BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion. It’s just one example among many of China charting the way forward and innovating while the US recedes further into backward-looking, protectionist policy. See: US politicians on both sides trying to ban BYD imports rather than incentivizing stiffer competition from US automakers.
Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression. But anyone paying attention can quite clearly see that China is winning and the US is sacrificing their global superiority at the altar of fear, ignorance, and religious nationalism.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
These aren't things unknown to other car manufacturers. Tesla, in particular, has suffered from mass recalls and faking sales. It also only really exists as a company because of government investment.
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.
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 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.
If you have ambitions that are contrary to that of the Party, well, they're going to get what they want, one way or another. It doesn't matter if you don't want to deal your AI to the military or if you'd rather not sell your home so that a highway can be built over the lot.
Some countries have stronger rule of law protections and social customs that enforce them, but the US has been on a speed run to dismantle all of them in the past year.
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.
the government is basically subservient to him, and there isn't anything stopping it from making a company cease to exist other than the status quo. If, for whatever reason, him (or in his absence the rest of the government) decide they don't want it to exist, it won't exist. It might not be as explicit as how the CCP does it, but it will have the same result
This shallow comparison could apply to any car. Are Toyota cars just Ford cars with a different logo?
Back when people used to buy Teslas, the company was notorious for how long it took to get repairs done. Even if BYD was exactly like Tesla theres many ways they could differentiate themselves if they were allowed in the US
A BYD seal is between $35k and $50k USD in various non US, non China countries that I checked Mexico, Germany, australia, Thailand.
Competition is great but it doesn't mean that the cars in America are bad. The lada was a failure of a car compared to other similar cars available elsewhere. That is not the case here.
I have one of the first runs of model 3s. It still runs perfectly. Great battery life. I'm happy with it. Nevertheless, I find it frustrating that I can't even consider buying a BYD as my next electric daily driver. Because when Tesla and BYD enter markets together Tesla is often getting creamed. That makes me curious as to why. This de-facto ban of BYD in the USA does nothing but encourage stagnation.
The why part is easy - Tesla is about as outdated of a car as it gets, it is practically same car and there are only few options. I own 2014 Model S and my neighbour has 2025 Model S - it is the same car when you look at it. We also got Model 3 (from many years ago) which was then blown up a little into Model Y and we have X from a decade ago. These are ancient cars. The tech inside may have improved but the offering is basically for my grandparents now.
100% tariff and political threats -- implying that they'd find a way to mark them as "unsafe", despite the fact that Canada and Europe tend to have higher safety standards than the US and already have BYD presence.
You can see the political groundwork being laid here.
If these concerns are so pressing, why do we allow any electronics at all from China?
It smells like air cover for a de-facto ban on BYD. To force US consumers to buy from politically blessed car makers instead of letting us choose the highest quality car available (at a given price point).
Some level of protectionism is in the best interest of national security. How is the local electronics industry that you referenced in the US doing? What is the ramification of eliminating the job market for engineers or discarding all of the US manufacturing know how? The CCP knows the answer to that question
The reason I called out Lada in my original comment is because it's a counterpoint to what you just said. The Lada was the result of too much protectionism. Produced from an empire that was too inward looking and feared interacting with the rest of the world on equal terms.
BYD keeps performing well in the rest of the world. If we hold US consumers hostage to prop up companies like Tesla, we risk allowing them to stagnate.
what has become of America where we are now scared shitless of China... oh well, i is what it is... America our ancestors built would have been like bring it on bitches and here we are "oh please, lets not let China in, our companies are subpar and we stand no chance against such a foe...
Global automakers typically make small modifications to vehicles for different markets. Cars, like most engineered products, are built to a list of design criteria. BYD, like every large automaker that does this, has capable engineers that can target any regulatory specification you give them. They already do it for all of the other markets they sell in, just as every global automaker does.
Chinese cars don't exist in the US because of laws specifically designed to prevent their sale here. The tariff for Chinese EVs was increased to 100% a couple of years ago when it was rumored that BYD was going to move to the US market. And currently, there is a bill circulating to ban them entirely.
I cannot answer your question but I visited China last year and the amount of different EVs they had was staggering. And really nice vehicles, I was very impressed with that.
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.
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.
I would certainly expect a country with 4x the population of the US, which is used as the center of global manufacturing, to need a lot of power.
I’m not sure that’s something that anyone should be concerned about from a geopolitical point of view. Likewise expecting Japan to have ever done the same is… silly.
> Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
Coal is still the majority of generation capacity [1] in China and China continues to build a lot more coal [2]
Who cares? China is revving up energy production in renewables to out eat the fossil production, but all of these processes are energy hungry, and you have to pay the non renewable cost to create the renewables. But then you don’t need the fossil fuels anymore. My solar panels will produce for the next 30+ years and power my EV with very little effort or maintaining, whereas the fuel I used to drive my ICE car to the store yesterday is gone forever and will need millions of years of dead things to recreate.
This is literally using fossil fuels to create renewable energy, which is the ultimate sane and responsible way to use the energy from fossil fuels.
The US with its high natgas generation is much cleaner than a majority coal driven generation scheme. I'm puzzled why we talk about "US decline" when we're pretty much creating paeans to marginal energy construction. Sure China's trajectory is good.
But it's still not at the point where it's cleaner per capital than the US and it's still quite far from that. Let's talk about reality here. The US shouldn't rest on its laurels, but we need to be real about where we are not how we feel
A lot can change. This administration has 2.5 years left. I'm tired of Reddit and Twitter doom-based virality hacks subsuming every net forum.
As an american i feel it. have you ever visited China? it's sad man, in more and more industries america is only able to compete by banning china from even contesting the market
Not just on dumping or price, actual product quality, innovation and value. It's impossible to visit a Huawei store in Beijing and not feel it in your bones
> Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
EDIT: thanks I didn't realize I forgot to add the context of my original reply to the post. Edited it to add context.
