Shanghai's Automotive Metamorphosis
arun.is
arun.is
Why so? Sure, it would be a nice world if no country was a military powerhouse, but that's not the world we live in. If the choice is between the US or China being the military powerhouse, why would you pick China?
There are plenty of us who will be forever bitter about this period in history of US dominance. You may not have noticed from your garden in Virginia, but entire countries have been bombed to rubbles and and entire populations killed or forced to migrate. Still continuing too. In that sense, we’d much prefer actually good and just people ruling the world, not US or Russia or China etc.
Edit: Fix ambiguity.
And again, if the choices are the US or China, why would you consider China to be more "just and fit to rule"?
> your garden in Virginia
I don't live in Virginia and I don't have a garden.
> entire countries have been bombed to rubbles and and entire populations killed or forced to migrate
So you think the US has done more of this than China? Or than other countries? What are you basing that on?
> we’d much prefer actually good and just people ruling the world
What if there aren't any? If you don't think the US makes the grade, who do you think does? Anyone?
>> your garden in Virginia
> I don't live in Virginia and I don't have a garden.
It’s a figure of speech, representing stereotypical upper middle class American.
> If you don't think the US makes the grade, who do you think does? Anyone?
People who actually let others live in peace and harmony, people who are guided by a strong set of morals. If you think you’re free to do whatever, you’ll do whatever. If you think you’re free to do whatever when others aren’t watching, you’ll do whatever when others aren’t watching. Muslims think neither and historically they have a proven track record of compassionate ruling, as opposed to the neo-feudalistic dog eat dog world we live in which is really just Middle Ages Europe with a higher baseline wealth.
I already got that that was your intended meaning. I was asking who you think do make just and good rulers. Apparently your answer is "Muslims", which I guess means we're just going to have to disagree.
Not sure where you're getting that from since the only claim I have made about the US (by implication) is that I think China is worse.
You weren't responding to "each and every reader", you were responding to me. Your "figure of speech" was not justified when responding to me. Whether it would be justified when responding to someone else is irrelevant.
China has not bombed entire countries into ruble. China is not currently sponsoring a state sponsored act of genocide.
I don’t really care what peoples “feelings” are on this. It’s a fact that America has fucked over literally billions of people over absolutely nothing. This is something that China has not done.
Speaking about incentives, China has an incentive to NOT do this. Their economy thrives on a global strong middle class that can buy goods. America does not have this incentive. America’s incentive is to create petrodollar dominance through its military.
So yes, I’m not going to be cheering on China because superpowers generally mean people suffer. I will however cheer on America’s sliding into irrelevance and weakness because it literally means less dead kids and less burnt generations.
> China is not currently sponsoring a state sponsored act of genocide.
> China has an incentive to NOT do this. Their economy thrives on a global strong middle class that can buy goods. America does not have this incentive. America’s incentive is to create petrodollar dominance through its military.
Evidently we don't live on the same planet.
Oh, not over nothing... Israel has to exist, because if Israel doesn't exist then Israel won't exist. Which is why Israel obviously has to always exist.
> This is something that China has not done.
The ongoing oppression of Uighurs, Tiananmen Massacre? Clearly China would do equally worse acts as US if she had the power US has.
> Speaking about incentives, China has an incentive to NOT do this. Their economy thrives on a global strong middle class that can buy goods. America does not have this incentive. America’s incentive is to create petrodollar dominance through its military.
Never thought about it like this... Maybe you're correct and a China-dominated world would be less violent. Still, the cultural homogenization policy they employ would clearly cause much harm if their borders were wider. Just look at the amount of oppression it's resulting in at the moment.
Right - it has a different style.
Instead, its government happily supported the genocidal Khmer Rouge, invaded Vietnam in retaliation for overthrowing that regime, and currently provides diplomatic, financial, and technical support to the Russian government which is currently bombing Ukraine into rubble (or as you cutely put it, "ruble").
