Yeah, the Economist is still an elite rag owned by European old money. Still they admit the (buried) fact that inexpensive EVs are good for Western consumers.
What a confusing article overall. Clearly the author was trying to make a nuanced argument about free trade, but then the editors had to put their trademark political spin on it, with the result that the headline undermines the central thesis.
On issues regarding the global south (like TFA), The Economist is one of the most noisy and unreliable narrators.
I'd recommend a diverse media diet that complements mainstream Western media (Reuters, AP) with non-Western English mainstream outlets like AJ, SCMP, CGTN, RT, TRT.
State/oligarch controlled media is only harmful if you think it is objective truth and not propaganda. This applies to RT, CGTN but also to Reuters, AP, Wikipedia.
We actually live in a very rich+diverse English-language media landscape, which "reputable", low-signal, vibes-based tabloids like The Economist, The Atlantic, etc. do not represent well.
If you're consuming RT you are choosing to believe that you are too smart to believe propaganda. Maybe so. More likely, you are the sucker in this transaction. Also, Wikipedia may have biases but it is weird to call it oligarch-controlled.
I read RT and think, "this is how the Russian elite think / want me to think".
I read BBC and think, "this is how the British elite think / want me to think".
If they both agree on something mundane, like Chinese EV exports, then it's almost certainly fact-based journalism.
If they disagree significantly or use emotional appeals, I look for the primary evidence to better understand who is in the right.
Everyone consumes propaganda every day, but it takes work to see through it. It is a form of ideological cope to pretend that RT or CGTN has significantly more misinformation/propaganda than NYT or BBC, and therefore we ought to rely on the latter while totally ignoring the former.
> It is a form of ideological cope to pretend that RT or CGTN has significantly more misinformation/propaganda than NYT or BBC
Really? There's a lot of reasons to expect it to be true. The NYT and BBC, while imperfect, have guard rails like independent trustees and a commitment to impartiality. RT is a dictator's tool, populated by his flunkies. Most people would think RT's news quality is significantly worse.
This is what you are led to believe if you consume RT. One of the cornerstones of RT's propaganda is cynicism paired with moral relativism; the idea that everyone is the same, that all governments and peoples of the world are the same dirty pigs as Russians, which in turn means that Russians do nothing wrong when they invade a foreign country to torture children, rape women, murder innocents.
But that's not true. Despite all of their faults, NYT and Fox News are not under direct editorial control of the White House, whereas the RT (and all other media in Russia) is directly run from the Kremlin. Every morning starts with a meeting where the editorial boards receive latest talking points from the Kremlin, and their freedom is only to choose how they phrase them, if even that. RT is a government-run project to warp perceptions; NYT and Fox aren't.
And public broadcasters like PBS or DR in Europe aren't even affected by ownership and financial factors, like one could blame the corporate media.
> or DW in Europe aren't even affected by ownership and financial factors
Wrong. Sometimes so biased that they are fully flat. Got caught over and over again. Including things comparable to
> Every morning starts with a meeting where the editorial boards receive latest talking points from the Kremlin, and their freedom is only to choose how they phrase them, if even that.
Though more indidrectly and subtle, but at the end of the day it amounts to the same shit, just (implemented) different.
> One of the cornerstones of RT's propaganda is cynicism paired with moral relativism; the idea that everyone is the same, that all governments and peoples of the world are the same dirty pigs as Russians
Wow. Western Liberalism & IR Realism are now Russian conspiracies. I don't know what to say except this is essentially NSDAP rhetoric.
a) because Wikipedia is directly downstream of Western state/oligarch controlled media via its sacred "reliable sources" policy, which hilariously gives e.g. Radio Free Asia, The Economist perfect scores while outright blacklisting analogous outlets from non-Western countries.
b) because it requires significant resources to operate/contract an astroturfed influence campaign on Wikipedia, especially if you want to control the "objective" narrative on hot political issues.
I don't understand how any value can be gained from reading RT. People often say it's a way to hear the other side but Russia doesn't have a free press so...whose side is that? It's the "side" that the Russian government wants you to believe.
> Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov believes there is neither freedom of the press nor freedom of expression in his home country. "The history of independent journalism is over, [it's] finished," the 61-year-old said on September 11 at the start of the first Hamburg Press Freedom Week. The editor in chief of the Novaya gazeta newspaper, which is banned in Russia, told Germany's NDR public broadcaster that, since he still lives in Moscow and will return there, he can only say in Hamburg what he can also say there, and "in Moscow, I can't talk about anything anymore."
I think that there are two dangerous assumptions going around:
1. That you must "dig" for good information. Meaning that all large media orgs can be dismissed out of hand for no other reason than being large. The more you dig the closer you are to the truth!
2. That Western media can never understand, study, or discuss non-western subjects.
RT does not offer "perspectives". Its sole purpose is to warp viewers' perceptions towards the position beneficial to Putin's clan without any regard for truth and objectivity.
Since the latest crackdown, the entire Russian public sphere has become performative. You have a wide variety of discussions shows, but all their guests are pre-vetted by the Kremlin and all they do is reiterate official talking points. Officials hold press conferences, but all questions and answers are pre-agreed. The country has thousands of newspapers and radio stations, but they only repeat the same central messages from the Kremlin instead of expressing the ideas of their staff and collaborators.
It is astonishing, really, how the public exchange of ideas has ceased in such a short time and how the entire society now willingly accepts a fake reality just like in Brezhnev's era.
> the entire Russian public sphere has become performative. You have a wide variety of discussions shows, but all their guests are pre-vetted by the Kremlin and all they do is reiterate official talking points.
I perceive that as not much different from the few German media I still occassionally watch. Since at least a decade, actually.
And I've got grumpy about them much earlier, tossed my TV in 1996 already.
But wasn't even so bad then, as it is now.
Edit: I also like their "Question more!" Just for the hell of it.
Yes!
Question all the shit the suckpuppets are bubbling out.
If a country like Germany is losing more and more of its clout, by losing out on internet, AI and now their car industry - does that make it a good place to live for someone who's business is international?
Barcelona (and Catalonia in general) is getting more expensive and crime is rising. There are scary junkies on the streets downtown. A lot of expats are leaving. But it is still fun if you like to party. I guess it's good if you are in your 20s and have good income.
Spain is rising taxes while cost of living is rising, too. Rent controls made the prices skyrocket. But if you have low income or live off savings (i.e. low income tax), small Spanish towns are a great choice. Pretty places, friendly open people, good weather. YMMV
If you own a business Germany is decidedly not a good place to live due to the tax burden and the bureaucracy.
CFC & management and control rules will make any company owned by you essentially a German company and you’ll have to be rectally examined by Finanszamt quite often.
Germany is not losing out on anything. It is simply structured so that there are no large public companies. A private german grocery store is taking over the US. There‘s a bunch of specialized companies producing stuff like Zeiss doing lenses for ASML. This is more or less just spurred by doomer rhetoric.
That's absurd, there are many large corporations in Germany, including VW, BMW, SAP, Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, Bosch. A lot of the Mittelstand is also directly dependent on those large corps as their subcontractors.
This might be a hot take, but I think Germany is suffering from a sort of Dutch disease with its car industry.
Germany has a lot of human capital, experienced and well educated workforce, but a lot of it got sucked into the car industry, because it was so profitable until now. I hope that with the car industry sunsetting, hopefully we'll see new innovative companies spring up.
> There is no theoretical reason why Chinese manufacturers cannot attain the same quality level over time (maybe even short time) as everyone else.
Chinese manufacturers can build to any standard of quality, the key being you have to be ready to pay for it which most companies aren't, which is why Chinese manufacturing continues to keep the rep it does: they'll build you a widget worth $0.50 or $50.00, but everybody only wants to spend $0.50 and then they complain when they get $0.50 worth of widget.
However, I would like to know why the BYD vehicles are so much cheaper. Are their workers being paid enough to live? Are they cutting corners in manufacturing? Is this a case of simply vertical integration providing dividends, or are they being sponsored by the Chinese government, and if the latter, why? Is it because they don't have dealers, and if so, is that a good thing? People rag on dealerships all the time and there's plenty of good reasons to hate them, but they do have upshots too. My dealership of choice where my salesman of choice works is one of the few places I'm fairly comfortable that I'm not going to get put over a barrel as soon as I sign. That relationship is hard to find these days.