> As an american i feel it. have you ever visited China? it's sad man, in more and more industries america is only able to compete by banning china from even contesting the market
That's how China was able to compete: banning America from contesting the market.
The problem the US has, at least in this area, is that it's manufacturing is in the dumps and that's not even plainly bad thing.
No US born child in the last 30 years aspired to working a factory job. The US is an advanced economy with advanced jobs. We get degrees, we sit at desks, maybe even sit at home, work on computers, and generate an order of magnitude more wealth than our screw turning counterpart overseas.
I can tell you with first hand experience, that this problem is much deeper than "the US needs to catch up" because in reality what is happening is that China is the one playing catch up. The US is already 30 years into the endgame of economic development. China is where the US was 75 years ago, and on paper, the US has only progressed from that point.
It seems like BYD is a much bigger threat to Europe (specifically Germany) and Japan. The auto industry is big in the US but an insignificant amount of total exports. Germany and Japan could both lose their cash cows if the Chinese auto industry dominates international sales.
That's not really like with like. If you divided the states in USA into countries, their sales would be "international". The designation is misleading.
The main point is that BYD is an existential threat to Germany and Japan. Per Wikipedia (List of countries by exports + List of countries by vehicle exports, latest available data):
Even if you treat US states as separate 'countries' and balloon the US export denominator further, the ratio doesn't move into the same league. Autos are roughly 3x more important to Germany and ~3.5x more important to Japan as a share of foreign-earned revenue than they are to the US.
BYD taking the US auto export share is an inconvenience for a few states. BYD taking Germany's or Japan's is regime-altering for the whole national economy.
38.9% of BYDs direct profits are from subsidies. Tesla subsidies expired already… if we are going to judge on equal footing China is subsidizing a much bigger part of BYDs sales.
I don't mind restricting Chinese imports in principle, since China is well known to be very protectionist, moreso than Western countries for sure. Trade needs to be a two way street.
That said, it is indeed disappointing that we can't get their affordable EVs over here. Western legacy automakers really need a kick in the ass (especially since Tesla seems to just be phoning it in now).
With EVs, Tesla's the only one in the US not phoning it in. I used to think they were until I got a new Model Y Juniper.
I don't count Rivian or Lucid until they actually have even somewhat affordable EVs.
But pretty much everyone else in the US is doing a piss poor job with EVs and just don't seem to care at all. Ford seemed to have lost interest in the F-150 lightning.
I agree that trade needs to be a two way street. But I'm not convinced yet on "affordable" since these might be severely subsidized by the Chinese Gov to undermine domestic car makers across different nations. I say might only because I'm not 100% sure.
How do you like Model Y so far? I am eyeing that and a Rivian. The newest Y design is great (outside) and the price is where I want it. But I can’t help thinking that it will break the second I complete my signature for purchase/lease.
You can tow. However you can't reasonably tow for any distance. You can probably even tow for most trips - but you will spend 1/3rd of the trip or more sitting at a fast charger in the best case (and in many cases the only charger is a level 2 chargers so many hours at the charger for every 1 driving)
The US is very strong in manufacturing. There is a lot lower percentage of the population working in the factories (thanks to automation), but there is just as much as there ever was if not more. It isn't high value/growth like data centers, but it is still there and strong
If 90% of the data centers in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb tomorrow, communication would be a shit show for a month or two, and then go on, as we'd fall back to simpler, less compute-expensive solutions. We'd also probably be net better off without all the adtech crap.
If 90% of the factories in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb, you'd find that your standard of living would immediately, and quite observably plummet.
You tell me which is more important.
The amount of internet technocrap we actually need to live comfortably is a tiny fraction of what actually gets built. Most of it is in service of adtech, the surveillance state, or shaving 0.5% off some rentseeker's fat margins (on his side, the savings aren't passed on to us).
No, US picked services, financials, defense, and energy
China picked manufacturing, infrastructure, consumable exports
All the compromises here were pointed out by critics on the left many decades ago. Letting capital flee to where labour was cheapest eviscerated the entire US and Canadian northeast/midwest manufacturing sector and was policy driven from the right.
That and we decided that only the private sector should be responsible for building infrastructure and housing, and then wondered why the cost of building either skyrocketed in cost...
And yet now it's the (far) right freaking out and trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
That idea that you could have a) stopped globalism as lots of new giant markets opened up after the 1970s and b) be better off paying 2x for everything by banning everything foreign is just a fantasy. It’s just nostalgia fueled radical politics that both the far left and right latch on to.
The other part of the story that gets ignore is the administrative state exploding in the US/Canada post 1970s, where making new industry and development became very difficult making other countries more attractive while the cost of living exploded.
So instead of becoming competitive all we’re left with is these ideas of the government forcing domestic industry by using national security as an excuse to justify the backwards economics of it all.
US is not even capable of building data centers (or anything else anymore). This is why all the planned capacity is waaaaaay behind schedule year after year, as if Elon is running the entire operation :)
Another thing overtaking the US is average IQ scores. Both in the current baseline and in rate of change. US has been declining, China has been increasing.
> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression.
To be very practical here… the lack of rights and freedoms as they exist in China typically has no consequence to the lives of individual people. For example you have no right to protest. But how many of us have exercised that right in the US? Personally I never did. And honestly those protests end up being just parties and parades
I write my congressman every few months about something. Sometimes just to send a form letter that one of the various organizations writes for me. I also vote regularly.
