But worldwide it has been for a while, no? I think total EV cars sold in 2025 BYD was top, if I remember correctly.
Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression. But anyone paying attention can quite clearly see that China is winning and the US is sacrificing their global superiority at the altar of fear, ignorance, and religious nationalism.
Right down to the shaky real estate markets.
Japan never surpassed the US in power or industrial output. China is different. They’ve clearly surpassed the US in some key areas.
I’m not sure that’s something that anyone should be concerned about from a geopolitical point of view. Likewise expecting Japan to have ever done the same is… silly.
China is also happily supporting Russia in their invasion of Ukraine, which makes the "not waging war" distinction a bit academic.
They also have fought wars, and my wording was admittedly bad. They haven't fought a serious war in a long time, and their military activity in general has been limited to a few border standoffs which I certainly wouldn't take as an indication of its willingness to fight for something like expansion
It's depressing that we can't buy BYD in the USA. It's feeling more and more like being stuck with a Lada in the 1980s.
You can see the political groundwork being laid here.
https://homeland.house.gov/2025/05/21/homeland-republicans-p...
If these concerns are so pressing, why do we allow any electronics at all from China?
It smells like air cover for a de-facto ban on BYD. To force US consumers to buy from politically blessed car makers instead of letting us choose the highest quality car available (at a given price point).
BYD keeps performing well in the rest of the world. If we hold US consumers hostage to prop up companies like Tesla, we risk allowing them to stagnate.
Today it’s “everyone can do this but we can’t”
And always used diplomacy and superpower status to push other countries into buying more american.
Let me tell you a highly stylized version of the American story.
In the beginning, there was a startup called the United States, which we’ll refer to by its stock-ticker symbol, USA. It was young, scrappy, and hungry and needed to figure out how to deliver value to its citizens users.
So it did a bunch of things: It created a central bank. It expanded its territory. It established mass communications (the postal service) and roads and public education. Eventually, it took the painful step of expunging slavery.
This startup grew in size and productivity and market cap. Its user base became enormous. After about 160 years, USA became the biggest company on the planet, at which point it achieved a bunch of important network effects. Because USA benefited from free trade, it developed a military that could enforce a globalized system of free trade. Capital—both human and financial—flowed into USA. People—both users and clients4—loved USA. And for another 70 years it delivered good results for both. Its stock couldn’t have been higher.
But then USA went down the road toward enshittification...
I don't think we get to be stagnant and fend off Chinese industrial hegemony. It's not a symmetric bet.
Chinese cars don't exist in the US because of laws specifically designed to prevent their sale here. The tariff for Chinese EVs was increased to 100% a couple of years ago when it was rumored that BYD was going to move to the US market. And currently, there is a bill circulating to ban them entirely.
Whatever the stated reasons are is one thing.
The biggest issue is that a network of BYDs in the US would be a massive intelligence coup.
It will never be permitted unless the intelligence aspect is addressed… if it can be.
The patterns of aggressively tariffing foreign automakers for protectionism in the US long pre-dates any sort electronics in cars.
Lobbying forces in the US care deeply about the latter, not so much the former.
Competition is great but it doesn't mean that the cars in America are bad. The lada was a failure of a car compared to other similar cars available elsewhere. That is not the case here.
The why part is easy - Tesla is about as outdated of a car as it gets, it is practically same car and there are only few options. I own 2014 Model S and my neighbour has 2025 Model S - it is the same car when you look at it. We also got Model 3 (from many years ago) which was then blown up a little into Model Y and we have X from a decade ago. These are ancient cars. The tech inside may have improved but the offering is basically for my grandparents now.
Back when people used to buy Teslas, the company was notorious for how long it took to get repairs done. Even if BYD was exactly like Tesla theres many ways they could differentiate themselves if they were allowed in the US
To a first order approximation yes.
The online discussion is dominated by fanboys who don't actually know squat and people who have an expensive purchase they need to feel justified in.
The differences between two competing cars of different makes is way, way, way less than these people will make it out to be.
These products are intentionally designed to be neck and neck. They're different, don't get me wrong. But they're all very close. Like a kid guessing the right answer on a math test. Things aren't the same, but the dumb fanboys who think that every Camry goes 500k on oil changes, every Tesla gets stuck in the shop forever, every American car handles like poo, etc, etc. Those idiots are wronger. You'd never be able to tell how different the cars are on those sorts of axis without fairly rigerous methods. And those people dominate the discussion.
You’d never know because you never had a choice in the first place
> massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects
The protectees in this case are fossil fuel interests.
It's quite unfortunate, but I can't say I blame them. From their perspective the tiger is finally showing its stripes.
1. Protecting your interests by building a dynamic strategy. You protect your interests by enhancing your strengths and building on them.
2. Protecting your interests by playing “defense” against your decline.
We all know which country chose which path.
Chinese party leadership is stacked with literal engineers. They’ve prioritized development of industries crucial to their success. For example, they know they’re never going to be a big oil producer and that fighting wars over oil is expensive and futile, so they have developed their path to energy independence with their solar and wind industry along with electrified transit of all types.
Meanwhile, in America, our leadership is stacked with grifters who only have experience in shifting money around. We are all stuck with oil and car dependence that nobody’s willing to address with long-term infrastructure development reforms.
We are trapped fighting wars over oil because $6-7/gallon gasoline in middle America would trigger a major recession. Our government actively incentivizes wasting oil via automotive regulations written by industry lobbyists. That big F-150 parked at the Old Navy that doesn’t need to follow CAFE regulations is totally a “work truck.”
We don’t strive to build the most competitive industries, instead we use sanctions and tariffs to prevent foreign competition from reaching our shores.
And before you talk about China disallowing foreign competition, I’ll note that Chinese citizens can go to the mall in China and buy a Tesla, an iPhone, an Audi, Levi’s jeans, Coach bags, do a web search on Bing, deploy applications on AWS servers in Beijing, etc.
"Dynamic" is doing a hell of a lot of work there. I guess what you mean is steal technology from the west, undercut pricing on foreign goods and dump products in their markets to destroy the competition, end up being the last one standing, because you freely violate trade agreements (as a member of the WTO) and other treaties.
> " so they have developed their path to energy independence with their solar and wind industry along with electrified transit of all type"
They have more coal power than the rest of the world combined, and are building more. Their "path to energy independence with their solar and wind" is purely propaganda.
>they know they’re never going to be a big oil producer
They're literally the sixth largest, just behind Iraq and ahead of Iran. I'm pretty sure people consider Iraq a "big oil producer", right? They also have the 13th most proven untapped oil reserves, and likely more than that since they're not in the business of oversharing.
It’s also a little bit ignorant of the existence of different cultural views of copying. Americans who love the second amendment wouldn’t want Europeans telling them to follow European gun laws, why should China follow Western IP laws?
The culture of copying and iterating in the Chinese hardware industry has proven to be incredibly good for innovation and healthy competition, just like open source has been incredibly good for the US software industry.
One example of Western IP ideology being stifling: 3D printing was artificially held back from consumers by patents on FDM printing. The moment those patents expired, prices dropped by two orders of magnitude. It’s easy to argue that Western IP laws result in oligopolies and monopolies forming as an inevitability.
