BYD overtakes Tesla and Kia as the best-selling EV brand in key overseas markets | Hacker News Reader

BYD overtakes Tesla and Kia as the best-selling EV brand in key overseas markets

electrek.co

266 pointsdoener447 comments

BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion. It’s just one example among many of China charting the way forward and innovating while the US recedes further into backward-looking, protectionist policy. See: US politicians on both sides trying to ban BYD imports rather than incentivizing stiffer competition from US automakers.

Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.

This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression. But anyone paying attention can quite clearly see that China is winning and the US is sacrificing their global superiority at the altar of fear, ignorance, and religious nationalism.

I was glued to the window while flying over southern China recently. There is so much infrastructure you can see from the air, even in fairly rural provinces. So many bridges. So many wind turbines. It is visibly a country on the move, a country that believes in itself and its ability to do things. The Chinese Century is increasingly palpable, for better or worse.

I have two chinese-born coworkers (who spent 20-30 years here in the us) in the same room. When we talk about china's expansion, I am always jealous of the public projects, infrastructure, housing, etc. They always point out the huge unemployment of young people, declining birth rate, and other social ills.

They say they're worried when the building stops. Even more people will be out of jobs. And when the nation ages all they built will be used and maintained by fewer people

I've never been to china so it's interesting perspective from people with family there and go back 2-3 times a year

I always take these views with a grain of salt, many immigrant's view of their home country is ossified at the time of emigration.

In the same vein, it’s reasonable to take a foreigner’s view with a grain of salt. For all its impressive progress, China doesn’t show off its problems.

The “West” had the same problem many times during the first Cold War, where things in the Soviet Union seemed really great from the outside. Only after the collapse did the truth become clear.

Now, I don’t think China is even remotely similar, but never forget that it is not a free society.

Sure, but in this case it seems spot on. China really does have a disturbingly high youth unemployment rate, along with a population that's aging and shrinking. I have no idea if they're headed for a major economic crash, but the track record of command economies controlled by a paranoid aging dictator don't have a very good track record.

For all the things China does well there are plenty of reasons for Chinese people to be concerned about their future.

But we’ve seen this already in Japan, and it kind of worked out for them? Yes, they didn’t become the richest country in the world like everyone predicted in the 80s, they have stagnated a bit, but life there is still pretty good.

I’ve been visiting China since 1999 (and lived there for around 10 years). Rapid progress, lots of investments, over investment (ghost districts and ghost cities) are inevitable, but after its all over they will still have an advanced economy with lots of opportunities.

Why is that a problem? Most of the people in China live in about 1/3 of the country. Imagine if everyone in the United States lived in just 1/3 of the United States even with 350 million people that would be crowded , but China has 1.3 billion people living in an area the size of the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi river imagine 1.3 billion people living just in that area.

Building infrastructure for a civilized society is never bad and when I say that nothing is perfect. There are downsides. I would rather have the infrastructure and I wished the United States still had that can-do attitude. The rail system across the country needs to be upgraded desperately.

The Chinese have even taken the lessons of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, they have built two Thorium reactors and refueled one without turning it off, and they appear to be right on schedule to have that larger second reactor online by 2030.

> Building infrastructure for a civilized society is never bad

If only. Everybody loves cutting the ribbon on shiny new infrastructure, but the cost of maintenance is very real and never ending.

As a simple example, rezone some agricultural land as residential and sell it to developers. Yay, free money! But only once, and now you have a bunch of roads and plumbing etc etc that you need to upkeep forever. If there's people living in the houses and paying taxes, that's fine, but if there aren't or they go away, you now have a very big, very expensive problem. Japan is deep into feeling the pain of this and demographically China is only a decade or two behind.

> Imagine if everyone in the United States lived in just 1/3 of the United States

Take a 100 mile strip down the east coast and the west coast. Add Chicago. That's pretty much everyone.

Visit if you can, and take some bullet trains! We had a blast last year there.

Shanghai was great in the 2010s. Seems like a different place today.

Are the bullet trains making enough to pay down construction debt yet? My understanding is that that has been a struggle, which is going to be a problem when they get past being new and start having more and more maintenance expense on top of paying back construction debt.

China will likely become the go-to place for immigrants within couple decades. Just like any other developed economy had.

That would be quite the change, considering they don't really allow any outsiders to become citizens.

It's not always the case, for example Japan has very low immigration.

And there is also the demographic disparity at play here.

The US is attracting migrants mainly from Latin America, that's a population basin of 650M people, roughly 2 times the US population.

In China's case, the surrounding countries susceptible to provide migrants is what? a third of China's population?

I'm not knowledgeable nearly enough about the area but I also feel there are also significant cultural and historical elements limiting large scale immigration (for example, the complex Sino-Vietnamese relations).

I do wonder about this. With demographic collapse coming for almost all nations, or with a notable trend line for it to come, what would happen if other nations basically prevent emigration? Better to keep their people than lose them. Alternatively, those with large populations can use this as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations.

The coming decades will be interesting.

I don’t think so. They have a massive working population and foreign entrepreneurship is hard there. Also they have no process of assimilation and are pretty openly hostile to outsiders. If anything you might see low skilled immigrant labor moving there but I don’t think there’s going to be large numbers of high skilled workers moving there.

China had way more immigrants a decade ago, or even 25 years ago, than it does today. They have been opening up and then closing again for a while now, I think they found that they don’t really need many immigrants, if any, to develop. They aren’t going to become immigrant dependent like the west, at best it will be more like Japan where immigrants fly under the radar (literally, having African work crews out at night so the locals don’t notice).

This has yet to happen in East Asia and probably never will.

America and countries that engaged in worldwide colonisation are the exception not the rule.

I doubt it because the Chinese are very protective of their homogeneity and see what has happened in Europe as a massive cautionary tale. So my guess is that they will be very picky and control both quality and numbers tightly.

I'm passively curious how the long-term maintenance of this all ends up. You don't just build a bridge, you have to keep it up when the natural strain of the world impacts upon it. Given provinces already have debt problems [0], how the hell will all of this infrastructure look in 50 years?

[0]: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3254680/c...

This is the structure of catabolic collapse. When the mere maintenance costs over run the capabilities/resources of the civilisation.

Funnily enough it may turn out that those nations that just muddled along could have the best long term out comes. Yes, they never got the really good stuff but they also won't have a harder decline.

"You cannot fall out of bed if you sleep on the floor" - Turkish proverb

>I have two chinese-born coworkers (who spent 20-30 years here in the us) in the same room. When we talk about china's expansion, I am always jealous of the public projects, infrastructure, housing, etc. They always point out the huge unemployment of young people, declining birth rate, and other social ills.

You have all of that (huge unemployment of young people, declining birth rate, and other social ills) also in Europe MINUS the Chinese progress, your co-workers are clearly biased

but for other perspective - I lived in China 5+ years, left in 2016, I returned for 3 weeks vacation/family visit last summer and honestly I didn't see that many changes as you would expect, in China in 9 years you would expect pretty much different country by previous standards, but I was like "meh", hardly any changes beside few more EVs on the road (even there I was disappointed, Beijing clearly ain't Shenzhen, maybe 25-35% cars on the road and I am including hybrids as well), bunch of new subway lines and skyscrapers, but nothing mindblowing, it was actually quite underwhelming, people still smoke in restaurants (and policemen in police station right under No smoking sign), still noise and mess on (some) streets, even more street markets (gentrification) closed, on the positive note thanks to crappy economy and zero inflation or maybe even deflation salaries are same and prices remained same (you can rent apartment for like 200EUR in Beijing suburbs), I can't imagine having pretty much same price for meal after 9 years in European restaurant

Are these not the same things people are complaining about in the West, though?

Not hard to find the evidence of tofu dregs. Start being envious when they stop using ewaste as filler for concrete roads and buildings.

I traveled to Wuhan twice a year for business for much of the last decade (until the pandemic).

China was a growing country that clearly knew how to build infrastructure. In Wuhan, they built an entire development intended to employ 100,000 engineers (Huawei + our US company's 50). They built a subway system in a decade that's bigger than New York City's. I took the high-speed rail to Beijing and it was superb. They replaced an old, shabby international airport terminal with a new one with the widest concourse I've ever seen. They subsidized regular flights between Wuhan and San Francisco on China Southern airlines. The Hyatt Regency there was one of my favorite hotels I've ever stayed in (cheap and high quality). In a big commerical district, they had the largest screen I've ever seen that had a Blue Screen of Death :-)

Dazzling yet I'm not bullish on China due to its demographics, among many other reasons.

What’s wrong with their demographics? Population decline?

It has been called the 4-2-1 problem. 4 people had 2 kids. Those 2 kids had 1 of their own. This means there ends up with a more elderly people with far fewer young to support them. That doesn't look like a recipe for social stability. This is why they are going in so hard on automation nowadays, they are trying to do what Japan attempted in the 90s/2000s but hopefully with more success.