Your understanding of the situation is over a decade out of date. The Chinese are outright innovating at this point, they are well past the copy-paste stage. If you'd like to catch up, this is a good place to start:
lmao. "religious nationalism"? What are you referring to here? The USA's new tighter immigration standards? What pray tell is China's immigration policy? Ignorance? Are you referring to perhaps San Francisco progressives eliminating enhanced schooling because it makes some students feel bad about themselves?
Fear? Oh I know, you are talking about how in blue states they can't even build simple housing never mind mega projects like high speed rail and that's why red states are acquiring population and capital at accelerating speeds.
those mega projects are almost always killed by republicans. also, listen to the rhetoric around christianity in republican circles and tell me it isn't religious nationalism
It's like what happened in the 80's with japanese cars. Except, America's poised to become a oligarchy and will absolute just punch itself in the face rather than let the oligarchy suffer.
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.
The sad reality is how politically influential it will be for Americans to take a Chinese EV from the airport to a hotel in Cancun and say, "Why don't we have this in 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.
They do. The Chinese government gave them a special exemption, presumably because they wanted to build EV manufacturing expertise. Other foreign auto companies are not allowed to open their own factories in China; they have to do a joint venture with a local manufacturer.
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.
Traveling in Asia and South America, the primary impression I got was not that this is a war of manufacturing that we're losing but that the game is already up. Chile was full of Chinese makes and they were all surprisingly good. Riding in a Chinese MG in Taiwan or Hong Kong you suddenly realize that this isn't a future competitor. The people talking about the war of car manufacturers here seem like those Japanese holdouts who were still fighting in 1956.
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.
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.
Is BYD beating Kia here in the UK? It's hard to tell from the SMMT figures [1] but it looks to me as if Kia sold just under twice as many vehicles as BYD. Given that so much of Kia's lineup is now BEV, I'm not sure who is winning.
Tesla is doing poorly here. That's almost entirely down to Musk's public image, not because BYD make better cars.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I just signed an offer to purchase a BYD Sealion 5, plugin hybrid small-to-medium SUV.
I’ve been largely happy with my 2018 Honda Fit and briefly researched a hybrid Fit.
In ZAR, the hybrid Fit is listed as ~530K, while the BYD is 570, however the BYD is way bigger, has much nicer interior and insanely more features, including: adaptive cruise control, lane assist (it can basically drive itself for simple traffic), 360 view camera, comparatively huge screen for my Apple CarPlay, sun roof, V2L (allows 2-3kw load off the battery or engine if the battery is low).
I largely liked my Honda Fit and my Ballade (that might be a South African model name), but have been annoyed for a long time at them being laggards on things like CarPlay (at least in South Africa, apparently the Fit in other markets had offered it for much longer).
I was thinking why the hell someone visiting HN, so arguably curious and interested in technology, would go for a PHEV but then you mentioned South Africa.
My SO bought an Ioniq 6 mostly because of the buttons and the seperate control surface for AC and such but they test drived a BYD as well which was the same as a Tesla, just one huge tablet and endless menus
Here in Spain you see a lot of BYD, considerable amount for Europe. But when I was in Uruguay that was a shock, almost all cabs, all electric cars, and some buses are BYD.
Musk was saying at the start that Tesla was going to be $80k then scale up so they would have a $10k/20k car. It looks like BYD beat them to it. I guess putting manufacturing in China, giving them all of the tricks of the trade, letting them build consolidated supply chains, letting them iterate on every aspect of manufacturing, and automate it all was a mistake in the long run. pikachu_face.jpg
You can't buy them in the US. You could buy one in Mexico and drive it across the border, but you wouldn't be able to register it in the US. It is probably possible to legally import one but it would be very expensive and time-consuming, and you'd need to know a lot about import law.
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.
Why has BYD stock been trundling along? They seem like they are so far ahead: incredible blade batteries with ridiculous power density (fast charging)/efficiency/cooling, while being structurally useful (mad cool). And mad popular. I feel like I'm missing something that this company is doing such amazing good work but the stock isn't really moving.
This is not surprising as other manufacturers continue moving away from producing cheap cars. One notable exception is dacia.
For all the China lovers here it's not a clear sign of Chinese superiority. I saw a video on youtube recently exploring BYD. It's success is due to the fact that the Chinese government as part of their plan to dominate the global car industry gives them massive amounts of money. Which manufacturer can compete with that? European tariffs in the near future looks likely.
Among other things the video explores some of BYD's shadier practices including artificially inflating domestic sales and not paying suppliers for up to 9 months.
I have my doubts whether their success is sustainable.
I hear this all the time, but I would point out that US car manufacturers are heavily subsidized as well. I’m sure other countries do their own things that effectively subsidize their automotive industries as well.
NAFTA and its successor keeps a lot of automotive production and assembly in North America.
The chicken tax protects American manufacturers from foreign competition on trucks and vans.
Tesla was started on the foundations of inexpensive loans and a “free” factory courtesy of government economic stimulus.
GM was bailed out and briefly owned by the federal government, saved by below-market rate loans.
Stellantis is also an organization that owes its existence on a bankruptcy bail-out package.
The US financially incentivizes car usage, period. They underfund transit projects, allow the gas tax rate to lag inflation, make zoning laws that require car ownership, and more. One great way to subsidize car companies is to make car ownership mandatory.
State and local governments frequently give tax incentives to major assembly plants in the name of preserving jobs for their constituents. For example, GM had a $60 million tax break to keep the Lordstown, OH plant open. Some of this was clawed back after the plant closed anyway.
CAFE standards incentivize manufacturers to build SUVs that aren’t practical or popular in many other markets, essentially enshrining America-specific car design, further separating the American market from global car designs. Companies like BYD can’t compete with American cars if they don’t sell models that resemble popular choices like the Ford F-150, which are designs which would be completely insane if sold in the Chinese, Japanese, and European markets.
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
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.