I'm all for cheaper cars, absolutely. Prices in the states especially are fucking ridiculous. But I also am cognizant of what "X but cheaper" usually means. It usually means one or more of the following:
> everybody only wants to spend $0.50 and then they complain when they get $0.50 worth of widget.
I don't think that's quite the case. Instead, I think the people complaining at receiving the $0.50 widget complain when the (now-broken) widget was in a $1000 gizmo, which used to include the $50 version before cost-optimization.
It's a market for lemons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons), only with general, notionally durable goods. Build quality is opaque and liable to change without notice, whereas price is obvious.
It's all of the above, but it's also because Americans like big cars, and manufacturers have realized that bigger, pricier cars are higher margin.
It's not that it's that much cheaper for what you get, it's that you can actually pay less for the smaller product, which is harder and harder in the US because they're simply not offering them.
All automakers (except maybe, sort of, Volvo) have shown they'll put in a minimum amount of effort on safety unless held to higher standards either by regulators or the insurance industry. It costs money to make things safe and if you spend more money on it than you're required to, your competitors won't.
The Chinese can build a safe car if they're required to do so.
Volvo is Chinese in the same way that RAM Trucks are Dutch.
I think in this context people are more referring to country of origin in terms of culture, engineering, and operations. Not just the financial side of the fence.
The absolute minimum of safety for a car that's legal to sell in USA or EU today is greater than the maximum of car safety any money could buy in 1990s, and we're not even speaking about 1970s or earlier.
Of course they will build a safe car, because they definitely will be required to do so; the law is there, and the local car industry are sufficiently powerful and capable to act as an effective watchdog ensuring that all the requirements are enforced for their Chinese competitors.
I would presume they might not meet voluntary standards, like high performance on IIHS tests, because their competitive advantage would likely be price. At least, in the short term.
Well, I've been looking at Chinese EV's and basically drooling at what they're doing.
In this country (USA), an EV is a ball-and-chain over how many miles until you go before a recharge for hours.
In China, its 3 minutes to SWAP a battery. You know, the solution the manchild in charge of Tesla said wouldn't work. And here it is, working in USD 12k ev's.
Eh. Recharge for hours is just incorrect. And BYD doesn't seem to be going the battery swap route either. So there's more to it than just Elon Musk doesn't like it.
Tesla demoed a battery swap in one of the early keynotes. But I can see the infra being much harder than just charging, as well as restricting the subsequent car design.
Maybe the timing is much better now that the EV design has settled a bit. Looks like Nio got to a good number of stations so far [1]
For a majority of people, I think most trips aren't long enough to require battery charging/swapping. Charging happens in between your trips when you don't need the car anyway. I travel regionally for work, but even on days that I spend a lot of time in the car my journey may only be 200-300 miles, punctuated by meetings and project work.
This system does appear to have advantages for vehicles that are being driven continuously, like taxis, delivery vehicles, or long haul. I think the capital expense for a complicated apparatus like this might be justifiable if you can amortize it across a fleet of vehicles. One drawback may be that if this complicated equipment breaks, you are in a pickle unless you have access to another battery machine.
------
-> You know, the solution the manchild in charge of Tesla said wouldn't work.
Disappointing personal opinion unnecessary to your point.
------
Edit: Another drawback may be technology lock in. If battery swap stations only service one brand of car you could look at them as having a reduced utility compared to an industry standard battery pack design. This is not an insurmountable problem, but worth consideration from an economic efficiency perspective.
Swapping had been tried elsewhere, and the economics never worked out. It's a massive capital investment in batteries, for one, plus the retail land cost. Not to mention that EV brands haven't standardized swappable batteries.
The competition operates on the thinnest of margins: utility electricity prices and gas stations. Swapping is just a crap market to get into.
Hours? You might wait 20-30 minutes every 2-3 hours of driving. Well I say wait, you’ll probably be doing something else for most/all of it since that is a natural stopping point for most.
Note: please people don’t shares stories of how you drive for 20 hours without stopping, I hate being reminded about the habits of some of the people I share the road with.
This must work on some subscription system. Otherwise how can you be sure you're not getting a bad nattery replacement. How can the business make sure you're not giving them a degraded battery for their new one?