This was originally a side effect of the One child policy, but now it is continued due to difficult living situations. This is not a uniquely China issue.

https://alexatsintolas.weebly.com/the-4-2-1-problem.html

Whenever the topic of Chinese infrastructure comes up I am reminded of a 2016 Wired documentary about Shenzhen. It was positive portrayal of hacker culture in Shenzhen. But one thing really stood out to me. They had demarcation line separating the city and “urban village”. It looked like lots of poor people lived in the urban village. The guide mentioned that the urban village will be torn down completely in 3 months to expand the city and people had to move. It sounded like gentrification. The host was impressed by the efficiency.

But it made me question how many countries can actually be that “efficiency” because matters of uprooting large swath of population will take years not months and run into significant legal challenges as well.

To be clear use of eminent domain and gentrification happens even in US but I doubt it can be as “efficient” as a technocratic government. It’s not a knock on Chinese government, just something I always wonder.

Tearing down a slum is not gentrification.

Gentrification is when existing communities that used to have decent if basic living situations get gradually priced out of an area as richer people and their expensive amenities move in. Gradually, as house prices go up and food gets more expensive, people sell and move. It's a slow, mostly voluntary thing, or at least, driven by market forces rather than official mandates.

Tearing down a slum is a much more disruptive thing that instantly displaces a entire community. Although it's unclear what happened to that community in this case and I can't find anything clear about it online (lots of clearly biased articles for one side or the other though).

A Chinese person who was here in the US as a foreign student once commented to me that he was so surprised that the United States was like the country side. He didn’t realize how rural the country was.

This was at UCLA which is in LA which is the second biggest city in the US.

West LA isn't like a Chinese city, but no one in their right mind would call UCLA rural

When friends visited NYC and we drove around a bit they said “it’s like everything is half finished”

Did he ask about all the bricked up windows in London?

You get what you incentivize.

Is that just because of the scaffolding on everything? IIRC that's due to some legal or tax bullshit.

I get the same thing here is Australia. There is a lot of space with little going on.

I mean we have the Nullarbor plain. The name literally means 'No Trees', and it is very fitting.

If you ever end up there... I hope you don't.

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

People are also surprised how rural much of China is.

https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/origin.png

Posting the map in case anyone hasn’t seen it.

Presumably referring to population density? People like the low density in California.

I'd say it's a country that builds a ton of infrastructure, at the expense of living standards of common people. The money from infra has to come from anywhere, and an all-powerful central government can just redirect the stream from consumer spending into building out infrastructure. Whether Chinese are happy about it, you'd have to ask them.

The US is not building infrastructure at the expense of living standard of common people. Ask Americans if they're happy about it.

On the move to where? Massive unemployment amongst youth and population collapse is on its way.

You are projecting a fantasy.

BYD has pretty amazing tech to be honest, but putting protectionism as an argument against the US and pro BYD in the same sentence is naive at best. The CCP allowed BYD to exist and the CCP can end BYD in a single weekend regardless of any human right concerns elsewhere.

And, more to the point, BYD exists because the CCP has been aggressively protectionist of its domestic companies and has been strongly involved in growing, supporting, and protecting its domestic industry to ensure it has one. BYD is not a cautionary tale about protectionism, it's a sales pitch for it.

Well, different kinds of protectionism.

The CCP's protectionism is because China is going for a cultural victory. It wants Chinese products to be available and inexpensive and purchased around the world. It puts resources to that end.

The US's protectionism is for the enrichment of the CEO, board members, stockholders, and Executive Branch's family members. It wants to protect the domestic market from sending money somewhere other than the relatives of the people in power.

While they're both "protectionism" they're not the same policies.

It is just sad that commentary like this even exists.

I sincerely am curious of the education that produces sentences like this. On one hand it is articulate and educated, on the other hand its amazing that one can think China is doing this out of charity and not wiping out its competitors one after the other.

Hasn’t the US been equally so, including the auto company bailouts, government fleet purchases restricted to US-made vehicles, US national moves to secure supply chain inputs for the auto makers, etc.?

The main difference that I see isn’t protectionism, it’s that BYD took a direction the market wanted, whereas US auto makers have not produced vehicles that were appealing to consumers who had choices.

BYD's direction was largely at the behest of the Chinese government, who were willing to demand things of BYD in exchange for that protectionism, instead of wringing their hands and saying "nothing you can do about the market" while simultaneously propping up industries of national strategic significance.

No, it is not. From mass recalls to faking sales targets and finances, BYD is actually facing serious problems. As soon as their benefits stop they are going the way of Evergrande

These aren't things unknown to other car manufacturers. Tesla, in particular, has suffered from mass recalls and faking sales. It also only really exists as a company because of government investment.

I may end up living outside the US next year (was going to be this year but it’s been postponed) and when I was investigating auto options, I’ve been severely tempted by the BYD Seal as a replacement for my Prius. All the reviews I’ve found have been positive and while I’m not a big fan of the compromises made in the display mount for the useless automatic rotation feature, it’s quite tempting. I’m torn between just getting a new Prius or spending an additional 8K for the Seal. I don’t know that I’ll drive enough for the difference in cost to add up (or, for that matter, to justify buying a car at all, but that’s a question for a different day), but I really like the idea of not contributing to the pollution in the urban area I’d be living. Option C would be the plugin hybrid version of the Seal which would be cheaper than the Prius.

Where outside the US? You might be fine with just a bike and transit.

Mexico City. The big gotcha is that I have two kids and an ex-wife who will be living a few miles away so there will be 1–4 times per week that I’ll need to manage their transport between homes. The kids are the main reason I own a car now.

The US has thousands of atrocities under its belt. For this aspect, the US and China tie in terms of the leaderboard.

> the CCP can end BYD in a single weekend

Seeing the way tech companies behave makes me think they fear Trump the same way. for example, Tim Apple certainly crawls up Trumps arse.

While not exactly the same, it does rhyme. More a case of suck up to Donny T and hope they give a tax break or something. Keep the shareholders happy.

I suspect you will see the same out of John Apple later this year.

I don't mean to downplay Trump's strongarming of industry or the obsequiousness shown by tech leaders, but let's be real, it's not remotely the same level of control.

the government is basically subservient to him, and there isn't anything stopping it from making a company cease to exist other than the status quo. If, for whatever reason, him (or in his absence the rest of the government) decide they don't want it to exist, it won't exist. It might not be as explicit as how the CCP does it, but it will have the same result

Biden and Obama did not had remotely same level if control. And they would be checked by court.

Trump has that control and supreme court will support his project 2025 consistently.

Running a business isn't a human right. Also, I hate the conflation people have that the ability for the CCP to do something means it would. Furthermore, the party in socialist states is basically just the government. It being called a party and being explicitly ideological in function isn't, in practice, very different from the US having something called the federal government that has a constitutional ideology

Doing anything you want to do that does not harm anyone else, and helps some, is most certainly a human right.

To arbitrarily repress this most basic impulse, the one to go after a dream to make better ways to do things, is severely anti-human.

Most businesses are in this category.

the problem is that it does harm people, at least at the large scale. And china exists because of that harm

>dream to make better ways to do things

The inability to exploit other peoples labor to achieve that doesn't mean those things are denied

The US can end any of its trillion dollar companies overnight. Ask anthropic how much they were looking forward to being on the receiving end of the orange gibbon's ire.

That's pretty much everywhere, especially China.

If you have ambitions that are contrary to that of the Party, well, they're going to get what they want, one way or another. It doesn't matter if you don't want to deal your AI to the military or if you'd rather not sell your home so that a highway can be built over the lot.

Some countries have stronger rule of law protections and social customs that enforce them, but the US has been on a speed run to dismantle all of them in the past year.

In what world is China less "protectionist" than the US?

The world before all of the big beautiful tariffs.

It's depressing that we can't buy BYD in the USA. It's feeling more and more like being stuck with a Lada in the 1980s.

Are BYD cars specifically banned or do they just not comply with all the US regulations?

Ya I heard that from some chinese facebook users... oh wait...

A BYD seal is basically comparable to a model 3, except it has a more classic car aesthetic as opposed to a giant screen. What are we missing out on?

I believe they're specifically referring to energy policy. As they said:

> massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects

The protectees in this case are fossil fuel interests.

The modern discourse is quite rough -- people have been making these equivalencies for quite some time -- but as the US behavior becomes worse and worse, these equivalencies become more and more true. And as they become truer, the people who have always been pushing them only feel vindicated.

It's quite unfortunate, but I can't say I blame them. From their perspective the tiger is finally showing its stripes.

There are two types of protectionism:

1. Protecting your interests by building a dynamic strategy. You protect your interests by enhancing your strengths and building on them.

2. Protecting your interests by playing “defense” against your decline.

We all know which country chose which path.