USA boomer car companies run a competition on who can build the biggest crappy SUVs around sold to other boomers who now look aghast at pump prices
Europe boomer car companies can't overrun their nit-pickiness and analysis paralysis and wonder why consumers are picking the car with screens that actually work like a modern device and don't have subscription horns or some other BS like that
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.
BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion. It’s just one example among many of China charting the way forward and innovating while the US recedes further into backward-looking, protectionist policy. See: US politicians on both sides trying to ban BYD imports rather than incentivizing stiffer competition from US automakers.
Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression. But anyone paying attention can quite clearly see that China is winning and the US is sacrificing their global superiority at the altar of fear, ignorance, and religious nationalism.
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.
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 always take these views with a grain of salt, many immigrant's view of their home country is ossified at the time of emigration.
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.
In the US it's practically a right of passage to be a young adult and very vocally hate the country, hate the government.
In China you don't have a life in front of you if you do that.
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...
China will likely become the go-to place for immigrants within couple decades. Just like any other developed economy had.
Visit if you can, and take some bullet trains! We had a blast last year there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
West LA isn't like a Chinese city, but no one in their right mind would call UCLA rural
People are also surprised how rural much of China is.
https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/origin.png
Posting the map in case anyone hasn’t seen it.
To be fair, six percent is still 84 million people.
When friends visited NYC and we drove around a bit they said “it’s like everything is half finished”
Did he ask about all the bricked up windows in London?
You get what you incentivize.
Presumably referring to population density? People like the low density in California.
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.
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.
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
These aren't things unknown to other car manufacturers. Tesla, in particular, has suffered from mass recalls and faking sales. It also only really exists as a company because of government investment.
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.
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
Doing anything you want to do that does not harm anyone else, and helps some, is most certainly a human right.
To arbitrarily repress this most basic impulse, the one to go after a dream to make better ways to do things, is severely anti-human.
Most businesses are in this category.
the problem is that it does harm people, at least at the large scale. And china exists because of that harm
>dream to make better ways to do things
The inability to exploit other peoples labor to achieve that doesn't mean those things are denied
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.
That's pretty much everywhere, especially China.
If you have ambitions that are contrary to that of the Party, well, they're going to get what they want, one way or another. It doesn't matter if you don't want to deal your AI to the military or if you'd rather not sell your home so that a highway can be built over the lot.
Some countries have stronger rule of law protections and social customs that enforce them, but the US has been on a speed run to dismantle all of them in the past year.
> 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.
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.
the government is basically subservient to him, and there isn't anything stopping it from making a company cease to exist other than the status quo. If, for whatever reason, him (or in his absence the rest of the government) decide they don't want it to exist, it won't exist. It might not be as explicit as how the CCP does it, but it will have the same result
The US has thousands of atrocities under its belt. For this aspect, the US and China tie in terms of the leaderboard.
In what world is China less "protectionist" than the US?
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.
A BYD seal is basically comparable to a model 3, except it has a more classic car aesthetic as opposed to a giant screen. What are we missing out on?
This shallow comparison could apply to any car. Are Toyota cars just Ford cars with a different logo?
Back when people used to buy Teslas, the company was notorious for how long it took to get repairs done. Even if BYD was exactly like Tesla theres many ways they could differentiate themselves if they were allowed in the US
>This shallow comparison could apply to any car. Are Toyota cars just Ford cars with a different logo?
To a first order approximation yes.
The online discussion is dominated by fanboys who don't actually know squat and people who have an expensive purchase they need to feel justified in.
The differences between two competing cars of different makes is way, way, way less than these people will make it out to be.
in a word, choice. also it's a much quieter car inside, despite being cheaper.
> What are we missing out on?
You’d never know because you never had a choice in the first place
and what's the tesla equivalent for the BYD dolphin?
There's more than one brand of car available in America... so it would probably be the Chevy Volt, the nissan leaf, or hyundai kona
Competition. Lower prices. Better repairability.
A BYD seal is between $35k and $50k USD in various non US, non China countries that I checked Mexico, Germany, australia, Thailand.
Competition is great but it doesn't mean that the cars in America are bad. The lada was a failure of a car compared to other similar cars available elsewhere. That is not the case here.
I have one of the first runs of model 3s. It still runs perfectly. Great battery life. I'm happy with it. Nevertheless, I find it frustrating that I can't even consider buying a BYD as my next electric daily driver. Because when Tesla and BYD enter markets together Tesla is often getting creamed. That makes me curious as to why. This de-facto ban of BYD in the USA does nothing but encourage stagnation.
> That makes me curious as to why
The why part is easy - Tesla is about as outdated of a car as it gets, it is practically same car and there are only few options. I own 2014 Model S and my neighbour has 2025 Model S - it is the same car when you look at it. We also got Model 3 (from many years ago) which was then blown up a little into Model Y and we have X from a decade ago. These are ancient cars. The tech inside may have improved but the offering is basically for my grandparents now.
Are BYD cars specifically banned or do they just not comply with all the US regulations?
100% tariff and political threats -- implying that they'd find a way to mark them as "unsafe", despite the fact that Canada and Europe tend to have higher safety standards than the US and already have BYD presence.
You can see the political groundwork being laid here.
https://homeland.house.gov/2025/05/21/homeland-republicans-p...
If these concerns are so pressing, why do we allow any electronics at all from China?
It smells like air cover for a de-facto ban on BYD. To force US consumers to buy from politically blessed car makers instead of letting us choose the highest quality car available (at a given price point).
Some level of protectionism is in the best interest of national security. How is the local electronics industry that you referenced in the US doing? What is the ramification of eliminating the job market for engineers or discarding all of the US manufacturing know how? The CCP knows the answer to that question
The reason I called out Lada in my original comment is because it's a counterpoint to what you just said. The Lada was the result of too much protectionism. Produced from an empire that was too inward looking and feared interacting with the rest of the world on equal terms.