Because hey, there's no point in China's regime letting a peccadillo such as Putin's murderous assault on Ukraine come between their limitless friendship, now is there?
Just yesterday I was watching a car slow down from 100 km/h to 70, much more noticeable than I expected.
Although there doesn't seem to be any obvious evidence here that the US could be lagging behind. Per-person the US is still a bit of a productivity outlier to the upside. When they aren't legislatively restrained they tend to work hard and in an organised way.
Also if the US makes very expensive widgets, but can't make cars cheaply, it would still show up as high worker productivity. It's not really the same as engineering efficiency per (PPP) dollar.
Is that true? There was a policy push here to sell EVs, though there of course is continuing debate about what the magnitude of that push should be. The market so far in the US has spoken against greater adoption of EVs, for various reasons.
OP's article doesn't mention or discuss two very salient factors: one, that EV use in Shanghai is massively subsidized, both at the point of sale (EVs are free to register, whereas ICE vehicle registration starts at $15k) as well as to the producers; and two, whether such a subsidy is in fact for the long-term benefit of the public.
> other countries have a more stable and hour-for-hour productive workforce because their workers can get preventative care and treatment for illnesses quickly and without a fuss
No one would argue that healthcare in the US couldn't be improved, but I disagree that the payment model is the biggest issue. The way I see it, the biggest issue by far is that people are just very, very unhealthy! A full three quarters of adults are either overweight or obese. No country can have a cost-effective healthcare system with this kind of population.
And the distribution of healthcare spending is extremely lopsided, with the top 5% of spenders accounting for over half of all healthcare expenditure, and the bottom half of spenders comprising a mere 3% of spending[0]. (A few countries with socialized healthcare are starting to toy with the idea of just letting those high spenders die, with assisted suicide.) I don't know that a better system can be achieved without first promulgating a culture that values being healthy.
[0]: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
Where I live in Germany we have a system I would characterise as somewhere in-between a fully socialized single payer system and the American system (you have insurance companies you choose between, but you're required to have some kind of insurance, and there are a set of "public" insurances that must meet a certain standard at a certain price). But here I can't buy a sugar free Fritz Limo, nor go to a popular bar or club without inhaling smoke.
Obviously countries can enact such policies without socialized health care, and things are not all sunshine and rainbows in the NHS. But I reckon that waiting around until there's a healthy populace before bringing in a better health system might not necessarily be the best strategy.
too many double negations?
where I live in Germany, smoking is plain banned in clubs. and sure there are sugar free drinks both on the menu and in shops.
so I don't get what you mean?
That's basically Obamacare. Except in the US most people still get health insurance through their employers.
If you're on a public insurance in Germany, you rarely pay any substantial copay, and there's no concept of a deductible. Not only that, but the price of the policy is a percentage of your income (capped at some absolute upper limit), so if you make little, you pay little.
Prices paid by public insurers to healthcare providers are fixed, and even the private insurers aren't allowed to pay providers more than a certain multiple of the public rate.
In other words, in Germany, the government has a much stronger hand in setting prices for both patients and insurers than under the Obamacare system.
Strictly speaking the incentives don't change much. People have a strong incentive to stay healthy no matter what system is in place, and the insurance companies have a strong incentive to make sure people know about the risks of sugar drinks etc.
For example, countries with socialized healthcare have significantly more walkable and bikeable cities. That’s not a coincidence.
The most plausible link would be if people couldn't afford cars under a socialised healthcare system; but I doubt anyone is going to try and argue that seriously.
No. It does not. Not "suddenly" or "magically".
What does happen is that social health concerns and advice feed back into other public policy making decisions.
Advertising agencies get contracts for campaigns to improve health awareness, walking and biking paths become routine considerations in city planning, etc.
This takes decades to iterate through from non existent to commonplace.
You might like to check whether the layout of the citys involved were decided on before or after the invention of the car - and the introduction of universal health care - before you post anything. That'll probably come up.