Even if you don’t agree with that, the fact remains that many technology transfers to China are done willingly for payment (e.g., IBM PC division sold to Lenovo, Motorola Mobility sold to Lenovo, high speed rail technology was sold to China. Nobody twisted Volkswagen’s arm and demanded that they build factories in China and train local workforces on automotive production, that was done for the same profit-seeking reasons Toyota came to America and taught GM the Toyota Production System).
Leveraging their coal power for today and building wind/solar/battery for tomorrow is a smart strategy that pragmatically considers their current resource mix. Trump administration canceling already approved wind projects because he doesn’t like how his Scottish golf course has a view of them is not smart strategy.
China is not a big oil producer relative to their size and population. In that sense countries like the US, Canada, and Russia are far more energy secure.
Something about America is consistently leading to monopolies and oligopolies. Interestingly, Americans actually like it and brag about it.
Our gasoline risks hitting $6-7/gallon because of a war we needlessly started to distract from our leader's seemingly rapidly progressing dementia, his approval numbers that are the lowest since I think LBJ, oh, and him being named repeatedly in the files of a notorious pedophile and child sex trafficker.
That said, it is indeed disappointing that we can't get their affordable EVs over here. Western legacy automakers really need a kick in the ass (especially since Tesla seems to just be phoning it in now).
I don't count Rivian or Lucid until they actually have even somewhat affordable EVs.
But pretty much everyone else in the US is doing a piss poor job with EVs and just don't seem to care at all. Ford seemed to have lost interest in the F-150 lightning.
I agree that trade needs to be a two way street. But I'm not convinced yet on "affordable" since these might be severely subsidized by the Chinese Gov to undermine domestic car makers across different nations. I say might only because I'm not 100% sure.
It’s cancelled.
So is the Chev Silverado EV.
Better than any other truck? I don't think so.
Better than any other EV truck? Unsure.
Or if we're still referencing that fully discredited "Cybertruck can tow a Porsche and still be faster than a Porsche", well: https://www.theautopian.com/a-cybertruck-towing-a-porsche-91...
But the Model Y seems like they fixed everything I complained about with the 3. Smoother ride, everything feels higher quality, and FSD (if you can get it) is just amazing.
Anyway with Teslas, you feel like you're living 10 years in the future from everyone else on the road. But Full Self-Driving makes it feel even more stark.
Like I said, at the price points of the Model Y (at its quality), there aren't too many alternatives. At least in Sept 2025 when I looked. I wish there were.
I don't count BYD because I was never going to buy a BYD even if it was available, because of how deeply connected these cars are nowadays. Maybe it's irrational, but giving the growing drumbeat of some sort of conflict with China over Taiwan, it doesn't seem prudent to have a fully connected car phoning home to the CCP.
Thanks for the insight. The more I look at the Y the more it moves closer to the top my list.
Obviously Rivian and Lucid don't have affordable cars yet, but they seem to be moving in that direction, and they're clearly still trying.
I'm hopeful about Slate, though obviously they haven't sold anything yet so it's just hope.
And Rivian is about to make an affordable SUV. So overall, I am hoping that there is a vibrant ecosystem of EVs from companies that actually understand software (as opposed to many EVs that have shitty software). Not sure about Lucid.
Here's to hoping their EV Maverick is still on track:
Ford Teases New Details About Its $30K EV Truck Coming Next Year
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a71204448/ford-ev-truck-fu...
Seeing the way tech companies behave makes me think they fear Trump the same way. for example, Tim Apple certainly crawls up Trumps arse.
Good luck suing the White House, sovereign immunity basically makes this impossible in most cases.
Trump has that control and supreme court will support his project 2025 consistently.
I suspect you will see the same out of John Apple later this year.
If you have ambitions that are contrary to that of the Party, well, they're going to get what they want, one way or another. It doesn't matter if you don't want to deal your AI to the military or if you'd rather not sell your home so that a highway can be built over the lot.
[0] actual conservatism, not the dishonest use of the label by reactionaries/fascists to cover for their radical agenda
Do they?
Ultimately, what you see in China is the dream of well-capitalized authoritarians in the US. You have a near-permanent upper class that has no real political opposition that could impact their value creation ambitions. If you want to open a factory that makes electronics where people work 18 hours a day, you do it. If you want to open a rare-earth minerals mine that lets its tailings leech into the water table, you do it. If you want to launch a rocket fueled with hypergolics and it could crash onto a populated area, you do it. If a group of people get in your way, you arrest them and send them off to a re-education camp. They certainly aren't allowed to run for office and change how things are run, not unless they pass the ideological litmus test put in place by the local Party boss.
More and more, that's what we're doing here in the US, too. We're making people work insane hours to afford the cost of living. We're undoing environmental protections so that we're more "competitive". And most importantly, we're letting a strongman move the country more and more towards a single-party state that enforces a social and ethnic hegemony on the population.
And, to be fair, why wouldn't they want this for themselves? The headline says it all: people will look the other way on all of this for the right price. A European will talk about how important it is for the continent to decouple itself from the US while gladly shipping thousands of euros to a country that is the logical conclusion of what the US is going through.
Sorry, what? China regularly prosecutes billionaires. Between 2003 and the mid 2010s it EXECUTED at least 15 billionaires.
When was the last time a US billionaire faced a death penalty case, even when their actions directly result in tens of thousands of innocents dying?
Isn’t the US much more aligned with the dreams of the capital class, given that distinction alone? All the money in the world won’t save a Chinese citizen from their laws. Meanwhile, we have the President’s family selling crypto coins and NFTs and Trump Gold Cards and “produced by USA” Trump phones made in China.
Billionaires are problematic by their very existence, but the sort of power they want is what the CCP has. They want to use their capital to build that. Trump's having the best luck so far. If there are people who also just happen to be extremely wealthy who get in their way, they'd gladly use the power they then had to get rid of them. Alex Karp would be a good example of this sort of aspirational melding of the state and capital.
In a way, the CCP is beyond someone with a lot of money being able to do anything about it, which would be nice, except for the fact that they're totalitarian.
This is a much different model. Yes, the CCP has the sort of power that elite authoritarians crave, but it also has constraints and demands that no elites would ever face.
I would add that China also executes quite a few government officials for corruption and bribery. Estimates based on reporting suggest that about 25 Chinese officials each year are executed for this, and over 200,000 have been prosecuted in serious criminal trials, often with multi decade prison sentences or even life sentences. Again, the contrast with Western permissiveness is stunning.
As far as the execution of government officials for bribery, they also do quite a bit of other enforcement action that "Western permissiveness" just wouldn't tolerate, like sending ordinary people - not billionaires or cadre members - to re-education camps for wrongthink.
China’s government is likewise not accountable to or easily fit into the framework of “a market”, for reasons not the least of which include it being explicitly anti-capitalist. Wealth hoarding does not accumulate political power in China, and those who attempt this play can and regularly do find themselves put back in their place - possibly a prison or a crematorium.
As for re-education “camps”, the US imprisons approximately 10% of its population - a huge number by any standards historical or contemporary - and virtually none of these are billionaires or governing elites, who are functionally immune to the systems of authority that “rehabilitate” regular Americans.
The CCP's protectionism is because China is going for a cultural victory. It wants Chinese products to be available and inexpensive and purchased around the world. It puts resources to that end.
