local content) subsidies, or otherwise benefited tremendously from the very same rent-seeking policies themselves past 15 years is solving the real problem.
They have leaner assembly lines. More sophisticated supply chain. They now make a product that it turns out people want (reliable/economy)
One big one to consumers is the focus on long term reliability. This was a complete joke in the 1980s-1990s for US cars. Everyone knew Toyota and Honda would last 300k miles and an American car would crap out at 80k miles. We are in a completely new world of more consistent reliability with cars. Even if Ford is 90% Toyota - that’s a much better place to be.
Everyone wanted trade barriers in the 80s and 90s but without the pain of competition our cars would feel like the modern equivalent of a bad Eastern European shitbox - only optimized for power and not economy.
Sure, Ford has always made cars that their customers want, F-150 for instance, the best selling vehicle in the US for an unbroken streak of nearly 50 years, during which it continued to improve and maintain its popularity. The Chicken law has done wonders for the American automakers.
>> ... the focus on long term reliability.
Sure, I don't question the Japanese automakers' reliability, but, in the cheap, small vehicle segments they compete with the Japanese import, the American automakers are now more or less wiped out. Most small, affordable vehicles from GM and Ford are now made in either Mexico or South Korea. So where is their "competitiveness" that otherwise wouldn't exist without the Japanese imports? In other word, the Japanese imports clearly did not prevent the "loss of competitiveness in the future."
>> Rent seeking is industry suicide.
If it's as bad as you say it is, why turn a blind to China's rent seeking past 15 years and promote their industry, which again benefited tremendously from forced JV, forced tech transfer, restrictive market access/licensing, local content/sourcing/production, high-tariffs, shadow-banning foreign competitors, arbitrary regulatory/safety barriers, etc?
I think we can glean a lot of lesson from the Chicken Tax past 60+ years and China's rent-seeking policies in the EV business past 15 years. We know what works and what doesn't -- and BYD is not it.
If tariffs are so bad for America why do other countries have tariffs on American cars?
They didn't just put tariffs on foreign EVs, they poured a lot of money into their own industry to produce a lot of different companies that became fiercely competitive in their own local market.
Once they got a few big players they stop a lot of the subsidies which led to a lot of companies falling under but at the same time the process produced some really good, competitive and profitable companies like BYD which then were ready to take on the international market.
America, on the other hand, hasn't done much to increase the competitiveness of their own internal market for EVs. Hence, the protectionist measures will have the consequences the poster above described.
Tariffs are not "good" or "bad" they're an economic tool countries can use. It's how you use the tool and in conjunction with which other tools that can have negative or positive consequences for the industry they're applying it to.
It's like "america uses a scalpel to peel oranges" versus "China uses a scalpel in open heart surgeries". The scalpel can cut, but context matters to say if it was used properly or not.
What has china actually don’t different than America? Was a 10-15 percent subsidy not enough? Were the carbon credits not enough? We’re the limitations on gas cars dependent on ev sales not enough?
As far as I’m aware both china and the us have heavily subsidized ev sales. What’s different?
Ford in Europe is Ford Germany, a fully owned but separate entity (which is probably why Ford sales in Europe are decent). I think they have presence in other markets but most of their money comes from the US.
GM used to have Opel/Vauxhall, but it sold it to Stellantis.
Chrysler is now owned by Stellantis, which is a mostly European car maker.
Tesla is the obvious new kid on the block but unless they're the only ones with self driving cars globally, I don't really see them hanging on to their global market share 20 years from now in front of Chinese, South Korean, Japanese and European car makers.
TL;DR: I agree with you.
A couple of years ago the only notable EVs you'd see were Teslas, now you'd see at least 2-3x as many BYDs.
I'm intrigued. What do you mean?
I have mostly driven BMW and Toyota sedan and fwd's. And as you progress in car price and size its a matter of getting more features, and a better version over the cheaper model.
The BYD's all seem really different,
For cars, I guess Henry Ford's anecdotal comment that "you can have any color you like as long as it's black" was a form of opinionated design. If BYDs cars are all different, surely they're less opinionated?
