BYD is successful because they are cheap. For most people cars are simple utilities.

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.

Oh, don't worry. I'm sure Mr. Stable Orange will follow the tradition and institute a Capybara tax soon, forbidding import of any foreign EV smaller than 2 meters wide and 7 meters long and having a fully enclosed body. That will show those libruls :) .

> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights

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.

I was glued to the window while flying over southern China recently. There is so much infrastructure you can see from the air, even in fairly rural provinces. So many bridges. So many wind turbines. It is visibly a country on the move, a country that believes in itself and its ability to do things. The Chinese Century is increasingly palpable, for better or worse.

BYD has pretty amazing tech to be honest, but putting protectionism as an argument against the US and pro BYD in the same sentence is naive at best. The CCP allowed BYD to exist and the CCP can end BYD in a single weekend regardless of any human right concerns elsewhere.

In what world is China less "protectionist" than the US?

BYD has to me become an icon of German decline vs Chinese expansion.

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.

Many predicted it for a long time, the US will always be a great power, for structural and geographical reasons, but it won't keep the position it had for almost a century.

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.

That's certainly a take. China just has this decades long history of targeting foreign industries, flooding the market with that product, and then being the only one left standing.

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?

I would support allowing any Chinese automaker in the US if they form a 51:49 joint venture with an American company.

It is a car. Don't hang your personally identity on a car. Many people fail at this, but it is wrong.

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.

The chinese are utilitarian but also, like anyone, care about aesthetics. Why make something that looks good enough when that isn't your main goal and the jobs already been done

Strange comment, look at some of the cars here - many are unique and more creative liberty than anything the West is putting out:

https://www.youtube.com/@Wheelsboy/videos

On the move to where? Massive unemployment amongst youth and population collapse is on its way.

You are projecting a fantasy.

Come to Australia. About two years ago there was so many Teslas. In the space of two years, I've seen twice as many BYDs. I can only imagine this will continue.

Yeah the game is already lost. The question is how long the US can keep dumb laws that don't acknowledge reality. Unfortunately that timespan is 249 years and counting apparently.

It has nothing to be about moat. It's about its older car brands and oil so much that it doesn't stay competitive.

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.

LOL, have you driven one?

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.

I see a lot more Kia’s but I think it’s shifting because dealerships are shifting. The Toyota dealership near me now sells Jaecoo, Cherry, etc. and I am seeing tons of the Jaecoo SUV cars around. The Pentagon Vauxhall dealership I bought my car from keeps emailing me about BYDs.

I see plenty of BYD around, but I see more Kia cars. Maybe I'm biased with my EV6 GT Line S, but I wouldn't swap it for a damn thing.

also, DAF was large in a very specific time in a very specific place. Let's not forget that the dutch car industry has always being dependant on german car industry.

The thing that surprised me the last time I was in Uruguay (2022) was riding an ICE BYD. I had only ever seen electric BYDs.

Wikipedia informs me that they stopped making ICE vehicles in 2022.

There is a significant amount of BYD buses here in Spain, I don't live in Madrid but I go every now and then and I noticed a fair amount of electric BYD.

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.

Yes, they are (were) significantly cheaper than similar western cars.

Have their share of problems thought. IIRC climate control is often subpar.

I have two chinese-born coworkers (who spent 20-30 years here in the us) in the same room. When we talk about china's expansion, I am always jealous of the public projects, infrastructure, housing, etc. They always point out the huge unemployment of young people, declining birth rate, and other social ills.

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

I traveled to Wuhan twice a year for business for much of the last decade (until the pandemic).

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.

A Chinese person who was here in the US as a foreign student once commented to me that he was so surprised that the United States was like the country side. He didn’t realize how rural the country was.

This was at UCLA which is in LA which is the second biggest city in the US.

Whenever the topic of Chinese infrastructure comes up I am reminded of a 2016 Wired documentary about Shenzhen. It was positive portrayal of hacker culture in Shenzhen. But one thing really stood out to me. They had demarcation line separating the city and “urban village”. It looked like lots of poor people lived in the urban village. The guide mentioned that the urban village will be torn down completely in 3 months to expand the city and people had to move. It sounded like gentrification. The host was impressed by the efficiency.

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.