The US's protectionism is for the enrichment of the CEO, board members, stockholders, and Executive Branch's family members. It wants to protect the domestic market from sending money somewhere other than the relatives of the people in power.
While they're both "protectionism" they're not the same policies.
I sincerely am curious of the education that produces sentences like this. On one hand it is articulate and educated, on the other hand its amazing that one can think China is doing this out of charity and not wiping out its competitors one after the other.
To expand your fortune relatively other people have to lose. Its required.
China wants to supplant the US as the world hegemony and we'll all be worse off for it. The Chinese protectionism I described is China exercising an avenue they think will help them approach that goal. It certainly is not charity.
The main difference that I see isn’t protectionism, it’s that BYD took a direction the market wanted, whereas US auto makers have not produced vehicles that were appealing to consumers who had choices.
To arbitrarily repress this most basic impulse, the one to go after a dream to make better ways to do things, is severely anti-human.
Most businesses are in this category.
>dream to make better ways to do things
The inability to exploit other peoples labor to achieve that doesn't mean those things are denied
This was at UCLA which is in LA which is the second biggest city in the US.
Posting the map in case anyone hasn’t seen it.
You get what you incentivize.
I mean we have the Nullarbor plain. The name literally means 'No Trees', and it is very fitting.
If you ever end up there... I hope you don't.
They say they're worried when the building stops. Even more people will be out of jobs. And when the nation ages all they built will be used and maintained by fewer people
I've never been to china so it's interesting perspective from people with family there and go back 2-3 times a year
The “West” had the same problem many times during the first Cold War, where things in the Soviet Union seemed really great from the outside. Only after the collapse did the truth become clear.
Now, I don’t think China is even remotely similar, but never forget that it is not a free society.
In China you don't have a life in front of you if you do that.
Well, unless ICE murders you at a protest for expressing your hate of the government's actions.
>In China you don't have a life in front of you if you do that.
That's very much not true. China isn't North Korea like Westerners imagine. Unless you riot, take to the streets, or become a big agitator or dissident, Chinese government and media actually does allow some controlled escape valves for regular people to vent about problems, no issue with that. This isn't Stalin's reign of terror.
You'll only get disappeared if you end up becoming a big fish to threaten the CCP, like Jack Ma, but otherwise the CCP don't end disappearing every schmuck who complains about the government.
You might not know this, but as a nation, you don't get very far economically, academically and technologically in the long run by consonantly oppressing your people under a culture of permanent fear of their government. You can't bleed a stone.
And China got where it is, due to its successful policies from the last half-century that brought prosperity and lifted millions of of poverty, it's government has earned a certain level of "buy-in" from the majority of the population, meaning the people are more likely to be cooperative and work with the totalitarian government towards a common set of mutually beneficial goals, rather than wasting their energy trying to mass emigrate out of the country or to fight for democracy.
And that's what so dangerous about this, because unlike the USSR who served in the west as THE model of inevitable failure for such systems, China found a successful form of totalitarian governance, that some western governments are now trying to copy when they saw how effective it is.
They are certainly trying to copy some elements, but also some parts might be inevitable in the age of decentralised social media which are much harder to control using the old tools. China just enacted that first and the West had to go through all the turmoil to arrive in a similar place much later.
Not because of the West giving China its industry, because - greed and China's blatant IP theft? Who cares if the communists make everything we consume, right? Stock price, yo.
"Apple in China" by Patrick McGee is a good read.
I like Chinese food, the arts, the folklore, they make my favorite bows (archery), but I don't want my grandkids have to learn Mandarin unless they want to.
Tangent, I always do a double take when I see CCP, as "USSR" is spelled "CCCP" in Cyrillic, it's charming (I am from a former USSR republic).
If I'm voluntarily giving you my IP with no contractual assurance for protection, is it my fault or yours?
Never stop your enemy when he's making mistakes.
>because - greed Stock price, yo.
Why wouldn't you weaponize their greed against them? "Forget about pedophiles, the DOW is over 50,000."
People often point to the take down of Winnie the Pooh memes as censorship but I don't think people realize there's a long history of racist groups using Pooh as a slur about Asian people and Tigger about black people. The meme exploded in popularity from a picture of Obama and Xi being compared to Tigger and Pooh.
You can have whatever opinion you want about taking down racist content but I don't it's any different from Western platforms. But spending any time on Chinese social media will quickly dispel the idea of harsh consequences for speech (an especially silly idea coming from members of the nation that contains 25% of the world's prisoners)
Among the problems is not being able to look in the mirror. There are those that don't realize, "when you point one finger, there are three fingers point back at you".
For all the things China does well there are plenty of reasons for Chinese people to be concerned about their future.
And that's why we are unlikely to see mass immigration allowed in China. They know that and can see what has happened and is happening in Europe and are thus likely to protect themselves. That's not my opinion but what Chinese think if you can discuss openly with people there.
This is a puzzling badly-received point of view here, but I think Europe and its official narrative that are actually the odd ones out globally.
China is investing a lot in automation and they already have state of the art automated factories. I think this will be the way forward for them and everyone (birth rates are dropping everywhere).
As a European - what has happened to us, exactly? I'm curious what kind of thing you think is happening to Europe that is such disaster that even China should be afraid of it.
You do realize that most of European migration is internal, right? Polish workers going to Germany, that kind of thing? It would be like complaining that American migration is crazy because of all the people moving from Kansas to take jobs in California.
>> house prices increases due to supply and demand and crime rate is not equal among groups
As compared to....?
>>It is not like the US where you have a massive startup scene and get an Elon Musk from South Africa to create jobs and add meaningful value.
I'm like, honestly not sure what to say to that. I could maybe start listing successful businesses started and/or ran by immigrants in the EU if that helps? Or is the fact that none of them are as famous as Elon Musk a dealbreaker?
Can you name a few of these effects that China sees as crazy?
In what way? Immigrants, even in France, are a tiny minority. How do you feel that your demographics have been "completely" destroyed?
I said "demographic", nothing about the legal concept of immigration/citizenship.
America and countries that engaged in worldwide colonisation are the exception not the rule.
The coming decades will be interesting.
Sadly, big business wants cheap labor so we can't have nice things.
And there is also the demographic disparity at play here.
The US is attracting migrants mainly from Latin America, that's a population basin of 650M people, roughly 2 times the US population.
In China's case, the surrounding countries susceptible to provide migrants is what? a third of China's population?
I'm not knowledgeable nearly enough about the area but I also feel there are also significant cultural and historical elements limiting large scale immigration (for example, the complex Sino-Vietnamese relations).
It's more likely PRC will have migrant labourers do low value work like Mexican fruit pickers. They're going to have ample high skill / tertiary workers for 50+ years, this baked into existing births... i.e. half the reason they have youth "unemployment" problem is they're generating so much tertiary talent vs opportunities, so there's no use for western based talent immigration to augment highend demographics.
The real shortfall is going to be low end blue collar - people willing to move dirt do shit jobs for peanuts, previously that's 100s of millions of undereducated who are aging out, so that leaves robots and south east asians and maybe africa because 1.4B PRC will require more remittance workers than poor asia can provide... unless they figure out automation. Even in west these cohorts are not immigration material, they're seasonal workers.