You could say that at a brand level, they are equally "opinionated" because the average car of each brand is average, but the OP argues that BYD does it by sampling N very distinct points from the car distribution, and other by sampling N times the same average point.
While this is one form of opinionated, it really just means that they are doing their own thing different from the other established players. This could mean MORE configurability in some cases. Another poster also said it, but opinionated just means that they have taken a stand in product design (features, looks, usability, etc) that they think it correct and it does not bow to 'the herd'. IMO, an opinionated design is neither good nor bad, but it is respected by me.
The standard new house isn’t opinionated - a custom build with features not normally seen could be.
Opinionated usually results in love it or hate it style design - unless they happen on something that just becomes standard.
The original Jobs iPhone was opinionated - an all touchscreen design went against the common “knowledge” that a physical keyboard was the way to go.
Also noticing that a lot of the rideshare/taxis are going EV quickly. I'm guessing the much lower maintenance and service requirements are outweighing any "range" issues, plus the trade-in value is irrelevant with warranties covering the batteries etc.
But getting hit by 50% tariffs in Mexico as of today:
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/mexico-tariffs-go-into-effe...
Their flagship show room has great beer and good food, too.
This was at a car plant for people working in manufacturing.
Makes sense anywhere :)
Well, almost anywhere. There are places where if you have a beer with lunch and they saw you arrive in a car, they'll ask you for your car keys otherwise they'll call the police on you. Daily life works differently around the world :)
For those without religious objections or addictions, one glass of beer or wine with a meal is a complete nothingburger. Yes, it technically impairs your reaction times, but not enough to be a crime.
Though I suspect the BYD folks would want to avoid any hint of impropriety, so they probably will only let you drink there _after_ your test drive.
But I've only ever ate and drank at their showroom, I never went to the car side of the business.
In Singapore you wouldn't necessarily arrive in a car (yet alone your own car) when you go to a car showroom. I'm not even sure they'd have enough parking around there.
See https://earth.google.com/web/search/BYD+Zhongshan+Park+1826/... for the location.
And many people bring a companion when they do a test drive. Filling up the companion is perfectly legal and fine.
Just need to make sure that the driving customer has the beer after their test drive. You can fill up the companions before, however.
But to strengthen your point: I don't know for sure, but from what I can tell by looking at the place there's barely enough inventory at that showroom to allow some test drives. It's definitely not a car lot.
And jokes aside, many people also need a car for work. Eg if you are a real estate agent, and always flitting around between different showings.
BYD can outwait the adjustments of the US car industry to a new reality, in the same way that the Japanese did back in the 80s.
Last time, the US did it by screwing the union workers of the rust belt, while also giving up on passenger cars and moving to SUV/trucks, but this time it's a complete change in technology and the US (and Japan to an extent) is having trouble reorienting its manufacturing and supply chains to support the change.
If Ford can't sell an EV version of an F-150, then it has a real problem, because the rest of the world is not staying on ICE technology.
Artificial trade barriers don't last.
He is literally the walking version of the stereotype of a rural cowboy type. He runs a small hobby farm, leases pasture to local farms. He works in financial management for a regional company and his wife is a procurement officer for a state government.
They produce most of their electricity with solar. Replaced some tractor use cases with oxen. They literally don’t pay to operate their daily drivers. (A lightning and a Volt now Bolt)
The lightning replaced their emergent generator when that reached its end of life.
He got into this stuff after doing the numbers for the company. It’s cheaper and better to operate. Last year they bought a dozen Silverado EV pickups for their field people. They work fine where they deployed them. The workers love them and the opex is better.
The self described rednecks hate it because the internet told them to. He almost removed the branding because he gets approached by people warning him about all of the terrible things that will happen.
It reduces the range, just as it reduces how far an ICE truck can go on one tank. But that's only an issue if you tow long distance and cannot find a place to charge on the way. You could choose to rent an ICE truck for such (increasingly) rare occasions. People for whom that's not so rare should stick with ICE or hybrid, or in future with an EREV.
The people with serious towing needs are buying F-250s anyway. The people towing their toys to the lake are mostly fine. If not, it’s not the right vehicle choice.
Is that a problem for Ford though? Basically nowhere outside of North America buys trucks like the F-150.