I'd say it's a country that builds a ton of infrastructure, at the expense of living standards of common people. The money from infra has to come from anywhere, and an all-powerful central government can just redirect the stream from consumer spending into building out infrastructure. Whether Chinese are happy about it, you'd have to ask them.

And, more to the point, BYD exists because the CCP has been aggressively protectionist of its domestic companies and has been strongly involved in growing, supporting, and protecting its domestic industry to ensure it has one. BYD is not a cautionary tale about protectionism, it's a sales pitch for it.

I may end up living outside the US next year (was going to be this year but it’s been postponed) and when I was investigating auto options, I’ve been severely tempted by the BYD Seal as a replacement for my Prius. All the reviews I’ve found have been positive and while I’m not a big fan of the compromises made in the display mount for the useless automatic rotation feature, it’s quite tempting. I’m torn between just getting a new Prius or spending an additional 8K for the Seal. I don’t know that I’ll drive enough for the difference in cost to add up (or, for that matter, to justify buying a car at all, but that’s a question for a different day), but I really like the idea of not contributing to the pollution in the urban area I’d be living. Option C would be the plugin hybrid version of the Seal which would be cheaper than the Prius.

> the CCP can end BYD in a single weekend

Seeing the way tech companies behave makes me think they fear Trump the same way. for example, Tim Apple certainly crawls up Trumps arse.

They're all over the place in Mexico City. It'll be interesting as these EVs start to show up along the northern and southern borders traveling within the US.

I agree that that would be great as a consumer, but given how protectionist China is, you can hardly blame countries for responding in kind. Trade should be a two way street.

Free market does not exist

For anyone that doesn't know, then president Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law in 1988 that banned all car imports into the US unless the car is at least 25 yaers old.

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.

Just buy a Textron golf cart and you have 90% of the Chinese EV experience.

It's not "surprisingly" unless you haven't bought much in the last 20 years.

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.

> BYD ... is leading in battery tech.

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.

BYD has its own "God's Eye" self-driving tech, and unlike Musk's pigheaded insistence on cameras only, BYD is incorporating LIDAR into their cars across the range:

https://thedriven.io/2026/01/11/byds-cheapest-electric-cars-...

You should be loyal only to the extent that the loyalty helps some interests of yours. That is if the car industry ensures military equipment should you need it. (or alternatively you are going to war and don't want them to have the expertise that a car industry has).

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.

The point of China's mercantilist and imperialist games with electric cars, is to attack and kill Western industry, and deprive us of the ability to defend ourselves.

Canada reduced theirs to 6.1% from 100% about a month ago.

Value, performance, quality, and not being associated with Elon.

Value price for us. The Sealion 7 for us had the combination of features, dimensions, range, 800v platform, for a price that was simply unbeatable (leasing).

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.

Don't forget their rampant channel-stuffing, which is so flagrant, that it makes Ford's and GM's channel-stuffing antics look like kindergarten games in comparison.

It's not yet easy to buy BYD vehicles in Canada either. The first quota of 49,000 vehicles was only recently announced, and that's to be shared across all Chinese vendors.

Provided they are available in Canada. There’s only roughly 50k imports in the first year and that will be split across all Chinese manufactured EVs (not necessarily Chinese brands). I assume the majority will be Teslas from their Shanghai factory.

I expect that the US administration will very quickly ban these cars from being leased or resold into the US from Canada.

...if they're not banned from entering the USA altogether, which seemed to be the way the US President was leaning already.

I think that if you maintain a policy, it becomes yours too.

But we’ve seen this already in Japan, and it kind of worked out for them? Yes, they didn’t become the richest country in the world like everyone predicted in the 80s, they have stagnated a bit, but life there is still pretty good.

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.

Are these not the same things people are complaining about in the West, though?

Not hard to find the evidence of tofu dregs. Start being envious when they stop using ewaste as filler for concrete roads and buildings.

West LA isn't like a Chinese city, but no one in their right mind would call UCLA rural

I get the same thing here is Australia. There is a lot of space with little going on.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullarbor_Plain

The US has thousands of atrocities under its belt. For this aspect, the US and China tie in terms of the leaderboard.

I believe they're specifically referring to energy policy. As they said:

> 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.

The modern discourse is quite rough -- people have been making these equivalencies for quite some time -- but as the US behavior becomes worse and worse, these equivalencies become more and more true. And as they become truer, the people who have always been pushing them only feel vindicated.

