In the UK, EVs are cheaper than petrol cars, thanks to Chinese competition

Really not true at all. Care to share your sources for this claim? Anecdotally, I've (plus friend and family) owned plenty of beater cars in that ballpark price, and none had failures needing to replace engine or transmission. Most of their faults came in the electronics (sensors, actuators, fuse box, wire harness) plus suspension, body rust, etc basically the same parts EVs also have.

Meanwhile, if you look up 'EV clinic' postings online, you'll see they find plenty of design failures with European and Korean EVs that are basically ticking timebombs(sometimes literally, hello Stellantis) where electric motors, inverters or battery packs are guarantee to fail in a short timeframe due to various design faults that were entirely preventable. Most common faults with poor EV designs I saw, seem to be the seal of the electric motor stator cooling which fails quickly leading coolant to flood the motor rotor killing it, needing a rebuild.

From what I gather from their analysis', the crux of this issue seems to be that some modern EVs, especially those less premium ones, are cost cut to the extreme in a race to the bottom to maintain shareholder value, both at manufacturing but also at design phase, leading to cut corners everywhere and such issues being a common occurrence and manifesting en-masse after their warranty runs out. From their analysis, IIRC Tesla's powertrains seem to be some of the most reliable and well designed, with the likes of Audi, VW, BMW, Mercedes being less so and Stellantis being trash tier.

Meanwhile, plenty of older ICEs are largely immune form such massive reliability faults, because they benefited from decades of industrial design and development experience done in a past era where race to the bottom cost cutting and planned obsolescence weren't yet a thing. So I wouldn't be surprised when an older 1500$ ICE car will last longer than a 1500$ EV.

For example, I have 2 gas stations within a mile of my home. They stay pretty busy because people around me constantly need to fill up. I, on the other hand, basically never visit either of those stations since I switched to an EV. I charge at home.

If everyone around me switched to EVs, those stations could not stay in business. There's a grocery store in the same area which makes anything those stations offer obsolete.

Those are the majority of gas stations that die with a mass switch over to EVs. There's a gas station for my hometown without an attached convenience store with 300 people there. There's no way that station stays in service if a significant portion of the community switches to EVs. It already struggles to be profitable as is (I know the owner).

- Gas Station = retail outlet that sells and dispenses gasoline and other petroleum-based fuel products

- Charging station = place to charge your EV

Could be an interesting long bet. Will the number of retail locations selling gasoline in the UK in the year 2045 be higher or lower than in 2026?

Also, with Chinese manufacturers increasingly pushing out batteries capable of 1000+ km, you'll be able to charge fully at home for increasingly long road trips.

For AC the rectifier is inside the car and the L2 chargers is just a fancy plug. Price should just be the base electricity cost.

I'd love to have slow chargers built into the street lights. Not everyone owns a house, and the public charging usually meets or exceeds the petrol price per mile.

Annual train ticket form my small town (25 miles from the Zone 1 of London) is over £5,500. Five GRAND. For the pleasure of standing every time and a much higher risk of getting mugged.

£15k will give you REALLY nice bike or pretty new car. After third year you're saving thousands. Of course if you decided to buy something old and used, you're saving from the second quarter of the first year on.

It's only functional because not everyone can afford another car to work.

Staff per passenger hour has got to be far higher in the airline industry.

My Model 3 (RWD SR+ 2023) is 1847kg unloaded weight, including driver.

I live in the UK where we pay heavy taxes on fuel and we pay higher taxes on vehicles with higher CO2 emissions.

The subsidies you talk about are US specific and was in rely to one about ICE buyers subsidising EV buyers in the UK.

In the UK we pay heavy fuel duties and car taxes so ICEs have not been subsidised any time recently, but, have been very heavily taxed.

There is no fairness in taxing UK ICE owners for subsidies received by American ICE owners.

You're incorrectly assuming I don't want something reliable that's safe for the environment in an attempt to make me look bad because you're defaulting to attacking the person instead of the message.

China, the US, Germany and Japan were all fighting against cultural genocidal Marxism which had global domination ambitions. It's a matter of historical record. There were dictators on both sides, but not all dictators are created equal. Both Germany and the US were helping provide supplies. The problem is that Japan and Germany got so fanatical and expansionist themselves that they became the bigger threat.

We are lucky that there are incredibly incompetent people in charge of Russia and China, but if Japan and Germany had sufficiently expanded into Russia and China to gain the resources they needed, that would be too much geographic power to allow their respective ideologies to have.

My point in this thread is essentially that the CCP has never ended its war in support of communism and while the era of the tank has largely ended, we now have EVs rolling straight through the middle of cities unopposed. Arguably every bit as useful as rolling a tank down to the capitol.

> And you see that ideology as a threat to US Global Imperialism, and you have internalised US Global Imperialism as part of your personality, I get it.

