[ApolloFortyNine]

Only reason they wouldn't take off outside China is the astronomical tariffs the West are putting on Chinese cars (100% in the US).

Though depending on the wording, they may be able to just build a plant in Mexico and take advantage of NAFTA. I can't tell from the whitehouse post on the tariff if it's tied to country of the manufacturer or just country of origin (usually it's origin).

[_mlbt]

For me it’s not so much about the tariffs. Personally, I have concerns about driving a network connected car that is ultimately controlled by one of my country’s main geopolitical adversaries. There is a nonzero chance that if war breaks out between them, best case they spy on me or brick some functionality, and worst case they weaponize a software update to do something malicious.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I would love to be wrong about these concerns, as there will be some who do purchase Chinese EVs. Also it is not about xenophobia, it is about geopolitics and cybersecurity. If someone can reply showing me how my concerns about the CCPs ability to weaponize these cars are unfounded, I would greatly appreciate it.

[nujabe]

Isn't that a good thing? Personally, I would much rather be spied on by the CCP than the NSA.

[_mlbt]

> Isn't that a good thing? Personally, I would much rather be spied on by the CCP than the NSA.

Care to elaborate how being spied upon or worse by the CCP could be a good thing?

Additionally, depending upon how any hypothetical CCP back doors get implemented, you might get the NSA and others spying on you as well.

[nujabe]

The objectives of the CCP are primarily geopolitical, they are not interested in handing over information to domestic law enforcement that relates to my personal life. Further they have limited jurisdictional reach, unlike the NSA.

[solumunus]

What a foolish remark.

[vitorgrs]

BYD is also building a factory in Brazil. It's almost ready (the deadline was later this year).

The factory stays on the same place of an old Ford factory. Ford left...

Fun fact: The street is called Avenue Henry Ford.

[izend]

Including Canada (100%) affects the Tesla built in Shanghai that were being imported into Canada.

[worik]

> Only reason they wouldn't take off outside China is the astronomical tariffs the West are putting on Chinese cars

Doing very well in New Zealand and Australia

The dealers doing even better with 200% markups....

[tim333]

BYD have said they don't want to push export to countries where they are not wanted politically.

They seem quite engineering focused which seems to be serving them well.

[bhouston]

> ...they may be able to just build a plant in Mexico and take advantage of NAFTA.

If Trump is elected, expect then NAFTA to be changed to exclude competitors to Tesla in some fashion. There is already a lot of expectations that a Trump win will heavily benefit Elon: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/business/economy/elon-mus...

[bluGill]

NAFTA doesn't exist anymore. Trump replaced it with a "I can't believe it isn't NAFTA", I doubt he will reopen that again.

[FileSorter]

God forbid a US automaker benefit for providing Americans jobs

[_mlbt]

Exactly. People are all for globalization until it comes for their specific industry and job. I remember there being a great uproar and gnashing of teeth over the outsourcing of IT jobs to Asia back in the 90s and 00s, yet now there’s something wrong with protecting one of America’s remaining big manufacturing industries.

[echelon]

> Only reason they wouldn't take off outside China is the astronomical tariffs the West are putting on Chinese cars (100% in the US).

They're dumping domestic overproduction on foreign markets. You do that long enough and you can weaken your foreign competitors in their domestic strongholds. This can destroy high-value domestic jobs, lead to atrophy of expertise, and is especially bad to "strategic" sectors of the domestic industrial base.

Tariffs are a tool to protect domestic markets against dumping. Every other nation's automotive companies are free to compete in Western markets because they're not actively engaging in dumping. Their competition strengthens domestic rivals because it is fair and on equal footing.

Australia doesn't care because it doesn't have a domestic automotive industry to protect, so Chinese overproduction is essentially just foreign subsidized stimulus to the Australian population.

[Kon5ole]

VW's former boss mentioned in an interview that it took VW 3 times as long to make a car than it does for Tesla. So I think that while there may be some dumping as well, the main explanation is efficiency.

A company that builds a robotic factory from scratch and that only makes electric cars will be able to make cheaper cars than one who already has a huge headcount of combustion car workers. Auto workers are unionised and often working in factories bound by political agreements. You can't just close the combustion engine plant or reeducate everyone to make electric engines, it's years of negotiations.