BYD electric cars are available in Australia and establishing a good reputation. Mainly because they are much much cheaper than Tesla's for a similar product. Also there's an influx of marketing for BYD eg. https://www.businessinsider.com/byd-electric-car-powers-life...
I noticed they aren't available in the USA but they are taking off where they are available.
i think there's a lot of variability in the cost a car. For example, a 2024 Toyota Corolla (decent car with decent reputation) starts at $22k. That's less than half the average you mentioned.
Do you really think encumbered car companies are going to let that happen? They will lobby against it heavily. Hell, look at Texas where laws say you have to buy a car through a dealership. It should’ve been repealed, but dealerships won’t let it happen.
In France, there are new rules for subsidies for EVs. Only some cars are eligible, and Chinese cars are notoriously absent. The reason given is that the environmental cost of delivering cars from China is too great. But to me, if it isn't protectionism, I don't know what is.
So no Dacia Spring, which is one of the most popular EVs in Europe, because of its low price and no-nonsense design. Nothing from BYD either. As for Tesla, only the Model Y (made in Germany) is eligible.
I hope we can ask them to build local factories to improve employment and also lower the cost of EV in the long run. Right now the other options are too costly comparing to my few years old 30K CAD Tucson Essential (and over 0% interest back then -> bought out after lease).
The American & European auto industries have led us to $50-70K electric cars and trucks with shoddy manufacturing, falsely advertised range, months-long wait times and dealership markups, expensive maintenance and repairs and shit like seat heating subscriptions on top. If China is succeeding it's because customers desperately want reasonable alternatives.
If BYD shows up stateside with a 25-50% discount over Tesla and other premium manufacturers for similar quality and features (like they do in Australia and elsewhere), I will be first in line.
I dropped 50k on a VW id4 and it’s honestly been a delight. All of the ranges have been spot on and the only issue has been the OTA updates being borked.
Very different experience here, to the point I will not buy a VW again. Not a single OTA update since I bought it in October 2021, 3 recalls already and they don't even have the parts available for the last door issue recall. Their mobile app is region locked and I can't install it on my android phone (my app store is set to UK), the bluetooth won't connect half the time, if you start the car too fast you may trigger weird bugs like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/VWiD4Owners/comments/qx1fvs/new_id4... and the list is very, very long.
I literally never use these services - except for remote access for insurance write offs - because carplay and android auto. They’re worthless featured at the end of the day.
Edit: at least my heaters and massage chairs aren’t on a subscription like BMW.
BYD's technological development program, in particular lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, is undeniably impressive. Tesla is now also moving to Li-FePO4 batteries:
I say more power to them. I was considering buying a "luxury" vehicle and realized that the cost (between insurance, personal property tax, opportunity cost / apr, increased gas, depreciation) was $2,000 a month. Instead I said, "What if I just keep my camry, blow through $2000 a month on other stuff instead." (if you lease this number is closer to $3k a month)
It's just wild how leather seats + 50% faster acceleration = 30,000 extra dollars.
Anyways the margins are nuts and we're due for some disruption and real competition for real features. Call me when a car washes itself.
Over Christmas I rented an EV here in Germany, wanted to try the Renault Megane E-Tech. Instead I got an Ora Funky Cat, so Chinese car.
Electrical driving was quite nice (as most EV), but there were so many other annoying things:
- First and most important for an EV: It needed a lot of energy, 25 kWh per 100 km at 120 km/h on the highway at 10 degree Celsius. Combined with a pretty small battery it was annoying how fast you lost range.
- It warns you (via voice) as soon as you hit 120 km/h, every time you go below and reach it again.
- If you activate the Automatic Distance Control it will warn you (again with voice), every time you activate it.
- It was cold in the car, even with temperature set to 26 degree Celsius. But the heating was working when the car was not moving but in ready mode.
- Slow charging speeds, 70kW max.
- If you unpack your car and leave the door open, it will warn you with voice output, that the key is not in the car. All the time, without any pause, a hundred times. Highly annoying.
- A lot more annoying things the car tells you to do, all with its voice.
So all in all a pretty horrible experience, if other Chinese cars are similar, they will not make a dent here in Germany, even with their lower price point.