Are the bullet trains making enough to pay down construction debt yet? My understanding is that that has been a struggle, which is going to be a problem when they get past being new and start having more and more maintenance expense on top of paying back construction debt.
Public services generally provide public good that outweighs their cost. Trying to quantify and charge for that cost is a useless exercise.
Chongqing too!
[0]: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3254680/c...
Funnily enough it may turn out that those nations that just muddled along could have the best long term out comes. Yes, they never got the really good stuff but they also won't have a harder decline.
"You cannot fall out of bed if you sleep on the floor" - Turkish proverb
Building infrastructure for a civilized society is never bad and when I say that nothing is perfect. There are downsides. I would rather have the infrastructure and I wished the United States still had that can-do attitude. The rail system across the country needs to be upgraded desperately.
The Chinese have even taken the lessons of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, they have built two Thorium reactors and refueled one without turning it off, and they appear to be right on schedule to have that larger second reactor online by 2030.
Take a 100 mile strip down the east coast and the west coast. Add Chicago. That's pretty much everyone.
The population of the NYC metro area exceeds that of the entire US Mountain _timezone_.
If only. Everybody loves cutting the ribbon on shiny new infrastructure, but the cost of maintenance is very real and never ending.
As a simple example, rezone some agricultural land as residential and sell it to developers. Yay, free money! But only once, and now you have a bunch of roads and plumbing etc etc that you need to upkeep forever. If there's people living in the houses and paying taxes, that's fine, but if there aren't or they go away, you now have a very big, very expensive problem. Japan is deep into feeling the pain of this and demographically China is only a decade or two behind.
You have all of that (huge unemployment of young people, declining birth rate, and other social ills) also in Europe MINUS the Chinese progress, your co-workers are clearly biased
but for other perspective - I lived in China 5+ years, left in 2016, I returned for 3 weeks vacation/family visit last summer and honestly I didn't see that many changes as you would expect, in China in 9 years you would expect pretty much different country by previous standards, but I was like "meh", hardly any changes beside few more EVs on the road (even there I was disappointed, Beijing clearly ain't Shenzhen, maybe 25-35% cars on the road and I am including hybrids as well), bunch of new subway lines and skyscrapers, but nothing mindblowing, it was actually quite underwhelming, people still smoke in restaurants (and policemen in police station right under No smoking sign), still noise and mess on (some) streets, even more street markets (gentrification) closed, on the positive note thanks to crappy economy and zero inflation or maybe even deflation salaries are same and prices remained same (you can rent apartment for like 200EUR in Beijing suburbs), I can't imagine having pretty much same price for meal after 9 years in European restaurant
I’ve been visiting China since 1999 (and lived there for around 10 years). Rapid progress, lots of investments, over investment (ghost districts and ghost cities) are inevitable, but after its all over they will still have an advanced economy with lots of opportunities.
China was a growing country that clearly knew how to build infrastructure. In Wuhan, they built an entire development intended to employ 100,000 engineers (Huawei + our US company's 50). They built a subway system in a decade that's bigger than New York City's. I took the high-speed rail to Beijing and it was superb. They replaced an old, shabby international airport terminal with a new one with the widest concourse I've ever seen. They subsidized regular flights between Wuhan and San Francisco on China Southern airlines. The Hyatt Regency there was one of my favorite hotels I've ever stayed in (cheap and high quality). In a big commerical district, they had the largest screen I've ever seen that had a Blue Screen of Death :-)
Dazzling yet I'm not bullish on China due to its demographics, among many other reasons.
This was originally a side effect of the One child policy, but now it is continued due to difficult living situations. This is not a uniquely China issue.
You are projecting a fantasy.
But it made me question how many countries can actually be that “efficiency” because matters of uprooting large swath of population will take years not months and run into significant legal challenges as well.
To be clear use of eminent domain and gentrification happens even in US but I doubt it can be as “efficient” as a technocratic government. It’s not a knock on Chinese government, just something I always wonder.
Gentrification is when existing communities that used to have decent if basic living situations get gradually priced out of an area as richer people and their expensive amenities move in. Gradually, as house prices go up and food gets more expensive, people sell and move. It's a slow, mostly voluntary thing, or at least, driven by market forces rather than official mandates.
Tearing down a slum is a much more disruptive thing that instantly displaces a entire community. Although it's unclear what happened to that community in this case and I can't find anything clear about it online (lots of clearly biased articles for one side or the other though).
In 2008 China had 1,300km of high speed rail. In 2025 they had over 45,000km.
Meanwhile America has zero…. But is bringing back the V8! Ye-haw!
Surely with the cost of fuel skyrocketing we'll pivot to public transit and non-fossil-fuel transport, right? Right?
Right.
Refining already invented things is 'innovation'.
Respondants:
Please, stop lying on the internet. It's not healthy. Stop making things up.
Source:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innovation
Making cars faster or cheaper isn't an "innovation". Making a flying car is innovation. Inventing the car is invention.
Systematic government-aided intellectual property theft, lax labor laws, low wages and low standards of living aren't innovative.
https://www.youtube.com/@Wheelsboy/videos
And btw, they are making flying cars as well:
Coal is still the majority of generation capacity [1] in China and China continues to build a lot more coal [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China
[2]: https://apnews.com/article/china-coal-solar-climate-carbon-e...
> BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion
Is this supposed to help virality or something? "US decline"?
Not just on dumping or price, actual product quality, innovation and value. It's impossible to visit a Huawei store in Beijing and not feel it in your bones
How do we have a productive discussion about our feelings on a tech site?
Because that, too, is feelings. In this case, insecurity.
EDIT: thanks I didn't realize I forgot to add the context of my original reply to the post. Edited it to add context.
Bizzare mix, but pretty fun with controversial topics
That's how China was able to compete: banning America from contesting the market.
This is literally using fossil fuels to create renewable energy, which is the ultimate sane and responsible way to use the energy from fossil fuels.
But it's still not at the point where it's cleaner per capita than the US and it's still quite far from that. Let's talk about reality here. The US shouldn't rest on its laurels, but we need to be real about where we are not how we feel
A lot can change. This administration has 2.5 years left. I'm tired of Reddit and Twitter doom-based virality hacks subsuming every net forum.
It's literally just a mind virus and folks hear it on the news and like the Chinese hypersonic missiles they just hear some capability or reporting and then don't know what to do with it except to parrot it.
They don't think about China's lying down culture [1], for example, ghost cities and over-building doesn't seem to phase them [2] (communism tends to waste a lot of money and drive economic inefficiency), China's over-capacity for manufacturing and now struggling to find markets for goods [3], local corruption, disappearing of folks who disagree with their government, and more. Even with respect to infrastructure. Yea they built a lot. Good luck maintaining it at an affordable cost. China has more manpower to do literally throw bodies at the problem, but economic physics will still win out and China's declining population and demographic crises and xenophobic culture don't help.
