> - Turkey is the perfect size for a relatively beefy electric car battery to make through in one charge, effectively removing the range anxiety.

I would also like to buy one 2.000 km battery. Where are they sold and what are they made of?

> - Lastly, Turkey has been building cars for the past 35 years and it’s gotten pretty good at it - many of the entry to mid level marques of European conglomerates are built in Turkish factories. This is an entry into luxury segment, it is not an entry into car manufacturing. That knowledge of being able to build safe and solid European cars already exists in there. If you’ve visited Europe, you likely already ridden a Turkish-made car (taxis) and if you live in Europe, chances are you might own one without knowing.

Having been working for large OEMs (Bosch/Continental - the primary components such as brakes, infotainments, sensors, etc., essentially the Legos that all "completely different" marques use to put their cars together, regardless whether being an EV/ICE/flying saucer/whatever), I cannot see how being a manufacture for a foreign car brand helps in any way in building your own car.

Have you ever been in a car factory? It is full of bio-robots. Go here, press this button, put the torque wrench on this until it makes "wrrrrr" and that's it. Yes, you save pennies on low-skilled labor to staff your factory, but you need a complete different skillset to start producing your own car. I'm not familiar with what is actually being done in Turkey, maybe they have some awesome R&D, but using an argument like "everybody has already driven a Turkey-made car" is like saying "country X can start its own space program, because major LEO launch paths go over that country, so every rocket has flown through there"...

No offense to Turkey, I'm from a (different) country where many foreign brands assemble their cars too, and it is just that, trained assemblers, not at all helpful at launching your own brand/model.

Are you saying that there is no advantage to having experience in designing and operating a car factory? The stories about Tesla seem to provide arguments both for and against that idea. They made choices for speed and efficiency that no other manufacturer would have tried. Those tradeoffs seem to have paid off so far, but not without some significant cost. It seems plausible that a car maker starting from scratch might make a simple, dumb mistake, that totally compromises the reliability of the car.

> Are you saying that there is no advantage to having experience in designing and operating a car factory?

The point is that they don't design the factory, and at best they operate in the sense that they are cogs in the machine.

The presence of a car industry does help because when VW launches a plant, that jump-starts demand for some sub-components to be built domestically as well, and that opportunity tends to open the door to some domestic initiatives. But that's it. VW cars are still designed by VW, VW engineers still come at the VW plant to instruct how VW products are assembled, and once sub components or components or even the finished product is assembled then VW's logistic chain picks up again.

At best the existence of a car industry helps out by giving a nationalist leader a set of sub-components built domestically to pick and choose to assemble their domestic product,but that's far from the challenge.

Let's put it differently: look at Tesla. The US has a car industry. Was Tesla's challenge to put their cars out of the factory floor an easy one?

> With the current very low, out of whack exchange rate (1USD:6TRY) this will also become competitive in at least Southern European markets fairly fast as well.

That depends on how it will fare in the crash tests.

here is some more video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLCJpE0OMfQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv4bYn-JitA

One comment on that last video:

"The country owes $ 500 billion to the outside world. It is a bit of a dream to give 22 billion Turkish liras and establish the factory of such a car and put it into mass production. Not very convincing. Because such games are played by the government in our country for years. They issue a new domestic car before each election. Whenever we launch a new vehicle, we know that there is an early election in the near future."

Wikipedia:

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

"The first two prototypes were produced in Italy by Pininfarina. The car manufacturing plant will be in Gemlik, Bursa."

Turkey and Europe uses the same crash tests and those tests are done in Europe, not in Turkey. In other words, if a car is safe to be sold in Italy, it’s safe to be sold in Turkey. If not, it’s not sellable in either. Turkey does not have its own crash crash testing rating system and legislates based on European tests.

The comment you’ve copied from YouTube demonstrates a lack of basic understanding of economics. Turkey’s debt load is typical of a country its size and furthermore debt itself is not a bad thing, it is a financial tool like any other. I do agree with the political aspects mentioned, however, the fact that it is also a political tool doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually not being built.

And surely they've factored in all the crash tests costs into the equation. I'd be surprised if didn't already have vehicles being shipped over and in the testing queue for the markets they want to be in. That's typically specked out in the design phase. The only manufactures who don't put much effort into that are the supercar designers.