The whole influx of Chinese cars is greatly exaggerated. Car is not a phone, so you can't just make it and have user to throw it away when it breaks. User will want support (service, diagnostics, parts) so you need service network and train people in that service network. You need to have aftermarket parts distribution and storge. This all will cost money, so price for Chinese cars will go up and level up with European cars and Asian brands already established in Europe.
Or you can ignore all of that and have people driving cars 10k EUR cheaper than competitors, but when they will experience minor breakage or fender bender, their cheaper (but still expensive) car will become a 2-3 tones brick on the side of a road. Not good for PR and future of your brand.
83 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadIt is terrifying American auto executives in their Grosse Pointe estates. They are afraid of losing their oligopoly.
What a confusing article overall. Clearly the author was trying to make a nuanced argument about free trade, but then the editors had to put their trademark political spin on it, with the result that the headline undermines the central thesis.
I'd recommend a diverse media diet that complements mainstream Western media (Reuters, AP) with non-Western English mainstream outlets like AJ, SCMP, CGTN, RT, TRT.
State/oligarch controlled media is only harmful if you think it is objective truth and not propaganda. This applies to RT, CGTN but also to Reuters, AP, Wikipedia.
We actually live in a very rich+diverse English-language media landscape, which "reputable", low-signal, vibes-based tabloids like The Economist, The Atlantic, etc. do not represent well.
I read BBC and think, "this is how the British elite think / want me to think".
If they both agree on something mundane, like Chinese EV exports, then it's almost certainly fact-based journalism.
If they disagree significantly or use emotional appeals, I look for the primary evidence to better understand who is in the right.
Everyone consumes propaganda every day, but it takes work to see through it. It is a form of ideological cope to pretend that RT or CGTN has significantly more misinformation/propaganda than NYT or BBC, and therefore we ought to rely on the latter while totally ignoring the former.
Really? There's a lot of reasons to expect it to be true. The NYT and BBC, while imperfect, have guard rails like independent trustees and a commitment to impartiality. RT is a dictator's tool, populated by his flunkies. Most people would think RT's news quality is significantly worse.
But that's not true. Despite all of their faults, NYT and Fox News are not under direct editorial control of the White House, whereas the RT (and all other media in Russia) is directly run from the Kremlin. Every morning starts with a meeting where the editorial boards receive latest talking points from the Kremlin, and their freedom is only to choose how they phrase them, if even that. RT is a government-run project to warp perceptions; NYT and Fox aren't.
And public broadcasters like PBS or DR in Europe aren't even affected by ownership and financial factors, like one could blame the corporate media.
Wrong. Sometimes so biased that they are fully flat. Got caught over and over again. Including things comparable to
> Every morning starts with a meeting where the editorial boards receive latest talking points from the Kremlin, and their freedom is only to choose how they phrase them, if even that.
Though more indidrectly and subtle, but at the end of the day it amounts to the same shit, just (implemented) different.
Wow. Western Liberalism & IR Realism are now Russian conspiracies. I don't know what to say except this is essentially NSDAP rhetoric.
b) because it requires significant resources to operate/contract an astroturfed influence campaign on Wikipedia, especially if you want to control the "objective" narrative on hot political issues.
> Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov believes there is neither freedom of the press nor freedom of expression in his home country. "The history of independent journalism is over, [it's] finished," the 61-year-old said on September 11 at the start of the first Hamburg Press Freedom Week. The editor in chief of the Novaya gazeta newspaper, which is banned in Russia, told Germany's NDR public broadcaster that, since he still lives in Moscow and will return there, he can only say in Hamburg what he can also say there, and "in Moscow, I can't talk about anything anymore."
I think that there are two dangerous assumptions going around:
1. That you must "dig" for good information. Meaning that all large media orgs can be dismissed out of hand for no other reason than being large. The more you dig the closer you are to the truth!
2. That Western media can never understand, study, or discuss non-western subjects.
All I'm advocating for is healthy skepticism and having a diverse media diet.
Since the latest crackdown, the entire Russian public sphere has become performative. You have a wide variety of discussions shows, but all their guests are pre-vetted by the Kremlin and all they do is reiterate official talking points. Officials hold press conferences, but all questions and answers are pre-agreed. The country has thousands of newspapers and radio stations, but they only repeat the same central messages from the Kremlin instead of expressing the ideas of their staff and collaborators.
