> Chinese keep prices low with .. subsidies from a totalitarian government

Lower labour costs per hour can be balanced against lower cost of living for workers.

Industrial Policy Spending for China’s EV Sector (subsidies) have dropped from $13,800 USD per vehicle in 2018 to $4,700 USD in 2023 and are less today in 2026.

How do these subsidies compare to US subsidies to the fossil fuel oil and gas industry?

You backed up my point though, so thanks? The CCP subsidized EV production heavily, lowering it over time as I assume manufacturing facilities are in place, but they continue to subsidize to keep prices low.

The oil industry is irrelevant here and feels more like a whataboutism deflection. We can debate the oil industry, based on your comment we'd likely agree on much of it, but that's a separate discussion.

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I'm not aware of the US government subsidizing the auto industry until well after automobiles and the oil industry was a thing.

Happy to be wrong here, but my timeline would have expected US subsidies in those industries to begin somewhere around the 70s give or take a decade, as both industries consolidated heavily.

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BYD subsidies ended this year and Xiaomi was never subsidized.

BYD subsidies have swung up and down over the years. Some years like 2020 it was a very small percentage of revenue and profit. Other years its been much more, 2024 they received just over 10.5 billion yuan accounting for 26% of total income and last year they received 12.5 billion yuan representing 38% of net profit.

The company would not exist as it does today without such funding.

Yeah, they were certainly accelerated by the subsidies, and now that the subsidies are just padding their profit, they're phased out.

That's.. completely sensible? Don't we all want a world with lower carbon emissions?

The discussion wasn't about whether we want carbon emissions, my only point here was that Chinese EVs were made so cheap largely due to cheap labor and government subsidies.

Whether we want lower carbon emissions, whether carbon emissions is the only metric that matters, whether moving from ICE vehicles to EVs, etc are all interesting topics in their own right.

Ok, but they're still cheap now with no subsidies. That's how it's supposed to work, subsidies to get off the ground in a strategic area with a goal of becoming self sustaining and then removing the subsidies.

Xiaomi YU7 is $30k new, and much nicer than a Model Y. Never subsidized.

China, for all its flaws, is the undisputed master of innovative automated manufacturing. They can iterate over design revisions quickly. They will build you whatever you want, and, unlike twenty years ago, it will be insanely precise, and everything that can be automated will be. US and EU automakers have to keep their unionized employees happy, which means less automation and less precision and higher prices. Robots and AI don't unionize.

No disagreement on the technical skills today. My point was simply that Chinese EVs are cheap, in part, because the government spends money to make them cheap.

And they do have plenty of flaws to call out, though living in the US today I don't want to throw stones in a glass house...