They don't have a factory yet. There are exactly as many prototypes - prototypes, not pre-production runs - as you see in those videos from what I gather because they are super expensive to make, hence the lack of variation in the cars displayed.

So far we have a couple of pre-production cars, I'll believe it when I see them rolling around here, Turkey has serious problems and the PR value of this is high enough that I can see this as a marketing piece rather than as a vehicle that is ready to be produced.

One tell tale here is that the factor apparently does not exist yet, if they were serious about production then you'd expect the factory to be ready to go at the moment of introduction, the way other car manufacturers - even small ones - do it.

I agree with you that I would not personally launch it at this stage, but again, Tesla does launches at a similar state as well. The launch date smells like Erdogan said ‘come hell or high water, we’re announcing this in 2019’. This feels the same as the very early and half built opening of the new Istanbul Airport. The guy has a fixation with dates and likely this was a compromise.

Turkey does have its problems, but this announcement is far too small to make any meaningful dent in them, so I would expect this is mostly domestic posturing for the 2023 election cycle. The earlier they can ship and sell at a reasonable price, the better it is for their election odds.

That said, the airport is getting better, and considering making a car is well within Turkey’s manufacturing capabilities, I don’t see a reason why it would be a stretch.

(I certainly wouldn’t buy one for the first 10 years though.)

You know they are in the middle of a debt crisis, right? The issue with Turkey specifically is that they borrowed a ton of EUR, they borrowed a ton of USD, they don't earn much of either, and the currency has halved in three years or so...oh, and they can't raise rates because the President thinks that high rates are part of a Jewish-led conspiracy to bankrupt Turkey...you really can't make this stuff up.

Your last comment about "the President thinks that high rates are part of a Jewish-led conspiracy to bankrupt Turkey" would benefit greatly from a reference or a quote, otherwise it is just as a good as propaganda. The apparent and most obvious reason for a president to not increase interests rates and to not decrease spending is the fear of recession. This is a controversial move but it has some interesting precedents: check the case of Malaysia after the Asian financial crisis of 1997.

Unfortunately he is correct, if poorly worded. I’m failing to find any sources in English right now on my phone, but he really did say this a couple years ago, pretty much word by word.

That does not always imply that the Turkish Central Bank is doing it because of his reasons, but Erdogan is remarkably like Netanyahu in that he knows well what is going to work on his audience, and at that time, this did.

Aside from the politics I agree raising rates would be good for foreign debt holders and bad to Turkey internally. Lower rates keeps exports high and jobs remain when employment is full start raising rates.

Wut? If you raise rates, then the price of bonds falls...if you hold debt, you want lower rates because you can then sell your bond at a higher price (theoretically, these are foreign-currency bonds so it isn't quite that simple).

And Turkey needs higher rates. The rate has been far below the natural rate for way too long. In capital markets, you saw Turkish companies make all these crazy acquisitions (in addition, to being forced by the govt into splashy infrastructure projects in areas that supported the govt)...the bust from this will be incredible (the only leverage Turkey has is that French/German banks are neck deep in this debt). Lowering rates is just prolonging the inevitable (the majority of Turkey's corporate sector is already functionally insolvent).

The lira is inflating out of control and you think high rates are bad for Turkey internally...

sigh

>Turkey’s debt load is typical of a country its size and furthermore debt itself is not a bad thing, it is a financial tool like any other.

It's a tool for Turkey because they control their own currency, which gives them an advantage over potential European manufacturers who are tied to the Euro and have much less flexibility.

Can you elaborate on how debt is a tool please

That old adage: If you owe the bank a million, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $2.5 billion, you own the bank.

You can only lend money to people (or States) you see as equals. Large scale lending essentially ties your economies together (like the US and China).

I highly recommend Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Grabber. He does a great deep dive into the history of debt (both personal and with States). It's an amazing read.

> You can only lend money to people (or States) you see as equals. Large scale lending essentially ties your economies together (like the US and China).

Debt can also be a thinly disguised bribe if there’s no real expectation that it’s ever going to be paid back. That’s how most lending to extremely poor countries works. The US or other “donors” lend money to the local tyrant to support domestically unpopular policy; the local tyrant pockets a large amount, distributes some to their cronies and some goes on the titular reason for the aid and at some point in the future the debt gets written off. Then the cycle repeats. The US does not view any other states as equals. China has lent a lot of money to Sri Lanka and Cambodia among others. It does not view either as an equal.