Now, with that being said, China has done some absolutely amazing and wonderful things. But we shouldn't confuse China's progress with a corresponding American decline. Instead, the more sophisticated model is looking at both American and Chinese progress while other nations, and the EU are struggling.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/world/asia/china-slackers-tangping.html
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/09/sp-i-china-property-slump-worse-than-expected.html
[3] https://www.ft.com/content/6822f01a-147a-4b04-a9d6-edeefc25d0d8?syn-25a6b1a6=1Agree with that sentiment absolutely. I’m not totally sure that is a given, however. The primary reason being that as America declines economically from the post-war boom, it no longer has the resources to simultaneously fight or contain many belligerent actors (Russia, Iran, China, &c.) and without the other dominant power (China) stepping up to assist in what I would loosely describe as a bipartisan way we are likely to see more conflict, not less, in my view.
The difference is the US's hostility to renewable energy versus China's embrace of it. China's path takes them to zero coal eventually - the US's does not.
I hope the US does change policies.
Manufacturing and shipping EVs I agree is going nowhere because they continue to be the leader and an increasing number of developing and underdeveloped countries are finding it easier to light up electrical sources than import oil.
At the cost of air quality. People are getting used to cleaner air. It's hard to go back.
Also the more solar they use, the more coal they can keep around for emergencies. The sun is free energy.
In 2025 China recorded a decline in generation from coal for the first time ever. [1]
1. https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/#data
If that's the case, then why is the US going back on its renewables commitment?
If China could always be energy independent with coal, why did they even build out solar and EV capability?
China has significantly lower co2 emitted per capita than the US already. Per kWh no, but that's a different thing. AFAICT China's renewable growth is now outpacing demand growth significantly though, so that per-capita gap will widen, and the per kWh is steadily improving as well, and faster than the US.
For some concrete numbers: China added 400GW of renewables in 2025 vs 78 GW of coal generation. Reduced CO2 intensity of power grid by 5% vs US 3% drop. In 2025 US total power emissions went up 5% (for many reasons, but arguably high gas prices and lots of data centres) while China total power emissions dropped 1.5%
All the details make China's path look much cleaner than the US's.
Sorry I meant per kWh not per capita.
I don't disagree that China's path looks cleaner than the US right now, but also think "US decline" is viral hyperbole. It's the kind of thing people use on Twitter to get everyone to start discussing something. It's the kind of thing people say on Reddit all the time to add a doomer emotional valence on their comment. I want HN to be better than that but it's obviously not.
The US has been losing in the automotive market for decades now, with Japanese brands hitting 25% penetration in the '80s, the Korean brands starting in the '90s, and by 2020 Asian brands making up roughly 45% of the market. US automakers are staying afloat in the CAFE-exempt space of light trucks.
It's true that this administration has been hostile to renewables, notably shutting down offshore wind. But I'm not sure what this has to do with "decline". In 2.5 years we'll have a different admin. There's already pressure to electrify cars with high gas prices thanks to the Hormuz crisis.
Where's the "decline" bit? What does it mean to "decline"? I maintain that it's largely bait to fish for upvotes and engagement.
This administration is attempting - and mostly succeeding - in "Dismantling the administrative state". They even provided a handy checklist (project 2025). That shit won't bw undone in 2.5 years.
Renewables generally aren't capable of a black start, wind turbines in particular use induction generators that require external power.
Doesn't hydropower count for like half of our black start capability?
> Renewables generally aren't capable of a black start, wind turbines in particular use induction generators that require external power.
Wind farms and PV both can use batteries to support black start capability.
China picked manufacturing.
US picked datacenters.
If 90% of the factories in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb, you'd find that your standard of living would immediately, and quite observably plummet.
You tell me which is more important.
The amount of internet technocrap we actually need to live comfortably is a tiny fraction of what actually gets built. Most of it is in service of adtech, the surveillance state, or shaving 0.5% off some rentseeker's fat margins (on his side, the savings aren't passed on to us).
Food is more critical to us than Alibaba crap or even top notch smartphones and would be missed rather more if we had a nuclear exchange, but Chinese entrepreneurs would rather own factories exporting manufactured goods than rice paddies, and for good reason. The Chinese government would like to be self sufficient with food production, but unlike many less technologically developed countries it isn't. Most of those countries stay poor though. Food doesn't change or scale as much as manufacturing, which possibly doesn't change as fast or scale as big as compute. Plus in theory at least, some of the compute is being devoted to automating away dependency on offshore labour for manufacturing, although I suspect China is generally ahead in the manufacturing automation areas of AI anyway...
[1]I'd rather have kitchen appliances than novelty image generation, spamblogs or ad retargeting, but then again I'd also rather have access to knowledge and communications than plastic toys...
My point is that you can get that with ~1/1000th the compute we spend. The truly useful parts of the internet are a tiny fraction of the tech footprint. There's more net value for us in Wikipedia than there is in ~a trillion dollars of the more vapid tech firms. And it runs on 3m/year in hosting costs.
You are right that China has a food security problem, though. I am, however, assuming that its government isn't blind to it - the country is self-sufficient for high-calorie staples, and wouldn't starve even if all food imports stopped.
China picked manufacturing, infrastructure, consumable exports
All the compromises here were pointed out by critics on the left many decades ago. Letting capital flee to where labour was cheapest eviscerated the entire US and Canadian northeast/midwest manufacturing sector and was policy driven from the right.
That and we decided that only the private sector should be responsible for building infrastructure and housing, and then wondered why the cost of building either skyrocketed in cost...
And yet now it's the (far) right freaking out and trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
The other part of the story that gets ignore is the administrative state exploding in the US/Canada post 1970s, where making new industry and development became very difficult making other countries more attractive while the cost of living exploded.
So instead of becoming competitive all we’re left with is these ideas of the government forcing domestic industry by using national security as an excuse to justify the backwards economics of it all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle_e...
- US: ~$144B vehicle exports / ~$3.23T total exports → ~4.5% - Germany: ~$280B / ~$1.99T → ~14% - Japan: ~$151B / ~$922B → ~16%
Even if you treat US states as separate 'countries' and balloon the US export denominator further, the ratio doesn't move into the same league. Autos are roughly 3x more important to Germany and ~3.5x more important to Japan as a share of foreign-earned revenue than they are to the US.
BYD taking the US auto export share is an inconvenience for a few states. BYD taking Germany's or Japan's is regime-altering for the whole national economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle_e... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports
> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression.
To be very practical here… the lack of rights and freedoms as they exist in China typically has no consequence to the lives of individual people. For example you have no right to protest. But how many of us have exercised that right in the US? Personally I never did. And honestly those protests end up being just parties and parades
You should too.
Additionally because your actions are irrational, the majority of people don't actually exercise the rights you exercise. That again is the tragedy of the commons.
So in short I'm still right, and you've proven nothing.
I have no reason to doubt that China is modernizing and improving their gross aptitude for knowledge work! The directional point you're making may very well be valid! I'm just wondering how anyone could be quantifying it in terms of "average IQ", a metric that generally does not exist.
As for iq by country all you need to do is google it. Many sources… all pretty aligned.
That being said lots of people in academia question the validity of these per country iq scores but that’s because they scored low from the aforementioned country in context.
I encourage you to cite the actual source you claim has authoritative "average IQ" scores broken down by country. According to you, they're readily available with a simple Google search. Fire away!
Also every measurement on google is remarkably inline with each other even though it's from sources that are noisy.
A better way to put it. If you have 20 noisy/biased sources of data but each source is unique and gathered in distinct ways. And all 20 sources show a unique pattern of Asia beating the US... then it's quite likely, the consistency is NOT noise.
