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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

> Automotive giant Ford is shoring up its battery supply chain — partly by importing lower-cost, iron-based batteries popular in China — as it sprints to increase electric vehicle production.

Old geezer's perspective: Back in its heyday, Ford Motor was one of the most vertically integrated (large manufacturing) companies in the world. They owned and operated their own fleet of ore carriers (cargo ships), to haul iron ore from the mines to the steel mill that was part of their all-Ford integrated manufacturing complex. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_River_Rouge_Complex - though Wikipedia barely scratches the surface on this. ) Back in the early 90's, I knew a couple guys who had spent their careers working on those iron ore carriers.

Current-day Ford Motor having to go begging to China - for a major, iron-based component needed to produce more cars - that is laughable, and beyond pathetic. In a dark, miserable sort of way, if you care about America or its future.

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And of course as a further example of their supply chain integration no conversation on it would be complete without mention of Fordlandia [1][2]

[1] Lost cities #10: Fordlandia – the failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/19/lost-cities-1...

[2] Wikipedia Entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlandia

>the failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon

That title is extremely loaded.

Ford rubber mining operations in the amazon fail when synthetic rubber is invented is the true story.

Hence the [1] and [2] provison of sources. It is an interesting historical factoid. Nothing more. Nothing Less.

One hour podcast: Fordlandia: America In Brazil (RCR Car Stories) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN5JjScdB3g

> Current-day Ford Motor having to go begging to China - for a major, iron-based component needed to produce more cars - that is laughable, and beyond pathetic. In a dark, miserable sort of way, if you care about America or its future.

Sounds similar to Boeing where accounting for personal gain (promotions / raises) of upper managers and executives took effect over the long term advantage of the company.

But there was no McDonald Douglas absorbed into Ford to explain this shift. Yet it seemed to happen during a similar timeframe (late '90s, early 2000s).

JIT MBA driven push came then, plus the whole "stay within your area of expertise" movement.

Wall St punished diversification, so anything that could slow growth had to go.

We’re shifting to a new era where cash is king. That’s why Amazon built their own UPS and Apple will be a bank in a few years.

why "a few years" why not now?

Funny you should mention Boeing. Alan Mulally went to Ford in 2006 after working for Boeing for 35+ years. In my opinion he was a net positive for the company, securing a credit line just before the 2007 recession so that Ford did not have to get bailed out by the government. He also sold off Jaguar/Land Rover just in time before gas prices spiked and their sales slumped.

I think he is one of the "good" Boeing execs, unlike the ones that came in with the McDonnell Douglas merger and mismanaged production of aircraft like the 787 and 737-MAX

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

Story my dad told of McDonald Douglass merger was that they intentionally hired a drunk incompetent ceo to scare away all of their business. So that the merger with Boeing could be approved.

He had many stories to tell of engineering non sense there. Supposedly they just trained whomever to be an engineer. They offered to make my dad one since they liked him.

> McDonald Douglass merger

Pray do tell more about that merger!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Against_B...

It’s mentioned in a well made Netflix documentary about the downfall of Boeing I think.

“Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” is the documentary title.

I think that this documentary is about McDonell Douglas, not MacDonald.

Exactly.

haha yes yes. I just assumed the MacDonald was a typo and the GP meant "McDonell Douglas".

And I figured that people that don't know the difference between McDonnell and McDonald can be ignored when it comes to their views on that particular merger.

> In my opinion he was a net positive for the company

That opinion is well founded. In the book American Icon by Bryce Hoffman (Detroit News journalist) he chronicles that entire time period.

Mulally pulled off one of the greatest challenges, a bonafide turn around. They had a company culture that was all about individuals protecting their own interests. Mulally changed it to one where they focused on making vehicles people want and thinking about the long-term.