> I highly recommend Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Grabber. He does a great deep dive into the history of debt (both personal and with States). It's an amazing read.

It’s also riddled with factual errors, from saying Apple was founded by engineers working on their ok laptops or that the Fed isn’t part of the USG, among many, many others.

Long post on a small selection of the ways the book gets things wrong.

https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/the-very-last-david-g...

When I bought my house 20 years ago, it cost me about 20% more than rent, and now about 30% less than market rents.

In ten years, I’ll own it free and clear, a feat that would have been impossible if I was just flushing money down the toilet in rent.

Ditto with national debt. If I borrow a billion dollars and provide health care, education or defend the state, what value am I allowing to be created?

You borrow some money, buy a house, do it up, sell it for more, pay off the debt with some left over for your trouble.

That's using debt as a tool to make more money than you could have made if you didn't have access to credit to buy the house.

Or you borrow some money, build a car-factory, sell some cars, pay off the debt, and then have an income stream you couldn't have had without having access to credit to pay to build the car-factory.

Let’s say I have $1m in cash and I want to buy a house worth $1m. I could either buy the house with my cash, or take out a loan to buy the house and invest my cash into another asset.

Almost any investment will produce a greater yield than the interest cost of the mortgage because the mortgage is secured debt. A mortgage might cost 3% while stocks can return 7-10% or more.

In this scenario, taking on the debt even though you don’t need to is financially advantageous most of the time. In this sense debt is a tool.

Debt is also a tool that lets you afford a house that you can’t buy with cash on hand but where your income is easily enough for principal + interest. What’s better: a) saving for 30 years after you start working and buying a house in cash (maybe paying higher rent that whole time?) or b) taking on a mortgage, getting your house now (as soon as it’s responsible), and paying it off over 30 years. Most people will choose the latter.

Thus debt is a tool that also allows you to buy things far sooner (in life or business) than you could afford to with cash.

There are other things that can be done with debt like borrowing against existing assets (to avoid having to liquidate the entire asset just to get a little cash) or borrowing against expected revenue streams and so on. Most of these tools permit greater economic growth than is possible without.

Depending on where you live the situation may be on reverse. You may have a €100k mortgage at ~7% and be unable to get a better investment from your local banking system for the same amount of cash.

First, 22 billion Turkish lira investment coming from local billionaires/companies according to newspapers, not from states pocket.

The biggest problem of Turkish economy is the lack of gasoline and imported cars. The country pay $20B for gasoline and 76% of the gasoline consumed for cars (remaining percentage for airline and sea vehicles). They import over 500M cars every year. Probably $30B to $40B goes to imported cars (it would be over $100B including taxes)

These issues, makes the negative trade gap in the balance sheet.

Overall, seems producing electric car will help a lot for Turkish economy, and Turkey might pay it's debt very short period by this step.

I can't edit this post anymore, please remove "000" for each number you see here related to imported car stats, gasoline numbers are correct.

> They import over 500M cars every year.

Turkey has a population of 82M, so this seems unlikely.

Thanks for pointing out, should be "over 500k annually"

There is a huge difference between being the country someone else manufactures their cars in, and doing your own. Even if they are requiring IP-transferring joint ventures like the Chinese do, it will still take a long time for them to develop their own brands to export quality. The Japanese has a distinct advantage in that they didn’t go the joint venture route and developed their own brands directly.

And that route is pretty much closed today. If you want to go and re-do the Japanese path starting with motorcycles and then working your way up through simple cars and then more and more luxurious and complex versions then today's 'simple' car is much more complex than the simple cars that Japan started out with. The barrier to entry is much higher than it was in the 50's and the 60's, this goes for any manufacturer. Witness the amount of crap leveled at Tesla for fit-and-finish when none of that would have even been a footnote for a new car launch several decades ago.

Just for a reminder of how bad it really was: at the end of the British Leyland body assembly line men with large hammers would whack the doors from below to make them close properly. Body panels were simply not made to the same standard that they are today and people didn't care that much about such stuff.

