Moreover, I always wonder how Americans accuse China of subsidizing its industries, while I never hear about any serious investment done by any big US company that is not conditioned by huge tax reductions.
All the kinds of fiscal facilities that the big US companies receive from the state or federal governments would be strictly forbidden in most places of Europe, as being a form of state help that distorts competition.
Where are you getting that idea?
I am too lazy to search now for quotations, but already the POTUS has referred to this subject so frequently that it should not be difficult to find such examples yourself.
Attempting nonetheless a very short search, one of the first entries is a New York Times article that says:
"The Trump administration has dismantled nearly 100 policies focused on clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals"
The following is not a joke, but it is an official statement published on the White House site:
"The Administration approved 76 coal-related permits to reinvigorate America’s beautiful, clean coal industry."
Also from the White House official site:
"“In this Administration, NEPA’s regulatory reign of terror has ended,” said White House Council on Environmental Quality Chairman Katherine Scarlett. "
Also consider: if California got rid of prop 65 warnings would that be bad? How would that fare on your scorecard?
Nonetheless, it is very likely that in many places they are not enforced, except perhaps when they might be used to punish someone who fell in disgrace for other reasons.
Meanwhile PRC annual renewable production wipes about 100m barrel of oil energy equivalent per day over their life time, i.e. comparable to global oil consumption - they are functionally preventing oil use from doubling. To reiterate: every year, PRC is averting equivalent of 100m barrels of future oil consumption. For mental picture that's carbon sink size of 500,000 sqkm of rainforest, i.e. equal to planting 7% of Amazon per year. Literally the greatest emission aversion machine in human history - PRC functionally preventing so much emissions its net carbon foot print is negative if you use sensible attributions.
> Why not just go all in on that and zero out any country that doesnt extract carbon sources!
We should in fact, totally do that, aka on going GHG Protocol Scope3 Cat11 battleground, among others. Precisely to address statistically context illiterate claims like muh Murican emissions went down and muh trade corrected co2 went down because legacy (itself politicized) accounting standards specifically masks / offloads emissions extracted from US onto their customers. Shifting emissions to extractor responsibility is heavily politicized / lobbied against by US fossil industry to make US #s look better. But that's all it is, fabricated numbers for lame aktually arguments that somehow export oil cleaner than domestic coal... Maybe on a spreadsheet, using biased formulas, for useful idiots to quote. But in reality US extracted stupendous amount of new emissions from the ground vs paper peak.
Like US become the worlds largest fossil exporter, high consumption population grew by 50m, went from dirty coal to even worse leaky NG (more lobby shenanigans) and somehow have the audacity to claim US contribution to emissions is somehow down without realizing the double think involved to reach such conclusion. The US emits more than ever, it's just good at lobbying so spreadsheets say it isn't.
1) China's government does not care, in the slightest, about the environment. Their big worry is energy independence, well lack of energy independence, which due to climate change has some overlap, but enough pictures have leaked about Chinese mines to establish that basic measures to protect the environment are not being taken.
This is also the only reason China has an advantage in rare earths, for example. Luckily now we have South America "promising to respect", and US and EU promising to believe, that they are now friendly to the environment. Of course, the first leaks have already come in, and what do you know? They lied (specifically Brazil under Bolsonaro lied, we'll see if things change now), and the EU is refusing to investigate as per traditional EU commission practice (which is very strict laws, very selective enforcement, especially when it comes to enforcement against governments or government companies)
2) While western countries lie, there's none that lie like China lies. In the sense that any number coming out of PRC is government-approved at the very least. Government-made-up more likely. They lie and lie and lie and lie. E.g. the 2007 housing crash is still happening in China, badly enough to get people constantly complaining about it because it's still stealing their savings. But on the official figures? Everything's fine! There was the incident just last year with Indian workers taking pictures of Beijing's (best city) homeless. An endless street with homeless encampments on both sides, as far as the camera could see (at least 300m). Homelessness, just like gays, don't exist in China. I don't understand why people laugh out loud when an Iranian politician says there are no gays in Iran, but nobody cares if ... And of course it's a lie. According to CCP there is no porn in China. Okay, now go to Youtube red and search ...
This combines to: the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of China's economic activity being horrible beyond belief for the environment, and you're just believing propaganda.
Overwhelmingly.
What kind of vehicles are people replacing with BYDs? I always assumed Brazilians drove mostly "legacy" VW or Nissans, but I looked at VW's Brazilian website and you all seem to have most of the same vehicles that are available in Europe and North America, including the ID.4!
I think most of the established brands have stopped doing a lot of that, but it used to be very common. VW would build some models in Germany for several years, mostly for sale to higher priced markets; when it came time for a new model, the old production tooling would go to South Africa, Mexico, or Brazil where it would continue to be built (and refined) for many more years. It's great for parts availability too, and sometimes there's nice improvements available with parts that were designed after the model left my market.
But now it's more common to have completely different models for lower priced markets, or build a global model with different options in different markets. Soemthing, something, model consolidation is expected to reduce costs? But BYD (and others) are making big inroads into low cost markets by building models that are more affordable and using that volume to maybe move into higher priced markets over time.