For example, Mulally held a weekly executive meeting and each head would give a color coded report of their domain's status (green for good, yellow for issues, red for caution). For weeks in this meeting every single executive reported their status as "green" for good. This in a fiscal quarter when Ford had a $6 billion loss! Mulally managed to change that culture, which for anyone who has work experience should speak very loudly.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13132620-american-icon

Ford was never going to take the bailout: GM and Chrysler were prohibited from paying dividends, while the Ford family receives income from FoMoCo stock.

It was more than that. GM went bankrupt and wiped out all the stockholders' equity. If Ford did that, it would have ended the two-tier stock structure that gives the Ford family control.

> Sounds similar to Boeing where accounting for personal gain (promotions / raises) of upper managers and executives took effect over the long term advantage of the company.

Executive pay is out of control in general in the USA, and performance is equally trash.

Offshore outsourcing of everything is as bad of an idea as vertical integration of every single aspect of your business.

Vertical integration builds up a resiliency against supply chain issues. You have a guarenteed supply of materials and components for a reasonable price no matter how crazy world markets get.

It's often too expensive to be worth it though. Just look at Intel.

It’s often not even about cost. Vertical integration works great if you can always make right R&D decisions. If you bet on wrong horses (even if you have money) you’re hopelessly stuck as you cannot “easily” shift to different suppliers that made better R&D choices. Just look at Intel.

Ford is building other battery plants. Huge plant going up in Tennessee, "Blue Oval City", for lithium-ion batteries.[1] The battery technology comes from S. Korea. The lithium will come from Ioneer in Nevada.[2] Another plant is going up in Kentucky. Plus there's existing electric production at the Rouge plant in Detroit. Ford is serious about electric trucks.

Tesla's Cybertruck initial delivery was just delayed another year.[3]

[1] https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/money/business/2022/0...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ford-b...

[3] https://observer.com/2022/07/tesla-cybertruck-production-del...

> But Ford also wants to produce LFP batteries in North America, and plans to open a 40-GWh LFP cell factory by 2026. (That's in addition to three previously announced battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky.)

And if I recall correctly Ford was the only US vehicle manufacturer that did not request a bailout in 2008.

That was impressive at the time and it made Ford look like solid well-run company that planned ahead.

It was a really well run marketing campaign, complete with clever nicknames (e.g. Government Motors)

The truth is a bit murkier. The car division was not bailed out, but the financial arm did accept government assistance like all the other car loan companies.

IIRC, Ford explicitly said that if it hadn't been for the effect of the bailouts of an other manufacturers on shared supply chains, it would have needed a bailout.

Could you explain this with a couple sentences, I don't understand.

Say GM and Chrysler weren't bailed out. Then they wouldn't be able to support the trade between other third party car parts manufacturers that rely on them. Those companies would lose economies of scale and/or go out of business too. Then wouldn't Ford be able to make their cars without those third parties and would need bailing out to not go bankrupt also.

When dominoes start tipping they can all fall over.

Totally made up example (with easy to follow numbers):

Let's say GM, Chevrolet and Ford all buy 12V car batteries from BatteryCo at the rate of 1,000,000 a year (each). BatteryCo has fixed annual costs of $3,000,000 and per battery costs of $1. Right now, Ford pays $2/battery. If GM and Chevrolet both go out of business, Ford's 1,000,000 batteries need to absorb the whole fixed operating cost of $3,000,000. Therefore, Ford's per battery cost doubles to $4/battery.

You can imagine other numbers and other parts of the supply chain all working similarly.

Thank you and @throwaway_4ever, excellent explanation!

The west completely ignored graphite + iron phosphate as electrode combination for cars while China researched it for decades. Packing innovation from China made that combination feasible to use in electric cars. Those packaging innovations are way more impressive then what Tesla is doing. </Context>

> Current-day Ford Motor having to go begging to China - for a major, iron-based component needed to produce more cars - that is laughable, and beyond pathetic.

They're lucky China is answering. They're incredibly late to the EV game; considering that they're doing remarkably well.