If you start from scratch you don't have that problem, and you don't need to include that cost into the price of your cars.

That said, it makes perfect sense for a civilised society to protect their workers while they are reeducated and reassigned to new work by blocking foreign competition. But only for a while, while going all-in on the required changes.

Reality can't be ignored forever.

[bluGill]

VW has also learned a lot about making cars over the years. Fit and finish is reportedly better on VW vs Tesla. (this is very hard to measure though - once someone buys something as expensive as a car they are not emotionally willing to admit they made a mistake and so they will tend to ignore problems with their own while piling on perceived problems with the other)

[tonyedgecombe]

VW has become fat and lazy. It looks like they are just getting started on fixing that but they have a long way to go.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...

[churchill]

Western cope never gets old. Western automakers had the chance to dominate international markets, but they stayed back at home, making overpriced cars for their captive audience of local buyers.

Whenever competitors showed up, they laughed at them, before panicking when those upstarts starting challenging their market dominance. It happened with Japan, Korea, and now China.

So, if you feel China competes unfairly, close off your markets. Countries without a local auto industry will accept Chinese EVs readily. BYD & co. will snatch American & EU automakers' foreign markets before they come home to swallow you alive by building factories in low-cost countries like Bulgaria, Mexico, & Brazil.

Basically, the Toyota cycle will repeat itself because Western (esp. American) automakers spent hundreds of billions on share buybacks instead of R&D.

[echelon]

That is a vast oversimplification that discounts the incredible geopolitical changes over the past 40 years.

But at the end of the day, we're protecting our own interests.

[churchill]

I understand - I'm not wishing evil on the West. I want prosperity for all humanity. All I'm saying is that it's shortsightedness and hubris that even got Western automakers (and businesses at large) to this stage. Rest on their laurels, not learning from history, assuming the good times will continue unabated.

Just like Jack Welch and General Electric: financialize companies to the max, optimize for quarterly share increases, and earn billion-dollar bonuses. When the company inevitably collapses/shrinks after you retire, it's no longer your business.

Whether it's China's foray into nuclear, wind power, carmaking, solar, etc., they simply copy existing Western designs and keep developing them diligently while the incumbents optimize for quarterly earnings.

[IncreasePosts]

These complaints seem orthogonal to the question of China using dumping as a tactic to dominate a market. Even if you thought the US auto industry was very healthy and well run, it could still be existentially affected by a huge actor with near infinite money like the CCP dumping

[churchill]

Only one country can print the world's reserve currency from thin air and it's not China nor the CCP. Why doesn't the US counter-dump then? Spoil the rest of us with affordable EVs and hasten humanity's transition away from ICE vehicles.

[tivert]

> Only reason they wouldn't take off outside China is the astronomical tariffs the West are putting on Chinese cars (100% in the US).

Yeah, due to Chinese state subsidies and other assistance, China has a competitive advantage in automobile manufacturing as well as in many other areas. The US needs to show its commitment to free market principles and lets its auto industry die already.

[Barrin92]

>The US needs to show its commitment to free market principles and lets its auto industry die already.

Given that the car industry here in Germany opposed the (even much more moderate) tariffs the state subsidies certainly don't seem to scare them more than a trade war. It's just a repeat of the automotive industry dark ages of the 70s/80s when tariffs vis-à-vis Japan were enacted based on the same reasoning. You're just gonna have 20 years of no competition.

China is going to win the markets in the rest of the world, which is where the bulk of cars go now. It's gonna be funny when everyone in Asia is driving a 15k modern electric car and we sit here driving old second hand gas cars behind a tariff wall. It's like a reverse Soviet Union situation

[bluGill]

15 years ago China was opening up and looking to become more free over time. As such I would oppose any tariffs in the belief that drawing them closer to us is for the better. However now that Xi is in power he has been doing everything to oppose US (and EU, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam...) interests and so I'm forced to support tariffs. In principal I favor free trade, but when I expect war with someone else I can't support them or allow them to get control of things we will need to fight that war.

