Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pjot 24 days ago

  > The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars.
Is this true? From years of watching Top Gear any Chinese car that was tested was laughably bad.
2 comments

For EVs, yes, absolutely
Yip, outside the US BYD cars are absolutely everywhere, pretty awesome cars, and crazy cheap - like < $15k. Apparently < $10k within China itself.
The price is not the important part, it basically doesn't matter. On top of subsidies and government policy aiming to undermine manufacturing in EU and elsewhere, domestic consumption in PRC is laughably low and government policies act to transfer wealth from households to manufacturing. Locals won't buy the supply, PRC literally has to get these cars somewhere or trash them.

Now if those cars are actually good, price independent, then that would be worth mentioning.

Do you have any references for your statements?

The majority of car sales in China are EVs (which is more than the UK, the EU and the US) so locals are buying the supply right now.

Reference: https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales

The articles you provided were relatively light on relevant facts, but did cite two important values - 60% of all vehicles purchased in China are now EVs, and domestic sales of such are about 1.4 million per month. The data they conspicuously left out is, well how many EVs are sold elsewhere per month? In the US, ostensibly the largest consumer market in the world, the figure is 0.082 million per month. [1]

Even if we scale US sales to adjust for population differences, the Chinese are picking up electric vehicles at a dramatically higher rate - and the single highest in the world. And this is almost certainly due to companies like BYD and others providing quality electric vehicles at prices below even cheap ICE vehicles.

[1] - https://www.anl.gov/esia/light-duty-electric-drive-vehicles-...

Maybe I'm dating myself, but I remember when the same was said of Japanese cars.

First we laughed at them, then we fought them, then they won, then we solved the problem with protectionist tariffs.