It's quite unfortunate, but I can't say I blame them. From their perspective the tiger is finally showing its stripes.

> The good thing about China is that apart from Taiwan they have little territoral ambitions

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 US auto manufacturers could compete, they just don't want to.

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.

> 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

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.

>I have two chinese-born coworkers (who spent 20-30 years here in the us) in the same room. When we talk about china's expansion, I am always jealous of the public projects, infrastructure, housing, etc. They always point out the huge unemployment of young people, declining birth rate, and other social ills.

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 always take these views with a grain of salt, many immigrant's view of their home country is ossified at the time of emigration.

Why is that a problem? Most of the people in China live in about 1/3 of the country. Imagine if everyone in the United States lived in just 1/3 of the United States even with 350 million people that would be crowded , but China has 1.3 billion people living in an area the size of the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi river imagine 1.3 billion people living just in that area.

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.

Visit if you can, and take some bullet trains! We had a blast last year there.

China will likely become the go-to place for immigrants within couple decades. Just like any other developed economy had.

I'm passively curious how the long-term maintenance of this all ends up. You don't just build a bridge, you have to keep it up when the natural strain of the world impacts upon it. Given provinces already have debt problems [0], how the hell will all of this infrastructure look in 50 years?

[0]: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3254680/c...

What’s wrong with their demographics? Population decline?

The US can end any of its trillion dollar companies overnight. Ask anthropic how much they were looking forward to being on the receiving end of the orange gibbon's ire.

Running a business isn't a human right. Also, I hate the conflation people have that the ability for the CCP to do something means it would. Furthermore, the party in socialist states is basically just the government. It being called a party and being explicitly ideological in function isn't, in practice, very different from the US having something called the federal government that has a constitutional ideology

The world before all of the big beautiful tariffs.

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.

There are two types of protectionism:

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.

In the world of Chinese media I suppose? To me this all looks like the same hand-wringing angst we went through in the 1980’s with the industrialization of Japan bearing massive fruit.

Right down to the shaky real estate markets.

Which country was this in?

It's what the USA did during its industrialisation, it's what Japan did during its industrialisation. If you are looking to history to find ways to make your country prosper and industrialise, wouldn't you take those examples since they panned out pretty well?

American car manufacturers have extremely small market shares outside N.A., and many (all?) of them required multiple government bailouts over the past few decades.

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".

AFAIK if its registered in Mexico it can be driven in US under temporary import permit. I've seen the odd Hilux or other new rarity that way. Quite common to see Mexico plates here in AZ in all number of cars not available for sale.

Currently the “best” way is to wait until they’re 25 years old and import them.

Not directly related to your comment, but I'm confused why so many people say "BYD is subsidized by the Chinese government" as some kind of gotcha for why they're "bad". The US government subsidizes farmers. Companies like Intel, Ford, and Boeing all get federal or state subsidies. Tesla's growth can in part be attributed to favorable tax credits. Should we qualify statements about how successful they are with an asterisk that they got favorable treatment from the government?

It advertises 52km range, which is plenty enough for us for day-to-day driving to be entirely in EV mode.

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.

Presumably referring to population density? People like the low density in California.

Tearing down a slum is not gentrification.

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).

The US is not building infrastructure at the expense of living standard of common people. Ask Americans if they're happy about it.

While not exactly the same, it does rhyme. More a case of suck up to Donny T and hope they give a tax break or something. Keep the shareholders happy.

I suspect you will see the same out of John Apple later this year.

Wait, wasn't the free market supposed to be a superior system? You cannot at the same time argue that something is better and wish you didn't have it

You really think BYD would exist in a free market?

I don’t mind the honesty.

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.

Ok but we are talking about tens of billions versus tens of millions. And some good old fashioned protectionism which has limited effect on the global market which we are discussing at the moment.

People are also surprised how rural much of China is.

When friends visited NYC and we drove around a bit they said “it’s like everything is half finished”

Well, different kinds of protectionism.

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.

Hasn’t the US been equally so, including the auto company bailouts, government fleet purchases restricted to US-made vehicles, US national moves to secure supply chain inputs for the auto makers, etc.?

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.