>They're incredibly late to the EV game; considering that they're doing remarkably well.

When you're not the trailblazer, it's easy to make catch-up progress to those that went before you in much much less time. Why this is constantly a source of amazement is funny to me. By the time Ford got involved, the path was no longer a beaten down path, it was fully paved 8-lane highway. Instead trying to figure out how to make an electrified car, they just took all of the learning before them and then turned it into something fancy. While Tesla is "working" on self-driving and not doing well with it, Ford said, nah, we'll just turn our batteries into a generator for the home. They built an actual truck that looks like the same truck everyone is used to and say here it is as an electric. That's easy to do when you are riding coat tails

All of this is true except for the part where no other manufacturer (other than Tesla) has a reliable source of batteries -- so they're subject to intense supply chain constraints that limit inventory drastically. And so they were unable to meet the consumer demand for EVs. Hence you simply can't even get a Ford F150 Lightning even though it looks like a great vehicle.

This all pre-dated the COVID related supply chain issues, BTW. Lack of battery supply is behind the lackluster inventory (and therefore sales) of all non-Tesla vehicles for over half a decade.

I say all this not as a Tesla fan, but as a GM electric vehicle owner. GM was unable to produce more then a few tens of thousands of Bolts a year -- not because consumers didn't want them, but because there was simply no way for them to get them from LG Chem. VW/Audi group has had the same issue. They're both not late to the game on EV tech or production, but very late to the game on battery production.

Being late to the game in this case has a huge cost. And various governments wasted time and money providing consumer subsidies for EV purchases thinking this would lead the market to magically "solve" the EV supply issue by increasing consumer demand when the issue that really needed solving was volume and cost of battery production.

If we were going to involve public dollars in getting EVs to market we should have invested massively in encouraging battery production. Some governments are waking up to this now at least.

Ford believes they have the battery supply for a 600,000 EV/year run rate by late-2023 and are shooting for 2,000,000/year by 2026.

Bloomberg projects VW selling more EVs than Tesla by 2024 and they are planning to have 240GWh/yr of in-house battery production by 2030.

BYD in China is fully vertically integrated on EV production, moreso than Tesla who relies on 3rd party mining and on Panasonic for chemistries/cell production. BYD is now the largest PHEV+BEV manufacturer in the world.

Tesla might have had a head start but There has been a lot of catching up going on, and as we get closer and closer to resource constraints instead of production constraints they aren't in much better of a position than any other manufacturer.

so what you're saying is they are not only copying the good parts of Tesla (Electrification) but also the bad parts (lying about future production?).

Ford made 30k electric vehicles in 2021, 600k means a growth rate of %1900 in the span of 2 1/2 years (They need to be at the run rate in 2026)?

Battery packs were a problem to Tesla in 2018 and now they've moved onto the bigger problem that no one is talking about.... There isn't enough lithium and nickel production to even make this possible.

That's why Tesla launched its own mining operations in Nevada.

Also, its not like Elon hasn't been screaming about lack of nickel and lithium production since like 2018, just no one seems to be paying attention.

>Ford made 30k electric vehicles in 2021

source? all i could find was this https://insideevs.com/news/596347/us-ford-ev-sales-june-2022

> H1 production of nearly 34,000 units is below the level from 2021 in the same period.

which is just talking about mach-e production, not other EVs.

I think Mach-e is the only BEV Ford sold in 2021. The E-transit and F-150 Lightning both started sales in 2022. They were selling anumber of PHEVs but many people don't count those as "EV" production.

presumably they built some in H2 as well though. the 34k number is only the first half of the year.

For one, Ford also made 1.7 million total vehicles in 2021 (down from 2.5 million pre COVID) so using their EV only rate doesn't necessarily capture the whole picture.

But mainly, they don't need to actually make 600k EVs in 2024 for it to be true that they have contracts in place to purchase that many batteries if needed.

