BYD calls for Chinese new ev companies to demolish western automakers

https://www.energyportal.eu/news/byd-calls-on-china-automakers-to-unite-demolish-the-old-in-global-push/148448/

It's quite interesting how fast the landscape has changed. Years of very heavy subsidies from the Chinese government has created a large amount of new Chinese ev companies. Among Which the largest are BYD (biyoudi) , Geely, Volvo/polestar (originally swedish), gm and nio.

A combination of European automakers being terribly slow to adapt, chinas monopoly on rare minerals, and massive subsidies has left European automakers (large revenue generators for the European Union largest member states) at very vulnerable positions.

As much as I dislike trump, his trade barriers and musk foresight have left the USA in a significantly safer place.

It reminds of a the solar panel industry situation, in which massive subsidies and dumping basically destroyed the European local industry and the USA's survived applying tarrifs.

Sadly the EU, due to its non completely unified government, has become slow to react, easy to divide and rather weak in action.

The story could repeat again.

We will see what happens.

This isn't the first time the US has been threatened by foreign automakers; something similar happened with the Japanese in the 70's or 80's iirc, everyone was saying "Oh, it's over for Ford and blah blah blah"

Sounds like yet another reason to continue decoupling.

Every time Western powers drop the ball on industry or foreign policy, China is standing ready to pick it up. Politicians would do well to look where world is going, instead of looking back where it's been.

It is Japan that should be worried the most. There are plenty of European EVs in production or designed and coming soon. Japanese auto manufacturers are way, way......way behind and companies like Toyota are still clinging to hydrogen as their savior.

Japanese closed culture and their industry operating as a consortium headed by Toyota spells doom for them. They cant react fast enough. They are also extremely dependent upon the Chinese auto market which is the largest in the world. Japanese manufacturer sales are being annihilated in China because they have no EVs.

For reference, EV market share in China is over 1/3 of all new sales and on a path to hit 50%+ by end 2024. Japanese manufacturer sales in China are way down this year and production has been halted on multiple occasions. They have no EVs, and ICE offerings are having to be discounted by every manufacturer in China.

NA auto industry has more built in defense than any other region: #1 being the utter dominance of SUVs/trucks as a % of market. #2 being the rules around subsidies (yes you Trump clowns should be kissing Biden's ass for the way he handled this). #3 being the rulesets around safety, range calculation, etc. which highlight the flaws of Chinese manufacturing claims.

@SUD123456: Whet specifics are you referring to in number 2?

@mrbojangles25: well, the japanese automakers did take a significant part of the USA market at the time.

But I think USA is quite prepared for this at this point.

1.It's trade barriers make it too expensive to import cars from china.

2.The inflation reduction acts subsidies only local production of electric vehicles.

3.They have the biggest ev maker in the world and this company has started battery production in the USA for a long time.

The EU on the other hand has:

1. No electric vehicle star manufacturers.

2. The traditional makers have been super slow to adapt.

3. It does not have any protections against cheap imported cars.

4. It electric cars subsidies don't distinguish between local and foreign production.

5. It's battery production infrastructure is massively lagging behind.

eh. if they build a car that's affordable, reliable, gets good range, and doesn't spontaneously burst into flames or disintegrate upon impact people will buy them.

@comp_atkins: they have. And a ton of brands and excess production due to heavy subsidies. The last time they did that it was with solar panels. They did lower the price but as prices were unsustainable for non subsided production, they also forced the entire eu manufacturers to declare bankruptcy.

Frankly China can dominate technology simply by controlling their rare earth resources on the global market.

The west is also concerned by China's desire to take Taiwan to dominate the world's semiconductor production, which would make the entire world bend the knee to them or face being forced back into a technologically stone age from lack of access to vital technological supplies. Currently Taiwanese companies are opening plants abroad in hopes to prevent such a scenario and perhaps give China less incentive to invade the nation.

I personally don't see China competing with western automakers with their own designs anytime in near future, or ever. I imagine a significant barrier could be IP related and barriers with trade laws as China doesn't respect IP, and this can serve them just fine domestically, but trying to create a broader international market will be a different game.