Also if we have 30 blurry lenses looking at the same thing from different angles and we see the same feature... that says something very likely about reality.
I hope we're not in the sort of discussion where if no absolutely solid statistical evidence or scientific paper says something about it then the topic cannot be discussed.
Put it this way. I'm quite likely to be right.
This paper was your best cite for the existence of national IQ averages, and it refutes your argument. If you have another cite, you should expect me to actually read that one too.
Where was I off? They are aligned.
My view.
I was looking at a new car. Went into several car shops, VW, Skoda, Toyota and BYD.
And all of them were basically empty and BYD was FULL! Like really really full.
And the sales guy confirmed it, they are selling cars like crazy.
Just curious-- if you did say something about this, what would it be?
https://www.educationnext.org/san-franciscos-detracking-expe...
Fear? Oh I know, you are talking about how in blue states they can't even build simple housing never mind mega projects like high speed rail and that's why red states are acquiring population and capital at accelerating speeds.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/why-nothin...
No US born child in the last 30 years aspired to working a factory job. The US is an advanced economy with advanced jobs. We get degrees, we sit at desks, maybe even sit at home, work on computers, and generate an order of magnitude more wealth than our screw turning counterpart overseas.
I can tell you with first hand experience, that this problem is much deeper than "the US needs to catch up" because in reality what is happening is that China is the one playing catch up. The US is already 30 years into the endgame of economic development. China is where the US was 75 years ago, and on paper, the US has only progressed from that point.
Quite a wild claim
But trust me, all those people working in poor conditions for cheap pay in China will do everything they can to ensure their kids don't work those jobs. And just like the US, that fountain of cheap labor will go away and everyone will want their comfy high paying desk job.
Generate wealth for whom, though?
That's also ignoring the entire economic underclass that system creates of service & gig workers that can no longer afford to live in the cities in which they work. Not everyone has the ability or desire for knowledge work.
The US still needs to catch up too. We have an infrastructure problem. Where is our high speed rail and public transit? Cycling infrastructure? Renewables? Housing in high demand areas? Socialized healthcare? Safety nets for said economic underclass?
We are behind in so many ways because we view wealth generation for the top xy% as the only metric of success.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/china-...
Both have decent amounts of Hyundai Ioniqs, Teslas, and some BYDs and Dacias. But especially in France, Renault Meganes, 5s and now the 4 is everywhere.
Don't forget that "Europe" is actually 30ish (if you count EU) or even more countries (if you count the continent), with wildly different markets and players on them.
I recently helped a friend looking for a brand new SUV in the 70-80,000 euro range (taxes included) and the audi Q5 was both the most expensive and the worst built one in that price range.
We checked loads of cars and agreed that the volvo XC60 was arguably the best value for money, the BMW X3 was the one which drove the best (but also the most uncomfortable), the Lexus NX450h was the most comfortable and the best built, the Mercedes GLC was probably the most balanced one (although the value for money wasn't great).
The Audi Q5 only stood out for poor build quality and being overpriced. It's literally the only car which we didn't see an upside for, we didn't even bother to test-drive it... Also it seems they aren't very reliable anymore...
The idea that we should allow cheap vehicles to flood the domestic market because that will "cause the US auto manufacturers compete" ignores the wholly uneven playing field at work here, and the government backed goal of one side. Just the cost of labor alone makes that not an approachable thing to do.
On the reverse "bad" US side, we have more and more international auto manufacturers building and investing in factories in the US every year. Strangely, this decision involves billions of dollars and years of work to make happen. It's not based on internet vibes.
And the "renewable" growth is really kind of misleading. They're also building more coal power plants than the rest of the earth, combined, each year. They represent ~50% of the worldwide coal power in use today and produce roughly one third of the total CO2 in the world now, almost 3x that of the US.
But I guess the future is government funded undercutting of international competitors, using technology stolen by the government from those competitors, in order to destroy those competitors, while using very dirty and cheap energy to do so? Is that the lesson we're supposed to learn from them?
If you think that keeping China is good for the consumer, you'll have to present a stronger case than "we must protect our companies".
It would be excellent for the consumer, in the rather short term, to not keep them out. Cheap cars! Cheap goods flooding our markets are great for consumers in the short term.
> American car manufacturers have extremely small market shares outside N.A
Here's a game:
One company is American. The other is not.
Company 1 Market Share: North America: 16.5% South America: 8.9% Asia: 7.6%
Company 2 Market Share: North America: 14.87% South America: 8.3% Asia: 8.28%
Now, without looking, which is the "US company without market share outside of NA", and which is the foreign company that understands how to compete?
Company 1: Europe ~0% (trucks & SUVs just don't sell well there it seems) Company 2: Europe 7%
Company 1: Manufactures in 8 countries, 2/3 of its factories are in North America. Company 2: Local production of cars in 25-30 countries depending on partnerships.
Company 1 data: 2025. Company 2 data: 2020 (?!)
There's a lot of data around that in the history of the US and Japan?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater
Also, the Chinese are absolutely making a profit on their exports, so I'd question your "below cost" broad characterization.
NSA spied on Airbus in the 90s and passed along information to Boeing and MacDonell Douglas - paving the way for the latter to win a Saudi deal, over Airbus. Further, Boeing airliner development is subsidized by military purchases of its jets by the US government. Its easy to forget that increasing the influence of and/or financially benefitting American champions falls under the auspices of "National interest"
They've played their own regulatory capture games here and have all but abandoned the concept of affordable small cars & EVs. They've decided to go all in on $80k luxury EVs and enormous trucks (while being protected by 25% tariffs on light truck imports), and the stupid CAFE footprint loophole.
Maybe if they'd stop flooding our streets with ridiculously sized vehicles and actually tried to compete, it would be a different story. They aren't even trying.
We are just as capable of offering subsidies, if thats what it takes, to make small affordable EVs.
We have been here before. This is Japan and the 1970s all over again.
The US car companies will absolutely refuse to deliver the affordable, high volume cars everybody wants until kicked in the ass and balls several times. In the 1970s it was land yachts; in the 2020s it's gigantic SUVs and brodozers.
I do not like what China and BYD represent. However, if they are the only way to dislodge the US car companies that are blocking progress, so be it.
Or just China just deserve special treatment?
The good thing about China is that apart from Taiwan they have little territoral ambitions, I don't foresee huge conflicts incoming, but I am a not entirely sure the US will manage to lost its position as gracefully as the British Empire.
It could be bad news for US citizens if their currency precipitiously lose its power, and they'll look for people to blame.
One of the reasons China wants Taiwan is because it would enable further territorial expansions into The Philippines and Japan. China considers any neighboring Democratic nation a threat. Taiwan is just their first / easiest prospective target.
If you have access to PBS, there's a very good documentary that touches on this a bit called Invisible Nation.
The problem is, China isn't competing fairly!
As a Western manufacturer, bound to well-paying union labor and environmental protection laws, and restricted by the mechanisms of the free markets, you cannot compete with a country that employs all sorts of labor abuses (from complete ignorance about OSHA and its national equivalents over 996 work model to outright forced labor and slavery), completely wrecks its own environment and provides virtually unlimited financial funds to its companies in its quest to achieve dominance.