There is argument that it's easier to build car now than in 60ies because car parts manufacturing was decentralized in 90ies. In 60ies vertically integrated car companies dominated market and you could not buy car parts at any price if those companies did not want to sell them to you. Now most parts are produced by third parties (that often used to be part of fully integrated car company like Delphi Technologies) and you can build modern car like legos, outsource pretty much everything and only do final assembly. Still not easy (30k+ parts in every car) but doable.

It’s a bit interesting in that because Chinese factories rely a lot more on human labor and less on automation, quality suffers significantly. A Toyota, Audi, or Honda simply isn’t the same level of car in the mainland as it is elsewhere.

Interesting, this is the first time I came across this. Do you have source that factories operated by Toyota, Audi, Honda etc. in China are different in operation by design from their home countries?

They are all done by 49/51 JVs, so it isn’t Toyota making the cars, it is GAC Toyota. My observations are all anecdotal and shared by Chinese colleagues when I was working in China. They are starting aggressive programs to automate (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/business/a-robot-revoluti...) and quality should improve over time.

Note that it doesn’t really bother most people because while the defect rate is higher, the mechanics to fix those problems are cheaper as well.

>at the end of the British Leyland body assembly line men with large hammers would whack the doors from below to make them close properly.

Not that your point about inherent complexity doesn't stand but having to whack body panels to make them fit just means the dies are at the end of their lives. They certainly would have fit without mechanical persuasion when the dies were new. The hood of any late 90s International S-series is a good example of this.

There is a reason why almost all British car companies went out of business.

Yeah, but using sheet sheet metal dies that were on death's doorstep wasn't it. Plenty of other companies did that back in the day.

That was partly Lucas Electric, which somehow managed to dominate UK car electrics in the 1950s and 1960s using technology from the 1930s.

Oh don't get me started. I rebuilt a bunch of Mini's from scratch.

If Turkey intends to sell domestic cars at lower taxes than imported / ones manufactured by foreign companies in Turkey, then it can expect repercussions in its free trade deals with other countries.

Not that Erdogan couldn't have such arrogant ideas, but it's not going to fly like that.

Also, I don't get that idea about Turkey being perfect size for making through its area with an electric car. Turkey is not a small country, Istanbul-Ankara is 450 km, Ankara-Gaziantep is 700 km, and that's not yet even close to "through" the country. Not that this is necessarily so relevant.

Turkey has two population clusters, one in the western side of the country along the Istanbul - Ankara - Izmir triangle, whose population is largely Turkish and connected to Europe. The second, much poorer population cluster (1/3 the size of the first) is in the Kurdish-dominated southeast whose economy is based on its interaction with the Middle East. As long as you don’t jump clusters you’re very well within the range of this car, which seems to have a 300mi range in theory. It remains to be seen how this will work in reality, but on paper it sounds plausible.

Not sure if you can call southeast Kurdish-dominated. Adana, Gaziantep & Mersin are the largest cities there, neither is Kurdish-dominated.

Anyway, even within western side, İstanbul — Antalya is ~700km, and İzmir — Ankara is ~600km, both over 300mi (~500km).

They don't have to do anything special. Once it's made in their country, import duties a will not be applied, just like it works everywhere else.

That is a significant discount on the price.

So far, these are taxes, not tariffs. If they want to charge it to only foreign cars, then they would be tariffs. If they are tariffs, then that will fuck their trade deals, and their domestic car industry. Which they are not in position to suffer.

I think GP is saying that other countries will charge similar tariffs on imported Turkish cars

Import duties are tariffs. The only way it wouldn’t be a tariff is if it applied to domestic cars as well.

Right, they can not lower taxes depends on manufacturer. But they can choose another way.

Like: - Government banks can provide 0 interest (5 years term) credit only for local car. - remove all taxes for 0 emission only with some spesifications like between 200-300 HP cars only to block Tesla (whatever).

Similar tricks already applying by all governments around globe.

I do not think any foreign company like Tesla will change his spec just to sell their cars in Turkey.

> - remove all taxes for 0 emission only with some spesifications like between 200-300 HP cars only to block Tesla (whatever). > Similar tricks already applying by all governments around globe.

> I do not think any foreign company like Tesla will change his spec just to sell their cars in Turkey.

True and false.

Yes, such tricks for circumventing (sometimes outright disadvantageous and stupid) foreign trade agreements are a common thing globally.