It is astonishing, really, how the public exchange of ideas has ceased in such a short time and how the entire society now willingly accepts a fake reality just like in Brezhnev's era.
I perceive that as not much different from the few German media I still occassionally watch. Since at least a decade, actually.
And I've got grumpy about them much earlier, tossed my TV in 1996 already. But wasn't even so bad then, as it is now.
Edit: I also like their "Question more!" Just for the hell of it.
Yes!
Question all the shit the suckpuppets are bubbling out.
All the times.
Will prices for rent etc go down?
EDIT: I tilt towards rural/low density areas. Understand the cosmopolitan desire though.
Not yet sure about Barcelona.
This chart (click on max) seems to say the opposite:
https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/rent-inflation
And from what I hear, the real rent inflation (on the free non-subsidized market) has been even higher over the recent years. Like 7% per year.
CFC & management and control rules will make any company owned by you essentially a German company and you’ll have to be rectally examined by Finanszamt quite often.
When in Germany, do as the (successful) Germans do.
Germany has a lot of human capital, experienced and well educated workforce, but a lot of it got sucked into the car industry, because it was so profitable until now. I hope that with the car industry sunsetting, hopefully we'll see new innovative companies spring up.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/adventure/red-li...
There is no theoretical reason why Chinese manufacturers cannot attain the same quality level over time (maybe even short time) as everyone else.
And Korean (e.g. Hyundai, Kia) in the 80s and 90s
Chinese manufacturers can build to any standard of quality, the key being you have to be ready to pay for it which most companies aren't, which is why Chinese manufacturing continues to keep the rep it does: they'll build you a widget worth $0.50 or $50.00, but everybody only wants to spend $0.50 and then they complain when they get $0.50 worth of widget.
However, I would like to know why the BYD vehicles are so much cheaper. Are their workers being paid enough to live? Are they cutting corners in manufacturing? Is this a case of simply vertical integration providing dividends, or are they being sponsored by the Chinese government, and if the latter, why? Is it because they don't have dealers, and if so, is that a good thing? People rag on dealerships all the time and there's plenty of good reasons to hate them, but they do have upshots too. My dealership of choice where my salesman of choice works is one of the few places I'm fairly comfortable that I'm not going to get put over a barrel as soon as I sign. That relationship is hard to find these days.
I'm all for cheaper cars, absolutely. Prices in the states especially are fucking ridiculous. But I also am cognizant of what "X but cheaper" usually means. It usually means one or more of the following:
- It's built by slaves (or near slaves)
- It's stolen from the global south
- It's of shit-quality
- It will show me ads
I don't think that's quite the case. Instead, I think the people complaining at receiving the $0.50 widget complain when the (now-broken) widget was in a $1000 gizmo, which used to include the $50 version before cost-optimization.
It's a market for lemons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons), only with general, notionally durable goods. Build quality is opaque and liable to change without notice, whereas price is obvious.
It's not that it's that much cheaper for what you get, it's that you can actually pay less for the smaller product, which is harder and harder in the US because they're simply not offering them.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/uaw-le...
You do not need to be a slave; it's enough to accept that the living standard comes with a cost.
The Chinese can build a safe car if they're required to do so.
I think in this context people are more referring to country of origin in terms of culture, engineering, and operations. Not just the financial side of the fence.
Of course they will build a safe car, because they definitely will be required to do so; the law is there, and the local car industry are sufficiently powerful and capable to act as an effective watchdog ensuring that all the requirements are enforced for their Chinese competitors.
In this country (USA), an EV is a ball-and-chain over how many miles until you go before a recharge for hours.
In China, its 3 minutes to SWAP a battery. You know, the solution the manchild in charge of Tesla said wouldn't work. And here it is, working in USD 12k ev's.
https://www.scmp.com/video/scmp-originals/3168635/chinese-sm...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anXQfRuAkZw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoBeXHYdO0Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTsrDpsYHrw
But hey, look at the "bright side" - we now get $7500 off cars that start at USD 70k for EVs. Real 'deal'.
Maybe the timing is much better now that the EV design has settled a bit. Looks like Nio got to a good number of stations so far [1]
[1] https://carnewschina.com/2023/10/20/nio-built-2000-battery-s...