You see a few Ford Transit chassis cabs with a flatbed on the back in Europe but mostly enclosed Transit vans.
(Of course the related news was that in Europe Ford also moved to an agreement to rebadge Renault EVs instead of manufacture their own. Has Ford given up on Europe, too?)
The argument that tariffs could protect Ford to do the hard work at building more EV models seems proven wrong when Ford makes the short-term decision that it can kick the can down the road on supporting EV models until after the tariffs expire.
No, because American truck buyers seem to prefer non-EV trucks while commercial EV buyers seem to prefer Ford's more practical E-Transit vans.
> The argument that tariffs could protect Ford to do the hard work at building more EV models seems proven wrong when Ford makes the short-term decision that it can kick the can down the road on supporting EV models until after the tariffs expire.
Ford's truck sales are not protected by the newly introduced tariffs but by the 25% Chicken Tax tariffs imposed in 1964. Seems unlikely that will change.
(There's been a lot of consolidation in the car industry over the past few decades which Ford hasn't much participated in. I guess the platform sharing agreement is a consequence of that as it wants to reduce development costs.)
For now. In a market with very few EV trucks (and very few EVs in general, and very few cheap ones).
If Rivian found a way to mass-produce an R1T at half the price, does Ford compete?
If BYD builds a North American truck in Mexico, does Ford compete?
GM's Silverado EV is growing at a decent clip, including commercial fleet sales, and looks possibly set up already to eat the market that Ford is leaving behind. If GM sales continue and maybe extend to another, cheaper pickup truck EV model, does Ford compete?
If Hyundai or Honda figure out how to get EV truck sales going in the US, does Ford compete?
Ford's pitching an EREV pivot as a "best of both worlds" situation. GM back in 2019 said EREV was a "worst of both worlds" situation that complicated drive trains for not enough benefit, especially to the consumer. Is Ford signalling competitiveness by ignoring warnings from their actual competitors?
If people in Nairobi are buying BYDs the American government can be smug about tariffs China still wins. The battle is over the emerging markets.
The reason BYD is killing it is because they can offer their cars at a price point unavailable to the US. The reason for that price point is because China is producing some of the cheapest batteries in the world.
BYD cannot build their cars in the US because the core part they need to make them cheap is the batteries. CATL makes the batteries that BYD uses and they aren't going to setup shop in the US. A lot of what makes CATLs batteries cheap is because China has a raw materials trade pipeline that's now superior than what's available in the US.
All of this goes back to tariffs.
By putting insane tariffs on all imports the US has effectively isolated itself from the rest of the world. Manufacturing will defacto be more expensive in the US because a significant portion of any incoming raw resources will get an automatic 25% tax.
The US does have it's own raw resources, but they aren't fully developed. Prior to 2024, we were heavily reliant on imports for a lot of our manufacturing. Shaking up the entire market for stupid reasons has destroyed manufacturing in the US. It'll take decades to repair and rebuild.
The steep tariffs against china that Trump did in his first term against solar, steel, and batteries were maintained by Biden. In term 2 Trump ramped those up to 11.
Chinese automakers can give you a lot of car for 30k.
That destruction has been ongoing since the 90s. We've hollowed out our ability to make things.
We basically focused on the exact wrong things which has put us in a pretty vulnerable geopolitical position. Rather than trying to bring resources into the US to aid manufacturing, we tried to bring finished goods into the US at a lower price.
China has done basically the opposite. They've focused on bring raw resources into china while centralizing manufacturing. That's what has turned them into the global powerhouse they are when it comes to producing everything.
For the US to turn this around, tariffs would have been in order, but they needed to be pretty focused and with internal plans on building out the industries we wanted to grow.
Doing tariffs first without building manufacturing was just dumb.
How much would you like to pay for that 80k new truck? Sure, we can give you that monthly payment, lets just structure it as a 10-year loan where you end up paying twice that on a rapidly depreciating asset. Boom, we've just sold two cars and only had to manufacture one.
Basically only Tesla offers any car that is even similar to the extremely popular Toyota Camry. No US maker offers a compact car anymore.
