I'm an American. I've never been to China or seen one of these Chinese electric cars in person but everything suggests they're on their way to a formidable auto industry in the electric and city-car/light use space - the demographic that Honda and Toyota captured in the 70s and 80s.
Of course if you've done any traveling you'd find many countries have a national auto-manufacturer that's deeply popular in country without much penetration outside (take Vinfast or Saipa for instance) and the Chinese auto companies have yet to prove they can stake a foothold outside of their home country at the Kia or Mercedes level but they just started.
BYD just entered Japan under 2 months ago and XPeng entered Europe only about 6 months ago.
Time will tell, but we could be seeing the very early stage of Chinese auto brands becoming household names.
As it looks now (in Europe); the stigma associated with China is very strong and the brands that succeed likely will be western (at least in name) but made in China.
GM is involved with Wuling for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAIC-GM-Wuling but I think we call this Chinese, right? Transnational industrial capitalism is weird like that.
Not if they increase tariffs beyond the measly 10%. Which they should.
History will treat these sites as the he modern equivalent of the hitler youth. For instance the recent US invasion and occupation of parts of Syria seems to be completely missing from peoples memories. Were Americans simply not informed in the first place? We got millions of Syrian refugees into the EU.
Essentially the US pretends like it's the only country. It's softened in the past 20 years with the rise of the internet but the bubble used to be extremely strong when I was younger.
Plus some notable milestones:
2001 Patriot Act - very unpatriotic and anti-american
2008 mortgage crisis - huge bailouts for large corps, nothing for regular joes
2016 election of Trump - reality TV president, collapse of "norms"
2020+ covid response - unprepared and poorly handled, contradictions and backpedaling abound
Probably lots more I'm omitting but it's much harder to make the case we're #1 these days without adding caveats and qualifiers.
There's many metrics for measuring this. Frequency of international travel is up for Americans, even normalized for immigration.
The consumption of foreign media such as anime kpop and bollywood films is up.
Classic white Americans have also become more multilingual and their cuisine choices have diversified.
It's not great but it's up from a baseline of terrible where people would be asked to point to England on a map and then point to, say, Japan or shown some Hangul text and think it's Farsi. They're not quite that awful anymore.
I remember the US getting constantly humiliated on the study and stopped taking it. I also remember it being a big thing here in the EU. Pretty much all national TV channels were covering their respective scores.
That was some time ago and I do believe you might be right and that things have improved dramatically. However how does one track this now-a-days? I tried the PISA website, but it seems to have been mostly discontinued, as the last published survey seems to be from 2018. So I'm basically looking for a source that compares education objectively by country with recent data.
Could simple nationalism (or something else) not be the motivator?
Stuff is just cheaper in China.
I highly doubt BYD could sell a car in the US for $20k.
Yeah I see no way that happens. They have no dealer network to fall back on, so they have to either partner with someone already established, or they have to try and spin up a mobile service network like Tesla did. That costs money, and isn't going to happen while selling $20K cars.
Or Walmart. Hell, even Costco could play well here.
But yes; in practice the US have banned Chinese EVs by a combination of subsidy policies and import taxes.
The 2025 Volvo EX30: Priced to Tempt Americans
Just because a Chinese holding company owns something doesn't mean it's a "Chinese company".
Just like MG, which is now a brand owned by Shanghai Automotive Industrial Co. Or Jaguar Land Rover, owned by Tata Industries.
It's only a reductionist view in the very short term.
In fact, JLR and Volvo were more "brands" under Ford ownership, as compared to now where both are independent car makers.
So yes, it's a Chinese company, as much as the ownership of any large modern conglomerate can be attributed to a given nation. If that one guy wants all Volvo's to be shipped fluorescent pink it's going to happen.
Note that I was referring to Volvo Cars, the company that manufactures trucks etc. isn't owned by the same holding company, but they've got an agreement to share the "Volvo" brand.
Great Wall Motors (Haval, GWM brands) is trying to push hybrids here. China already has its own legacy manufacturers like Toyota or Volkswagen.