At the same time, tuning specs to cater for local tax bands, local driving license restrictions, import taxes, or _these tricks_ is also a common thing, dating back before ECUs with physical chokes etc. And nowadays, it is a bit flip in EV's software to restrict the max output, so why not produce a local market version after a law&marketing department brainstorming and two-week R&D testing.... And nowadays, another two weeks later, instead of traditional physical/chiptuning derestriction, there is a downloadable "unathorized jailbreak" to remove that.

Mind you, cars are a 20.000+ USD things. Put on low incentive and nobody cares. Put on high enough incentive and labor-intensive things become lucrative - such as assembling the car completely, disassembling the car again, shipping parts by train, reassembling the cars and bam, local car. If you can disassemble and reassemble it cheaper than 10.000 USD import tax, you have net gain (this was really done in some parts of Europe!). And you can flip bits cheaper than 10 USD and you sell.

Depends!

Might work for some countries (like banana republic) but I do not think it would be valid case for Turkey. It is not about assembling/disassembling or where the factory is. Toyota, Renault, Honda, Isuzu, Hundai, Ford already producing (yes factories planted) in Turkey but consumers pay custom tax.

They can drop "income tax" for TOGG manufacturer, while others pay income tax.

Like, Amazon, Google does not pay their taxes fully while many others pay.

We are not talking about VAT or custom, it is income tax that government takes some percentage from the profit of the TOGG. Then, TOGG can sell their cars cheaper even though there is Tax and VAT.

If they really want to make price advantage for TOGG, they will find a way to achieve their goal.

They can make a price advantage for TOGG, but if they do it via taxes, tariffs or subsidies, they will cripple all the other manufacturing in the country.

Because car industries are expecting a downturn in the coming years, this would be a strong indicator to international manufacturers for deciding where to cut production.

They are already closing their factories (or reducing capacity) in many countries. I know Honda will close by 2021 in England and Turkey.

May be, Turkish government preparing for this.

"What if they close their factories one day" is the question in their mind?

Whatever the case is, it is a good news for everybody. I believe every country must build their own technology to compete others.

"Turkey is not a small country, Istanbul-Ankara is 450 km, Ankara-Gaziantep is 700 km, and that's not yet even close to "through" the country. "

Also, lots of mountains.

> If Turkey intends to sell domestic cars at lower taxes than imported / ones manufactured by foreign companies in Turkey, then it can expect repercussions in its free trade deals with other countries

Who would adjudicate such a dispute? The WTO can no longer hear appeals on trade disputes, because there is only one judge left. Three judges are required to hear cases.

There are normally seven judges, but the US under Bush and Obama used its power to slow down appointments to replace judges whose terms expired, and under Trump to completely stop such replacements. Earlier this month, the terms of two of the remaining three expired.

If there's no abjudication, then there is just retaliation. I.e. other countries will apply punitive tariffs to Turkish (car) imports.

Good luck producing an entirely new car model for domestic consumption only. Even when country is as big as Turkey, it will not be able to compete in scale, because in automobile industry, scale is very important.

Turkey high tariffs on imported cars is a response for sanctions/high tariffs imposed on the country's products.

I went to Turkey in 2010. Drove about 2500km around the country. One thing that stood out to me was the amount of work going into making really epic stretches of highways.

I was driving on 6+ lane highways that were so new, there wasn't even stripes on the roads. It is neat to understand now that they were also building the infrastructure to support these cars.

Where are they getting the batteries?

Electric cars are an extremely simple, mature technology that is decades old. Building one isn't hard. The real trick is high volume production of high capacity lithium ion batteries, and the associated pack technology. This is why the Europeans are still massively behind Japan, Korea, and the US (Tesla) with EVs. They can't get enough cells to manufacture cars in high enough volume to be profitable, because they are simply buying them from LG Chem and Panasonic.

If Turkey isn't investing billions into battery production, then the whole endeavor is a pointless prestige project.

Zorlu Enerji (It's a well known Turkish energy company as well as part of the TOGG) already invested 4.5 billion USD to build up a battery factory together with Chinese GSR Capital.