Chinese party leadership is stacked with literal engineers. They’ve prioritized development of industries crucial to their success. For example, they know they’re never going to be a big oil producer and that fighting wars over oil is expensive and futile, so they have developed their path to energy independence with their solar and wind industry along with electrified transit of all types.

Meanwhile, in America, our leadership is stacked with grifters who only have experience in shifting money around. We are all stuck with oil and car dependence that nobody’s willing to address with long-term infrastructure development reforms.

We are trapped fighting wars over oil because $6-7/gallon gasoline in middle America would trigger a major recession. Our government actively incentivizes wasting oil via automotive regulations written by industry lobbyists. That big F-150 parked at the Old Navy that doesn’t need to follow CAFE regulations is totally a “work truck.”

We don’t strive to build the most competitive industries, instead we use sanctions and tariffs to prevent foreign competition from reaching our shores.

And before you talk about China disallowing foreign competition, I’ll note that Chinese citizens can go to the mall in China and buy a Tesla, an iPhone, an Audi, Levi’s jeans, Coach bags, do a web search on Bing, deploy applications on AWS servers in Beijing, etc.

> 1. Protecting your interests by building a dynamic strategy.

"Dynamic" is doing a hell of a lot of work there. I guess what you mean is steal technology from the west, undercut pricing on foreign goods and dump products in their markets to destroy the competition, end up being the last one standing, because you freely violate trade agreements (as a member of the WTO) and other treaties.

> " so they have developed their path to energy independence with their solar and wind industry along with electrified transit of all type"

They have more coal power than the rest of the world combined, and are building more. Their "path to energy independence with their solar and wind" is purely propaganda.

>they know they’re never going to be a big oil producer

They're literally the sixth largest, just behind Iraq and ahead of Iran. I'm pretty sure people consider Iraq a "big oil producer", right? They also have the 13th most proven untapped oil reserves, and likely more than that since they're not in the business of oversharing.

> We are trapped fighting wars over oil because $6-7/gallon gasoline in middle America would trigger a major recession.

Our gasoline risks hitting $6-7/gallon because of a war we needlessly started to distract from our leader's seemingly rapidly progressing dementia, his approval numbers that are the lowest since I think LBJ, oh, and him being named repeatedly in the files of a notorious pedophile and child sex trafficker.

In the world of Chinese media I suppose? To me this all looks like the same hand-wringing angst we went through in the 1980’s with the industrialization of Japan bearing massive fruit.

Right down to the shaky real estate markets.

China has surpassed the US in total energy generation, and the gap is growing in their favor every year.

Japan never surpassed the US in power or industrial output. China is different. They’ve clearly surpassed the US in some key areas.

BYD has to me become an icon of German decline vs Chinese expansion.

My view.

I was looking at a new car. Went into several car shops, VW, Skoda, Toyota and BYD.

And all of them were basically empty and BYD was FULL! Like really really full.

And the sales guy confirmed it, they are selling cars like crazy.

Which country was this in?

Well.. Germany :)

Wow, it will be interesting to see how this changes things over the next few years

Must be EU somewhere, never seen a Skoda anywhere else.

Plenty in NZ. The police use the wagon. They used to use GM/Holden vehicles but at some point they became the worse choice (reduced headroom in the rear seats amongst other reasons).

they're reasonably popular in Australia. They have done a good job of marketing their station wagons/estates to the road-biking community

Many predicted it for a long time, the US will always be a great power, for structural and geographical reasons, but it won't keep the position it had for almost a century.

The good thing about China is that apart from Taiwan they have little territoral ambitions, I don't foresee huge conflicts incoming, but I am a not entirely sure the US will manage to lost its position as gracefully as the British Empire.

It could be bad news for US citizens if their currency precipitiously lose its power, and they'll look for people to blame.

> The good thing about China is that apart from Taiwan they have little territoral ambitions

One of the reasons China wants Taiwan is because it would enable further territorial expansions into The Philippines and Japan. China considers any neighboring Democratic nation a threat. Taiwan is just their first / easiest prospective target.

If you have access to PBS, there's a very good documentary that touches on this a bit called Invisible Nation.

> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights

The U.S. record on human rights is horrific, if you see it from a global perspective (which you should). China is a saint in comparison.

That's certainly a take. China just has this decades long history of targeting foreign industries, flooding the market with that product, and then being the only one left standing.

The idea that we should allow cheap vehicles to flood the domestic market because that will "cause the US auto manufacturers compete" ignores the wholly uneven playing field at work here, and the government backed goal of one side. Just the cost of labor alone makes that not an approachable thing to do.

On the reverse "bad" US side, we have more and more international auto manufacturers building and investing in factories in the US every year. Strangely, this decision involves billions of dollars and years of work to make happen. It's not based on internet vibes.

And the "renewable" growth is really kind of misleading. They're also building more coal power plants than the rest of the earth, combined, each year. They represent ~50% of the worldwide coal power in use today and produce roughly one third of the total CO2 in the world now, almost 3x that of the US.

But I guess the future is government funded undercutting of international competitors, using technology stolen by the government from those competitors, in order to destroy those competitors, while using very dirty and cheap energy to do so? Is that the lesson we're supposed to learn from them?

The US auto manufacturers could compete, they just don't want to.

They've played their own regulatory capture games here and have all but abandoned the concept of affordable small cars & EVs. They've decided to go all in on $80k luxury EVs and enormous trucks (while being protected by 25% tariffs on light truck imports), and the stupid CAFE footprint loophole.

Maybe if they'd stop flooding our streets with ridiculously sized vehicles and actually tried to compete, it would be a different story. They aren't even trying.

We are just as capable of offering subsidies, if thats what it takes, to make small affordable EVs.

It's what the USA did during its industrialisation, it's what Japan did during its industrialisation. If you are looking to history to find ways to make your country prosper and industrialise, wouldn't you take those examples since they panned out pretty well?

The US, via a wide reaching, decades long government policy stole technology from other countries, passed that along to chosen domestic companies, and helped flood the market with the stolen/cheaper goods by supporting the companies doing so to produce goods to be sold at below cost?

There's a lot of data around that in the history of the US and Japan?

For the first part, yep. Samuel Slater (known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" in the US, but "Slater the Traitor" in the UK) was the most well known example, but was also simply one piece of a large policy of ignoring European parents and encouraging people to come with 'stolen technology' to the US and make a competing company here.

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

Also, the Chinese are absolutely making a profit on their exports, so I'd question your "below cost" broad characterization.

> The US, via a wide reaching, decades long government policy stole technology from other countries, passed that along to chosen domestic companies... market with the stolen/cheaper goods by supporting the companies doing so to produce goods to be sold at below cost?

NSA spied on Airbus in the 90s and passed along information to Boeing and MacDonell Douglas - paving the way for the latter to win a Saudi deal, over Airbus. Further, Boeing airliner development is subsidized by military purchases of its jets by the US government. Its easy to forget that increasing the influence of and/or financially benefitting American champions falls under the auspices of "National interest"

See Doron Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power. Concern for IP tends to come _after_ a country develops.

> The idea that we should allow cheap vehicles to flood the domestic market because that will "cause the US auto manufacturers compete" ignores the wholly uneven playing field at work here

We have been here before. This is Japan and the 1970s all over again.

The US car companies will absolutely refuse to deliver the affordable, high volume cars everybody wants until kicked in the ass and balls several times. In the 1970s it was land yachts; in the 2020s it's gigantic SUVs and brodozers.

I do not like what China and BYD represent. However, if they are the only way to dislodge the US car companies that are blocking progress, so be it.

American car manufacturers have extremely small market shares outside N.A., and many (all?) of them required multiple government bailouts over the past few decades.

If you think that keeping China is good for the consumer, you'll have to present a stronger case than "we must protect our companies".

> If you think that keeping [out] China is good for the consumer

It would be excellent for the consumer, in the rather short term, to not keep them out. Cheap cars! Cheap goods flooding our markets are great for consumers in the short term.

> American car manufacturers have extremely small market shares outside N.A

Here's a game:

One company is American. The other is not.

Company 1 Market Share: North America: 16.5% South America: 8.9% Asia: 7.6%

Company 2 Market Share: North America: 14.87% South America: 8.3% Asia: 8.28%

Now, without looking, which is the "US company without market share outside of NA", and which is the foreign company that understands how to compete?

Unfortunately, I looked, so let me add to this game, starting with the fact you omitted Europe:

Company 1: Europe ~0% (trucks & SUVs just don't sell well there it seems) Company 2: Europe 7%

Company 1: Manufactures in 8 countries, 2/3 of its factories are in North America. Company 2: Local production of cars in 25-30 countries depending on partnerships.

Company 1 data: 2025. Company 2 data: 2020 (?!)

Company 1 is the American one?

Even more so with public transport.

In 2008 China had 1,300km of high speed rail. In 2025 they had over 45,000km.

