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Their state has a serious incentive to ship out cheap cars to destroy the automotive industry in the US and the EU for example. When that happens they can double the price on all their vehicles and you can't restart your car factories to compete with them again until years down the line.
With Huawei its about telecom equipment which is essential in today's age, with TikTok it's about controlling the narrative, also essential.
Yes, US and EU manufacturers need to innovate and be less greedy but the cost to make things will always be higher than in China so even though protectionism sounds bad, you'll always have some of that around to even the playing field.
In the middle of this was Jack Welch's "destroy your business dot com", which is still highly controversial. But he did at least recognize that running a big ossified business in a time of change was going to need a massive kick to get everyone out of their complacency (and if not, out of their jobs!). Cannibalize your own legacy business, or some competitor will.
I think this is a serious problem in existing car companies. They attach too much prestige and career to being "petrolheads", or simply working in the engine division; after all, that's the most expensive to develop and least easy to substitute part of the car. The EV transition threatens to sweep that all away. Probably most of the EU manufacturers won't really get on board until those people retire.
There's probably a whole other essay that could be written about labour relations and the decline of mass car manufacture in the UK while we retain a lot of high-end boutique expertise (Formula 1 etc).
Anyway, I have an EV on order from FCA Poland, so we'll see how that turns out.
You speak as-if they didn't create EVs. It's just that most of the European EV platforms were resounding failures, be it CLAR, CLAR II (BMW), MEA1 & MEA2, (Mercedes), J1 (Porsche), e-tron (Audi), MEB (VW), of these MEB is pretty much the only one that turned around to generate some kind of volume, but that took many years. Sales numbers for all of these are way below predictions, we're not talking about a 50% miss here. I don't know how much a car architecture costs to develop, but I'd wager it is not a cheap endeavor. Between that and the comparatively large number of battery-related EV recalls these projects probably represent double-digit billions of losses for the European car industry. This seems realistic given the widely publicized $20bn Ford EV write-down. So given these enormous sunk costs and yet they're still somewhat investing in EVs doesn't read to me like they're not trying to compete on EVs. If that were the case, they'd just cut their losses, or done so years ago.
That's where all those European battery factories that were announced a couple years ago went: Consumers do not buy EVs anywhere near the expected volume and therefore there is no demand to finance such factories. The handful of batteries needed for the low volumes of EV production are easily sourced from existing factories and the rest is imported from China.
Stellantis/PSA doesn't appear in this story because they never went beyond compliance car EVs (i.e. their "let's stuff a 50 kWh gross battery and the cheapest electric drive we can buy from a supplier into an ICE chassis" approach).
OK so the billion Euro question is: why not? Tesla seem to be making adequate sales in Europe. China has passed 50% EVs as new sales. Norway (in Europe, but not the EU) is approaching 100%.
Is it simply price? Of the car, and/or electricity?
The EU was originally proposing to phase out ICE in 2035, which is now less than 10 years away!
> compliance car EVs (i.e. their "let's stuff a 50 kWh gross battery
I had noticed that all the Stellantis EVs have desperately bad range. I guess that's why they're showing up for cheap leasing offers to meet compliance.
But that's what I mean. It's an intentionally half-assed product. Only the recent Renault 5 and VW ID series cars feel like serious market entrants rather than "will this do?"
BYD and Tesla are popular in the UK, but not EU manufacturers. Why? Product? Price?
“Those damn pesky artists still painting by hand. We need to wait for them to die out to let the stable diffusion guys take over and then we will be number one!”
I know what I said. Engines are an art.
Long ago hand painters used cadmium yellow. It may be art, but it's also poisonous. Same for Napoleon and his arsenic wallpaper. In the end, same for CO2-emitting engines.
Some engines maybe. Your average 1.5 TFSI is the equivalent of drawing corporate memphis clipart for a paycheck, no one is pouring their passion into that. Maybe not so bad if it gets replaced by an EV/AI.
What is this?
Interesting takeaway is everything on there (smart homes, integrated financial media and trading, etc.) eventually happened, not by GE, except the GE Capital stuff, which wound up a disaster. So the signal to look for in AI is folks deploying levered balance sheets directly to consumers. Which I don’t think we’re directly seeing, outside OpenAI.
It actually began a few months ago regarding solar panels and batteries [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...
Chinese imports and local manufacture should be able to compete in the "free market". It's just that that term has been heavily debased by idiots misusing it, like everything else.
Frankly, what are they if not power delivery/generation - which is always defined as such.
Now the government has ordered massive development of electric cars, to push down prices to loss making levels. In a few years, a lot of chinese elctric car manufacturers will close down, just like what happened with solar.
The trick here for the west, is to copy china, and once the internal bubble bursts, launch its own companies in solar and e-cars based on copied chinese technology.
The hunter has truly become the hunted!
Complete protectionism doesn't work because it makes your own manufacturers non-competitive on the global stage.
