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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

I have been recently looking at new cars in Europe and there is s massive difference in quality at all price tiers between Chinese and non Chinese cars.

Mind you, Chinese cars are often assembled in Europe and have to comply with all the safety laws etc, but at any price tier it feels you're getting a car that is 10k+ more expensive than it is.

And that's despite EU putting (non sense) sanctions on Chinese cars and components.

If Chinese were free to compete square and fair they would've long swallowed the European industry.

Like look at Volkswagen and what you get at 40k. A non base Golf, maybe?

It also grinds my nerves that European cars are less expensive anywhere but in Europe.

You go to US and they are like 15/20% less expensive.

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The argument (which has its own pros and cons) is that the Chinese vendors are not competing fair and square.

The governmental/industrial coordination in China is quite literally un comparable to Western style industries so the western governments feel they have to protect their local industries.

This definitely hurts consumers in the short term, so the whole argument is about long term impacts.

Nothing stops western governments from adopting the tactics that work well.

Western populations do.

If western populations are so committed to failure, then failure is deserved.

If your definition of success and failure is based on how well your country motivates the production of consumer goods, I suppose that’s true.

This is bs.

Both German and Italian auto industries e.g. have received countless money.

FIAT alone got an equivalent of 200B+ euros in state/regional aid in Italy alone (that's ignoring the generous incentives of all the countries they opened plants).

Through capital and currency controls, the yuan is structurally undervalued between 9 and 25% depending on your source. That’s a direct transfer from the Chinese consumer to the Chinese exporter.

That’s hundreds of billions of dollars before we get to cash subsidies, IP subsidies, central direction, property right differences etc.

The Chinese approach is so different than the western approach that there isn’t broad consensus on how to quantify it, but it’s for sure more than the direct subsidies that something like the WTO was built to negotiate.

Chinese cars built in Europe are not taxed/sanctioned.

I think the base golf is around 30k.

(Renault, fiat and Citroen are better priced than German cars if you don't mind staying in the low-end. You still have park assist, Google/Apple carplay and they are still good on the road, but they feel less luxurious.)

Renault isn't on a lower tier than VW btw.

Like look at Volkswagen and what you get at 40k. A non base Golf, maybe?

If I recalled correctly, we got a higher-specced Id.3 for around that price (yes new). It's a great car.

But I am grumpy now, because they added Play Integrity (strong) to their app (which is handy for monitoring charging, etc.) and now I cannot run it on GrapheneOS. They also cut API access for Home Assistant users. I think we are probably an invisible blip on the radar, but our next car probably won't be VW.

It's like the entire western world has forgotten how to make things. And I don't blame the individual workers who are having to beg the billionaire capitalists for scraps to avoid going homeless or hungry. It's obviously been a high-level policy decision that we should forget how to make things.

For consolation, China will probably suffer the same effect, in about 20 years when it has its own billionaire capitalists who control it (currently it has some but they don't control it, also they are first-generation billionaires who are stuck to the productive activity that made them wealthy)

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