Meanwhile America has zero…. But is bringing back the V8! Ye-haw!

/insert star wars anakin and padme meme

Surely with the cost of fuel skyrocketing we'll pivot to public transit and non-fossil-fuel transport, right? Right?

It seems like BYD is a much bigger threat to Europe (specifically Germany) and Japan. The auto industry is big in the US but an insignificant amount of total exports. Germany and Japan could both lose their cash cows if the Chinese auto industry dominates international sales.

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

That's not really like with like. If you divided the states in USA into countries, their sales would be "international". The designation is misleading.

The main point is that BYD is an existential threat to Germany and Japan. Per Wikipedia (List of countries by exports + List of countries by vehicle exports, latest available data):

- US: ~$144B vehicle exports / ~$3.23T total exports → ~4.5% - Germany: ~$280B / ~$1.99T → ~14% - Japan: ~$151B / ~$922B → ~16%

Even if you treat US states as separate 'countries' and balloon the US export denominator further, the ratio doesn't move into the same league. Autos are roughly 3x more important to Germany and ~3.5x more important to Japan as a share of foreign-earned revenue than they are to the US.

BYD taking the US auto export share is an inconvenience for a few states. BYD taking Germany's or Japan's is regime-altering for the whole national economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle_e... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports

BYD is successful because they are cheap. For most people cars are simple utilities.

But countries either need to be protectionist or you need to lower production costs to a Chinese level. That means workers only earn the same as a Chinese worker.

You could also collect import taxes, but I think people simply cannot or don't want to afford a car that is much more expensive.

Some decry Chinese government subsidies for cars, but the truth is that these exist in western nations as well. They are sometimes indirect, but the end result is the same. The secret to cheap prices is simple labor costs.

Commonly refereed to as race to the bottom and not a new topic/problem. Car makers in countries with high labor costs could maybe pivot to luxury cars... otherwise the result of the competition is already determined.

In 50 years China will have the same problem with other countries that produce even cheaper. That is already happening and for quite a few years already.

Taxes would probably be the best solution, but they have become politicised and weaponised.

> BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion. It’s just one example among many of China charting the way forward and innovating while the US recedes further into backward-looking, protectionist policy. See: US politicians on both sides trying to ban BYD imports rather than incentivizing stiffer competition from US automakers.

The problem is, China isn't competing fairly!

As a Western manufacturer, bound to well-paying union labor and environmental protection laws, and restricted by the mechanisms of the free markets, you cannot compete with a country that employs all sorts of labor abuses (from complete ignorance about OSHA and its national equivalents over 996 work model to outright forced labor and slavery), completely wrecks its own environment and provides virtually unlimited financial funds to its companies in its quest to achieve dominance.

China is inarguably the biggest threat the entire rest of the world faces and barely anyone is even seeing the dangers.

How did it get here though? The west basically handed them everything on a plate and gutted the domestic industries for a quick profit. What next?

I would support allowing any Chinese automaker in the US if they form a 51:49 joint venture with an American company.

Wait, wasn't the free market supposed to be a superior system? You cannot at the same time argue that something is better and wish you didn't have it

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Or just China just deserve special treatment?

> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression.

Just curious-- if you did say something about this, what would it be?

And even more an icon of european irrelevance. In Prague almost all EVs are Teslas. I see a BYD time to time. Škoda or Volkswagen almost never.

No wonder, VAG has only produced overpriced cars for a while...

I recently helped a friend looking for a brand new SUV in the 70-80,000 euro range (taxes included) and the audi Q5 was both the most expensive and the worst built one in that price range.

We checked loads of cars and agreed that the volvo XC60 was arguably the best value for money, the BMW X3 was the one which drove the best (but also the most uncomfortable), the Lexus NX450h was the most comfortable and the best built, the Mercedes GLC was probably the most balanced one (although the value for money wasn't great).

The Audi Q5 only stood out for poor build quality and being overpriced. It's literally the only car which we didn't see an upside for, we didn't even bother to test-drive it... Also it seems they aren't very reliable anymore...

As a counterpoint, around 1/3 of EVs I see in France are Renaults. SImilar story, but a bit less evident, in Spain.

Both have decent amounts of Hyundai Ioniqs, Teslas, and some BYDs and Dacias. But especially in France, Renault Meganes, 5s and now the 4 is everywhere.

Don't forget that "Europe" is actually 30ish (if you count EU) or even more countries (if you count the continent), with wildly different markets and players on them.

Sure, it could be that in Czechia most EVs owners are still tech fans and they choose Tesla. BYD expands to the EU from the east, so it may overrepresentated here. Škoda apparently has decent electric sales in the Vokswagen group. Just anecdotally something like 80% EVs I see are Teslas.

In the Netherlands I see plenty of Renault 5s or VW IDs, many Teslas, too. And almost no BYD

I don't mind restricting Chinese imports in principle, since China is well known to be very protectionist, moreso than Western countries for sure. Trade needs to be a two way street.

That said, it is indeed disappointing that we can't get their affordable EVs over here. Western legacy automakers really need a kick in the ass (especially since Tesla seems to just be phoning it in now).

With EVs, Tesla's the only one in the US not phoning it in. I used to think they were until I got a new Model Y Juniper.

I don't count Rivian or Lucid until they actually have even somewhat affordable EVs.

But pretty much everyone else in the US is doing a piss poor job with EVs and just don't seem to care at all. Ford seemed to have lost interest in the F-150 lightning.

I agree that trade needs to be a two way street. But I'm not convinced yet on "affordable" since these might be severely subsidized by the Chinese Gov to undermine domestic car makers across different nations. I say might only because I'm not 100% sure.

Tesla still seems like they're phoning it in to me. Where's the generational refreshes? Where's the Model 2, or any new regular consumer models?

Obviously Rivian and Lucid don't have affordable cars yet, but they seem to be moving in that direction, and they're clearly still trying.

I'm hopeful about Slate, though obviously they haven't sold anything yet so it's just hope.

I do think they're missing an affordable SUV (something that's a true 3-row SUV like the Model X but cheaper). And Musk has teased something like that recently.

And Rivian is about to make an affordable SUV. So overall, I am hoping that there is a vibrant ecosystem of EVs from companies that actually understand software (as opposed to many EVs that have shitty software). Not sure about Lucid.

>Ford seemed to have lost interest in the F-150 lightning.

Here's to hoping their EV Maverick is still on track:

Ford Teases New Details About Its $30K EV Truck Coming Next Year

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a71204448/ford-ev-truck-fu...

How do you like Model Y so far? I am eyeing that and a Rivian. The newest Y design is great (outside) and the price is where I want it. But I can’t help thinking that it will break the second I complete my signature for purchase/lease.

I absolutely love it. I had a Model 3 for 7 years before that, and that car (at least in 2018) felt like a slightly beta car. Manufacturing was a bit shoddy in places, but still was an _awesome_ car to have for 7 years.

But the Model Y seems like they fixed everything I complained about with the 3. Smoother ride, everything feels higher quality, and FSD (if you can get it) is just amazing.

Anyway with Teslas, you feel like you're living 10 years in the future from everyone else on the road. But Full Self-Driving makes it feel even more stark.

Like I said, at the price points of the Model Y (at its quality), there aren't too many alternatives. At least in Sept 2025 when I looked. I wish there were.

I don't count BYD because I was never going to buy a BYD even if it was available, because of how deeply connected these cars are nowadays. Maybe it's irrational, but giving the growing drumbeat of some sort of conflict with China over Taiwan, it doesn't seem prudent to have a fully connected car phoning home to the CCP.

> Ford seemed to have lost interest in the F-150 lightning.

It’s cancelled.

So is the Chev Silverado EV.

The Chevy is not. A refresh was delayed

EV trucks don't work yet. The technology isn't there yet in this country. You can't tow.

I've had to rent cars a couple times the last year due to flight cancellations. Twice I got a corolla and was really impressed how nice they were, then I got an upgrade to a Cadillac. It had the lousiest transmission and the interior was covered in low quality feeling materials. Honestly at this point I would never buy American, sloppiest fit and finish I've seen.

Oh, don't worry. I'm sure Mr. Stable Orange will follow the tradition and institute a Capybara tax soon, forbidding import of any foreign EV smaller than 2 meters wide and 7 meters long and having a fully enclosed body. That will show those libruls :) .

> Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.

Coal is still the majority of generation capacity [1] in China and China continues to build a lot more coal [2]

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

[2]: https://apnews.com/article/china-coal-solar-climate-carbon-e...

> BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion

Is this supposed to help virality or something? "US decline"?

Who cares? China is revving up energy production in renewables to out eat the fossil production, but all of these processes are energy hungry, and you have to pay the non renewable cost to create the renewables. But then you don’t need the fossil fuels anymore. My solar panels will produce for the next 30+ years and power my EV with very little effort or maintaining, whereas the fuel I used to drive my ICE car to the store yesterday is gone forever and will need millions of years of dead things to recreate.

