Comment by nanotuber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nanotuber | Hacker News Reader

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Hmm. I appreciate the response but it does not address my concern. The reason is I'm trying to quantify the subsidization. I think what you are trying to articulate is that a $1k subsidy (in the form of a corporate credit card analogy) is equivalent to or greater than a $9k subsidy (in the form of reimbursement analogy). That's not as obvious to me as it is to you, because I have trouble quantifying the end market effect. It's also an order of magnitude difference in the actual amount of subsidy: the analogy I guess would be a company allowing you to spend $100 with the corporate card for dinner, or reimbursing you $900 for dinner? Again I'm struggling to see how one is obviously anti-competitive vs the other.

I'm very interested in hard, quantifiable numbers. I've read lots of articles that have various types of qualifications/characterizations but they don't help. For example, the fact that China's economy is producing 4x the battery capacity as domestic need is forecast - in terms of competitiveness what does this mean for BYD? Does it amount to their being able to sell a car for $10 cheaper? $100? $1000?

I think ascribing a unit price to the Chinese government's grants is what is misleading.

To put it another way: Each company only ever produced one car and sold it in the US - no tariffs. A Tesla buyer would receive $7500 from the US government and Tesla would receive $0. A BYD buyer would receive $7500 from the US government, and BYD would have already gotten $3 billion dollars from the Chinese government.

It's not at all an apples to apples comparison.

A BYD buyer would not get $7500 from the US government. It is not a qualified manufacturer, which are companies from the US and allies (Germany, Japan): https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04012024/inside-clean-ene...

Is it just a "subjective point of view about an apples-to-oranges comparison" or is there a very clear way to objectively base the criticism of China?

> I think ascribing a unit price to the Chinese government's grants is what is misleading.

Could you expand on this? I do not understand it.

Note: Tesla does get the $7500 and gets it immediately, from the customer, who is then reimbursed later by the US government. If you check Tesla's website they count on this: they advertise Tesla prices after the rebate, even though the customer will go out of pocket for more.

This may be a moot point though. Before Telsa gets this $7.5k, Tesla gets a subsidy of $1.5k in regulatory credits per vehicle from the US government for producing electric vehicles (around the same / more than BYD gets per vehicle from the Chinese government).

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