China is inarguably the biggest threat the entire rest of the world faces and barely anyone is even seeing the dangers.
And several US states are inching closer to making being some of those letters, particularly the T, outright illegal.
The U.S. record on human rights is horrific, if you see it from a global perspective (which you should). China is a saint in comparison.
It was also a little sad to see the treatment of Tesla by Biden. It was the world's leading EV company at the time but he excluded from EV get togethers because he wanted the unionised companies like GM to win. I think that sort of thing - protecting mediocre incumbents that contribute to the right politicians didn't help. Musk was a dem at the time but after that flipped to Trump and went a bit off the rails.
It’s like there was this belief, we are the most powerful country in the world and we can do whatever we want. Meanwhile we see countries very much question that as we flounder in the Middle East for the umpteenth time in a few decades. We see countries start to get away from the dollar, we see countries call out our military leaders for poor planning.
It’s not like the American public deserve this, but America itself might.
America has simply forgot how to build real things on a schedule and on a budget. Our only real niche now is software (with help from Indian and Chinese talent) and locked down tech that China will eventually figure out. It’s very hard to not be pessimistic about the direction the USA is going and I can see why people elected someone horrible like Trump (he promised a way out, even if it was a stupid way out that would never work).
It's not quite nationalism or maybe the term is being used as a disguise for something else, if those in power believe 50% or even the majority of their own population is not worth worrying about, should be "thrown away", or "removed". Out of control elitism and corruption, combined with lack of empathy and narcissism, can very easily undermine human rights, freedom, and national progress.
But countries either need to be protectionist or you need to lower production costs to a Chinese level. That means workers only earn the same as a Chinese worker.
You could also collect import taxes, but I think people simply cannot or don't want to afford a car that is much more expensive.
Some decry Chinese government subsidies for cars, but the truth is that these exist in western nations as well. They are sometimes indirect, but the end result is the same. The secret to cheap prices is simple labor costs.
Commonly refereed to as race to the bottom and not a new topic/problem. Car makers in countries with high labor costs could maybe pivot to luxury cars... otherwise the result of the competition is already determined.
In 50 years China will have the same problem with other countries that produce even cheaper. That is already happening and for quite a few years already.
Taxes would probably be the best solution, but they have become politicised and weaponised.
Worked with Apple!
China was more than happy to welcome him in, and have him teach them how to build an EV. They simply copied what they could and improved on it.
"The communists will happily sell the capitalists the rope the capitalists hang themselves with"
"Communism" is a theoretical concept. The CCP is what they are protecting, an authoritarian power structure.
How is modern China even close to theoretical "communism?" It's certainly not Marxist, right?
Disclaimer: I believe that pure "capitalism" and pure "communism" are marketing terms which both lead to authoritarianism, aka the "Horseshoe Theory of politics." To me, the natural end-state, if we survive the extremists is Social Democracy. However, it's boring and everyone appears to find the extremes far more exciting.
Not really, marxism is a way of looking at the world, not an economic system in itself
>There are more billionaires in China now, then there were back then
They hadn't even built capitalism fully, so it makes sense that there was less capital
>By that I mean, the wealth disparity in China is at an all-time high now, is it not?
it is, and they're currently working on how to deal with that
>Xi keeps remove the 2 term limits from just position, and has been doing an excellent job at consolidating his power base, through all means necessary.
Sure, but that's just politics. Ultimately if the majority of the party had a problem with him he wouldn't be in power for long before a coup or a request for him to step down happened
Until Xi, China appeared to be moving in a good direction.
No it's not. It's in a state capitalist stage.
It's not. China has literally _thousands_ of years of bureaucratic institutional memory. And it just keeps perpetuating itself.
Before the 20-th century, the Chinese officials had to study the classic Chinese literature and pass exams based on that knowledge. These works were completely abstract and literally useless in day-to-day work. And you had to follow all the rituals to demonstrate your allegiance and being-in-the-group.
Now they just swapped the Classical Chinese works with Marxist writings. Nobody cares about their content, but you have to know them and you have to follow the rituals.
If you think China can only make stuff by copying what other does, you're gonna under-estimate them.
And they clearly have their own expertise. There are videos of BYD and Tesla car teardowns, and you can see that they quite differ in design philosophies.
I think China was more interested in creating more competition internally, rather than just ripping off the technology.
is there even a screen?
Military, food, energy, etc.
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/chinese-cars-byd-geely-u-...
Why? Because US Mercedez-Benz dealers were selling their cars at too high a price and a lot of Americans were importing them directly from Germany. So the dealers associations lobbied Congress for a ban.
Country of free markets, by the way.
I'm not in the market for a new car, but anyone who has looked recently what is the draw to BYD? Is it strictly value/price?
*except Elon’s
Lacking that, I must hold the preemptive view that they cut corners at least as much as the average make/
Have their share of problems thought. IIRC climate control is often subpar.
Out of question that Volvo ex90, Kia ev9, Hyundai Ioniq 9 or even the BMW ix3 would have come on top if it wasn’t for the price.
Ones in NZ are 400v and tops at 150KW charging.
A bit like wearing Adiboss or Gacci clothes. Nothing wrong with that.
Hopefully BYD will make something original and with style on its own.
But counter example is e.g. new Audi look like Kia.
Funny.
Or at least if you do make sure it isn't your transportation. Drive something else most of the time that you don't care about so your identity car isn't scratched. Bring the identity car to a parade with the "pork queen" or whatever.
USA boomer car companies run a competition on who can build the biggest crappy SUVs around sold to other boomers who now look aghast at pump prices
Europe boomer car companies can't overrun their nit-pickiness and analysis paralysis and wonder why consumers are picking the car with screens that actually work like a modern device and don't have subscription horns or some other BS like that
For those not paying attention to geopolitics, Taiwan is the real concern here. China wants to control them, and is building a strong military. How the future will play out I don't know, but this should be your concern.
China-owned brands are now often better and more premium than their Western counterparts across the entire spectrum. Give me Anker over Belkin any day. There are a few areas where the West still leads - Chinese software tends to be buggier and less polished, luxury apparel isn't at the same standard - but that lead is diminishing rapidly. Customer service could still do with some improvement: it's usually much slower and less professional, but the trade-off is it's not uncommon to end up talking to an actual engineer who can investigate and solve the problem rather than just follow a script, even at a huge company.
The worst products are now formerly high quality Western brands with PE overlords that forced them to outsource manufacturing to the lowest bidder.
Stanley Black&Decker?
> Anker was founded in 2011 by Steven Yang in Shenzhen, Guangdong, but the company moved its headquarters to Changsha, Hunan.
And its listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange as a public company.
Tesla is doing poorly here. That's almost entirely down to Musk's public image, not because BYD make better cars.
For all the China lovers here it's not a clear sign of Chinese superiority. I saw a video on youtube recently exploring BYD. It's success is due to the fact that the Chinese government as part of their plan to dominate the global car industry gives them massive amounts of money. Which manufacturer can compete with that? European tariffs in the near future looks likely.
Among other things the video explores some of BYD's shadier practices including artificially inflating domestic sales and not paying suppliers for up to 9 months.
I have my doubts whether their success is sustainable.
NAFTA and its successor keeps a lot of automotive production and assembly in North America.
The chicken tax protects American manufacturers from foreign competition on trucks and vans.