It was some years ago IIRC

https://www.dailysabah.com/technology/2018/02/27/turkeys-zor... As with Tesla's Panasonic partnership the huge Chinese investment in battery tech defines who really steers these early days attempts at mass market EV's

Don't really understand the point about autarky. Sure you can build all the wheel yourself but historically that haven't made competitive industry, rather, it made horribly inefficient state owned enteprise and produced extremely poor product. And it's not like global battery supply is monopolized - you can get battery packs from Panasonic, BYD or LG Chem, and it will be both cheaper and better than whatever Turkey can come up in a few year.

I'll believe it when I see it but I'd not be very surprised if they pull this off. Turkey has been able to pull off lots of giant infrastructure projects like the new Airport, Metros, Highways, Bridges, etc...

I think the government is very functional from that aspect.

Just came back from Turkey and have to agree. The new airport is excellent and they are currently building a new metro to/from airport. I was surprised at how well run some of the government services are. Just wish more people spoke English.

I crossed Turkey years ago (back in 2005-6) from Georgia all the way to Istanbul. Even then, they had very impressive freeways crossing very difficult terrain, that must have costa fortune to build and maintain.

The company will build a generic charging infrastructure in return to state support it gets. This way people can see advantages of electric vehicles. We expect a huge impact on fossil fuel dependency.

I'm shocked it never occured to me that big countries were impeding EV growth .. interesting note.

I’ve always thought this is quite similar to the wireless service. Smaller, densely populated European countries (compared to the size of the US) can much more quickly deliver new technologies at a much cheaper cost compared to the US, which has to basically cover half a continent of sparsely populated towns of several hundred people 50 miles across and a gaping nothing in between. As a result, cell service is 5-10x cheaper for the same amount of LTE data in Turkey compared to the US. For example, the last time I was there, 15gb LTE was about $7 pre-paid.

The same kind of penetration efficiency is in play when you’re trying to bootstrap a whole new infrastructure network like electric car charging stations.

Communication infrastructure is more of a "US did bad" scenario than an "other countries did good" one.

US policy people were tied down to various abstract philosophical/economic ideas (and their refutations) which made comms, especially cellular services generally more expensive than other places. Coarse theory and such.

It's partly cyclical. Following the antitrust actions (Bell etc), the US had a great Telecom market. In the 90s, compared to almost any other country, US telecom service was amazing. Most other countries were highly ideological about "key industries" like telecommunications and it resulted in a mess.

In the cellular/broadband age, the situation reversed. Turkey is more of the "norm." US is the outlier.

The problem I see is the taxes themselves. If they are making purchase and use of vehicles p prohibitively expensive, they are too high and are inhibiting growth and quality of life. Other car companies probably already reach a higher cost-quality balance than Turkey will get. There's something to be said for the economic stimulus of home grown industry, but you can also get a lot of that by working with a big manufacturer on a custom design built for & in your own country.

> they are too high and are inhibiting growth and quality of life

If they are making cars more expensive, they are improving quality of life. Less death, less pollution, less huge cost of extra traffic and roads and hospitals.

Turkey has a fantastic bus system with very comfortable buses more like airplanes (they have a host to bring tea, and have tv's in every chair).

> If they are making cars more expensive, they are improving quality of life. Less death, less pollution, less huge cost of extra traffic and roads and hospitals.

That's assuming that they're bringing the expense of cars more in line with their true cost including negative externalities. Once they're increasing the expense beyond that, it's a net QoL decrease.

I'd rather prefer to have WC on a bus than tea. I did appreciate electric outlets though.

Can you clarify your point about making it through Turkey on one charge. It’s around 1,000 miles wide so I’m not sure I understand.

Don't you need a rich economy for advanced products to be successful and profitable?

Or a pretty yawning wealth disparity that Erdogan has created for his supporters. BMW and Porsche sell plenty of cars in Turkey, even with the obnoxious taxes mentioned above.

In a more neutral way of phrasing it, per-person Turkish GDP PPP is now higher than Greece and closing in on Italy. (https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/gdp-per-capita-ppp)

Without commenting on who holds it, there’s plenty of wealth there.

Does PPP matter for that particular comparison? I'd have assumed that BMW and Porsche prices are fairly PPP-agnostic.

But a domestic car production would be all about PPP.

Besides, thos8 id a long term project, we should be considering 10-20 year trends.

They are a pretty rich economy, despite Erdogans best efforts to botch it.

This is ad hominem at it best. Please check the Turkey's economic statistics before and after Erdogan is in charged of Istanbul and Turkey, before you slander the person.