No, it is not. From mass recalls to faking sales targets and finances, BYD is actually facing serious problems. As soon as their benefits stop they are going the way of Evergrande

Where outside the US? You might be fine with just a bike and transit.

I don't mean to downplay Trump's strongarming of industry or the obsequiousness shown by tech leaders, but let's be real, it's not remotely the same level of control.

> Dang, it seemed not that long ago - 5 to 10 years - when Tesla had far superior battery tech.

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.

I'm no fan of China but is it totally unimaginable to you that a country might just want to be successful?

Quality? I'm really interested into hard and extensive data about mechanical (drivetrain, suspension, brakes, etc...) engineering and quality control that would make me put them on the same level as the Japanese.

Lacking that, I must hold the preemptive view that they cut corners at least as much as the average make/

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Or just China just deserve special treatment?

China and USA can fight it out propping up BYD and Tesla instead of Norinco and Lockheed Martin.

I was just referring to specifically the cruise control which seems useful only in traffic conditions. As soon as the road gets a bit cleared up it has a tendency to accelerate too much, and a bit too eagerly.

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.

That’s only one example of subsidy for one location: tens of millions in one specific type of tax break from one state for only one factory.

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...

BY*D

*except Elon’s

> 800v platform

Ones in NZ are 400v and tops at 150KW charging.

Sure, but in this case it seems spot on. China really does have a disturbingly high youth unemployment rate, along with a population that's aging and shrinking. I have no idea if they're headed for a major economic crash, but the track record of command economies controlled by a paranoid aging dictator don't have a very good track record.

For all the things China does well there are plenty of reasons for Chinese people to be concerned about their future.

> Building infrastructure for a civilized society is never bad

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.

China had way more immigrants a decade ago, or even 25 years ago, than it does today. They have been opening up and then closing again for a while now, I think they found that they don’t really need many immigrants, if any, to develop. They aren’t going to become immigrant dependent like the west, at best it will be more like Japan where immigrants fly under the radar (literally, having African work crews out at night so the locals don’t notice).

I don’t think so. They have a massive working population and foreign entrepreneurship is hard there. Also they have no process of assimilation and are pretty openly hostile to outsiders. If anything you might see low skilled immigrant labor moving there but I don’t think there’s going to be large numbers of high skilled workers moving there.

This is the structure of catabolic collapse. When the mere maintenance costs over run the capabilities/resources of the civilisation.

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

> LIDAR

You still believe that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLgCJUeBuI

Isn't the concern with over the air updates and back-doors? As in, if the citizens in county A buy country B's cars, and now there is a tiff between the two countries, country B could potentially brick all of those vehicles in country A.

I wonder what happens if someone from the US buys one in Canada and just drives it home? At what point and how do they get charged an import tariff? When they register it?

In the same vein, it’s reasonable to take a foreigner’s view with a grain of salt. For all its impressive progress, China doesn’t show off its problems.

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.

> Imagine if everyone in the United States lived in just 1/3 of the United States

Take a 100 mile strip down the east coast and the west coast. Add Chicago. That's pretty much everyone.

Shanghai was great in the 2010s. Seems like a different place today.

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.

It's not always the case, for example Japan has very low immigration.

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).

That would be quite the change, considering they don't really allow any outsiders to become citizens.

I do wonder about this. With demographic collapse coming for almost all nations, or with a notable trend line for it to come, what would happen if other nations basically prevent emigration? Better to keep their people than lose them. Alternatively, those with large populations can use this as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations.

The coming decades will be interesting.

This has yet to happen in East Asia and probably never will.

America and countries that engaged in worldwide colonisation are the exception not the rule.

I doubt it because the Chinese are very protective of their homogeneity and see what has happened in Europe as a massive cautionary tale. So my guess is that they will be very picky and control both quality and numbers tightly.

It has been called the 4-2-1 problem. 4 people had 2 kids. Those 2 kids had 1 of their own. This means there ends up with a more elderly people with far fewer young to support them. That doesn't look like a recipe for social stability. This is why they are going in so hard on automation nowadays, they are trying to do what Japan attempted in the 90s/2000s but hopefully with more success.

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.

https://alexatsintolas.weebly.com/the-4-2-1-problem.html

Cool collection of self driving edge cases, thanks. How are any of them related to Waymo using or not using a particular sensor, LIDAR or otherwise?