As for Tesla's mining chops, they bought mining rights in 2020 and as of April 2022 they haven't even broken ground, with Elon saying "price of lithium has gone to insane levels! Tesla might actually have to get into the mining and refining directly at scale, unless costs improve."

I guess while Elon has been screaming about it other companies like BYD and CATL have been the ones actually scaling global production.

Tesla hasn't ever lied about future production, not once.

If you actually look at their guidance, it's "50% growth on average," and they've consistently hit it.

> In May 2016 Tesla told its suppliers that it intended to double earlier-announced[clarification needed] Model 3 production targets to 100,000 in 2017 and 400,000 in 2018 due to demand

> In October 2016 Tesla said its production timeline was on schedule.[115][116][117] Again in February 2017, Tesla said that vehicle development, supply chain and manufacturing are on track to support volume deliveries of the Model 3 in the second half of 2017.

> As of February 2017, Tesla planned to ramp up production to exceed 5,000 vehicles per week in Q4 2017 and reach 10,000 vehicles per week in 2018.[111]

> By early November 2017, Musk had postponed the target date for manufacturing 5,000 of the vehicles per week from December 2017 to March 2018.

- 100,000/yr in 2017: fail, occurred in 2018

- 400,000/yr in 2018: fail, occurred in 2020/2021

- Volume delivery in in 2H 2017: fail unless you consider 1764 to be volume

- 5000/wk in Q4 2017/March 2018: fail, produced 187/wk, probably first broke 5000/wk Q1 2019 (total quarterly rate was almost 5k/wk)

- 10,000/wk in 2018: fail 4,722/wk Q4 of 2018, probably first broke 10,000/wk at the tail end of Q3 2020 (total quarterly rate was almost 10k/wk) as long as we include model Y production as well

Now I wouldn't call this lying, but its definitely not consistently hitting production goals either

Bloomberg's terrible analysis depended on Tesla standing still. But it is not doing that. Quite the opposite. Also, this was the entire point of Tesla. To do exactly this. Getting other automakers on board the EV train was a stroke of genius.

> That's easy to do when you are riding coat tails

No, that really isn't easy to do when you're running something as large as the Ford Motor Company. In fact it is much easier for a new entrant to make such big changes.

I think you’re precisely identifying why Tesla is well and truly fucked. The big automakers know how to make cars at scale and once they decide to it’s easy. They may be slow giants, but Tesla lost the advantage of being small and quick.

German, Japanese, and American manufacturers were the biggest national security components of WWII. Tesla is a second tier interest of a CEO who prefers to be an online troll than keeping up with the auto industry.

Tesla assembly lines appear to be very well designed. I wonder what else they could make.

> Tesla is well and truly fucked

Sorry, this is just absurd. Tesla is the only company designing for massive scale and ruthless simplification from the start. Their entire DNA is based on YAGNI.

Every other legacy automaker is pinned between their dealerships, their dependence on consumer debt, their own massive debt, and the fact that they'll need to cannibalize existing business to pivot to EVs.

No other company owns their own destiny by being more in control of their supply chain than Tesla.

> Tesla is the only company designing for massive scale

In 2020 GM sold 6.8 million vehicles. The other manufacturers are already operating at massive scale. Or are you arguing the automotive market will suddenly dramatically increase in a way existing manufacturers can't deal with? That consumers will suddenly be flush with cash to buy more brand new cars than they are already buying and Tesla will be the most popular option? This is very hard for me to imagine.

> their dependence on consumer debt

??? Teslas are not cheap. I will not be able to afford a Tesla for the forseeable future. Unless Teslas comes down below 25k, no Teslas are in my future, another ICE car or hybrid will be. How is Tesla not dependent on consumer debt? Or do you mean something else by this?

Exactly. I don’t see the entry level EV that tips the balance coming from Tesla. Model 3 is a luxury vehicle.