BYD keeps performing well in the rest of the world. If we hold US consumers hostage to prop up companies like Tesla, we risk allowing them to stagnate.
I prefer to take my chances on stagnation vs Chinese industrial hegemony
> stagnation vs Chinese industrial hegemony
I don't think we get to be stagnant and fend off Chinese industrial hegemony. It's not a symmetric bet.
what has become of America where we are now scared shitless of China... oh well, i is what it is... America our ancestors built would have been like bring it on bitches and here we are "oh please, lets not let China in, our companies are subpar and we stand no chance against such a foe...
Global automakers typically make small modifications to vehicles for different markets. Cars, like most engineered products, are built to a list of design criteria. BYD, like every large automaker that does this, has capable engineers that can target any regulatory specification you give them. They already do it for all of the other markets they sell in, just as every global automaker does.
Chinese cars don't exist in the US because of laws specifically designed to prevent their sale here. The tariff for Chinese EVs was increased to 100% a couple of years ago when it was rumored that BYD was going to move to the US market. And currently, there is a bill circulating to ban them entirely.
> Are BYD cars specifically banned or do they just not comply with all the US regulations?
Whatever the stated reasons are is one thing.
The biggest issue is that a network of BYDs in the US would be a massive intelligence coup.
It will never be permitted unless the intelligence aspect is addressed… if it can be.
That's the focus of the yet-to-be-passed bill that is circulating congress.
The patterns of aggressively tariffing foreign automakers for protectionism in the US long pre-dates any sort electronics in cars.
Lobbying forces in the US care deeply about the latter, not so much the former.
I cannot answer your question but I visited China last year and the amount of different EVs they had was staggering. And really nice vehicles, I was very impressed with that.
I could see them going the Huawei (pun intended and apologised for)
Ya I heard that from some chinese facebook users... oh wait...
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.
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.
China has surpassed the US in total energy generation, and the gap is growing in their favor every year.
Japan never surpassed the US in power or industrial output. China is different. They’ve clearly surpassed the US in some key areas.
I would certainly expect a country with 4x the population of the US, which is used as the center of global manufacturing, to need a lot of power.
I’m not sure that’s something that anyone should be concerned about from a geopolitical point of view. Likewise expecting Japan to have ever done the same is… silly.
For the last 200 years the world was run by white people. That is changing and let me tell you a lot of folks are not taking it well...
You're not concerned about the biggest army in the world flexing its muscles?
If the size of an army represented a reliable measure of its ability to project power, we’d all be trembling at the might of North Korea.
Not really, china has never started a war and overall seems to understand it as a pointless yet necessary endeavour
China has 100% started wars. The Sino-Vietnamese War for starters.
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.
Which country was this in?
> Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
Coal is still the majority of generation capacity [1] in China and China continues to build a lot more coal [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China
[2]: https://apnews.com/article/china-coal-solar-climate-carbon-e...
> BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion
Is this supposed to help virality or something? "US decline"?
Who cares? China is revving up energy production in renewables to out eat the fossil production, but all of these processes are energy hungry, and you have to pay the non renewable cost to create the renewables. But then you don’t need the fossil fuels anymore. My solar panels will produce for the next 30+ years and power my EV with very little effort or maintaining, whereas the fuel I used to drive my ICE car to the store yesterday is gone forever and will need millions of years of dead things to recreate.
This is literally using fossil fuels to create renewable energy, which is the ultimate sane and responsible way to use the energy from fossil fuels.
The US with its high natgas generation is much cleaner than a majority coal driven generation scheme. I'm puzzled why we talk about "US decline" when we're pretty much creating paeans to marginal energy construction. Sure China's trajectory is good.
But it's still not at the point where it's cleaner per capital than the US and it's still quite far from that. Let's talk about reality here. The US shouldn't rest on its laurels, but we need to be real about where we are not how we feel
A lot can change. This administration has 2.5 years left. I'm tired of Reddit and Twitter doom-based virality hacks subsuming every net forum.
As an american i feel it. have you ever visited China? it's sad man, in more and more industries america is only able to compete by banning china from even contesting the market
Not just on dumping or price, actual product quality, innovation and value. It's impossible to visit a Huawei store in Beijing and not feel it in your bones
> As an american i feel it
How do we have a productive discussion about our feelings on a tech site?
You start with a non-sequitur on China using coal to generate electricity.
Because that, too, is feelings. In this case, insecurity.
> Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
EDIT: thanks I didn't realize I forgot to add the context of my original reply to the post. Edited it to add context.
> As an american i feel it. have you ever visited China? it's sad man, in more and more industries america is only able to compete by banning china from even contesting the market
That's how China was able to compete: banning America from contesting the market.
As much as coal is bad for the environment, eliminating it completely isn't a great idea. It's one of the few sources of energy capable of a black start https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023/06/13/black-start/
Renewables generally aren't capable of a black start, wind turbines in particular use induction generators that require external power.
> It's one of the few sources of energy capable of a black start
Doesn't hydropower count for like half of our black start capability?
> Renewables generally aren't capable of a black start, wind turbines in particular use induction generators that require external power.
Wind farms and PV both can use batteries to support black start capability.
And even more an icon of european irrelevance. In Prague almost all EVs are Teslas. I see a BYD time to time. Škoda or Volkswagen almost never.
The problem the US has, at least in this area, is that it's manufacturing is in the dumps and that's not even plainly bad thing.
No US born child in the last 30 years aspired to working a factory job. The US is an advanced economy with advanced jobs. We get degrees, we sit at desks, maybe even sit at home, work on computers, and generate an order of magnitude more wealth than our screw turning counterpart overseas.
