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Comment by hangonhn | Hacker News Reader

I would be OK if we tariff or effectively ban Chinese EVs (as is the case now) for a little while to give our auto industry time to retool and catch up. The current situation with a ban but no long term EV adoption plan in place is just incredibly short sighted. We could end up like certain developing nations that has an indigenous auto industry that are nothing more than glorified assembler of foreign cars or the American consumer continues to buy cars that are more expensive and less performant to use and operate while making all of us vulnerable to oil price shocks.

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Ok.

So instead of being able to buy a 10K BYD car, Americans have to buy 30k cars that are inferior in many aspects.

It would be easier to just pay fired American Auto workers directly over protecting inefficient auto companies. I have no sympathy for Ford who keeps making the F-350 or whatever bigger and more expensive every single year. Nobody needs a $90,000 truck

Customers keep buying those trucks though. Why wouldn't you sell a product to a market that continues to purchase?

There are smaller, cheaper trucks, suvs, sedans, etc. $100k trucks make a lot of money, so Ford keeps building them.

Ford could sell 15k EVs, they just choose not to.

Why should ford be protected from Chinese car manufacturers who can make better and cheaper cars.

A 143 kWh battery pack alone costs around $10k. I don’t think they can realistically sell $15k EV trucks.

The only way to get American auto manufacturers to step up their game is completion. Worked when the Japanese cars came, American car quality improved dramatically in response because it had to.

Still no one wants American Cars outside the US, with the exception of Ford and Tesla

Even Ford has fallen out heavily from just 20 years ago. It used to be much more common to see the Ford badge in Europe when the Ka, Fiesta, Focus line-up was around.

Thinking now the only times I see the Ford badge are on work vehicles like vans or the odd Mustang Mach-E (well, not literally the Ford badge but the Mustang one).

I haven't seen (or at least noticed) any of the new cars in the Ford line-up in Sweden: Puma, Capri, Kuga, Bronco, etc.

I see more and more Douchebags driving with a Pick-Up in Germany.

Those cars doesn't fit at all into Europe, but it is what it is

Otherwise it's mainly Pumas and Vans, yeah.

And the quality's back through the floor again. How many recalls have the domestic slovenly-built Big Three had to put up with in the last ~6 years? Ford alone is showing just how bad the UAW's building on the factory floor.

The amount of trim and garbage I've had to take our domestic-built Ford Escape back in for service and factory bodge fixes for is staggeringly high. Meanwhile, my Mexican-built Fusion? Rock solid.

The US car companies have been given decades to catch up. That's the problem: they have been shielded from competition.

I wouldn't encourage that and I don't think it will be necessary. In Europe, most Chinese brands aren't selling exactly well, while domestic manufacturers really sped up their timelines and pushed for competitive pricing, so generally I don't think there's much of a demand for Chinese EVs, except for the genuinely nice brands, like XPeng and Nio.

There's also the issue, it that in most places in Europe outside of Scandinavia, the charger infrastructure is lacking, and regular people are quite rightly averse of getting an EV if you step out of the tech bubble.

I have a friend who's a high-level manager in automotive retail, and he said he thinks Chinese EVs will be like Chinese smartphones - yes they are nice, and cheaper, but still the market looks like 70% of it is controlled by Apple/Samsung, and the rest of the manufacturers fight over what's left

I don't know about EVs specifically, but there seems to be demand in Europe for Chinese PHEVs: "Chinese automakers nearly double Europe market share to 8% in February as PHEVs drive growth" [1].

[1] https://www.autonews.com/retail/sales/ane-europe-chinese-feb...

Here in spain i suddenly see a lot of them (chinese brands) and not in a bader meinhof way. They are advertising more and i see a lot more on the streets. I was picked up from the station by a BYD. Not sure about the numbers, but something is definitely happening.

The charging infrastructure has changed a lot in the last few years. You can very comfortably travel all the way across Europe without even thinking about where to charge. There is a Tesla Supercharger every 50 miles or even less all the way from the Netherlands via Germany to Austria. And the same via Belgium to the South of France. And that's only Tesla, you also have Ionity building chargers, and Fastned, and you see more and more chargers at Shell and BP petrol stations.

It's been pretty great the past 3 years at least, just last summer I drove from Stockholm -> North Italy and had no anxiety about finding chargers on our way.

> In Europe, most Chinese brands aren't selling exactly well

https://www.carscoops.com/2026/01/chinese-car-sales-europe-2... says pretty much the opposite. Maybe more detailed analysis is provided by https://chinaevhome.com/2026/01/20/chinese-automakers-europe....

Both of them align what I personally see on the streets, more and more Chinese brands, especially BYD, MG and Geely.

I mean it's a bit hard to take away hard data from just monthly sales across the whole of Europe. 10% is a lot, but far from overwhelming, and individual popular models can create big changes in overall stats.

For example, the Brits love their SUVs, and the Jaecoo undercut the market, so that particular model has been selling very well.

I think we should wait and see for stats to stabilize over time. Chinese smartphones did something similar - initially they were way better for way cheaper, but other manufactures adapted, so they failed to grab huge chunks of the market.

The report uses the number of newly registered vehicles AFAIU and correlates them to the total % of Chinese vehicles sold, so that's not really the monthly sales but the general trend, no?

Market cap amounts to 10% as an absolute figure but that isn't what I find most important from reading that article - it is the trend I find intriguing, which doubles or triples by each year, so if such or similar trend continues, Chinese manufacturers will penetrate into the market substantially more.

They innovate at much higher pace at much lower price points and at pretty high quality as the evidence we have so far suggests. So IMO it's going to be hell of a ride for European manufacturers to adapt - they need to start moving faster and deliver at much lower cost. This means complete restructuring which I find hard to believe it will happen any time soon.

Well, I wouldn't extrapolate much from this. Look at what happened to entry level EVs - brands like BYD and MG undercut VW, Kia and others, and their cars came fully loaded with extras missing from Western models.

In response VW and co. dropped prices, so Chinese cars are not that much cheaper again.

Just to understand where I'm coming from - if the Chinese would put out a better car for less money, I would buy it in a heartbeat. But from listening to reviews, as well expert opinion, you don't get better stuff for the same money just by buying Chinese

Here's a comparison video for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1id5MpFLEw

I've heard that mechanics raised similar concenrns about the quality of rust protection as well as the thickness of steel on BYDs.

Let's wait until these cars are 5 to 10 years old.

> In response VW and co. dropped prices

I don't really see that, perhaps if you could give a reference to the price points it would be clearer but new cars, especially the ones coming from German manufacturers, have never been so expensive. Mid-range vehicle used to be around 35k EUR few years ago and today it is no less than 50k. Upper mid-range is 60-70k EUR. And premium is almost 100k EUR. Chinese vehicles are almost at half of that price point, even with the tariffs that were imposed on them.

> I've heard that mechanics raised similar concenrns about the quality of rust protection as well as the thickness of steel on BYDs.

They have to comply with European standards so something like Euro NCAP safety tests. BYD in particular scores 5 stars across their models so "thickness of steel" sounds exaggerated and subjective.

Wrt rust the most notable example of that issue is Tesla. Many ADAC reports have been made pointing out exactly that problem, however, I haven't seen the same for Chinese models. They may exist though although my personal gut feeling is that this is also FUD.

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