> While Tesla is "working" on self-driving and not doing well with it

Maybe you missed the footage of FSD perfectly navigating San Francisco during rush hour [1]. I'd say they're doing pretty damn well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh8AV3OMWYs

You must have missed the news reports today of a self driving Tesla running into a motorcycle and killing the rider because AP didn't "see" it.

> When you're not the trailblazer, it's easy to make catch-up progress to those that went before you in much much less time. Why this is constantly a source of amazement is funny to me.

That sounds logical but it doesn't often actually happen that way, which is why I think there is amazement the few times it does.

For example, Nokia could have just caught up with Apple after they released the iPhone? Motorola etc. could have just caught up with Nokia in the 90s when Nokia made phones people actually wanted? Apple of the 90s could have just caught up with Microsoft and Windows right?

Incredibly late? EV are still tiny % of global sales. And compared to what some EV startups want people to think, building good EV isn’t that hard for traditional OEMs, once company commits to it. F150 and MachE are very good EVs.

It's at around 9% of market share and doubling annually.

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/electric-cars-fend-off-supp...

They are missing out on the easy part of the S-curve of adoption, and will have a far far harder time securing key competitive tech and supply chains by entering too late

There are currently ~8 major battery manufacturers, and right now a large bevy of battery startups. But right now is probably the last time in history to enter the market, because you can't just innovate on electrolyte or anode or cathode and enter the market, you have to do it all. And the lead times for development of new products, even in wel established companies with solid pipelines, is around five years.

The US did innovate quite a bit in this space, but political interference and strange political beliefs about batteries, like the physics prevents them from being used in all the ways we are currently using them, has significantly held back the US from leading as much as it could have in this space.

This is I n large part because industry leaders like Ford were so anti-scientifically anti-EV.

We kneecapped our future to let current rentiers, masquerading as gigantic industrialists, collect rent.

You don’t need to be manufacturing batteries to make EVs. Even vertical integration darling, Tesla, is buying most of their batteries (and the tech behind them) from suppliers like BYD and Panasonic. Their in-house efforts so far are not yielding any massive success.

Batteries at the core are commodities, where you have laser thin margins and supplier model that is pulling R&D costs from many companies is basically only long term way to go.

Electric part of an EV is easy. It’s a car that’s hard part.

>Batteries at the core are commodities

I would argue that might have been true 5 years ago, but now it's proving to be the competitive advantage. Batteries and the materials that produce them are no longer selling at 'Razor thin margins' because the 'Commodity' is extremely constrained. No EV manufacturer can get enough batterys to produce the cars they sell.

It’s a temporary state. There’s nothing at the core that would make batteries not a commodities, production just needs to pick up (and both suppliers and raw materials producers are making huge investments to make that happen). Plus we’re in a weird state where COVID supply chain issues and overheating of economy makes it very hard to reason about true state of the market.

But please tell me who has that competitive advantage? Tesla? They’re Panasonic/CATL shop, with negligible amount of in house production.

When batteries are the primary bottleneck on production, the primary source of innovation, change, and price drops, then in that case batteries are not mere commodities but a key technology in the car.

The rest of an EV is pretty simple. Drivetrain is no longer a really hard component, as electric motors are far more straight forward.

> > It’s a car that’s hard part.

Countries that try to kickstart a new car industry often outsource the drivetrain, as it's the most difficult part to build.

With EVs, batteries are by far the touchiest and most difficult part to build. Companies that outsource battery design, or at a bare minimum are not intimated involved with the batteries for their own packs, will be left behind.

Ford bought New Holland back in the 80s. New Holland was very vertically integrated and Ford, after taking the reins, declared that they were going to teach New Holland how to become recession proof by outsourcing as much as possible and pushing the risk onto the suppliers. Yes, there is some logic in that plan, but on the other hand, it comes with a whole other set of risks.

What a shocking final sentence!!

"Current-day Ford Motor having to go begging to China - for a major, iron-based component needed to produce more cars - that is laughable, and beyond pathetic. In a dark, miserable sort of way, if you care about America or its future."

