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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

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It happens all the time that a government regulates foreign industries while giving domestic ones relatively free reign. Canada has no car manufacturers. Europe has no Facebooks or Apples. The US doesn't make diesel cars.

Canada might not own car manufacturers but they do have factories that build cars for GM, Ford, etc, and these are important to their economy. I thought some were sold in the US even?

Chinese companies aren’t exactly building factories in Canada to sell to NAFTA, but I guess Carney figures it’s worthwhile overall?

Many are made in Canada [1]. I remember traveling to Quebec in the early 2000s and being surprised to see more people driving Fords than back home in the US.

I suspect part of BYD’s strategy is to get a foothold in the North American free trade zone. Maybe they won’t be able to export to the US at first. But if I recall correctly, an import US legal principle is that laws/tariffs cannot discriminate against a single company (excluding for national security). So BYD will simply iterate toward a design that satisfies US regulators. I am not familiar with Canadian safety regulations but I would be surprised if they were dramatically different. Unless American car manufacturers can find it in their hearts to sell an affordable car, this is an existential threat.

[1] https://www.guideautoweb.com/en/articles/76684/all-the-vehic...

It’s highly impractical to import cars less than 25 years old into the US for anything beyond “show & display” licensing, and that’s only for select models.

Modifying them to meet US safety standards and then getting them approved is arduous and expensive, especially if there’s no comparable US model to emulate / borrow parts.

If they're new they could just be built to pass US safety standards, BYD vehicles perform well on safety ratings and I imagine that's what their strategy has been. Sure still have to go through the procedures but the hard part is done once the regulatory blocks are removed.

I don’t mean to pick on this particular comment, but broadly the EV enthusiast community is severely underestimating what would happen to the sticker price of a BYD that could actually be sold in the United States in alignment with a real market strategy, even if the company only faced German-level tariffs.

BYD currently has no dealer network in the US. $0 marketing spend. $0 on regulatory compliance. These things are all very expensive, especially in the United States for a new entrant. Even moreso for one that has to overcome concerns about Made in China.

Add even 25% for tariffs, and BYD’s vehicles would have to be sold for significantly more than they’re sold today in (say) Sydney, let alone what they sell for in Shanghai.

Not that they couldn’t grow into a competitive player. The Koreans did, they’re kicking ass in the US these days. But it took a long time and a ton of investment.

This only matters if you were to assume they are undercapitalized to execute this strategy, I would assume the opposite in this thought exercise. EV enthusiasts are going to be the first adopters at any price, BYD has a lot of hype.

Dealer network is pretty easy these days, DTC. Service, probably just create a network like Slate. Regulatory, yep cost of business but again should be able to do it without changing the vehicle much if they've already been focusing on our standards (IDK if that's true exactly, but it could be). Marketing, choose your adventure, there's tons of ways to go cheap (of course it's all relative and still a lot compared to how you'd open a taco stand) if they wanted to go grassroots, influencer first, etc to get it out there. If the product is good, people will talk and it will grow. In this industry, I don't think anyone expects a new car brand to come close to dominating the market within the first decade or even two but they could become fixtures on the fastest growing list. If not them, who?

I'm not sure how all the economics would flush out, but I do know US vehicles are getting super expensive and if they could just pack in more luxury per dollar, people would take a chance on it.

https://www.slate.auto/en/certified

What are the requirements of vehicles that drive across the border, like if a Canadian family is holidaying in Buffalo?

If they're driving a BYD, do they get stopped at the border?

What if they sold their BYD to a US family? Can it be registered and insured? I'd guess not, therefore it wouldn't get bought by a US resident in the first place.

Border-crosser here: Many Canadian-model-only vehicles are driven in the US by tourists and the like - you can bring it in for up to the year temporarily.

https://www.cbp.gov/trade/basic-import-export/importing-car

> Nonresidents may import a vehicle duty-free for personal use up to (1) one year if the vehicle is imported in conjunction with the owner's arrival. Vehicles imported under this provision that do not conform to U.S. safety and emission standards must be exported within one year and may not be sold in the U.S. There is no exemption or extension of the export requirements.