I'd say around 60% of the Ubers I get are BYDs and I'm glad when it's one because that means it's a newer car and it's very comfortable.
Very well. Not only BYD but also other brands like GWM and Geely.
> What kind of vehicles are people replacing with BYDs?
Combustion cars with the same price, they are not replacing other electrical vehicles because the Chinese brands are way cheaper yet they are good cars.
> I always assumed Brazilians drove mostly "legacy" VW or Nissans
Nowadays we have many models from different brands.
In the past the fleet was basically VW, Ford, Chevrolet and Fiat. In the late 90s and early 2000s the Japanesne (Honda, Toyota and Nissan) and French (Renault, Citroën, Peugeot) became popular, and then Hyundai also became a success here. Recently, the Chinese brands are becoming more popular, especially Chery and the ones that I mentioned before.
> including the ID.4
But I never saw it here, even though VW is a very popular brand here.
cheap, fast, good, its a rare moment to pick all three and the market is
most reservations about EVs are based on range anxiety, charging time and cost. only people with a certain level of advantage will pay to experience inconvenience, and that issue disintegrates at a certain threshold for a much broader population
listen to them, solve their frictions related to considering EVs, and more people choose EV
Charging stations typically also have on-site battery storage to have peak charging power that exceeds grid supply (and also because energy arbitrage is profitable).
The letter of the law often says things like that.
These chargers are already deployed and used in China and Norway. There are also tens of thousands of 400kW chargers all over the world, even in the USA. People use them every day. It's not a hypothetical.
For the user the connector is foolproof and even a child can plug it in (the cable isn't energised until the plug is locked, all pins are connected and temperatures are nominal). It's safer than plugging in US 110V household plug.
The above has nothing to do about safety or how practical it is. It is about people who can apply the law to their twisted ends.
There are international standards for 1000 V and 800 V charging, but I have no idea whether they are allowed in NA.
As another poster has already said, like in USB chargers, the charging voltage is negotiated with the car and the old cars are charged slowly, at a low enough voltage for them.
For now, most of these fast chargers have been installed in China, but there are plans to install them also in Europe.
I'm kind of torn myself. Although I'd like more range, 300 does get me where I'm going, and performance vehicles want less weight, not more.
Do you want your war munition manufacturers to say "we'd have better short term bonuses if we didn't manufacture what you need but instead just kept manufacturing our old stuff with no regard for the nations future"?
The factory stops being efficient and easily pivoted the second the people running said factory want it to stop. That, in turn, depends on how friendly you are with the country running said factory.
Let's say there's some sort of negotiations going on between the country that hosts the factory and the country that operates the factory, which, in this case, means a country with a government that has a very deep cadre system that gives them control of almost all enterprises, state-owned or otherwise.
The negotiations (whatever it is, let's just say they're economic for an example) reach an impasse. You are the country that has control over the factory. Sure, the host country has the factory, but they don't have the institutional knowledge, intellectual property, or supply chain deals that your firm does.
Do you ignore this leverage? Hell no. You say "it'd be a real shame if we had to find a new place to make our products for your market", which would imply a serious loss of employment in the region and a massive factory complex sitting empty and decaying.
Unless you're talking about the sort of relationship the US and Japan have, the factory's host country now has to consider that possibility.
> Do you want your war munition manufacturers to say "we'd have better short term bonuses if we didn't manufacture what you need but instead just kept manufacturing our old stuff with no regard for the nations future"?
That's literally how pretty much all industrialized and post-industrialized nations' defense manufacturing sectors work to one extent or another. Some munitions and defense systems are incredibly complex. You can't just move the knowledge about their manufacture over in a few corporate wiki pages; you have to have the greybeards teach the young guys by doing. This happens all the time, particularly with nuclear weapons. If you don't do that, the greybeards retire or die off and no one knows how to make this system that the military has speced, tested, approved, and gone through the bureaucracy of acquisition for. This means they either do without or get to start over from scratch at tremendous cost.
The thing all these countries have in common is their own Automobile sector which is a huge part of the economy that they need to protect.
BYD had to open factories here
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fact-sheet-safegua...
For all the talk about data and technology sovereignty in Europe, you would think they would take that more seriously too. Instead Europe is flooded with underpriced Chinese cars that they have no control over.
Please someone fact check that, as far as I know there are import taxes on Chinese EVs, and protectionist measures. The only "loophole" I know is for vehicles built in the EU, which is fine as it employs local workforce.
And if this were really the issue, why wouldn't BYD build vehicles with swappable control software and hardware? Ship unfinished vehicles to the US and install approved electronics in them?
One example from Brazil since that's the topic:
> Brazilian prosecutors have filed a lawsuit accusing electric carmaker BYD of human trafficking and keeping its workers in “slavery-like conditions” in its biggest market outside China.
> The investigation found the Chinese workers were brought to Brazil under false pretences and their visas did not match their jobs.
> Prosecutors said the workers were found working in “slavery-live conditions” and with "minimum comfort and hygiene”, calling them victims of international human trafficking
> The workers were forced to sleep on beds that did not have mattresses and as many as 30 people shared a bathroom, MPT alleged.
https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/china/byd-china-ev-sued-b...
