this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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China is the largest producer of EVs in the world by far (the next country on the list, Germany doesn't even come close). In fact, China produces more EVs than the next 4 top producers combined.
The US is running scared because there is absolutely no way they can compete, unless they severely handicap the competition.
So, instead of free competition in Western markets, we have coddled American companies that are "too big to fail" that will continue producing obsolete technologies. If we haven't already, we'll start to see Boeing's product issues in American cars.
I do question the amount of lifting the word essentially is doing in the above snippet, but that does sound like grounds to limit the inverse for Chinese imports
No need to question it. Western auto companies in China aren't independent. They're nearly always joint 50/50 ventures with Chinese auto companies and are under Chinese government regulation. I know for a fact that at least one American car company has the infotainment software for China written in China while all other regions use completely different software, written in NA.
Well, if the US spies on its own citizens can you imagine the shady shit they'd do on Chinese citizens?
I also wonder if restrictions on software are in response to the US restricting access to Huawei tech in allied nations. This shit is not new.
I also wouldn't put it past US officials to inflate something for their own purposes - what if the Chinese requirement is for Chinese language software and it got turned around into Chinese software to serve an agenda.
This is one of the reasons the US is looking to restrict Chinese EV imports. And to be clear, they’re so cheap because the CCP is subsidizing the entire Chinese EV industry, since they want to entirely own the market. But that’s not all.
China, as you may know, has a lot of serious problems around privacy and surveillance. More pointedly: it’s a surveillance state. It’s entirely possible that Chinese EVs could be sending back tons of data to servers in China. That data could be related to users and passengers… but it could also be area surveillance and data gathering (i.e. effectively employing multiple cars in a particular area as a distributed integrated sensor system), because modern cars have a shitload of cameras and microphones in them these days. I would be extremely unsurprised if the CCP was leveraging EV data gathering as an intelligence source. Think about it: they could give/sell near-realtime information to anyone they feel like. The CCP themselves is interested, I’m sure, in what’s going on in Taipei right now. They might sell South Korean data to North Korea. They might sell Ukrainian or Moldovan or Latvian or Finnish data to Russia. Those states might then turn around and use that data to try to destabilize the specified target countries, or even to assist with an invasion.
There are a LOT of reasons why letting the CCP own a vast majority of global EV production is a bad idea.
Remember when the Patriot Act was a thing?
Surveillance of your citizens isn't a CCP only thing.
Yeah. I know. But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about this.
Whataboutism isn’t going to change what I said, or how accurate what I said is.
It's not whataboutism, it's hypocrisy.
It’s really not, and it’s also not really apples to apples.
The Patriot Act, and the level of surveillance it enabled and continues to enable, is absolutely bad, and I am absolutely not defending it.
But the CCP comprehensively surveils its citizenry in ways that would appall people born and raised in the west - think “you were having a bad day last week and you yelled at a rude store clerk, and a camera caught that and flagged it for a party official to review, so now your metro card won’t take you anywhere besides work and home”. That’s a level of granular surveillance and control that’s commonplace in China, and would be absolutely unheard of in a non-authoritarian state.
To get back to the main points I am expressing here:
Thus, it stands to reason that the CCP, which is footing the bill for a meaningful percentage of their auto industry’s EV development costs, could very plausibly make “throw tons of sensors in there and pipe the data to us” a condition of that assistance.
That example you gave about yelling at a store clerk led to a man being murdered by the police in America (George Floyd).
Yeah, but 80% are super cheap crap.
Leave that to the customer to decide. Or is that not the point of the free market?
Not when it comes to things that will kill people.
"Super cheap crap" in this case could lead to the steering binding up and making a car drive into a crowd of people.
The car market is far from free and is probably one of the most regulated markets in the US. Introducing "free market" now to it would be quite catastrophic.
They still wouldn't be able to sell anything that doesn't meet the standards in place, so I really don't get your comment.
The government can't inspect 100% of every vehicle. Chinesium crap is notorious for swapping out parts. If the company is based in the US or has significant ownership/operations in the USA then you can take actions against the company...
A Chinese company has no care in the world about US operations. They'll just change name and peddle it under a new name. (see dropshipping problems we have now on all the major e-tail platforms).
Curious, are planes manufactured by Boeing being considered in your comparison of Chinese made vs US made products?
Well that's a good question... I would normally say no... But a little googling brings up results like
https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/boeing-expands-chinese-parts-factory-for-second-time
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/boeing-company-opens-new-chinese-factory-amid-us-chinese-trade-war
and
https://simpleflying.com/boeing-777x-parts-manufacture-site/
And then you look at the problems Boeing have recently faced... And you have to wonder... newer manufacturing facilities in China... and now we're seeing an uptick in problems at Boeing. Definitely a hell of a coincidence, but ultimately hard to tie them together as a causal relationship.
Whenever I see anyone comparing |absolute| values of anything between China and other countries, I just automatically assume they aren't thinking very hard. You realize it's a country of a billion and a half people right?
Okay so you're saying the US doesn't stand a chance.
India has a billion and a half people too by the way. Where are India's EVs?
Doesn't stand a chance at what? Producing more cars than an industrialized country with 4x as many people? Yes I am. Would you say Canada "stands a chance" in that sense compared to the US?
The better question is: what benefit is a country getting for the stuff it makes and sells. GDP per capita is a useful measure because in theory it means every person is getting a larger slice of the country's productive economic activity. Obviously reality is a lot more complex than that, but it's certainly not helpful to be even more reductive and just ignore the population factor entirely.
I'm not sure OP is talking about the net distribution of profit though, they're talking about gross market output. China can flood the EV market with cheap commodities, that's bad news for American manufacturers because -as op said- they can't compete. A lot of that is related to population, but that's kind of irrelevant to the point op is making.
They may be on the way, since India is already the 4th biggest economy in the world and growing fast.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2023/10/03/india-s-growth-to-remain-resilient-despite-global-challenges
https://hbr.org/2023/09/is-india-the-worlds-next-great-economic-power
Can't wait for sanctions against India, am I right?
Tell me you only read the headline
Oh I read the article and found most of it to be rehashed arguments about Huawei.