I can tell you with first hand experience, that this problem is much deeper than "the US needs to catch up" because in reality what is happening is that China is the one playing catch up. The US is already 30 years into the endgame of economic development. China is where the US was 75 years ago, and on paper, the US has only progressed from that point.
> China is where the US was 75 years ago
Quite a wild claim
> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression.
Just curious-- if you did say something about this, what would it be?
It seems like BYD is a much bigger threat to Europe (specifically Germany) and Japan. The auto industry is big in the US but an insignificant amount of total exports. Germany and Japan could both lose their cash cows if the Chinese auto industry dominates international sales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle_e...
That's not really like with like. If you divided the states in USA into countries, their sales would be "international". The designation is misleading.
The main point is that BYD is an existential threat to Germany and Japan. Per Wikipedia (List of countries by exports + List of countries by vehicle exports, latest available data):
- US: ~$144B vehicle exports / ~$3.23T total exports → ~4.5% - Germany: ~$280B / ~$1.99T → ~14% - Japan: ~$151B / ~$922B → ~16%
Even if you treat US states as separate 'countries' and balloon the US export denominator further, the ratio doesn't move into the same league. Autos are roughly 3x more important to Germany and ~3.5x more important to Japan as a share of foreign-earned revenue than they are to the US.
BYD taking the US auto export share is an inconvenience for a few states. BYD taking Germany's or Japan's is regime-altering for the whole national economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle_e... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports
38.9% of BYDs direct profits are from subsidies. Tesla subsidies expired already… if we are going to judge on equal footing China is subsidizing a much bigger part of BYDs sales.
From my understanding China did have subsidies for EVs but that expired last year.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/china-...
I don't mind restricting Chinese imports in principle, since China is well known to be very protectionist, moreso than Western countries for sure. Trade needs to be a two way street.
That said, it is indeed disappointing that we can't get their affordable EVs over here. Western legacy automakers really need a kick in the ass (especially since Tesla seems to just be phoning it in now).
With EVs, Tesla's the only one in the US not phoning it in. I used to think they were until I got a new Model Y Juniper.
I don't count Rivian or Lucid until they actually have even somewhat affordable EVs.
But pretty much everyone else in the US is doing a piss poor job with EVs and just don't seem to care at all. Ford seemed to have lost interest in the F-150 lightning.
I agree that trade needs to be a two way street. But I'm not convinced yet on "affordable" since these might be severely subsidized by the Chinese Gov to undermine domestic car makers across different nations. I say might only because I'm not 100% sure.
>Ford seemed to have lost interest in the F-150 lightning.
Here's to hoping their EV Maverick is still on track:
Ford Teases New Details About Its $30K EV Truck Coming Next Year
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a71204448/ford-ev-truck-fu...
Tesla still seems like they're phoning it in to me. Where's the generational refreshes? Where's the Model 2, or any new regular consumer models?
Obviously Rivian and Lucid don't have affordable cars yet, but they seem to be moving in that direction, and they're clearly still trying.
I'm hopeful about Slate, though obviously they haven't sold anything yet so it's just hope.
How do you like Model Y so far? I am eyeing that and a Rivian. The newest Y design is great (outside) and the price is where I want it. But I can’t help thinking that it will break the second I complete my signature for purchase/lease.
> Ford seemed to have lost interest in the F-150 lightning.
It’s cancelled.
So is the Chev Silverado EV.
The Chevy is not. A refresh was delayed
EV trucks don't work yet. The technology isn't there yet in this country. You can't tow.
You can tow. However you can't reasonably tow for any distance. You can probably even tow for most trips - but you will spend 1/3rd of the trip or more sitting at a fast charger in the best case (and in many cases the only charger is a level 2 chargers so many hours at the charger for every 1 driving)
??? There is such a thing as a cybertruck. It can tow better than any other truck.
No to me it just shows 2 different capital allocation strategies.
China picked manufacturing.
US picked datacenters.
The US is very strong in manufacturing. There is a lot lower percentage of the population working in the factories (thanks to automation), but there is just as much as there ever was if not more. It isn't high value/growth like data centers, but it is still there and strong
If 90% of the data centers in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb tomorrow, communication would be a shit show for a month or two, and then go on, as we'd fall back to simpler, less compute-expensive solutions. We'd also probably be net better off without all the adtech crap.
If 90% of the factories in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb, you'd find that your standard of living would immediately, and quite observably plummet.
You tell me which is more important.
The amount of internet technocrap we actually need to live comfortably is a tiny fraction of what actually gets built. Most of it is in service of adtech, the surveillance state, or shaving 0.5% off some rentseeker's fat margins (on his side, the savings aren't passed on to us).
No, US picked services, financials, defense, and energy
China picked manufacturing, infrastructure, consumable exports
All the compromises here were pointed out by critics on the left many decades ago. Letting capital flee to where labour was cheapest eviscerated the entire US and Canadian northeast/midwest manufacturing sector and was policy driven from the right.
That and we decided that only the private sector should be responsible for building infrastructure and housing, and then wondered why the cost of building either skyrocketed in cost...
And yet now it's the (far) right freaking out and trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
That idea that you could have a) stopped globalism as lots of new giant markets opened up after the 1970s and b) be better off paying 2x for everything by banning everything foreign is just a fantasy. It’s just nostalgia fueled radical politics that both the far left and right latch on to.
The other part of the story that gets ignore is the administrative state exploding in the US/Canada post 1970s, where making new industry and development became very difficult making other countries more attractive while the cost of living exploded.
So instead of becoming competitive all we’re left with is these ideas of the government forcing domestic industry by using national security as an excuse to justify the backwards economics of it all.
the US picked those because it was cheaper to move the others to china. It again shows that capitalism will inevitably die without colonialism
Yeah I think you added that before I edited my comment to say the same :-)
And yet we will do worse in both categories
US is not even capable of building data centers (or anything else anymore). This is why all the planned capacity is waaaaaay behind schedule year after year, as if Elon is running the entire operation :)
Even more so with public transport.