This is literally using fossil fuels to create renewable energy, which is the ultimate sane and responsible way to use the energy from fossil fuels.

The US with its high natgas generation is much cleaner than a majority coal driven generation scheme. I'm puzzled why we talk about "US decline" when we're pretty much creating paeans to marginal energy construction. Sure China's trajectory is good.

But it's still not at the point where it's cleaner per capita than the US and it's still quite far from that. Let's talk about reality here. The US shouldn't rest on its laurels, but we need to be real about where we are not how we feel

A lot can change. This administration has 2.5 years left. I'm tired of Reddit and Twitter doom-based virality hacks subsuming every net forum.

As an american i feel it. have you ever visited China? it's sad man, in more and more industries america is only able to compete by banning china from even contesting the market

Not just on dumping or price, actual product quality, innovation and value. It's impossible to visit a Huawei store in Beijing and not feel it in your bones

> As an american i feel it. have you ever visited China? it's sad man, in more and more industries america is only able to compete by banning china from even contesting the market

That's how China was able to compete: banning America from contesting the market.

> As an american i feel it

How do we have a productive discussion about our feelings on a tech site?

As much as coal is bad for the environment, eliminating it completely isn't a great idea. It's one of the few sources of energy capable of a black start https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023/06/13/black-start/

Renewables generally aren't capable of a black start, wind turbines in particular use induction generators that require external power.

Batteries & solar (with sunlight) can black start if they have grid-forming inverters. Grid-following inverters are cheaper, but there's nothing physical or engineering-based that prevents using grid-forming inverters on enough renewable sources to black start when needed, just the economics of cheaper installations.

> It's one of the few sources of energy capable of a black start

Doesn't hydropower count for like half of our black start capability?

> Renewables generally aren't capable of a black start, wind turbines in particular use induction generators that require external power.

Wind farms and PV both can use batteries to support black start capability.

The problem the US has, at least in this area, is that it's manufacturing is in the dumps and that's not even plainly bad thing.

No US born child in the last 30 years aspired to working a factory job. The US is an advanced economy with advanced jobs. We get degrees, we sit at desks, maybe even sit at home, work on computers, and generate an order of magnitude more wealth than our screw turning counterpart overseas.

I can tell you with first hand experience, that this problem is much deeper than "the US needs to catch up" because in reality what is happening is that China is the one playing catch up. The US is already 30 years into the endgame of economic development. China is where the US was 75 years ago, and on paper, the US has only progressed from that point.

> We get degrees, we sit at desks, maybe even sit at home, work on computers, and generate an order of magnitude more wealth than our screw turning counterpart overseas

Generate wealth for whom, though?

That's also ignoring the entire economic underclass that system creates of service & gig workers that can no longer afford to live in the cities in which they work. Not everyone has the ability or desire for knowledge work.

The US still needs to catch up too. We have an infrastructure problem. Where is our high speed rail and public transit? Cycling infrastructure? Renewables? Housing in high demand areas? Socialized healthcare? Safety nets for said economic underclass?

We are behind in so many ways because we view wealth generation for the top xy% as the only metric of success.

> China is where the US was 75 years ago

Quite a wild claim

It's the progression of countries from agriculture economies to service economies. 1950's US was a manufacturing powerhouse with almost entirely in house supply chains and with heavy public infrastructure drives, not at all unlike China today.

But trust me, all those people working in poor conditions for cheap pay in China will do everything they can to ensure their kids don't work those jobs. And just like the US, that fountain of cheap labor will go away and everyone will want their comfy high paying desk job.

It makes sense to ban BUD imports but don’t you dare try and both sides this argument by saying EV and renewable power strategy are the same on both sides.

Tesla would be considerably more popular globally if Elon kept his political opinions to himself and exaggerated capabilities and timelines a bit less.

Another thing overtaking the US is average IQ scores. Both in the current baseline and in rate of change. US has been declining, China has been increasing.

> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression.

To be very practical here… the lack of rights and freedoms as they exist in China typically has no consequence to the lives of individual people. For example you have no right to protest. But how many of us have exercised that right in the US? Personally I never did. And honestly those protests end up being just parties and parades

I see claims like this all the time on HN. Where is this data supposed to be coming from? When I look it up on Google, I get data ultimately sourced from shady online IQ tests (which nonetheless purport to provide a monotonic ranking of every country in the world from China to Nauru, despite the fact that virtually none of these countries collect IQ scores from their populations).

I have no reason to doubt that China is modernizing and improving their gross aptitude for knowledge work! The directional point you're making may very well be valid! I'm just wondering how anyone could be quantifying it in terms of "average IQ", a metric that generally does not exist.

It does exist. You take all iqs of people measured and you average it. Boom it exists.

As for iq by country all you need to do is google it. Many sources… all pretty aligned.

That being said lots of people in academia question the validity of these per country iq scores but that’s because they scored low from the aforementioned country in context.

I write my congressman every few months about something. Sometimes just to send a form letter that one of the various organizations writes for me. I also vote regularly.

You should too.

futile attempts at change. All your work logically amounts to know measurable difference in change. Imagine the counter factual if you didn't vote or write letters. Nothing changes. Your actions are irrational in nature and that is the tragedy of the commons.

Additionally because your actions are irrational, the majority of people don't actually exercise the rights you exercise. That again is the tragedy of the commons.

So in short I'm still right, and you've proven nothing.

A key point is whether a government actually cares about its citizens and their future, which also creates a side benefit for humanity in general.

It's not quite nationalism or maybe the term is being used as a disguise for something else, if those in power believe 50% or even the majority of their own population is not worth worrying about, should be "thrown away", or "removed". Out of control elitism and corruption, combined with lack of empathy and narcissism, can very easily undermine human rights, freedom, and national progress.

Left in US sneer at technocrats but absolutely gobble up their products with gusto.

No to me it just shows 2 different capital allocation strategies.

China picked manufacturing.

US picked datacenters.

The US is very strong in manufacturing. There is a lot lower percentage of the population working in the factories (thanks to automation), but there is just as much as there ever was if not more. It isn't high value/growth like data centers, but it is still there and strong

If 90% of the data centers in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb tomorrow, communication would be a shit show for a month or two, and then go on, as we'd fall back to simpler, less compute-expensive solutions. We'd also probably be net better off without all the adtech crap.

If 90% of the factories in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb, you'd find that your standard of living would immediately, and quite observably plummet.

You tell me which is more important.

The amount of internet technocrap we actually need to live comfortably is a tiny fraction of what actually gets built. Most of it is in service of adtech, the surveillance state, or shaving 0.5% off some rentseeker's fat margins (on his side, the savings aren't passed on to us).

Whilst manufacturing has more practical value than much of what's in datacentres[1] it doesn't necessarily follow that it's the more valuable strategic play or route to long term economic growth (bubble or no bubble)

Food is more critical to us than Alibaba crap or even top notch smartphones and would be missed rather more if we had a nuclear exchange, but Chinese entrepreneurs would rather own factories exporting manufactured goods than rice paddies, and for good reason. The Chinese government would like to be self sufficient with food production, but unlike many less technologically developed countries it isn't. Most of those countries stay poor though. Food doesn't change or scale as much as manufacturing, which possibly doesn't change as fast or scale as big as compute. Plus in theory at least, some of the compute is being devoted to automating away dependency on offshore labour for manufacturing, although I suspect China is generally ahead in the manufacturing automation areas of AI anyway...

[1]I'd rather have kitchen appliances than novelty image generation, spamblogs or ad retargeting, but then again I'd also rather have access to knowledge and communications than plastic toys...

No, US picked services, financials, defense, and energy

China picked manufacturing, infrastructure, consumable exports

All the compromises here were pointed out by critics on the left many decades ago. Letting capital flee to where labour was cheapest eviscerated the entire US and Canadian northeast/midwest manufacturing sector and was policy driven from the right.

That and we decided that only the private sector should be responsible for building infrastructure and housing, and then wondered why the cost of building either skyrocketed in cost...

And yet now it's the (far) right freaking out and trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

That idea that you could have a) stopped globalism as lots of new giant markets opened up after the 1970s and b) be better off paying 2x for everything by banning everything foreign is just a fantasy. It’s just nostalgia fueled radical politics that both the far left and right latch on to.

The other part of the story that gets ignore is the administrative state exploding in the US/Canada post 1970s, where making new industry and development became very difficult making other countries more attractive while the cost of living exploded.