People knew what life was like inside Soviet Russia. It wasn't free, life sucked. Nobody wanted that to happen to their country. If Marxists gained control of enough global resources and continued to build giant militaries to expand with then they posed a legitimate risk of erasing freedom worldwide.

The US has never been about imperialism in the way you think of the British Empire, the Russian Empire or the Chinese Empire. You're only applying a naive filter by suggesting land empires aren't real empires, only ocean empires are real empires. All of the other empires have been actually imperial, with kings, emperors and so on. It's not really accurate to call the US a religious empire even, but it was a country formed anew with deep understanding of the problematic cycles the world has faced for thousands of years.

There are scenarios where we have critical interests like Panama, Hawaii, Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Greenland, etc, but it's not like we're in these places enslaving their populations and preventing them from knowing the truth. If we were a true British or Russian style empire with endless ambition, the US could have wrecked Germany and Japan, then gone on to finish China and take over Russia, capture all of the middle east, steamroll south america and so on. If we are an aggressive empire, then we have been extremely judicious relative to the amount of projection power we have.

After World War 2, we invested in the rest of the world to help it recover. Why do that when we could've just steamrolled a weak and battered world? Because that's not how we think.

The only reason we're using more of our leverage lately, is because we're countering the things Russia and China are already doing and we're not being ignorant about the threats that are being posed.

> The difference between this and something like the US All Writs Act, or Australias Access and Assistance bill is super negligible. Just the overt trappings of single party politics really differentiate it. The US, and its allies are equally capable at compelling corporate action. I know its scary when the red guys do it, but if you want me to care about this, you would need the US and friends to not be leading the charge.

The US does not require companies to hire political and intelligence minders. It would be like the US requiring a company to align with Republican politics, even if their company wasn't politically minded. We see this kind of wild stuff in radical Islam, where the religious law must be enforced, so religion and state are one. In China, it's more than nuance around a one party state, it is that the politics and the state are one, because Marxists believe that all social action is political action and so social action must sufficiently adhere to Marxist principles. It's just not realistic to enforce this at the lowest levels, so some version of CCP interests are imposed at the company level.

You can point to various laws, but it depends on the spirit of the law and how those laws are actually being implemented in practice. Next to Iran, China leads the charge globally in sociopathy around this particular issue, I'm sorry to say. So, no, you can't normalize it like China is just doing it, because the US is doing it. We're absolutely not doing it the way you are imagining.

The closest thing is when there is military-civil public/private fusion, which is for defense purposes in specific critical areas, but it's not about political compliance as much as it's about national security.

The CCP thinks the survival of the CCP itself is national security. In the US, if you got enough support you can make a new political party.

We do have scenarios where organizations that get a lot of public funding can be required to change some of their policies which can be close to political enforcement, but it is optional for organizations to receive public funding. They have to decide if they're committed to whatever their political thing is enough that they like it more than the money. It makes sense that if public funding is going towards anything that is considered political, it needs to be evaluated whether the state should be doing that since it risks a self-reinforcing cycle that can politically weaponize the state against itself into some kind of one party system.

I've never said the US is perfect, but it's very cheap to point at some random thing in the US that looks vaguely duck-like and say look, you taught us about ducks! It's especially weak when you're trying to defend the goodness of your country and think of the US as bad, but then you use the US as an example for why you're doing something? What China does is much closer to the political radicalism of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the US.

> I could literally sit down, go through every single piece of Chinese history for the last 20 years and recontextualise it for a US audience. The problem is largely that you dont believe in their legal system. And fair cop, just like the national security courts in the USA theres literally no oversight. So when they disappear someone in the government, and claim they were a traitor, you say that's bad. Fair enough. But thats just noise to me. Because I dont trust the US legal system either. The purges are sold internally as fighting dissent and corruption. If the US government took precisely the same action with precisely the same justification you would be clapping like a seal, and trying to convince others using your "dangerous free thinker" powers.

Of course when you've been immersed in the kool-aid of any given system you get used to it and start to rationalize things like "well, the world didn't end after this and it happens a lot, so I guess it's ok". Being desensitized to it is a risk.

The difference is that our justice system succeeds far more than it fails. Journalism can get a little warped, but when one journalistic outlet goes crazy and becomes useless there are others you can look to instead. In China, so many political things are considered national security that you don't have the right to even be accurately informed about political things occurring. Essentially, this is like if Democrats started jailing Republicans for basic vanilla conservatism, but then also jailed any journalists that reports on it in a way that was not aligned with the Democrat party line.

Look at what Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Russia do with their political opponents. China is that with a little more sparkle at a much larger scale with extreme censorship. When you are raised in a system like that, your ability to even know what is true is degraded significantly since it has been curated in advance to be more favorable to the CCP.