In 2008 China had 1,300km of high speed rail. In 2025 they had over 45,000km.
Meanwhile America has zero…. But is bringing back the V8! Ye-haw!
/insert star wars anakin and padme meme
Surely with the cost of fuel skyrocketing we'll pivot to public transit and non-fossil-fuel transport, right? Right?
Another thing overtaking the US is average IQ scores. Both in the current baseline and in rate of change. US has been declining, China has been increasing.
> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression.
To be very practical here… the lack of rights and freedoms as they exist in China typically has no consequence to the lives of individual people. For example you have no right to protest. But how many of us have exercised that right in the US? Personally I never did. And honestly those protests end up being just parties and parades
I write my congressman every few months about something. Sometimes just to send a form letter that one of the various organizations writes for me. I also vote regularly.
You should too.
Sounds like wishful and biased thinking, but enjoy your updoots
>innovating
Right.
Refining already invented things is 'innovation'.
that's what most innovation is. the model T wasn't the first car. it was the car that was sufficiently refined to take over.
We have very different definitions of innovation.
Respondants:
Please, stop lying on the internet. It's not healthy. Stop making things up.
Source:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innovation
Making cars faster or cheaper isn't an "innovation". Making a flying car is innovation. Inventing the car is invention.
Systematic government-aided intellectual property theft, lax labor laws, low wages and low standards of living aren't innovative.
The word you are looking for is "invention". Innovation instead means exactly refining and improving existing things.
Your understanding of the situation is over a decade out of date. The Chinese are outright innovating at this point, they are well past the copy-paste stage. If you'd like to catch up, this is a good place to start:
https://www.youtube.com/@Wheelsboy/videos
And btw, they are making flying cars as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBp96YGStIQ
Victim of propaganda.
I assume you're being sarcastic, but it actually is.
lmao. "religious nationalism"? What are you referring to here? The USA's new tighter immigration standards? What pray tell is China's immigration policy? Ignorance? Are you referring to perhaps San Francisco progressives eliminating enhanced schooling because it makes some students feel bad about themselves?
https://www.educationnext.org/san-franciscos-detracking-expe...
Fear? Oh I know, you are talking about how in blue states they can't even build simple housing never mind mega projects like high speed rail and that's why red states are acquiring population and capital at accelerating speeds.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/why-nothin...
those mega projects are almost always killed by republicans. also, listen to the rhetoric around christianity in republican circles and tell me it isn't religious nationalism
It's like what happened in the 80's with japanese cars. Except, America's poised to become a oligarchy and will absolute just punch itself in the face rather than let the oligarchy suffer.
Tesla has no moat.
BYD makes better EVs & is leading in battery tech.
FSD has been promised forever & not delivered. Now Musky says - for cars to have real FSD they need to be newer hardware tech.
Robotaxis - Waymo is better.
Would be great if we could buy/drive these in the US. Funny how we have a "free market" only when it is convenient for certain interests...
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.
WSJ had a piece on just this recently.
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/chinese-cars-byd-geely-u-...
The sad reality is how politically influential it will be for Americans to take a Chinese EV from the airport to a hotel in Cancun and say, "Why don't we have this in the US?"
Saw some in southern Arizona, had to do a double-take.
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.
Doesn't Tesla have a factory in China?
They do. The Chinese government gave them a special exemption, presumably because they wanted to build EV manufacturing expertise. Other foreign auto companies are not allowed to open their own factories in China; they have to do a joint venture with a local manufacturer.
>presumably because they wanted to build EV manufacturing expertise
Worked with Apple!
They do. Because Elon is proving himself to be quite an idiot.
China was more than happy to welcome him in, and have him teach them how to build an EV. They simply copied what they could and improved on it.
"The communists will happily sell the capitalists the rope the capitalists hang themselves with"
It’s other capitalists that stole the tech. China is a country of capitalists living under a communist regime.
capitalists the communists put up with because it's better for communism in the long run
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.
This is entirely misleading and misinformation -- only those not meeting all applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS).
Free market does not exist
Or rather, it exists briefly until it is naturally captured by the biggest players.
Just buy a Textron golf cart and you have 90% of the Chinese EV experience.
Are you saying all cars that are manufactured in China are rubbish? Because that is just plain wrong.
It's the same propaganda that was used against Japan and Korean cars. Asia = bad, America = good.
https://electrek.co/2026/04/27/byd-seal-08-blade-battery-2-1...
https://ezgo.txtsv.com/
is there even a screen?
Traveling in Asia and South America, the primary impression I got was not that this is a war of manufacturing that we're losing but that the game is already up. Chile was full of Chinese makes and they were all surprisingly good. Riding in a Chinese MG in Taiwan or Hong Kong you suddenly realize that this isn't a future competitor. The people talking about the war of car manufacturers here seem like those Japanese holdouts who were still fighting in 1956.
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.
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.
I'm sure BYD and other Chinese EVs would dominate here too if it wasn't for tariffs.
BYD UK import tariff is 10%
BYD US import tariff is 100%
Canada reduced theirs to 6.1% from 100% about a month ago.
Is BYD beating Kia here in the UK? It's hard to tell from the SMMT figures [1] but it looks to me as if Kia sold just under twice as many vehicles as BYD. Given that so much of Kia's lineup is now BEV, I'm not sure who is winning.
Tesla is doing poorly here. That's almost entirely down to Musk's public image, not because BYD make better cars.
[1] https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrations/
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.
Ive seen soo many BYD cars in the UK in the last year.