So instead of becoming competitive all we’re left with is these ideas of the government forcing domestic industry by using national security as an excuse to justify the backwards economics of it all.

the US picked those because it was cheaper to move the others to china. It again shows that capitalism will inevitably die without colonialism

US is not even capable of building data centers (or anything else anymore). This is why all the planned capacity is waaaaaay behind schedule year after year, as if Elon is running the entire operation :)

And yet we will do worse in both categories

I never really expected the USA to allow low tariff Chinese car imports since China has been very protective of their own car market over the last couple of decades. I did expect BYD to set up some factories in the USA (or Canada Mexico when NAFTA was still a thing) to make their EVs for the American markets (should be affordable in a third world state like Mississippi), just like the Japanese auto manufacturers did. It’s sad that we aren’t getting that anytime soon.

America has simply forgot how to build real things on a schedule and on a budget. Our only real niche now is software (with help from Indian and Chinese talent) and locked down tech that China will eventually figure out. It’s very hard to not be pessimistic about the direction the USA is going and I can see why people elected someone horrible like Trump (he promised a way out, even if it was a stupid way out that would never work).

One thing China did which was smart was to start training thousands of engineers about twenty years ago, about 10x the number of US engineering graduates. That's paying off now.

It was also a little sad to see the treatment of Tesla by Biden. It was the world's leading EV company at the time but he excluded from EV get togethers because he wanted the unionised companies like GM to win. I think that sort of thing - protecting mediocre incumbents that contribute to the right politicians didn't help. Musk was a dem at the time but after that flipped to Trump and went a bit off the rails.

In some ways it’s sad to see, but I’d be lying to say I didn’t have a little happiness seeing the actions of politicians in the U.S. catch up with them.

It’s like there was this belief, we are the most powerful country in the world and we can do whatever we want. Meanwhile we see countries very much question that as we flounder in the Middle East for the umpteenth time in a few decades. We see countries start to get away from the dollar, we see countries call out our military leaders for poor planning.

It’s not like the American public deserve this, but America itself might.

lmao. "religious nationalism"? What are you referring to here? The USA's new tighter immigration standards? What pray tell is China's immigration policy? Ignorance? Are you referring to perhaps San Francisco progressives eliminating enhanced schooling because it makes some students feel bad about themselves?

https://www.educationnext.org/san-franciscos-detracking-expe...

Fear? Oh I know, you are talking about how in blue states they can't even build simple housing never mind mega projects like high speed rail and that's why red states are acquiring population and capital at accelerating speeds.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/why-nothin...

those mega projects are almost always killed by republicans. also, listen to the rhetoric around christianity in republican circles and tell me it isn't religious nationalism

Ah yes, like those dang ol no good reds in single party California, sabotaging their high speed rail project for the past 20 years. 14 billion in the hole and not a single mile of track.

Sounds like wishful and biased thinking, but enjoy your updoots

It's like what happened in the 80's with japanese cars. Except, America's poised to become a oligarchy and will absolute just punch itself in the face rather than let the oligarchy suffer.

China harvests organs of muslims. China doesn't allow LGBTQ representation on public media. China forcibly married uyghur women to handle men. It's important to remember the whole global picture before we take sides.

> China doesn't allow LGBTQ representation on public media.

And several US states are inching closer to making being some of those letters, particularly the T, outright illegal.

[flagged]

>innovating

Right.

Refining already invented things is 'innovation'.

that's what most innovation is. the model T wasn't the first car. it was the car that was sufficiently refined to take over.

We have very different definitions of innovation.

Respondants:

Please, stop lying on the internet. It's not healthy. Stop making things up.

Source:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innovation

Making cars faster or cheaper isn't an "innovation". Making a flying car is innovation. Inventing the car is invention.

Systematic government-aided intellectual property theft, lax labor laws, low wages and low standards of living aren't innovative.

I assume you're being sarcastic, but it actually is.

38.9% of BYDs direct profits are from subsidies. Tesla subsidies expired already… if we are going to judge on equal footing China is subsidizing a much bigger part of BYDs sales.

From my understanding China did have subsidies for EVs but that expired last year.

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

Really? I think 38.9% of statistics without sources are made up.

Would be great if we could buy/drive these in the US. Funny how we have a "free market" only when it is convenient for certain interests...

For anyone that doesn't know, then president Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law in 1988 that banned all car imports into the US unless the car is at least 25 yaers old.

Why? Because US Mercedez-Benz dealers were selling their cars at too high a price and a lot of Americans were importing them directly from Germany. So the dealers associations lobbied Congress for a ban.

Country of free markets, by the way.

This is entirely misleading and misinformation -- only those not meeting all applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS).

They're all over the place in Mexico City. It'll be interesting as these EVs start to show up along the northern and southern borders traveling within the US.

WSJ had a piece on just this recently.

https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/chinese-cars-byd-geely-u-...

The sad reality is how politically influential it will be for Americans to take a Chinese EV from the airport to a hotel in Cancun and say, "Why don't we have this in the US?"

Saw some in southern Arizona, had to do a double-take.

That was me with Polestar like 4 years ago but really don't see many of them anymore in the PNW

I agree that that would be great as a consumer, but given how protectionist China is, you can hardly blame countries for responding in kind. Trade should be a two way street.

Doesn't Tesla have a factory in China?

They do. The Chinese government gave them a special exemption, presumably because they wanted to build EV manufacturing expertise. Other foreign auto companies are not allowed to open their own factories in China; they have to do a joint venture with a local manufacturer.

>presumably because they wanted to build EV manufacturing expertise

Worked with Apple!

They do. Because Elon is proving himself to be quite an idiot.

China was more than happy to welcome him in, and have him teach them how to build an EV. They simply copied what they could and improved on it.

"The communists will happily sell the capitalists the rope the capitalists hang themselves with"

BYD has been making batteries since '95, cars since '05, plug-in hybrids since '08 and EVs since '09. I don't doubt that China may have made use of Musk, but I severely doubt he's the one who "taught them how to build an EV".

If you think China can only make stuff by copying what other does, you're gonna under-estimate them.

The timing doesn't line up. BYD has already been selling EVs by the time Tesla opened a factory in China. Heck, they were selling EVs even before _Tesla_ existed.

And they clearly have their own expertise. There are videos of BYD and Tesla car teardowns, and you can see that they quite differ in design philosophies.

I think China was more interested in creating more competition internally, rather than just ripping off the technology.

It’s other capitalists that stole the tech. China is a country of capitalists living under a communist regime.

Free market does not exist

Or rather, it exists briefly until it is naturally captured by the biggest players.

There is always some industry thats favored by gov due to good reasons.

Military, food, energy, etc.

Which is sensible; the problem is favouring some players so much they capture an entire industry. Free market is a perfect ideal, it can't exist in the real world.

Just buy a Textron golf cart and you have 90% of the Chinese EV experience.

Are you saying all cars that are manufactured in China are rubbish? Because that is just plain wrong.

It's the same propaganda that was used against Japan and Korean cars. Asia = bad, America = good.

https://electrek.co/2026/04/27/byd-seal-08-blade-battery-2-1...

https://ezgo.txtsv.com/

is there even a screen?

Traveling in Asia and South America, the primary impression I got was not that this is a war of manufacturing that we're losing but that the game is already up. Chile was full of Chinese makes and they were all surprisingly good. Riding in a Chinese MG in Taiwan or Hong Kong you suddenly realize that this isn't a future competitor. The people talking about the war of car manufacturers here seem like those Japanese holdouts who were still fighting in 1956.

Come to Australia. About two years ago there was so many Teslas. In the space of two years, I've seen twice as many BYDs. I can only imagine this will continue.

It's not "surprisingly" unless you haven't bought much in the last 20 years.

China-owned brands are now often better and more premium than their Western counterparts across the entire spectrum. Give me Anker over Belkin any day. There are a few areas where the West still leads - Chinese software tends to be buggier and less polished, luxury apparel isn't at the same standard - but that lead is diminishing rapidly. Customer service could still do with some improvement: it's usually much slower and less professional, but the trade-off is it's not uncommon to end up talking to an actual engineer who can investigate and solve the problem rather than just follow a script, even at a huge company.

The worst products are now formerly high quality Western brands with PE overlords that forced them to outsource manufacturing to the lowest bidder.

> The worst products are now formerly high quality Western brands with PE overlords that forced them to outsource manufacturing to the lowest bidder.

Stanley Black&Decker?

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/

Anker was founded and is owned by an American...

I'm not sure where you're getting that from, from wikipedia:

> Anker was founded in 2011 by Steven Yang in Shenzhen, Guangdong, but the company moved its headquarters to Changsha, Hunan.

And its listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange as a public company.

Yeah the game is already lost. The question is how long the US can keep dumb laws that don't acknowledge reality. Unfortunately that timespan is 249 years and counting apparently.

Tesla has no moat.

BYD makes better EVs & is leading in battery tech.

FSD has been promised forever & not delivered. Now Musky says - for cars to have real FSD they need to be newer hardware tech.

Robotaxis - Waymo is better.

It has nothing to be about moat. It's about its older car brands and oil so much that it doesn't stay competitive.