For a majority of people, I think most trips aren't long enough to require battery charging/swapping. Charging happens in between your trips when you don't need the car anyway. I travel regionally for work, but even on days that I spend a lot of time in the car my journey may only be 200-300 miles, punctuated by meetings and project work.
This system does appear to have advantages for vehicles that are being driven continuously, like taxis, delivery vehicles, or long haul. I think the capital expense for a complicated apparatus like this might be justifiable if you can amortize it across a fleet of vehicles. One drawback may be that if this complicated equipment breaks, you are in a pickle unless you have access to another battery machine.
------
-> You know, the solution the manchild in charge of Tesla said wouldn't work.
Disappointing personal opinion unnecessary to your point.
------
Edit: Another drawback may be technology lock in. If battery swap stations only service one brand of car you could look at them as having a reduced utility compared to an industry standard battery pack design. This is not an insurmountable problem, but worth consideration from an economic efficiency perspective.
The competition operates on the thinnest of margins: utility electricity prices and gas stations. Swapping is just a crap market to get into.
Note: please people don’t shares stories of how you drive for 20 hours without stopping, I hate being reminded about the habits of some of the people I share the road with.
https://www.dw.com/en/do-germans-fear-chinese-electric-vehic...
I noticed they aren't available in the USA but they are taking off where they are available.
[0] https://brazilian.report/liveblog/politics-insider/2023/10/0...
The quote above is just the first thing that came up when I Googled the average cost of a new car in the U.S. (article was from May, 2023).
I welcome any disruptive force that brings that down back into the troposphere.
So no Dacia Spring, which is one of the most popular EVs in Europe, because of its low price and no-nonsense design. Nothing from BYD either. As for Tesla, only the Model Y (made in Germany) is eligible.
Does this sound like a respectful opinion? Or one that desperately wants my click? I'm not reading this.
But in general, I will vote to keep my QoL. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with import tariffs if required.
If BYD shows up stateside with a 25-50% discount over Tesla and other premium manufacturers for similar quality and features (like they do in Australia and elsewhere), I will be first in line.
> According to myVW (formerly VW Car-Net): my current subscriptions (that were prepaid by VW at time of ID4 purchase )-
> Remote Access (myVW) is a subscription that expires on 3/17/2026.
> Plus Nav (VW native navigation and traffic) is a subscription that expires on 4/23/2024.
> Plus Speech (IDTalk) is a subscription that expires on 4/23/2024.
That's exactly the point of the grandfather comment - bullshit subscriptions inside western cars are now everywhere.
1. https://www.vwidtalk.com/threads/did-you-know-prepaid-vw-sw-...
Edit: at least my heaters and massage chairs aren’t on a subscription like BMW.
https://www.manlybatteries.com/info/why-byd-insists-on-using...
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/china-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/05/how-byd-grew-from-a-phone-ba...
It's just wild how leather seats + 50% faster acceleration = 30,000 extra dollars.
Anyways the margins are nuts and we're due for some disruption and real competition for real features. Call me when a car washes itself.
I think my next car is going to be from 30-40 years ago, not something new.
- First and most important for an EV: It needed a lot of energy, 25 kWh per 100 km at 120 km/h on the highway at 10 degree Celsius. Combined with a pretty small battery it was annoying how fast you lost range.
- It warns you (via voice) as soon as you hit 120 km/h, every time you go below and reach it again.
- If you activate the Automatic Distance Control it will warn you (again with voice), every time you activate it.
- It was cold in the car, even with temperature set to 26 degree Celsius. But the heating was working when the car was not moving but in ready mode.
- Slow charging speeds, 70kW max.
- If you unpack your car and leave the door open, it will warn you with voice output, that the key is not in the car. All the time, without any pause, a hundred times. Highly annoying.
- A lot more annoying things the car tells you to do, all with its voice.
So all in all a pretty horrible experience, if other Chinese cars are similar, they will not make a dent here in Germany, even with their lower price point.
Or you can ignore all of that and have people driving cars 10k EUR cheaper than competitors, but when they will experience minor breakage or fender bender, their cheaper (but still expensive) car will become a 2-3 tones brick on the side of a road. Not good for PR and future of your brand.