To actually legally permanently import the vehicle, you have to go through the rest of the onerous CBP requirements, validate safety standards, etc, etc - and that's when it becomes a true screwball and it'll never happen. But yes, I guarantee you'll see some BYDs running up and down the Northeast, and very likely spot them around Florida as snowbirds drag them down with them still. I think I'm even more likely in my position to see a BYD with red Ontario diplomat plates, now that I think about it...

My favorite oddball I've seen the most of is the Chevy Orlando MPV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Orlando

I see BYDs a lot here in Phoenix with MX (Sonora) plates.

now now, Canada is only allowing 50K of these cars to be imported per year. This is a middle power extending a hand to a superpower in the new multipolar world, nothing more. Also BYD subsidies (and sales) in China have been dropped in the past year.

Is the tech better? Yes. Is protecting domestic auto capability from subsidies in the National Interest? Debatable. This convo always circles around to how we characterize subsidies (EV credits for Elon, direct state sponsorship by China) in a way that's always concealed just enough from the general public to stop people from asking hard questions.

> because they know there will never be competition

In the US only.

It seems to be the same small vision that lead to French cars being sold in droves in Latin America.

Biden’s banning them was not a good decision IMO.

At the same time, he was encouraging domestics manufacturers to start building their own EVs out, which opened up the possibility of unbanning, with reasonable import duties, once the American companies were competitive.

However, right now we are pushing American companies to go in the opposite direction and dismantle their EV efforts.

Do you know how we are "pushing American companies to go in the opposite direction"? Genuine question. The only thing I know of is repealing the tax credits.

Personally, I think EVs are neat, but I also think the industry has grown enough already that they should be able to compete with ICE vehicles on as close to a level playing field as can be arranged. Let them beat the ICE industry by making vehicles that are actually better.

Well, if we were going to have government support anywhere, it should be through encouraging L2 charging availability in new homes and apartment buildings, ideally at a more local level.

Yep. No need to subsidize what end up being luxury priced vehicles. The technology is there and if the already spent billions of dollars on subsidies haven’t incentivized enough of a bootstrapping of the supply chain tossing more billions at it is just going to be diminishing returns.

I’d also be ok with diverting that spend towards building out proper charging infrastructure. But not subsidizing rich folks tossing a charger in their garage like it has been up to this point. I would like more towards chargers in public parking lots, rapid chargers deployed along interstates at current truck stops who will commit to actual binding deliverables, etc.

Basically anything but sending more tax money to the top 30% homeowners in the country like pretty much all EV and home solar/etc. tax programs have been designed towards.

I think I would model it sort of like how governments subsidize(d) the infrastructure for the automobile vs everything else by building out roads, local ordinances for parking mandates, etc. vs direct subsidies to end-users. Build the commons.

EV Tax rebates ended.

EPA standards for fuel mileage goals in the future were scrapped.

Current fuel mileage standards are no longer enforced.

The Trump Feds sued to stop California’s fuel mileage standards goals.

Tariffs on EV / battery imported products.

The administration paused the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program and cancelled over $7.5 billion in funding for green energy projects, including grants meant to convert manufacturing plants to EV production.

And Musk participation in the fraud that was DOGE sure did push EV buyers away from Musk / Tesla.

I think you'd have to be a bit ignorant of very recent history to think that America is some cesspool of lack of innovation in the electric car industry. They invented it, despite there being no competition at the time.

America certainly did not invent electric cars. Depending on which electric car you consider the first real one, the inventor was either French, British or German [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...

GP is talking about the current market and product class, not the drive train/mechanisms. There was ~a century where EVs were effectively nonexistent

If the GP was aware of the history of electric cars, they would have known how to word their comment to be factually accurate.

> "electric car industry. They invented it"

"Industry" is a keyword that your pedantry is overlooking. Unless you can edify us as to where there was an EV industry prior to Tesla? The existence or history of the tech is irrelevant in that comment.

The first automobiles were electric and they weren't American:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...

The most important component in an EV is the battery. The lithium ion battery made electric cars practical.

So you could say Sony invented the electric car industry by being the first to commercialize lithium ion batteries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_lithium-ion_bat...

I suppose so. By that logic you could say that whoever invented the wheel invented the electric car industry. But I'd say it's definitely, overwhelmingly Tesla.

In “recent history”, America invented EVs, and there was no competition? What kind of revisionist crap is that? Or am I just misreading your comment?

Reference to perhaps GM EV1 in the 90s, and to Tesla which actually made electric cars desirable.

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