Jensen Huang says that the same thing can happen to NVIDIA. Tinygrad is stopping exporting Blackwell based cards to most countries except the 10 Tier 1 countries, as all others need a few months of paperwork. Huawei GPUs don't have these export restrictions.

> BYD ... is leading in battery tech.

Dang, it seemed not that long ago - 5 to 10 years - when Tesla had far superior battery tech. I know that isn't a short scale by tech standards but has BYD, and others, really leap-frogged that much?

I'm not in that space myself and do not keep up with EV benchmarks but am curious what advances or other changes were made. I recall reading Ford battery technology was also very good but interpreted that to be due to general advances in EV battery technology across the board rather than any one specific make/manufacturer.

BYD is one of Tesla's battery suppliers.

https://thedriven.io/2023/05/22/teslas-switch-to-byd-batteri...

Interesting I had no idea, thanks.

> Dang, it seemed not that long ago - 5 to 10 years - when Tesla had far superior battery tech.

It seems logical that if someone was going to surpass Tesla in battery tech, it'd be a battery company. BYD has, after all, been making batteries since its founding under the name "Shenzhen BYD Battery Company" 30 years ago.

BYD has its own "God's Eye" self-driving tech, and unlike Musk's pigheaded insistence on cameras only, BYD is incorporating LIDAR into their cars across the range:

https://thedriven.io/2026/01/11/byds-cheapest-electric-cars-...

> LIDAR

You still believe that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLgCJUeBuI

Cool collection of self driving edge cases, thanks. How are any of them related to Waymo using or not using a particular sensor, LIDAR or otherwise?

There are plenty of FSD failure examples on YouTube too. I don't think you can draw conclusions from that. Especially because FSD isn't actually driverless yet, unlike Waymos.

LOL, have you driven one?

Other than nice alcantara interior the drive is just a mush and software is awful (BYD Sealion 7). Older ones (i.e. Atto 3) were obsolete from the factory.

I got to sit in Zeekr 7x yesterday (top 3 in NZ by sales in April), hopefully I can get a test drive soon. It actually has every feature Tesla has (and more). Will be interesting to see how they actually execute.

Is BYD beating Kia here in the UK? It's hard to tell from the SMMT figures [1] but it looks to me as if Kia sold just under twice as many vehicles as BYD. Given that so much of Kia's lineup is now BEV, I'm not sure who is winning.

Tesla is doing poorly here. That's almost entirely down to Musk's public image, not because BYD make better cars.

[1] https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrations/

I see a lot more Kia’s but I think it’s shifting because dealerships are shifting. The Toyota dealership near me now sells Jaecoo, Cherry, etc. and I am seeing tons of the Jaecoo SUV cars around. The Pentagon Vauxhall dealership I bought my car from keeps emailing me about BYDs.

I see plenty of BYD around, but I see more Kia cars. Maybe I'm biased with my EV6 GT Line S, but I wouldn't swap it for a damn thing.

Why should Australians or Dutch people have loyalty to foreign car industry? Who killed Holden or DAF? It wasn't BYD lol.

You should be loyal only to the extent that the loyalty helps some interests of yours. That is if the car industry ensures military equipment should you need it. (or alternatively you are going to war and don't want them to have the expertise that a car industry has).

For those not paying attention to geopolitics, Taiwan is the real concern here. China wants to control them, and is building a strong military. How the future will play out I don't know, but this should be your concern.

Isn't the concern with over the air updates and back-doors? As in, if the citizens in county A buy country B's cars, and now there is a tiff between the two countries, country B could potentially brick all of those vehicles in country A.

That is just another variation of geopolitical worry. Nobody will do this unless there is a geopolitical situation happening. If you are going to war then bricking the enemies cars is useful. Otherwise it is harmful (even if you do it accidentally you lose trust and so nobody will buy from you again - which is why so often rollouts are done slowly - if it doesn't work you only have a few customers affects and can spend more than a car's value on techs to fix them thus ensuring you don't lost reputation)

The point of China's mercantilist and imperialist games with electric cars, is to attack and kill Western industry, and deprive us of the ability to defend ourselves.

I'm no fan of China but is it totally unimaginable to you that a country might just want to be successful?

also, DAF was large in a very specific time in a very specific place. Let's not forget that the dutch car industry has always being dependant on german car industry.

I'm sure BYD and other Chinese EVs would dominate here too if it wasn't for tariffs.

BYD UK import tariff is 10%

BYD US import tariff is 100%

Canada reduced theirs to 6.1% from 100% about a month ago.

I wonder what happens if someone from the US buys one in Canada and just drives it home? At what point and how do they get charged an import tariff? When they register it?

AFAIU, import duties aren't really something you're necessarily "charged" as much as it's something you have a legal obligation to pay. Sure, maybe you could buy a car in Canada and bring it in to the US without paying the tariffs... we call that smuggling.

Here in Spain you see a lot of BYD, considerable amount for Europe. But when I was in Uruguay that was a shock, almost all cabs, all electric cars, and some buses are BYD.

The thing that surprised me the last time I was in Uruguay (2022) was riding an ICE BYD. I had only ever seen electric BYDs.

Wikipedia informs me that they stopped making ICE vehicles in 2022.

There is a significant amount of BYD buses here in Spain, I don't live in Madrid but I go every now and then and I noticed a fair amount of electric BYD.

Also this is anecdotal, but I live in a small province capital (<100k citizens) and the urban planning councilor told me most likely most of the new buses we're getting next year will be electric and they'll probably be either BYD or eCitaros.

Ive seen soo many BYD cars in the UK in the last year.

I'm not in the market for a new car, but anyone who has looked recently what is the draw to BYD? Is it strictly value/price?

Value, performance, quality, and not being associated with Elon.

BY*D

*except Elon’s

Quality? I'm really interested into hard and extensive data about mechanical (drivetrain, suspension, brakes, etc...) engineering and quality control that would make me put them on the same level as the Japanese.

Lacking that, I must hold the preemptive view that they cut corners at least as much as the average make/

Yes, they are (were) significantly cheaper than similar western cars.

Have their share of problems thought. IIRC climate control is often subpar.

Value price for us. The Sealion 7 for us had the combination of features, dimensions, range, 800v platform, for a price that was simply unbeatable (leasing).

Out of question that Volvo ex90, Kia ev9, Hyundai Ioniq 9 or even the BMW ix3 would have come on top if it wasn’t for the price.

> 800v platform

Ones in NZ are 400v and tops at 150KW charging.

My SO bought an Ioniq 6 mostly because of the buttons and the seperate control surface for AC and such but they test drived a BYD as well which was the same as a Tesla, just one huge tablet and endless menus

> With over 7% market share, BYD is now the top-selling EV brand in the UK so far in 2026

But worldwide it has been for a while, no? I think total EV cars sold in 2025 BYD was top, if I remember correctly.

I think Tesla just beat them on pure EV because BYD sell a lot of hybrids too.

Why has BYD stock been trundling along? They seem like they are so far ahead: incredible blade batteries with ridiculous power density (fast charging)/efficiency/cooling, while being structurally useful (mad cool). And mad popular. I feel like I'm missing something that this company is doing such amazing good work but the stock isn't really moving.

BYD is ahead in the export game, but they're struggling in their home market, where the competition is furious and margins low.

Well their forward P/E is double Ford or Toyota, so presumably people think that's what their profit trajectory is worth.

BYD ships

USA boomer car companies run a competition on who can build the biggest crappy SUVs around sold to other boomers who now look aghast at pump prices

Europe boomer car companies can't overrun their nit-pickiness and analysis paralysis and wonder why consumers are picking the car with screens that actually work like a modern device and don't have subscription horns or some other BS like that

The complacency of American, Euro and Japanese auto manufacturers as Chinese, through domestic hyper competition and protectionism. Is going to be an MBA case study on how to fumble the bag.

This is not surprising as other manufacturers continue moving away from producing cheap cars. One notable exception is dacia.

For all the China lovers here it's not a clear sign of Chinese superiority. I saw a video on youtube recently exploring BYD. It's success is due to the fact that the Chinese government as part of their plan to dominate the global car industry gives them massive amounts of money. Which manufacturer can compete with that? European tariffs in the near future looks likely.

Among other things the video explores some of BYD's shadier practices including artificially inflating domestic sales and not paying suppliers for up to 9 months.

I have my doubts whether their success is sustainable.

I hear this all the time, but I would point out that US car manufacturers are heavily subsidized as well. I’m sure other countries do their own things that effectively subsidize their automotive industries as well.

NAFTA and its successor keeps a lot of automotive production and assembly in North America.

The chicken tax protects American manufacturers from foreign competition on trucks and vans.

Tesla was started on the foundations of inexpensive loans and a “free” factory courtesy of government economic stimulus.

GM was bailed out and briefly owned by the federal government, saved by below-market rate loans.

Stellantis is also an organization that owes its existence on a bankruptcy bail-out package.