Tesla was started on the foundations of inexpensive loans and a “free” factory courtesy of government economic stimulus.
GM was bailed out and briefly owned by the federal government, saved by below-market rate loans.
Stellantis is also an organization that owes its existence on a bankruptcy bail-out package.
The US financially incentivizes car usage, period. They underfund transit projects, allow the gas tax rate to lag inflation, make zoning laws that require car ownership, and more. One great way to subsidize car companies is to make car ownership mandatory.
State and local governments frequently give tax incentives to major assembly plants in the name of preserving jobs for their constituents. For example, GM had a $60 million tax break to keep the Lordstown, OH plant open. Some of this was clawed back after the plant closed anyway.
CAFE standards incentivize manufacturers to build SUVs that aren’t practical or popular in many other markets, essentially enshrining America-specific car design, further separating the American market from global car designs. Companies like BYD can’t compete with American cars if they don’t sell models that resemble popular choices like the Ford F-150, which are designs which would be completely insane if sold in the Chinese, Japanese, and European markets.
Now multiply that and add in every other kind of subsidy.
Ford Motor Company topping the list at $8 billion in subsidy.
https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/?major_industry_sum...
Vid of Munger saying Wang Chuanfu is great and he tried to talk him out of starting a car company in 2003 https://youtu.be/PbgqkAQ41mM?t=69
you can't buy BYD in the USA (thanks to Biden actually, not current admin)
BUT
there's a loophole to have a car from Canada in the USA for a year
so lease them from Canada to USA buyers for a year at a time
...if they're not banned from entering the USA altogether, which seemed to be the way the US President was leaning already.
BYD UK import tariff is 10%
BYD US import tariff is 100%
What if it's a used car, not new, what's the tariff then?
I can't believe there is no process to collect it if you import it just by driving across the border.
That is exactly how it works. You go to the customs and hand them bunch of filled papers to proceed with customs clearance procedure.
Also you cannot simply import a car to USA, unless it is for a "demo" purposes or 25+ y.o.
If you were having a car shipped (literally) to you from overseas then presumably customs clearance is at the port.
What if someone buys a 1 year old car (any Brand, not just BYD) from Canada - what import fees would apply?
What fees to pay depends on the vehicle. Could be a chicken tax there as well
Also you simply cannot import for personal use a car which was not certified to be sold in USA.
Maybe you are not understanding the question.
Where is the customs office?
Do you get customs clearance first, then proceed to the border and show the paperwork?
Yes - I realize there are many cars the US does not allow, which is why I broadened the question to not just be about BYD.
Wikipedia informs me that they stopped making ICE vehicles in 2022.
Also this is anecdotal, but I live in a small province capital (<100k citizens) and the urban planning councilor told me most likely most of the new buses we're getting next year will be electric and they'll probably be either BYD or eCitaros.
I’ve been largely happy with my 2018 Honda Fit and briefly researched a hybrid Fit.
In ZAR, the hybrid Fit is listed as ~530K, while the BYD is 570, however the BYD is way bigger, has much nicer interior and insanely more features, including: adaptive cruise control, lane assist (it can basically drive itself for simple traffic), 360 view camera, comparatively huge screen for my Apple CarPlay, sun roof, V2L (allows 2-3kw load off the battery or engine if the battery is low).
I largely liked my Honda Fit and my Ballade (that might be a South African model name), but have been annoyed for a long time at them being laggards on things like CarPlay (at least in South Africa, apparently the Fit in other markets had offered it for much longer).
I work from home and would prefer spending money on things like better school for kids, holidays, house being comfortable and as paid off as possible than on an over priced car as some sort of status symbol (it’s common for people here to choose to spend a fortune on their cars while living in small rented apartments, it’s quite financially stupid).
I also believe that we pay comparatively high taxes on our motor vehicles, our location probably also means that shipping here just costs more, the Sealion 5 is ZAR 570K which is about EUR 29.6K / USD 34.8K
Edit: Seems Sealion 5 price here not necessarily high compared to other countries. It might be BYD “entering the market” and thus putting less of a markup. Hyundai did that here in the early 2010s, but China is a different beast so who knows.
Price is so good that even if it’s a little lacking in this regard, I’ll probably still be very happy as a lot of the features are just a bonus.
Important for us was that it’s bigger as we have two growing kids, and that it is essentially an electric that we can plug in to charge.
I’ve only ever used simple cruise control on my CVT Fit and before that on a manual. On the BYD test drive (on my own chosen route) the cruise control seemed to work at least as well as what I was used to and the adaptive in traffic was impressive (to me whose never before had it), but was just one drive so will see how I feel after driving it for a while.
Also, I certainly wouldn’t count on it, but it’s conceivable that a software update could improve things, my honest hunch though is that it would be very unlikely.
But we have similar conditions, 2kids and in need of space and Sealion 7 won over many other EVs for number of features, platform, and especially price.
The OTA updates are quite regular and for us one fixed a bug that did not let the doors lock entirely when the car was off.
BYD makes better EVs & is leading in battery tech.
FSD has been promised forever & not delivered. Now Musky says - for cars to have real FSD they need to be newer hardware tech.
Robotaxis - Waymo is better.
Dang, it seemed not that long ago - 5 to 10 years - when Tesla had far superior battery tech. I know that isn't a short scale by tech standards but has BYD, and others, really leap-frogged that much?
I'm not in that space myself and do not keep up with EV benchmarks but am curious what advances or other changes were made. I recall reading Ford battery technology was also very good but interpreted that to be due to general advances in EV battery technology across the board rather than any one specific make/manufacturer.
It seems logical that if someone was going to surpass Tesla in battery tech, it'd be a battery company. BYD has, after all, been making batteries since its founding under the name "Shenzhen BYD Battery Company" 30 years ago.
https://thedriven.io/2023/05/22/teslas-switch-to-byd-batteri...
https://thedriven.io/2026/01/11/byds-cheapest-electric-cars-...
You still believe that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLgCJUeBuI
You should be able to share some videos?
Next?
https://youtube.com/shorts/iGGZGNIpVmM
I'm sure there are reasonable explanations for some of them (just like with Waymo). There really are lots though.
Do you have a link though? Because I could only find articles about the initial incident; nothing about telematics he posted. The driver's name is Wally apparently which makes searching easier...
Funnily if you search for "tesla fsd crash compilation" instead you get tons of videos where car prevents crashes. Funny how that works.
Other than nice alcantara interior the drive is just a mush and software is awful (BYD Sealion 7). Older ones (i.e. Atto 3) were obsolete from the factory.
I got to sit in Zeekr 7x yesterday (top 3 in NZ by sales in April), hopefully I can get a test drive soon. It actually has every feature Tesla has (and more). Will be interesting to see how they actually execute.
Jensen Huang says that the same thing can happen to NVIDIA. Tinygrad is stopping exporting Blackwell based cards to most countries except the 10 Tier 1 countries, as all others need a few months of paperwork. Huawei GPUs don't have these export restrictions.
TL;DR Byd is amazing and fatally flawed. The details are too much to place here.
> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression.
> The Chinese Century is increasingly palpable, for better or worse.
Ummm remember Guantanamo? Lol.
Samsung to exit China home appliance sales amid shrinking market share