Honestly, I don't think the immediate impact of dropping tariffs on Chinese vehicles would be as dire for the US automakers because the Chinese vehicles largely sell into noncompetitive segments. I don't doubt that the F-150s and Silverados can coexist with BYD sedans.
Fine, so let BYD come in with compacts, sedans, electrics.
It'll be interesting to see if US auto manufacturers were right that Americans only want trucks and SUVs.
> Doing tariffs first without building manufacturing was just dumb.
What you are looking at is unbound and shameless grifting. Not the first insurrection by the oligarchy in US history. Monopolies and wealth concentration come with a price. A very steep price.
Even if we don't consider these things, here in the EU, very few Chinese models look like a steal.
Tariffs or not (PHEVs and ICE cars are not tariffed like EVs afaik), the consensus seems to be that Chinese cars at a given category, are built better, cost like 10-20% less, are well equipped, but generally drive worse and often have annoying usability issues
All things considered, they're certainly competitive depending on what you're looking for, but don't look likely to oust the existing competition.
And I don't get the West's obsession with BYD - imo they look weird, they either get the interior or exterior styling wrong (with the notable exception of the Seal U), and aren't really selling that well compared to other Chinese brands.
This is the wrong mental model for a few reasons, not least that breaking into the US market would require massive marketing and infrastructure investment that would have to be paid for. And that’s before you worry about reengineering for US regulations.
Also: The current Chinese EV market is not in a sustainable place. It’s the product of massive government investment and (over) incentive to produce. Most Chinese EV makers are headed to bankruptcy if current trends continue, so they won’t.
In the steady state, Chinese EVs with German-class tariffs would be competitive in the US but they wouldn’t blow the doors off the market any more than, say, Hyundai/Kia have.
The high end Sea Lion 7 from BYD apparently tops out at around 205k yuan in China. $29k USD.
https://carnewschina.com/2025/05/08/byds-sealion-07-dm-i-lau...
Found it in Australia for $64k AUD, that’s $43k USD.
https://evdealergroup-byd.com.au/configurator/byd-sealion-7?...
That’s a lot more than a 15% markup. A Tesla Model Y Premium would be competitive at a minimum.
Australian sticker price for the atto 3 is under $45,000 AUD, a smidgen over $30K usd.
With a wife with a mobility scooter and working 30-90 mins away from the office depending on traffic, I picked on up (salary sacrificing) as the lease costs less than what I was paying for fuel on the Kia carnival (Sedona in the us) each week.
Tesla model 3 entry level was another $10K AUD for a car with less features.
A big issue is education. In my region the state government is pushing hard to support semiconductor manufacturing. In addition to incentives for building facilities they funded education in community colleges to train up the workforce, did some similar stuff at the high school level and implemented incentives for supporting industry.
But… you get the army you have, not what you want. POTUS has the strategic insight of a cab driver and is surrounded by a wack pack of sycophantic C-team players. We’re hurting manufacturing because without a strategy you’re just driving margin enhancement for a few industries, and the grinding down of the economy will hurt most others.
We should look to the Chinese as a place to learn from rather than a faceless enemy. They achieved amazing results and made some mistakes and sought out to do some things that are kinda gross as well. But… they aligned policy, governance and incentives to move their country out of the sorry state it was in. DJI has like 20k PhDs working on drones. I doubt we have that many in the US.
I'm not saying that Tariffs are necessarily bad or wrong. But they are a shape blade that is really easy to cut yourself with. Blanket tariffs are effectively putting a sword on a rope and wildly swinging it around in a crowd.
What you need is a surgeon to handle the tariffs.
It's just sort of amazing how badly the west dropped the ball on green tech. We're also working on importing an off grid solar system from china that will easily be a third of the price that we'd get from a US supplier.
One interesting thing that people don't realize with regards to the US tariffs is that a lot of goods flow through the US on their way to international markets. For a long time it has been easiest for us to buy stuff made in china from vendors such as Amazon in the US and have it shipped internationally from the US. Now with all of the tariffs we end up getting double tariffed for doing this (once when the goods enter the US and a second time when they ship to my country). As a result I'm seeing more and more people looking for ways to buy from China directly.