The US financially incentivizes car usage, period. They underfund transit projects, allow the gas tax rate to lag inflation, make zoning laws that require car ownership, and more. One great way to subsidize car companies is to make car ownership mandatory.

State and local governments frequently give tax incentives to major assembly plants in the name of preserving jobs for their constituents. For example, GM had a $60 million tax break to keep the Lordstown, OH plant open. Some of this was clawed back after the plant closed anyway.

CAFE standards incentivize manufacturers to build SUVs that aren’t practical or popular in many other markets, essentially enshrining America-specific car design, further separating the American market from global car designs. Companies like BYD can’t compete with American cars if they don’t sell models that resemble popular choices like the Ford F-150, which are designs which would be completely insane if sold in the Chinese, Japanese, and European markets.

Ok but we are talking about tens of billions versus tens of millions. And some good old fashioned protectionism which has limited effect on the global market which we are discussing at the moment.

That’s only one example of subsidy for one location: tens of millions in one specific type of tax break from one state for only one factory.

Now multiply that and add in every other kind of subsidy.

Ford Motor Company topping the list at $8 billion in subsidy.

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/?major_industry_sum...

They've been hyped up recently by that sort of thing but a lot of the success is built on a dedicated founder who is exceptional at building things and has been keeping at it for ages.

Vid of Munger saying Wang Chuanfu is great and he tried to talk him out of starting a car company in 2003 https://youtu.be/PbgqkAQ41mM?t=69

Don't forget their rampant channel-stuffing, which is so flagrant, that it makes Ford's and GM's channel-stuffing antics look like kindergarten games in comparison.

Musk was saying at the start that Tesla was going to be $80k then scale up so they would have a $10k/20k car. It looks like BYD beat them to it. I guess putting manufacturing in China, giving them all of the tricks of the trade, letting them build consolidated supply chains, letting them iterate on every aspect of manufacturing, and automate it all was a mistake in the long run. pikachu_face.jpg

Tesla severely lacks competition in the North American market. They lost all their first mover advantage by sitting back and spending significant R&D into FSD. Chinese manufacturers have some incredible innovations such as Nio’s battery swapping.

Where/how can we buy a BYD in the US?

You can't buy them in the US. You could buy one in Mexico and drive it across the border, but you wouldn't be able to register it in the US. It is probably possible to legally import one but it would be very expensive and time-consuming, and you'd need to know a lot about import law.

AFAIK if its registered in Mexico it can be driven in US under temporary import permit. I've seen the odd Hilux or other new rarity that way. Quite common to see Mexico plates here in AZ in all number of cars not available for sale.

Currently the “best” way is to wait until they’re 25 years old and import them.

You won't get past step one: vote for political candidates who will fight for free markets.

You really think BYD would exist in a free market?

China and USA can fight it out propping up BYD and Tesla instead of Norinco and Lockheed Martin.

similar thing happening to Samsung in China (soon also elsewhere)

Samsung to exit China home appliance sales amid shrinking market share

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48045298

Some amusing comments from Americans in this thread

> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression.

> The Chinese Century is increasingly palpable, for better or worse.

Ummm remember Guantanamo? Lol.

Is volume or revenue/profit/margin etc? Quite important to know this.

Proof that if the price is right, you can look past anything.

I will always wonder what Tesla could have been, hadn’t Musk gone completely off rails around the time he was presenting the cybertruck’s vision. Remember when it was pitched at 40-50k?

It's kind of a shame.

I just signed an offer to purchase a BYD Sealion 5, plugin hybrid small-to-medium SUV.

I’ve been largely happy with my 2018 Honda Fit and briefly researched a hybrid Fit.

In ZAR, the hybrid Fit is listed as ~530K, while the BYD is 570, however the BYD is way bigger, has much nicer interior and insanely more features, including: adaptive cruise control, lane assist (it can basically drive itself for simple traffic), 360 view camera, comparatively huge screen for my Apple CarPlay, sun roof, V2L (allows 2-3kw load off the battery or engine if the battery is low).

I largely liked my Honda Fit and my Ballade (that might be a South African model name), but have been annoyed for a long time at them being laggards on things like CarPlay (at least in South Africa, apparently the Fit in other markets had offered it for much longer).

I was thinking why the hell someone visiting HN, so arguably curious and interested in technology, would go for a PHEV but then you mentioned South Africa.

It advertises 52km range, which is plenty enough for us for day-to-day driving to be entirely in EV mode.

I work from home and would prefer spending money on things like better school for kids, holidays, house being comfortable and as paid off as possible than on an over priced car as some sort of status symbol (it’s common for people here to choose to spend a fortune on their cars while living in small rented apartments, it’s quite financially stupid).

I also believe that we pay comparatively high taxes on our motor vehicles, our location probably also means that shipping here just costs more, the Sealion 5 is ZAR 570K which is about EUR 29.6K / USD 34.8K

Edit: Seems Sealion 5 price here not necessarily high compared to other countries. It might be BYD “entering the market” and thus putting less of a markup. Hyundai did that here in the early 2010s, but China is a different beast so who knows.

Own the sealion 7. It is feature full, and don’t want to crush your dreams, but i would trade that killer unreliable adaptive cruise control and lane assist with a (missing?!) simple speed limiter 100 times over

I don’t mind the honesty.

Price is so good that even if it’s a little lacking in this regard, I’ll probably still be very happy as a lot of the features are just a bonus.

Important for us was that it’s bigger as we have two growing kids, and that it is essentially an electric that we can plug in to charge.

I’ve only ever used simple cruise control on my CVT Fit and before that on a manual. On the BYD test drive (on my own chosen route) the cruise control seemed to work at least as well as what I was used to and the adaptive in traffic was impressive (to me whose never before had it), but was just one drive so will see how I feel after driving it for a while.

Also, I certainly wouldn’t count on it, but it’s conceivable that a software update could improve things, my honest hunch though is that it would be very unlikely.

I was just referring to specifically the cruise control which seems useful only in traffic conditions. As soon as the road gets a bit cleared up it has a tendency to accelerate too much, and a bit too eagerly.

But we have similar conditions, 2kids and in need of space and Sealion 7 won over many other EVs for number of features, platform, and especially price.

The OTA updates are quite regular and for us one fixed a bug that did not let the doors lock entirely when the car was off.

I saw this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS_fJJxMjn4

TL;DR Byd is amazing and fatally flawed. The details are too much to place here.

It was a good watch but I don't think there is too much detail to put here. BYD has a lot more debt than they're claiming and their growth was subsidized by the Chinese government in order to buy market share.

Not directly related to your comment, but I'm confused why so many people say "BYD is subsidized by the Chinese government" as some kind of gotcha for why they're "bad". The US government subsidizes farmers. Companies like Intel, Ford, and Boeing all get federal or state subsidies. Tesla's growth can in part be attributed to favorable tax credits. Should we qualify statements about how successful they are with an asterisk that they got favorable treatment from the government?

I didn't say they're bad. Subsidies are fine, all governments do it for their own reasons but when you receive artificial support it does beg the questions as to when and how that support will be pulled so it puts a question mark over the sustainability of whatever is being subsidised.

>Should we qualify statements about how successful they are with an asterisk that they got favorable treatment from the government?

Yes

steal this startup idea:

you can't buy BYD in the USA (thanks to Biden actually, not current admin)

BUT

there's a loophole to have a car from Canada in the USA for a year

so lease them from Canada to USA buyers for a year at a time

It's not yet easy to buy BYD vehicles in Canada either. The first quota of 49,000 vehicles was only recently announced, and that's to be shared across all Chinese vendors.

Provided they are available in Canada. There’s only roughly 50k imports in the first year and that will be split across all Chinese manufactured EVs (not necessarily Chinese brands). I assume the majority will be Teslas from their Shanghai factory.

I think that if you maintain a policy, it becomes yours too.

I expect that the US administration will very quickly ban these cars from being leased or resold into the US from Canada.

...if they're not banned from entering the USA altogether, which seemed to be the way the US President was leaning already.

It's a shame their cars are being devoid of its own identity. If you squint you might think it's an Audi or Range Rover.

A bit like wearing Adiboss or Gacci clothes. Nothing wrong with that.

Hopefully BYD will make something original and with style on its own.

But counter example is e.g. new Audi look like Kia.

Funny.

It is a car. Don't hang your personally identity on a car. Many people fail at this, but it is wrong.

Or at least if you do make sure it isn't your transportation. Drive something else most of the time that you don't care about so your identity car isn't scratched. Bring the identity car to a parade with the "pork queen" or whatever.

Strange comment, look at some of the cars here - many are unique and more creative liberty than anything the West is putting out:

https://www.youtube.com/@Wheelsboy/videos

The chinese are utilitarian but also, like anyone, care about aesthetics. Why make something that looks good enough when that isn't your main goal and the jobs already been done

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