You mean the countries that still have native automotive industries and an understanding of the strategic value of heavy industry in both economic and martial terms?

> You mean the countries that still have native automotive industries

Thanks for the laugh, as a lifelong Michigan resident I have to say this is great satire.

How do Chinese owned industrial factories in Brazil differ, apart from being more efficient and able to pivot to new markets better? Which seems like useful properties in a war footing?

Do you want your war munition manufacturers to say "we'd have better short term bonuses if we didn't manufacture what you need but instead just kept manufacturing our old stuff with no regard for the nations future"?

> How do Chinese owned industrial factories in Brazil differ, apart from being more efficient and able to pivot to new markets better? Which seems like useful properties in a war footing?

The factory stops being efficient and easily pivoted the second the people running said factory want it to stop. That, in turn, depends on how friendly you are with the country running said factory.

Let's say there's some sort of negotiations going on between the country that hosts the factory and the country that operates the factory, which, in this case, means a country with a government that has a very deep cadre system that gives them control of almost all enterprises, state-owned or otherwise.

The negotiations (whatever it is, let's just say they're economic for an example) reach an impasse. You are the country that has control over the factory. Sure, the host country has the factory, but they don't have the institutional knowledge, intellectual property, or supply chain deals that your firm does.

Do you ignore this leverage? Hell no. You say "it'd be a real shame if we had to find a new place to make our products for your market", which would imply a serious loss of employment in the region and a massive factory complex sitting empty and decaying.

Unless you're talking about the sort of relationship the US and Japan have, the factory's host country now has to consider that possibility.

> Do you want your war munition manufacturers to say "we'd have better short term bonuses if we didn't manufacture what you need but instead just kept manufacturing our old stuff with no regard for the nations future"?

That's literally how pretty much all industrialized and post-industrialized nations' defense manufacturing sectors work to one extent or another. Some munitions and defense systems are incredibly complex. You can't just move the knowledge about their manufacture over in a few corporate wiki pages; you have to have the greybeards teach the young guys by doing. This happens all the time, particularly with nuclear weapons. If you don't do that, the greybeards retire or die off and no one knows how to make this system that the military has speced, tested, approved, and gone through the bureaucracy of acquisition for. This means they either do without or get to start over from scratch at tremendous cost.

Exactly the countries where brand loyalty has a culture status. If you let go of that, there are only a few sensible economic options left, BYD high on that list.

You forgot India.

The thing all these countries have in common is their own Automobile sector which is a huge part of the economy that they need to protect.

Surprisingly I have seen imported BYD Atto at 100% tariffs or so and Olectra buses which are actually BYD buses , probably CKU imported into India. Auto sector employment in India is seriously important as is the need for capturing a fair value even of EVs locally while on the other hand Oil & Gas imports have always been the biggest import bill and Forex drain so there are good incentives to move. It is just they do it slowly and in their own ways and the handful of capital intensive companies who tried getting LFP manufacturing into India failed as China scale cannot be replicated in India due to differing political systems and cultures, even today

India’s approach has been to allow the competition but at a tariffed rate that makes the imports slightly more expensive than the domestic products. This ensures local industry doesn’t get decimated but also doesn’t get complacent without competition. The consumers get the option to buy BYD, but it won’t be cheap.

Brazil also has a huge automobile sector, even though it's not Brazilian-owned

BYD had to open factories here

Assuming the blue wave continues for 2 more years, I've been wondering if the Democrats are going to open up America to Chinese EVs as a way to punish Elon for his engagement with the GOP

USA bans the onboard Chinese automotive software for national security reasons, effectively banning Chinese cars. This isn't a partisan political thing, Biden was the one that signed the Secure Equipment Act.

For all the talk about data and technology sovereignty in Europe about USA tech, you would think they would take that more seriously too. Instead Europe is flooded with underpriced Chinese cars that they have no control over.

