Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

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You're making a lot of assertions without citations here.

If I look at a BYD at my local dealership, and compare it to a comparable spec German car (I live in the UK, so tariffs are not the thing shifting the needle here), I can see where the cost savings are and the trade-offs.

I don't think they're artificially more affordable. I just think they're more affordable.

Using public funds to invest in capital expenditure is - outside of the US - considered a wise use of public funds. If the result is a more competitive industry, whether that's ship building (South Korea), steel production (recent UK nationalisation efforts), military hardware (United States), or medical research, physics, chemistry, computing (look at the history of all the G7 there), and so on, and so on... irrelevant.

China has decided to spend it on complex manufacturing that they've been the supply chain for to Western manufacturers for the last 30 years. That's not controversial - it's been obvious this is where they were heading for some time.

First off, I admit I have no idea what the EU and US car manufacturers are doing, their positions for the past decade don't make any sense to me in the electric market. Actually smells like hubris and inertia more than anything to be honest.

I'm not being super academic with citations, but the CCP investments in BYD, to the point it makes no sense to exist without aren't exactly hard to find secrets.

You're not comparing comparable things, in the UK, there is a great deal of expectations of what an employee has as rights for instance. There are extremely rigorous safety regulations that are very onerous. We can debate wether those are justified but it's a very complex topic you're brushing off. Their innovation seems mostly on small iterative gadgets, but look more closely into what they tolerate as self driving and the death it causes, and be sure you want that in the UK for profit margins.

I'm really not against neither subsidies nor artificially inflating one's strategic advantage at all to develop a market and corner the competition. I never said China is wrong to do what it's doing. What I am saying is that its dangerous for us outside of China to buy into it now. Beyond the security implications of chinese robots with sensors everywhere roaming about cities the CCP considers their ennemies, there's just the dependency risk, there's the "how much do you trust the people who fed paint to their babies to handle super dense explosives that cant be put out by water in dense cities", and the basic question, maybe its better to have the lightest car possible, not the most gadgetty with drones and ipads.

So the basic point above "China has more electric trucks therefore it makes economic sense" is helped by none of this

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