I expect the role they play in western markets will be strictly on the supply side. After Ukraine's war with Russia plays out, I imagine world governments will be considering their vulnerabilities to resource shortages cause by such conflicts. Perhaps new sources of rare earth minerals will be explored and produced to not rely on a potential hostile nation trying to exercise leverage with vital resources. They're currently working on more oil/gas extraction sources. We've seen what Russia and Saudi Arabia have tried doing limiting oil and gas production. We also see what effect the Ukraine conflict has had on global grain prices. Even Covid itself illustrated the demand for semiconductors in technological driven industries and additional shortcomings in ability for cargo ships to keep up with trade demands.

Anyhow, yeah, again, I see China's role being supply side related. I think the idea of westerners buying 100% Chinese designed and produced cars from 100% Chinese companies would make westerns laugh themselves to death.

@lamprey263: I don't see why it would be laughable. China has a very large population and a very educated population.

They have engineers, designers and scientist. Many of them very high quality.

And their electric cars companies come with the advantage of already having large battery production facilities and enjoying more than a decade of heavy subsidies.

Chinese cars aren't a thing here.

@nirgal: "I don't see why it would be laughable. China has a very large population and a very educated population. They have engineers, designers and scientist. Many of them very high quality. And their electric cars companies come with the advantage of already having large battery production facilities and enjoying more than a decade of heavy subsidies."

China's reputation among westerners is where western companies go to get their products made cheaply and of lesser quality. I've no doubt China is perfectly capable of making reliable products themselves, but they'd have mountains to move to convince western consumers they're not buying lemons.

Like I said before though, what they can make for domestic consumption may differ than what they offer abroad. China doesn't respect the intellectual property of companies from other countries and that serves them fine for their domestic market to make and design stuff that's reliable, but it'd be a major hurdle trying to market worldwide. Many of the world's nations are bound by trade agreements and laws that wouldn't allow for the sale of devices that use stolen intellectual property of other companies. This will no doubt be the largest hurdle trying to market Chinese automobiles abroad.

Here neither, but I see that changing.

Maybe don't blindly trust Chinese statistics? It's a known fact that a shit ton of their EVs are "sold" to rot in fields, because the dealers buy them and them don't have any end-users to sell them to.

It the ghost cities all over again. Manufacturing just to inflate GDP, not because people want the product.

@rmpumper: dude, I lived in china for over 10 years. I know what to trust and what not to trust based on my experiences and conversations.

The rise of Chinese EVs is very real it even preexisted the cars.

@hardwenzen: that situation does exist, but it's decontextualized.

Basically, the government spent massively on subsidies on electric vehicles.

The subsidies as always were for the most part very wasteful and were abused by companies that pretended to sell the car to get subsidies and then dumped them.

But at the same time it originated several other very functional and profitable companies that did sell most of their vehicles.

Currently china has an active fleet of millions of these cars in consumers hands and the subsidies did allow for some companies to find the way to produce evs faster and cheaper than most western competitors (except Tesla due to their extremely streamlined car manufacturing process and vertical integration)

None of the pre existing European car manufacturers have the knowhow or infrastructure to compete with them now and they have been leap frogged.

Electric cars is the wrong move personally. We should move for those hydrogen cars and my take is that electric cars takes too long for a spot to charge, wait while charging and will take longer as more users on the road. Not to mention having to build more wasteful electric generators that harm the environment like coal or gas electric plant or destroying ecology like building dams.

how will all the hydrogen be manufactured, stored, transported, etc?

This thread is back to being relevant. As I pointed out EU is in a very vulnerable positions.

Now they have tried to address that by initiating an investigation in to Chinese ev subsidies.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/13/cars/europe-china-electric-car-subsidies/index.html

Damn. So fucked up. Learned a lot about wallets as well... until I clicked fast forward.

Stop pushing for EVs. Most will be Chinese made. If you outlaw ICE cars you are basically handing China the keys to the car no pun intended. Most places don't have the proper infrastructure for the charge stations and they really aren't great for the environment either with all the mineral mined for the battery's and the charge stations running off diesel.

EVS can exist and grow but we shouldn't be banning the cars our own automakers have been making

@sargentd: I agree. They are commiting suicide by ideology.

there needs to be a balance between protecting the environment and protecting the companies that produce wealth.

@nirgal: agreed, shouldn't be any subsidies given to EV companies. Make them compete fairly with gas vehicles.

@sargentd: I disagree with that part. They will probably need a period of subsidies to develop the infrastructure to mass produce EVs at a market competitive cost. But their subsidies shouldn't apply to import products.