There's also the 100% tariff to overcome. But I'm sure with a friendlier tax/tariff regime, Chinese companies wouldn't be opposed to bringing 98% complete vehicles from China to the US and then finishing them with American comms equipment.

they wouldn't mind standing up factories and importing the parts for assembly.

> Instead Europe is flooded with underpriced Chinese cars that they have no control over.

Please someone fact check that, as far as I know there are import taxes on Chinese EVs, and protectionist measures. The only "loophole" I know is for vehicles built in the EU, which is fine as it employs local workforce.

The link says restrictions on software take effect in model year 2027 and hardware in 2030. So those rules are not in force yet right?

And if this were really the issue, why wouldn't BYD build vehicles with swappable control software and hardware? Ship unfinished vehicles to the US and install approved electronics in them?

No they won’t as they have auto unions to protect

American auto unions largely aren't competing in the EV space. 80%+ of EVs sold in America aren't built using American union labor - Tesla at 60% sales is non-union, Rivian at 10%, Toyota imports EVs, Ford and Chevrolet build the Mach E and Equinox EV in Mexico

It doesn't refute GPs point. If foreign EVs are better than ICE vehicles manufactured by union labor, the unions are going to have a problem letting the foreign EVs in.

US car makers can be cheaper too if they put workers in slave-like conditions, even aside the Chinese govt subsidies and investment.

One example from Brazil since that's the topic:

> Brazilian prosecutors have filed a lawsuit accusing electric carmaker BYD of human trafficking and keeping its workers in “slavery-like conditions” in its biggest market outside China.

> The investigation found the Chinese workers were brought to Brazil under false pretences and their visas did not match their jobs.

> Prosecutors said the workers were found working in “slavery-live conditions” and with "minimum comfort and hygiene”, calling them victims of international human trafficking

> The workers were forced to sleep on beds that did not have mattresses and as many as 30 people shared a bathroom, MPT alleged.

https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/china/byd-china-ev-sued-b...

BYD in China shows off their factory towns for how wonderful the workers live. Its a modern day Hershey. It might be more of a Brazil issue than a BYD issue.

Good ol’ propaganda?

wjy is that your reflex? good ol' propaganda.

There is a lawsuit in China involving BYD, it shows in October of 2020 an assembly line worker clocked 441.5 raw hours, got paid ~$1.96/hr after overtime multiplier. The reality in car manufacturing in China is 12hr shifts, 2 days off a month and $2-3/hr wage, simply sweatshop in the 21st century.

BYD cars are cheaper because China just has the most expertise at building things at scale and because they're making many formerly discrete car parts entire modules, which are cheaper to manufacture.

There's also been plenty of reporting of 'slave like conditions' at Tesla, GM etc.

I mean, both can be true?

Can be, but likely isn't to any greater extent than in the West without substantial evidence. And so perhaps it should not be the first reason listed for why it's cheaper when there are perfectly reasonable explanations outside of the constant 'China bad, evil' orientalist shtick that just shows how scared we in the West are of actual competition, accustomed to exploiting the world for half a millennia.

No, it can't. If PRC makers NEEDED low wages to undercut pricing vs west sure. But PRC EVs selling far above domestic MSRP, more than enough to cover wage differential, i.e. lower wages isn't doing the undercutting, it's enabling more profitable extraction. Reality is western competitors are simply not competitive regardless of wage differential when most structural competitiveness come from vertical integration. It doesn't help west is paying more to build worse. Paying less to build worse also not going to close gap.

Slave-like by American standards maybe, not Chinese. In the US Janesville GM pays assembly workers $28/hr in 2008 before closure, and nowadays anywhere between $20-$35 and they enjoy a strong union and good pension.

A few labor lawsuits show that in China Tesla wage starts at ~$4.5/hr while BYD ~$1.7/hr. Tesla also limits overtime to 36 hrs/mo by China labor law, while gov allows BYD workers to clock 441.5 raw hours in a single month. Pension and union is basically non-existent. And the reason why ppl work at BYD instead of Tesla is by clocking monstrous overtime they actually make more despite lower hourly pay.