This is because the "safety" measures focus on cars and drivers, while everyone is switching to "truck" vehicles that are less safe for pedestrians.
even a golf with typical latam striped down specs (no center console, no glove box, manual windows, non adjustable side mirrors, etc) is OVER $20k
it seems to point down now, but who knows?
What does that even look like? I've driven plenty of old US cars, and power mirrors pretty much weren't a thing, but the side mirrors always were mounted on some sort of swively thing so you can adjust them. Big truck mirrors might only adjust horizontally and not vertically though, but I've never seen that on a car.
The often quoted sales figures, that you appear to be referencing, that have them way out in the lead include ICE and Hybrid cars, so if you're going to include those you're really comparing overall auto sales not BEV sales.
https://www.investors.com/news/tesla-vs-byd-2023-comparing-e...
Christensen formula is still in play.
(For people reading that's not to say it's a good stock buy, btw. Please don't try to divine financial advice from this comment)
(And yes, it is because of him, Blue Origin, Arianespace, and many others haven't been able to compete at the level of China, and neither have any electric car makers with BYD on a serious numbers level)
https://www.youtube.com/@Wheelsboy
I'm really blown away with some of their exterior designs. Less so with their touch interfaces (which range from atrocious to outright dangerous).
The car they bought looks really good too: https://youtu.be/kDRDNRuDnOA?si=DPzacq2fMcrJf-dj&t=250 (BYD Yuan PLUS, $21k, 480 km range).
I read an article that said this all started with Tesla production in China needing local manufacturing to support. The Tesla way allowed Chinese brands to see what was being done and catch up almost immediately on the processes and technology. That was step 1. Step 2 was applying the better understanding of what the Asian market wants to the Tesla business model. VW was the largest Chinese manufacturer, but VW EVs have flopped and are by all measures worse than what is offered by say BYD. There was a VW anecdote about BYD having in-car karaoke and this never occurring to Germans as something people would want.
"Sing mit die Hasselhoff zur die autobahn, jah!"
Why wouldn't they?
https://en.byd.com/news/byd-and-the-city-of-lancaster-announ...
But BYD seems more advanced in getting consumer automobiles into EU markets than US markets.
They also make electric busses: https://en.byd.com/news/byd-receives-largest-battery-electri...
There's definitely a market for super-cheap cars - Malcolm Bricklin knew this when he arranged to import the Yugo GV[0] (peak sales was 48,000). But BYD has much deeper pockets that Malcolm had, so they may be able to invest in safety, a dealer network, and the market research to produce an EV that Americans will buy.
The pace of new model introductions from BYD may actually work against them - the cars may be regarded as disposable, with environmental concerns over recycling the plastics and batteries. If the Han[1] is only on sale for a few years, to be replaced with an entirely different model, that also creates a brand identity problem. Compare that with Honda who has been selling the Accord since the late 1970's.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugo#In_the_United_States_and_...
I would not make the link that BYD == "super-cheap cars"
BYD Han, EU price €69,990. High price.
BYD Seal, EU price €44,900 and up. Not cheap, lower-middle of the pack.
BYD Dolphin, E Price €29,990 and up - that's at the cheap end. But not "super" cheap.
BYD Sea Lion, coming soon, around €24K / USD $26K maybe?
BYD and other might (and hopefully will) go below €20K / USD $25K into the "super-cheap" category. But that's hardly the whole of or current reality of the brand.
Your video link has the title calling the Han a "luxury Sedan" so I don't know why you would talk about "super-cheap", or invent concerns about model name longevity.
The US automotive market plays a completely different game than the rest of the world, with a bunch of protections and quirks that have a great potential to stifle a disruptive innovator.