I could not have summarized it more differently. Vertical integration and monopolies are absolutely terrible in many ways. Globalization and inter-reliance are very good in many ways! The ideal system for everyone (workers, buyers, the business itself, the society it resides in, and the world itself) is probably a healthy middle point.

I'll go so far as to say this: if the US did not inter-rely on China over the past 30 years since they opened up their markets, with multi-national US corporations beginning to rely on various Chinese resources or products, then the US would be at a hot or cold war with China right now, just like they were with the USSR a generation ago.

They also grow their own trees for the rubber required to make tires ! Next level !

From the U.P. To Rouge it was Ford all the way. Did they own the mines as well?

Doesn't sound like it

http://www.miningartifacts.org/Michigan-Iron-Mines.html

What's wrong with trading with China?

China spent the last two years demonstrating that they're "fair weather partners" when it comes to trade. And winter is coming.

So obviously it's not bad _per se_ to rely on China ; but if it's not possible to diversify sourcing, this is begging for a disaster next time whatever geopolitic hits the fan.

> Fairweather

What do you even mean, it wasn't them whom started the whole tradewar... It was the US gov

I meant that in any situation where china has to choose between interior market / upholding CCP plans / régional partnership vs trading with the global west, they will chose the former in times of crisis. Which is not a bad thing, again, it's just that everyone is relying on them as if they are an infinite factory of everything with unlimited supply, and it seems that, well, it's not true any more.

But if they decide to stop trade with Russia tomorrow, I'll reconsider.

How did they spend two years demonstrating they are fair weather partners? Was it the part where they locked workers inside of factories producing goods for America to make sure that the Americans got their shipments in spite of the Covid-0 policy? Or was it how China is actually upholding most sanctions against Russia, despite giving less than 0 f's about Ukraine?

IMO the real disaster would be a total de-link between Chinese and American economies. Neither country can currently engage in any kind of meaningful hostilities while 10%+ of their economies are linked in trade. Trade prevents war because war would mean decimation of their economies and lead to likely depressions, although I suppose the results of Russia's invasion and how their economy handles de-linking will inform this logic going forward

> Trade prevents war because war would mean decimation of their economies and lead to likely depressions

1913 is calling and wants its optimism back.

If the fertilizer hits the fan re Taiwan, the CCP will not hesitate to cut off all trade with everyone who supports Taiwan.

They won't stop trading with Taiwan supporting countries. They don't have any plans of that as far as anyone knows and never threatened it. The threat is that the US executes it's public plans of sinking ships trading with China in such a contingency.

That will sound tongue in cheek, and to some extend it is, but if the last few years have shown us anything, it's the perils of starting a sentence by "xxx won't yyy" (for several values of x and y.)

That's an extrapolation. There hasn't ever been in a country that decided to sanction themselves within wartime from most of the world economy, and leaked documents show that one of the reason China wants Taiwan to begin with is to make their trade more secure.

I don't even know what the first sentence is supposed to mean. Germany knew they would be blockaded by the Brits in WW I and II and proceeded to go to war anyway, so didn't they "decided [sic] to sanction themselves within wartime from most of the world economy"?

Japan continued with their China war in the 1930s, despite sanctions from the US and the West, so didn't they?

As for the "leaked documents", the claim on Taiwan is that it is an inseparable part of China, and not that they want "to make their trade more secure."

You lost the plot of the original comment. The original point was that somehow China would stop trading with any country that didn't agree Taiwan was Chinese by their own volition. This never happened is in no way analogous to to Japan or Germany being blockaded.

And no, the leaked documents don't just claim that Taiwan is an inseparable part of China, that's the public position. The leaked documents detail how control over Taiwan is necessary to be able to project sufficient naval power to break any attempted blockade especially by submarine due to the low depth of waters within the first island chain.

So they tell their population and the whole world that Taiwan is an inseparable part of China, and have been doing so since Nixon and Kissinger went to China, but the real reason is to break an attempted blockade?