I'm not in the market for a new car, but anyone who has looked recently what is the draw to BYD? Is it strictly value/price?
Value, performance, quality, and not being associated with Elon.
BY*D
*except Elon’s
Why should Australians or Dutch people have loyalty to foreign car industry? Who killed Holden or DAF? It wasn't BYD lol.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I just signed an offer to purchase a BYD Sealion 5, plugin hybrid small-to-medium SUV.
I’ve been largely happy with my 2018 Honda Fit and briefly researched a hybrid Fit.
In ZAR, the hybrid Fit is listed as ~530K, while the BYD is 570, however the BYD is way bigger, has much nicer interior and insanely more features, including: adaptive cruise control, lane assist (it can basically drive itself for simple traffic), 360 view camera, comparatively huge screen for my Apple CarPlay, sun roof, V2L (allows 2-3kw load off the battery or engine if the battery is low).
I largely liked my Honda Fit and my Ballade (that might be a South African model name), but have been annoyed for a long time at them being laggards on things like CarPlay (at least in South Africa, apparently the Fit in other markets had offered it for much longer).
I was thinking why the hell someone visiting HN, so arguably curious and interested in technology, would go for a PHEV but then you mentioned South Africa.
My SO bought an Ioniq 6 mostly because of the buttons and the seperate control surface for AC and such but they test drived a BYD as well which was the same as a Tesla, just one huge tablet and endless menus
Here in Spain you see a lot of BYD, considerable amount for Europe. But when I was in Uruguay that was a shock, almost all cabs, all electric cars, and some buses are BYD.
> With over 7% market share, BYD is now the top-selling EV brand in the UK so far in 2026
But worldwide it has been for a while, no? I think total EV cars sold in 2025 BYD was top, if I remember correctly.
I think Tesla just beat them on pure EV because BYD sell a lot of hybrids too.
Is volume or revenue/profit/margin etc? Quite important to know this.
Musk was saying at the start that Tesla was going to be $80k then scale up so they would have a $10k/20k car. It looks like BYD beat them to it. I guess putting manufacturing in China, giving them all of the tricks of the trade, letting them build consolidated supply chains, letting them iterate on every aspect of manufacturing, and automate it all was a mistake in the long run. pikachu_face.jpg
Where/how can we buy a BYD in the US?
You can't buy them in the US. You could buy one in Mexico and drive it across the border, but you wouldn't be able to register it in the US. It is probably possible to legally import one but it would be very expensive and time-consuming, and you'd need to know a lot about import law.
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.
Why has BYD stock been trundling along? They seem like they are so far ahead: incredible blade batteries with ridiculous power density (fast charging)/efficiency/cooling, while being structurally useful (mad cool). And mad popular. I feel like I'm missing something that this company is doing such amazing good work but the stock isn't really moving.
Well their forward P/E is double Ford or Toyota, so presumably people think that's what their profit trajectory is worth.
This is not surprising as other manufacturers continue moving away from producing cheap cars. One notable exception is dacia.
For all the China lovers here it's not a clear sign of Chinese superiority. I saw a video on youtube recently exploring BYD. It's success is due to the fact that the Chinese government as part of their plan to dominate the global car industry gives them massive amounts of money. Which manufacturer can compete with that? European tariffs in the near future looks likely.
Among other things the video explores some of BYD's shadier practices including artificially inflating domestic sales and not paying suppliers for up to 9 months.
I have my doubts whether their success is sustainable.
I hear this all the time, but I would point out that US car manufacturers are heavily subsidized as well. I’m sure other countries do their own things that effectively subsidize their automotive industries as well.
NAFTA and its successor keeps a lot of automotive production and assembly in North America.
The chicken tax protects American manufacturers from foreign competition on trucks and vans.
Tesla was started on the foundations of inexpensive loans and a “free” factory courtesy of government economic stimulus.
GM was bailed out and briefly owned by the federal government, saved by below-market rate loans.
Stellantis is also an organization that owes its existence on a bankruptcy bail-out package.
The US financially incentivizes car usage, period. They underfund transit projects, allow the gas tax rate to lag inflation, make zoning laws that require car ownership, and more. One great way to subsidize car companies is to make car ownership mandatory.
State and local governments frequently give tax incentives to major assembly plants in the name of preserving jobs for their constituents. For example, GM had a $60 million tax break to keep the Lordstown, OH plant open. Some of this was clawed back after the plant closed anyway.
CAFE standards incentivize manufacturers to build SUVs that aren’t practical or popular in many other markets, essentially enshrining America-specific car design, further separating the American market from global car designs. Companies like BYD can’t compete with American cars if they don’t sell models that resemble popular choices like the Ford F-150, which are designs which would be completely insane if sold in the Chinese, Japanese, and European markets.
Proof that if the price is right, you can look past anything.
It's a shame their cars are being devoid of its own identity. If you squint you might think it's an Audi or Range Rover.
A bit like wearing Adiboss or Gacci clothes. Nothing wrong with that.
Hopefully BYD will make something original and with style on its own.
But counter example is e.g. new Audi look like Kia.
Funny.
Strange comment, look at some of the cars here - many are more unique and more creative liberty than anything the West is putting out:
https://www.youtube.com/@Wheelsboy/videos
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
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.
BYD ships
USA boomer car companies run a competition on who can build the biggest crappy SUVs around sold to other boomers who now look aghast at pump prices
Europe boomer car companies can't overrun their nit-pickiness and analysis paralysis and wonder why consumers are picking the car with screens that actually work like a modern device and don't have subscription horns or some other BS like that
steal this startup idea:
you can't buy BYD in the USA (thanks to Biden actually, not current admin)
BUT
there's a loophole to have a car from Canada in the USA for a year
so lease them from Canada to USA buyers for a year at a time
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.