[tivert]

> Given that the car industry here in Germany opposed the (even much more moderate) tariffs...

Isn't the German car industry pretty much all-in on China, and thus dangerously exposed to any retaliation? IIRC, they have lots of factories there and depend on their output for a lot of their revenue. It would be pretty easy for China to shut them down or make life difficult them with some kind of pretext.

Boy, do I wish governments shared business's wise preoccupation with next year's numbers.

[jajko]

The ideal 'free market' you are referring to doesn't exist in real world. Every single country out there champions their own companies, giving them as much unfair advantage as they can while punishing any competition as much as possible, for mostly good and rational reasons. US is no different. The rest is history, and thats written by victors.

Even say EU vs US is not so rosy in trade wars. Remember how German government played down VW's dieselgate? Every single state has something similar, even if not on same scale.

[thefaux]

That seems crazy to me unless we're prepared to rebuild our infrastructure to allow a majority of the populace to live car free. Otherwise completely eliminating our auto industry would be an enormous national security risk.

[tivert]

> Otherwise completely eliminating our auto industry would be an enormous national security risk.

But I have been told zealous adherence to free market dogma will guarantee national security, without explicitly considering it!

[Also, I'm being sarcastic. I thought people would pick up on the double-standard in my original comment, but I guess free marketers can be that kooky sometimes. Everyone should realize by now China is playing a different game vis-a-vis trade than the free marketers want to play.]

[IncreasePosts]

Do any free market absolutists actually say these things, or are you just attacking a strawman?

I assumed they would say something like tariffs=bad, unless it's to overcome market manipulation by some state actor.

[Neonlicht]

The uncomfortable truth is that industry IS state politics.

The Volkswagen CEO has the German chancellor on speed dial. If your government's politicians have an emergency session on the future of a particular company there is no "free market".

[tivert]

> Do any free market absolutists actually say these things, or are you just attacking a strawman?

Oh, they totally do. See https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/26/mcdonalds-peace-nagorno... (paywall bypass: https://archive.is/lNwNQ) for an example:

> Friedman’s claim was simple: The benefits of economic integration reduce the policy choices open to governments, making war—which disrupts that integration—so unattractive as to be practically unthinkable. If that sounds like the theory of the capitalist peace as understood by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Richard Cobden, well, it pretty much was.

If you're going all-in on the free market and globalization, you need an answer to the national security objections, and that (unconvincing) answer is the risk to profit that conflict represents makes conflict unthinkable.

The thing that free market absolutists frequently forget that market values are not the only values, even among market participants. That's especially forgotten by forum participants who read a book proceed to swing around Econ 101 like it's a club.

[HDThoreaun]

Chinese auto makers dont get any more subsidies than american auto makers get. Domestic sales get tax subsidies but international ones do not, same as US.

[freeone3000]

It would probably be better for the consumer.

[IncreasePosts]

Better for the consumer in the brief period before they are ripped off repeatedly due to lack of competition after the subsidies are not passed to the consumer.

[polartx]

Or if the build quality of their vehicles was not up to par with US regulation or the quality standards the US market is accustomed to..which seems very possible given the connotations generally shared domestically around the phrase “made in china”

[porphyra]

The build quality of Chinese electric cars is generally pretty good.

In the past "made in Germany" used to have derogatory connotations due to German goods being worse than British ones too.

As for regulations, the BYD cars consistently rank very highly on the stringent Euro NCAP tests: https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/byd/seal-u/50187

[amrocha]

Teslas have a reputation for shoddy quality but they’re still sold in the US, i’m sure BYD will be fine

[bryanlarsen]

Chinese made Tesla's are generally acknowledged to be higher quality than American Tesla's.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

"Made in China" in the US typically means "made cheaply" - which, if you look at what people buy, is actually what people typically want.

You get what you pay for.

In the case of electric cars, China has their own domestic market that actually wants to drive a decent car, and so they are building for that.

BYD cars aren't particularly "cheap" in the way a "Made in China" spatula is.

[consteval]

In the automotive world, US cars are the ones who have an image of poor quality. GM, Ford, and Tesla are routinely viewed as shoddy and suspiciously built.