Erdogan is a corrupt fascist and a war criminal (most recently: killing civilians in Syria). But I agree: the coming economic crash is the least offensive consequence of his regime.

Since 2003 when erdogan came to power, the turkish economy grew 4 or 5X. There are lost of areas to criticize when it comes to erdogan, but the economy really ain't it.

As I said, despite his actions. It’s not like putting 100k political opponents in prison is a boost to the economy. (And to teleforce, ad hominem? Really? Someone is hot for autocrats. That is how you do an ad hominem.)

I have found it strange that most of the people even in HN did not realise that economic achievement is largely orthogonal to the political nature of the country e.g. the autocratic, monarchy or dictatorship. I think I don't need to provide you the modern example of this scenario and most of ancient empires have achieved economic miracles despite the autocratic/monarchy/dictatorship nature of the government. Having said that, Turkey is a democratic country with many legits political parties, it is neither autrocatic, monarchy or dictator.

And in true democratic fashion Turkey jails political opponents. “But they were terrorists”. How convenient. Go protest the war and see how “not autocratic” Turkey is.

Erdogan survived an attempted coup. Attempt a coup in Germany or France and see how fast those democracies get "autocratic".

Talk about muddying the waters. (It's not even clear where the coup came from, how it played out was surreal.) And even if a coup was attempted in Germany or France, people would not be arrested in the tens of thousands the next day. Curfew? Yes. Incidents where civilians were killed by mistake or in crossfire? If the coup was large - likely yes. War is not pretty.

A concerted effort to round up and imprison tens of thousands of people from all walks of life overnight? No.

It's almost like the coup played in Erdogans hands. I don't know what was behind the coup. It was clearly ill advised in every way. It's evidently clear Erdogan took the coup as his cue to further repress and imprison people he doesn't like.

Like the dictator he is. Unfortunately, the peoples of Turkey will pay the price.

> It's almost like the coup played in Erdogans hands.

FALSE.

I ain't defending anybody but If one try a coup he would not bombard his own home by a helicopter full of heavy guns.

All the citizens were suffering of these people who made the coup since 1990's as far as I read. They are hiring their members to critical positions like governor, judge etc and they do mobbing on others to quit, that's how they take over almost all the country.

Which ever main stream media you are following obviously managing a perception propaganda.

And those people who made the coup & escaped Turkey, doing this perception propaganda sice they have very good friends in mainstrem media like NY Times, Independent, The Guardian, german welt, etc.

You can't find those propaganda in Russia/China media, Russia found CIA ties with these terrorists who made the coup and never let them open their school in Russia.

Their schools operated over 100 countries (they were eye of the CIA according to claim) before the coup.

There is no example of this organisation in history, hard to believe but looks so true.

BTW, no opposition party member in jail as long as no ties with any terrorist organisation.

Economic growth alone is not relevant, what matters is how much there would have been with another system in comparison. A much harder question.

That's an un-answerable question, we can't even predict what economy will do next year

> As I said, despite his actions.

And I said since 2003. Before the coup attempt ( in 2016 ), his actions boosted turkey economy 5X. It has slipped since the coup attempt but that's to be expected. Political stability is required for economy prosperity.

> It’s not like putting 100k political opponents in prison is a boost to the economy.

What should he do with coup plotters? Throw them a parade?

Do you really believe he found 100k coup plotters overnight.

The intelligence service watching over them last years, but "the organisation" had members even among the intelligence service members.

See more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21932211

What's the electric grid situation in turkey? Can it sustain substantial car loads, and would this work outside big cities?

Disclaimer: not an expert.

It does have a decent, modern baseline grid running at 220v (EU standard). This is more amenable to EV than US 110v, but otherwise insignificant. A nontrivial portion of the base demand is supplied by hydroelectric dams, thus renewable, some old coal plants as generators of last resort, largely being replaced by natural gas plants for environmental and efficiency reasons. A new nuclear plant is going online in the next few years in Sinop.

I don’t think load created by EVs would make a significant difference. It’s a developed country connected into the European grid, if it can’t generate it’ll buy from its neighbours and sell to its citizens at a premium.

Nitpick: EU standard for tension is 230V (used to be 220V)

My apologies, you are correct. Turkey is also 230V it appears. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/World_Ma...