OK, if that's what you want to believe. Seems kinda implausible, though.

War is hell.

In WW I, the Germans didn't move to "unrestricted submarine warfare" until 1917. The fact that the CCP doesn't plan for it now means absolutely nothing.

First of all, this isn't WW1. Secondly, there is a difference between using violence to impose an embargo on someone else (what Germany did and what the US threatens to do) and embargoing yourself, which no country has ever done ever.

I think you are just embarrassing yourself now. You say "This isn't WW I" but then you claim that there hasn't ever been something. Either history is relevant, or it isn't.

Edit: you can't "impose an embargo" on another country. That's a misunderstanding of the word. You can "blockade" them. Blockades are a feature of almost every war.

>If the fertilizer hits the fan re Taiwan, the CCP will not hesitate to cut off all trade with everyone who supports Taiwan.

Of the ~780 million Chinese who work, ~200 million support the export economy.

So the CCP will put 25% of their workers out of a job over Taiwan?

Feel free! Their regimes lifespan will be measured in months if they do.

This is why trade prevents wars. China has to solve the "200 hundred million jobs" problem before they can start a war.

> Was it the part where they locked workers inside of factories producing goods for America to make sure that the Americans got their shipments in spite of the Covid-0 policy?

They did this because it would cause their economy to collapse and there are social repercussions against the CCP if that were to happen. Had 0 to do with the US or the West or any sort of altruism. They also welded doors of apartments shut so people inside couldn't leave during the initial lock downs. China has a much more robust class system than the US and the lower class/rural people are taken advantage of at an astounding rate because they aren't the right kind of Chinese.

> Or was it how China is actually upholding most sanctions against Russia, despite giving less than 0 f's about Ukraine?

China is essentially the sole reason Russia is still occupying Ukraine and they have been skirting sanctions left and right; even going as far as partnering with Russia on a new inter-banking system. They've also used the Ukrainin War as a way to test the waters in the South China Sea and step up their territorial claims over international waters in violation of international law.

China arbitrarily bans trade when it wants to "punish" nations:

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/china-turns-to-lobsters-wine-and...

China has made it clear that it is an unreliable business partner.

It is a mistake to do business with nations that don't share your values, as Russia is also currently demonstrating.

This is the price, those are the terms. If you don't like them go buy somewhere else or produce yourself.

So then yes, you agree completely with the statement that was made, which was "It is a mistake to do business with nations that don't share your values".

Yeah that's the point.

America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests

Beyond the political issues already noted...

- "We must travel to the most-distant place in the world, and the only source of $Thing, which we cannot survive without!" That sounds great, if you're writing epic fantasy quest stories. If you're talking supply chain management...maybe there is something profoundly wrong with your company?

- Even if the CCP would never dream of squeezing Ford's battery life-line...the battery factory there could be shut down for yet another COVID outbreak, or the US could squeeze it (due to domestic politics or "Taiwan Troubles"), or etc.

- The giant mess (huge delays, staggering price spikes, etc.) that global shipping has been in the past few years. Shipping car batteries from China to the US via air freight does not sound like a money-making plan. My old World Atlas suggests that shipping by rail is probably not an option.

>My old World Atlas suggests that shipping by rail is probably not an option.

Is that the same atlas that says there's not an option for rail from UK to France as well?

Great quip, but it's more complex. The Chunnel is delicate infrastructure, with neither a backup nor a short repair time if something bad happened. I have not examined their Dangerous/Forbidden Freight List for "bulk rechargeable batteries" - but such lists can change. OTOH, there are dense freight rail networks on both sides of the Channel, and similar for ports, shipping, etc.

Vs. you'd need to build a few thousand miles of freight RR in Siberia, Alaska, and other places "unfriendly to economical RR construction and operation" in order to ship from China to the US via rail.

Themz commies something something pooh bear.

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