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by ShinyLeftPad 24 days ago
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.

1 comments

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-...

How is it relevant how many EVs are sold in the US? The country obviously prefers internal combustion engines.

I am saying that PRC is a command economy, EV production is strongly subsidized, no labor protection, falling domestic sales and crazy low domestic consumption in general, a lot of excess of EVs to the extent that they are trashed instead of resold, and so comparing EVs by price to European EVs is silly. Nothing you say contradicts me.

Yes Chinese buy lots of EV so what? And if you mistake this for choice or how great Chinese EVs are, I have news for you. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/bogof666/shanghai-car-licens... https://www.cpopartners.com/chinas-green-push-shanghai-2025-...

Your entire premise was that domestic consumption of EVs in China is low, "laughably low" as you put it. That is an absurd statement when they have, by a very wide margin, the highest consumption rate in the world not only as a whole, but even per capita - at least relative to major economies. If you want to argue that global EV consumption rates are low then that's an entirely different topic.
Did you see my link that shows per capita household consumption in PRC lower than world average and places like Kosovo or Sri Lanka?

Here's a relevant article https://www.ft.com/content/f294be55-98c4-48f0-abce-9041ed236...

> If you want to argue that global EV consumption rates are low

No. Do you read my comments? I argue China subsidizes production of more and more EVs and buys less and less domestically, so they will be sold at unfair prices and comparing them by price to European EVs is pointless.