There's also been plenty of reporting of 'slave like conditions' at Tesla, GM etc.
A few labor lawsuits show that in China Tesla wage starts at ~$4.5/hr while BYD ~$1.7/hr. Tesla also limits overtime to 36 hrs/mo by China labor law, while gov allows BYD workers to clock 441.5 raw hours in a single month. Pension and union is basically non-existent. And the reason why ppl work at BYD instead of Tesla is by clocking monstrous overtime they actually make more despite lower hourly pay.
There are reasons why Tesla consistently ranks in China 1st/2nd by sales. One of them is Chinese workers are the ones exploited by sweatshops and a government only nominally communist so they are paying the price, while Western customers are enjoying good ol' NIMBYism.
> In China Tesla wage starts at ~$4.5/hr while BYD ~$1.7/hr.
You can't compare wages in China vs the US like that. The cost of living is much, much different than in the US. Healthcare, energy costs etc. aren't comparable.
As a side note, counterintuitively BYD has a lot more workers per car vs a lot of their competitors, but that's because of their extreme vertical integration where most are assembling upstream parts.
The dark factory part is simply propaganda, the viral WSJ interview is only about body assembly which is already automated everywhere. The labor intensive part is the general assembly and even they admit this in the video. However here it's like Chinese EV found the silver bullet in car manufacturing.
[0]: https://chinalaborwatch.org/building-byd-szeged-labor-risks-...
in the US auto OEMs are mainly putting parts together, made by different suppliers like ZF, Bosch, Lemforder etc etc. Its assembly work and it split across hundreds of legacy car component suppliers
Lol, I wonder why. It really is a mystery. Why did we once rule the world pre-1970's and have been waning and decaying ever since? Gee, maybe these Chinese geniuses can figure out the reason for us.
the real argument is efficiency, US cannot match efficiency and scale. Thats the root cause.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinese-evs-win-o...
In Spain, they dont do that and adaption and dealerships for Chinese EVs is taking off nicely, I ask every single owner I can if they're happy with the service and the cars and all of them have never been happier. Subjective, yes, but I welcome the Chinese cars and free markets:-)
This about PRC localization, EU can't do shit. Think about insinuation if they tried? EU incumbent carmakers from economic giants, Germany, France, wants to prevent rest of EU from access to cheap cars to protect their industry and maintain economic hierarchy. What happens once PRC plants opens up in Spain, Hungary for whom DE, FR auto dying is now opportunity? Reality is EU is not so unified that smaller countries want to live in shadow of DE and FR forever. Once localized PRC plants take root, they become daggers vs incumbent EU producers instead of shields vs EU protectionism - they will be supported locally and the geopolitics of banning would break EU.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fact-sheet-safegua...
We need to let them in at a limited capacity and our domestic companies need to feel the heat.
The geopolitical risks are real. Stronger foreign companies can kill local ones if there's no stopgap or means for local companies to catch up. The cars are microphones for politically exposed persons (which most of you are not). If there was ever a hot war, these cars can turn into remote bombs and take out key infrastructure.
But in the here and now, we need Ford and friends to grow up and face real evolutionary pressures.
American consumers like big SUVs. But they also want cheap and modern, and once they see what else the market has to offer, they'll use choice to force the hands of American auto.
could have banned the practice, demanded literal hardwire controls around it, etc. ensured that the customer cannot be pressured into enabling it all (so the vendor can't just disable unrelated functionality).
heaven forbid, demand selling infotainment-less configurations, or agreeing on a communication standard for real tablets and smartphones to communicate through.
instead, no, it's the chinese cars that should go.
In terms of data privacy which state isn't hostile? I'd like an EV which is not connected, but out of available choices, I don't care if it's China or the US or someone else.
I probably even prefer China since they usually collect data but not on a personal level. It feels like the US products say "link to all accounts, tell us everything about you", while the Chinese products are monitoring things in a more generic way.
Whats the real argument for a Brazilian, why they should be concerned with this ludicrous claims from USA: "muh China is tracking you going to Copacabana beach. Stop buying Chinese EV for $20k, buy Tesla for $60k instead and you will be safe!!!!11"
if you are not reckless driver yourself, I dont see a downside here. You get lower premiums, insurance is able to narrow down the pool of reckless drivers and properly price them and modify their behavior via monetary incentives
whats the actual downside here??????
Or maybe BYD could just start its own ridesharing service.
They're amazing super quality cars. Cheap maintenance. There's no other can compete for quality + price. We was explored for decades from ocidental companies. No more.
Thanks GOD for BRICS.
I'm asking just because BYD is building plants and selling cars in Europe too, despite EU's tariffs on Chinese cars.
Do you think Brazil wouldn't be an interesting enough market for Chinese automakers without BRICS?
I read some horror stories chinese ev dealers charging $700 nzd to inspect exhaust system so your warranty stays valid (legally you can do maintenance in independent shops, but it’s rare). Coincidentally extra long warranty on car that has nothing to break is milking machine IMO. Over that period it costs more than competition.
article that says and is titled like that :)
https://electrek.co/2026/11/04/germany-electric-car-sales-re...