That is just another variation of geopolitical worry. Nobody will do this unless there is a geopolitical situation happening. If you are going to war then bricking the enemies cars is useful. Otherwise it is harmful (even if you do it accidentally you lose trust and so nobody will buy from you again - which is why so often rollouts are done slowly - if it doesn't work you only have a few customers affects and can spend more than a car's value on techs to fix them thus ensuring you don't lost reputation)

There are plenty of FSD failure examples on YouTube too. I don't think you can draw conclusions from that. Especially because FSD isn't actually driverless yet, unlike Waymos.

AFAIU, import duties aren't really something you're necessarily "charged" as much as it's something you have a legal obligation to pay. Sure, maybe you could buy a car in Canada and bring it in to the US without paying the tariffs... we call that smuggling.

FSD clocked in 10billion miles, not in some geofenced playground mind you.

You should be able to share some videos?

It's hardly smuggling if there is no process to collect the duties from you. Are you meant to walk into a random local government office and hand them a bunch of cash and say "i think i owe you this" ?!

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.

I don't know how the US does it, but at least where I'm from, major border crossings (be it a road or an airport or something else) typically always have a place you can go to declare goods you're importing. That's where you're typically expected to, well, declare your goods. I imagine they don't see many people just driving there and saying "Hi, I'm here to declare this car I'm in", but I don't see why it shouldn't work...

> it's better for communism in the long run

"Communism" is a theoretical concept. The CCP is what they are protecting, an authoritarian power structure.

There are literally hundreds. Just search for "FSD fail". This one's great.

https://youtu.be/frGoalySCns

>>> walk into a random local government office and hand them

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.

the CCP exists to build communism

I remember this. Driver posted telematics where it clearly shows he turned right into ditch.

Next?

So where exactly? At the border? Someplace else?

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?

That's the biggest joke.

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.

I enjoyed this one.

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...

Custom clearance is at the customs office. At the border they will simply check the papers.

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.

I mean, that's the marketing material. Once Xi declared himself emperor for life, that marketing material fell apart a bit, didn't it?

How is modern China even close to theoretical "communism?" It's certainly not Marxist, right?

Telemetry analysis: https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaFSD/comments/1kx6pf0/data_repo...

Funnily if you search for "tesla fsd crash compilation" instead you get tons of videos where car prevents crashes. Funny how that works.

I'm sure that the people of Tibet at the very least would feel strongly about the notion of a peaceful, non-expansionist China. You could ask the people of the Philippines as well, or for an admittedly more complicated answer the people of Japan and the RoK.

China is also happily supporting Russia in their invasion of Ukraine, which makes the "not waging war" distinction a bit academic.

I fail to see how both can't be true. It demonstrates your allegiance to the parties main goal (communism) and filters out those who oppose it

China does not have “shareholders”, though. There are incredibly substantive differences between the accountability structures and expectations of shareholders, and those that govern broad based and diverse national geopolitical interests in China.

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.

Perhaps but how did America get “more developed than competition”? Bangladesh cannot “use diplomacy and superpower status” to push other countries around…

I never said they were peaceful and non-expansionist, just that it's unlikely they'd turn to war for those gains.

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 currently in a socialist stage.

No it's not. It's in a state capitalist stage.

Ok, so please explain what you mean because I'm still not sure what exactly "complete destruction of demographics" means in this context.

In the age of Mao, wasn't it closer to Marxism? There are more billionaires in China now, then there were back then. By that I mean, the wealth disparity in China is at an all-time high now, is it not? Xi removed the 2-term limit from his own position, and has been doing an excellent job at consolidating his power base, through all means necessary.

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.

>In the age of Mao, wasn't it closer to Marxism?

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

China was completely mucked up economically under Mao, especially around the cultural revolution. I went there in 1983 when GDP per capita was like $300 and it was a bit prison camp like. It's changed a lot.

I was not there, but I believe that history shows that you are correct. I am not trying to sell Mao at all. If anything, he is a yet another ideological-extremist cautionary tale. (yet again, killed millions of his own people through poorly thought out absolutism)

Until Xi, China appeared to be moving in a good direction.

Yeah it's a shame Xi has reverted a bit - less economic freedom and more warlike. Still it's much better than it used to be.