First: the products themselves are regionally unique. The #1 selling vehicle in the US is the F-150, a truck that is a completely insane purchase for most of the rest of the world’s population. Japan may have disrupted the US market, but many of their vehicles they sell in big volumes are designed in America built in America sold primarily to Americans. BYD can’t sell the Qin Plus in America, they need to sell something more like the Rivian R1T. That means BYD needs a US factory to avoid the chicken tax…
Second: The US already shows high willingness to “chicken tax” EVs. All the vehicles that qualify for the EV tax credit are Ford, GM, and Tesla vehicles with high domestic part counts. The government can play this game until the cows come home giving the big 3 ample time to catch up.
So we’ve established that if you’re selling big volumes in America, you are producing cars in US factories. In that regard, China has a weak record of success. If they want to sell trucks in America they’ll probably have to have a UAW factory. The documentary “American Factory” comes to mind for me.
At best, this means that China won’t get the typical labor cost advantage that their entire export economy thrives on. What is their competitive advantage at that point?
Third: the dealer network. Operating in the US means dealing with independent dealerships often enshrined by law. Tesla had to fight an improbable battle to get to the scale it is now without independent dealerships.
Fourth: the incumbents have good tech and are high volume producers in their own right. BYD is big. You know who is bigger? Volkswagen. Toyota. GM. Ford. Even Tesla is bigger by global revenue. 17 other global automotive companies pull in more revenue than BYD, and 9 pull in more revenue than SAIC.
By the way, the “$5,000 used car killer” has been a legend for decades and will never happen in developed markets with strong safety regulations and demanding living standards. Americans literally do not buy city cars, new or used. Get back to me when the Cherry QQ more closely resembles the Ford Maverick.
Now, I'm skeptical that, after all the US safety regulations are met, that it could still be made for $4,000, but the utter manufacturing advantage of paying Chinese workers in Chinese factories local wages is not to be underestimated.
$1000 in tariffs can pay an American factory worker’s total compensation for something like 15-20 hours.
The Suzuki Samurai’s cult following is irrelevant to this discussion, which is about vehicles that will sell in high quantities in the United States. You might as well tell me that Disney should start making biopics about famous computer scientists instead of their next Marvel movie.
I am talking about the cars that are the bread and butter of the business of the global automakers.
Also, if your “disrupt the industry” plan is to sell cheap stuff, you’re basically dooming yourself to have the lowest margins. A $5,000 car can only make $5,000. So you sell 10 shit boxes and Ford sells one F-150 and makes the same amount of money but on a higher profit margin because they only had to make one vehicle.
And again, the US market has spoken on cheap shitty vehicles. City cars struggle to survive and most have exited the market.
Ask all your family and friends what they think about their next car being a Nissan Versa or Chevy Spark with no options. How many of them drive something nicer and larger?
I would be highly surprised if the raw ingredients for any car would be more then 4k, but that's also not a very useful metric.. i guess a cpu Would be a few cents
Aside from US consumers, everyone stands to lose from cheap EVs flooding the market: oil companies, conventional domestic and import manufacturers, electric manufacturers like Tesla, dealerships, arguably even state and local governments who under current laws make less in tax revenue on electric cars.
I saw a BYD logo on a vehicle on the roads of London UK a few days ago. I knew they were coming, and now they are arriving.
Geely is more stealthy, Electric vehicles from Geely subsidiaries (Volvo, Polestar, LEVC) have been around for years. The last, LEVC ( https://levc.com/ ), is the current London "black cab" taxi.
For 2023, China's BYD has globally outsold Telsa by over 50% and 8 out of the top 10 brands for global electric car sales for Oct 2023 are from China.
The BYD qin plus, for instance, is about $20k, the Wuling Mini-ev is about ~$10k, Aion Y is $20k. They're eating everyone's lunch and expanding into Central America, Africa and Europe.
Cars like the Cherry QQ, which are $5,000 aren't meant to be compete with new cars but instead, to the vast majority of price-sensitive buyers who normally purchase used cars. Introduce a used-price new car, however ...
They're poised to do to the American auto market what Japan did 40 years ago and just like then, American auto seems to be asleep at the wheel.
This is a classic Clayton Christensen innovators dilemma formula.
Edit: Apparently factual statements are unpopular once again. The internet is so cool.