There are reasons why Tesla consistently ranks in China 1st/2nd by sales. One of them is Chinese workers are the ones exploited by sweatshops and a government only nominally communist so they are paying the price, while Western customers are enjoying good ol' NIMBYism.

> In the US Janesville GM pays assembly workers $28/hr in 2008 before closure, and nowadays anywhere between $20-$35

> In China Tesla wage starts at ~$4.5/hr while BYD ~$1.7/hr.

You can't compare wages in China vs the US like that. The cost of living is much, much different than in the US. Healthcare, energy costs etc. aren't comparable.

What you linked to is of contractors building the plant, not assembly line workers. It's a blurry line and certainly affiliated with BYD, but car assembly itself is moving toward 'dark' factories, populated by robots that are indeed kept in slave-like conditions, unpaid and worked beyond humane shifts.

As a side note, BYD indeed has a lot more workers per car vs a lot of their competitors, but because of the vertical integration, most are assembling upstream parts.

BYD pulled off the same thing in EU as well, in Hungary [0].

The dark factory part is simply propaganda, the viral WSJ interview is only about body assembly which is already automated everywhere. The labor intensive part is the general assembly and even they admit this in the video. However here it's like Chinese EV found the silver bullet in car manufacturing.

[0]: https://chinalaborwatch.org/building-byd-szeged-labor-risks-...

Cheaper but not cheap. US can pay literally 0 and still be substantially more expensive than PRC, labour simply rounding error ($500-$1000) per chassis.

Have you ever seen warehouses in the US or construction projects with only Mexicans. Not so much different to what you describe.

BYD is cheaper because BYD engineers are smarter, have higher IQ and able to vertically integrate components to cut overheads.

in the US auto OEMs are mainly putting parts together, made by different suppliers like ZF, Bosch, Lemforder etc etc. Its assembly work and it split across hundreds of legacy car component suppliers

> BYD is cheaper because BYD engineers are smarter, have higher IQ and able to vertically integrate components to cut overheads.

Lol, I wonder why. It really is a mystery. Why did we once rule the world pre-1970's and have been waning and decaying ever since? Gee, maybe these Chinese geniuses can figure out the reason for us.

That’s what happens when the state intentionally heavily subsidized an industry to destroy existing competition

Yes, but we're not talking about GM right now

Dated take. China and BYD are doing a lot of things right that make this possible. A recent article showing how they're consolidating parts that passes the buck to consumers is a great example as to why they can sell 20% cheaper and still have higher margins.

Yeah we can see that with Anthropic and OpenAI.

No it's what happens when smart state intelligently subsidizes to bring down structural costs, while retarded state foolishly subsidizes to keep pork barrel jobs program going as legacy processes fall into uncompetitiveness. We had 30 years of PRC shock evidence now - everything PRC made cheap, remains cheap long after subsidies, because they structurally lower floor vs western competition doesn't.

"They subsidize their industries. We protect local jobs." Totally different things.

It’s unavoidable, every country does it.

subsidies is a very lazy argument, US subsidizes and protects even more and bails out car OEMs.

the real argument is efficiency, US cannot match efficiency and scale. Thats the root cause.

Thought you were talking about the US.

Is that why the US bans exports of EUV machines and Nvidia chips to China?

Germany is being taken over, too. Perhaps slower than other markets but sales of Chinese cars are booming.

BYD is available in both South Korea and Japan and making inroads. The biggest barrier is a deep distrust of Chinese brands, not tariffs, plus in Japan's case favorable tax treatment of "kei" (light) cars, a Japan-only segment that BYD has just entered.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinese-evs-win-o...

I have no doubt they can build an excellent machine. I’ve also received enough plated brass/pot metal “100% stainless steel” items from China to know I would have zero trust in their suppliers even if I trusted one company enough to buy a car.