Comment by lucubratory | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucubratory | Hacker News Reader

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I think part of it may be a nationalism thing. People don't like to mention it, but EVs are doing insanely, incredible well in China, and China is increasing the amount of car exports it does as a result by huge amounts (seriously, Chinese car exports five years ago to today is an absolutely incredible accomplishment, check out the graphs sometime). I believe currently in China 30% of all new car sales are EVs, and it's not showing any signs of slowing down. Pretty soon, that should mean petrol cars in China enter a death spiral where it's unprofitable to keep service stations operational and filled with expensive underground fuel storage because demand for fuel is falling so filling up gets harder and prices get higher, then because filling up is harder and prices are higher EVs become even more attractive, rinse and repeat. They are well on track to that, while here in the Anglosphere we're stuck at "only" around 8% of new car sales (still very impressive compared to where it was five years ago).

Basically, China is doing a better job than us, therefore the job isn't worth doing anyway and frankly who even cares about competing? I'm going home, and I'm taking the ball, and you can forget about my birthday party too.

It's definitely something coming from the top down. I'll watch Peter Zeihan's Youtube because he tends to make arguments that the incumbent elites want to hear, and he did an anti-EV one yesterday in which he argued that the logistics were impossible and EVs could not be green.

But the only worthwhile analysis is basically "too bad, disruption is happening". Total car/truck sales went into a steep dive in 2020, made a marginal recovery the next year, and then declined again in 2022. The back-to-office coercion only had partial success - commercial real estate is still sinking in many markets. Meanwhile, e-bike sales got red-hot and everyone suddenly discovered Youtube urbanism. California governor Gavin Newsom made a trip to visit BYD recently, and their buses are being trialed in a few cities. You can even pin a lot of the global instability on energy changes - Russia was a big oil/gas exporter, and they seem to have driven everyone away from them at this point.

Can we skip to the part where they realize the errors in their ways and begin to honestly put effort into the solution? All this hemming and hawing and pouting is just delaying the inevitable.

China's domestic EV market has a hidden advantage: the Chinese power grid

The small number of incumbent ICE manufacturers probably helps as well.

This is the real answer. Many industries have a huge inertia from built-up skill in the labour force and industry R&D, and built capital. In all of these areas, China was far behind the West for cars. That was until EVs came along and completely eliminated the engine and exhaust management, which was by far the most complicated part of the car in terms of expertise. To make it even better, it all got replaced by electronics, which is something that China is great at and a lot of traditional car countries aren't great at. The combination meant that even though China didn't have a great industry around forming body panels to an effective precision, even though they didn't have the best engineers that understand suspension systems or ultra-reliable control systems, they could compete with the big car countries on something much closer to an equal footing. And when the Chinese get to compete on an equal footing in the modern era, they win more often than they don't.

Not sure about that, it's certainly newer but the grids in America aren't in any way bad enough that they're affecting whether or not people buy EVs or manufacturers make them.

I mean the oil price is 50% more expensive in China, but in China the electricity is 50% cheaper than US. So if you live in China, driving an EV means 5%~10% of the cost of ICE cars.

how do you explain this then: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/

western conspiracy?

It's not a conspiracy, although obviously Bloomberg has got a bone to pick with EVs right now. It's just not at all contradictory with the fact that EVs are doing fantastic in China right now. Graveyards of discarded vehicles is a consequence of rideshare fleets of undesirable vehicles disbanding, which is a consequence of relatively minor errors in Chinese industrial policy being present in their EV subsidies, then being removed when China stripped out those heavy subsidies to stop graft four years ago. The article even explains all of this.

The important part is that while the subsidies introduced significant graft and the creation of some vehicles which were below market standard to the point that consumers wouldn't buy them, those subsidies also worked to build the factories, train the people, and demonstrate the demand which have then ensured that ever since China axed those subsidies four years ago, EV sales have still been growing extremely fast, every single year. Those subsidies were good policy, and so was gutting them to reduce corruption once EVs had enough momentum to not be significantly helped by them anymore. We should learn from that good policy and try to compete, rather than just giving up and going home.

ja, Evergrande is the way to go.

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