The problem is this is really hard to objectively measure.
> Complete protectionism doesn't work because it makes your own manufacturers non-competitive on the global stage.
Yes - and this is a problem Detroit has been struggling with since Japan got decent at cars. The recent wave of protectionism is backing them into the dead end.
Actually I know why it's different, I was just doing an online knee jerk response the difference is that western capitalism has a hands-off (but regulated) approach, letting the companies do their own thing. China and their companies are much more involved. I'm sure the US was a lot more directly involved in setting the directions of its industry in decades past, but since then the industry and stock market took over the reins.
Another factor may be that in the west, workers have more rights, unionized, and set their own boundaries. But they were also constrained - what would've happened if someone at Ford 10, 15 years ago said "I want to develop an EV?". In the US, it took a new company (Tesla with a heap of investor money) to make strides in that area. But because Tesla didn't have any actual experience in making cars, they reinvented the wheel and are (from what I gathered) still building sub-standard cars.
If an experienced company like Ford or VAG set aside money and resources to reinvent the car every once in a while they would've been able to keep up. As it stands, all the existing car companies bolted a battery and engine to their existing models, turning their cars into some weird frankenstein of 20+ year old car electronics, electric drives, and entertainment systems because they didn't have what it takes to design a car from scratch.
They also tried to min/max and moved a lot of production to China; short-term that was a benefit, especially VAG was the biggest car manufacturer / seller over there, until they caught up and overtook them in very short order.
> Tesla ... are (from what I gathered) still building sub-standard cars.
this is called: sensible state industrial policy
Just read their five year plans. Not the 'yellow peril' fearmongering, just go to source and make your own mind up. The Chinaman is not out to get you. In fact, until recently, he looked up to you and had the open hand of friendship. He made you many beautiful things and you didn't say thank you, you wittered on about 'stolen IP' (from your stolen land, and it wasn't even your IP, not personally).
China is in no urgency to supply their fine electric cars to the 5% that consider themselves to be American. Why would you? The most litigious place going, with the cheap gas, sinophobia, tariffs and special dealership rules. There is no 'rug pull' either, you are on the 'rug pull' now, with US/EU vehicles costing a fortune. Chinese cars offer savvy consumers a way off, to the sensible land of great value cars.
What you are failing to understand is that, internally, China is hyper competitive, with no rent-seeking class and no settled in mono-duo-trio-polies to stifle all innovation, as per the West. What emerges from the brutal competition of the free market in China (free from rent seeking monopolists) is super-good when it makes it to the wider world.
Huawei kit was just too good, plus the backdoors for five eyes weren't in it, so it had to go. Do you honestly think they had 'communist' backdoors to key infrastructure they were selling into the West, to be scrutinised by armies of security engineers? They are not stupid.
As for the costs being higher in the West, that is just rent seeking, not workers getting paid more, just having more rent/mortgage to pay due to the class of rent seekers the West upholds as 'smart' when they are just parasites, in a financialised economy that is broken.
The UK used to have a special BT+Huawei+MI6 joint office where the kit was subject to inspection. I never heard of anything confirmed coming out of there, and the thing seems to have vanished from the internet. So I suspect the order to phase out Huawei was similarly politically motivated.
The party elites and their families are all billionaires!
> One must admit that Jiaqi Liang, senior director of electrical hardware at Ford's Advanced EV team went to Tsinghua University.
I found his LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jiaqi-liang-6a653b1b/
It looks like after Tsinghua Uni, he moved to the United States and attended Georgia Tech to get a Master's and PhD. Further, he has worked his entire professional career in the United States and has never worked for a Chinese company.
If someone tries to tell you that these are somehow morally different, and one of them is the good guy and the other is the bad guy, they are pushing propaganda, knowingly or unknowingly.
A lot of these vehicles rely on OTA updates or are controlled through apps. This essentially means the manufacturer controls them. Imagine the consequences if half the vehicles in your country stopped working, or became unsafe? Do you really want to hand this power to a foreign country?
The thing is, this problem exists regardless of who the manufacturer is, and using nationalism to make it about China disguises the real problem. Tiktok didn't magically become safe or unsafe when it was divested.
But it's all capitalist forces, because while in theory new companies could start that make basic / offline / affordable / maintainable / reliable cars (and tractors, and everything else), there is simply not enough demand making them non-starters.
It's like people (on here) asking for open phone platforms or phones with smaller screens; they're a minority. Most people do not care.
> It's like people (on here) asking for open phone platforms or phones with smaller screens; they're a minority. Most people do not care.
That is partly because most people do not understand the benefits of open phone platforms. This is a lot easier to understand and similar issues have gained traction: e.g. sovereign cloud is much discussed now.
One things for sure: somehow Japanese cars aren't in the mix at all (the experience of trying to even see the bz4x at a Toyota dealer felt like the dealer was unhappy I was even there to see it).