Chinese cities are very very dense, and very new due to urban redevelopment projects in the 2000s-2021. For example, the urban core of Shanghai is around 20 miles end-to-end, so the same size as Wichita end-to-end, yet has a population of around 20mil compared to 350k.
This helps sustain both public transit as well as EVs with minimal range anxiety.
The industrial policy aspect of EVs also helps ofc, but big picture it works with the range and size of Chinese metropolitan areas.
The issue is the sprawl factor simply can't be solved in a country as spread out as the US, so long range batteries (looking at you Idemetsu Kosan and Toyota) or hybrids are the best solution in a sprawly semi-urban environment.
The average round trip commute in the US is 42 miles [0] versus 11 miles in China [1]. This means the average American needs to charge almost 4x more often. Alternatively, imagine the range anxiety a Chinese driver might have with an EV with a range of 80 km/50 mi.
When you purchase a vehicle, you also take into account edge cases like interregional or intercity travel like roadtrips, family, or business.
Charging infra can get spotty very fast outside of dense regions. With the sheer density that most of China has, you don't have to worry about dead zones as much. Furthermore, that density also means you have alternative options for inter-city transit (eg. Sleeper Buses, Trains) that don't really exist at the frequency needed in the US.
The differences in expected distances also plays a major role in EV design - a number of Chinese EVs at the lower price range (eg. BYD Seagull, Wuling EV) have much smaller trunk sizes compared to Western oriented hatchback EVs like the Nissan Leaf, because there isn't the need or the expectation to do almost all your shopping with your car when high density urban environments allow you to have various options downstairs or rapid delivery (like 1 hour delivery).
Consumer Habits for Chinese are different from Americans, and the model that worked for China doesn't necessarily work for the US. That said, the Chinese style model would work well in similarly dense Western+Central Europe and Japan.
[0] - https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us...
[1] - http://service.shanghai.gov.cn/sheninfo/specialdetail.aspx?I...
And there are lots of factors that reduce the range - hilly or mountainous terrain, aircon/heating, number of passengers or load, and driving style.
Longer range also improves security since people don't necessarily have to stop in places where they feel unsafe.
A fast charging solution massively improves things for EV though - gleaning from TA, the battery packs of Chinese EVs seem to be exchanged at charging stations.
Nio (a Shanghai firm) is the primary battery swap EV car brand, but by market share (BYD and Tesla) most EV cars in China don't support battery swapping.
That said, Geely, Changan, JAC, and Chery are looking at battery swapping as well in order to differentiate themselves in the Chinese EV market which is dominated by BYD with secondary marketshare for SAIC and Tesla.
Given BYD's dominance in the Chinese EV space, I'm not sure how much market share secondary brands can gain, and this is influencing the mass EV export attempts by Chinese players leading to multiple trade wars as smaller players in the Chinese market who tend to be funded or owned by regional governments are subsidized by those local governments to export abroad and/or start price wars domestically in China.
> A fast charging solution
Battery Management Systems and Battery Chemistry are hard. BYD is a leader in the space because they've been manufacturing batteries for decades (ever used a cellphone in the 2000s or an iPhone before 2016? - it was using a BYD battery)
Other EV players in China not so much.
BYD is basically a battery maker who became an automotive manufacturer, but the other players in the Chinese market are automotive players who don't have the domain experience in battery technology.
It's worth noting that car registration in Shanghai was staggeringly expensive before electric cars were a possibility. That's just a continuation of existing Chinese policies; it obviously helps electric cars, but that was no part of the intent of the policy. (I assume the intent was some combination of reducing traffic times and reducing pollution from exhaust.)
The support by local governments is a major factor for the EV boom (along with other booms like renewables).
The mixture of federal, regional, and local support is a fairly critical part of the Chinese development model.
(Technically there's no federal government, period. There's just the bureaucracy and the party. The party's leadership determines policy, the bureaucracy carries it out. Local decisionmaking exists when micromanagement reaches its limits, and ultimately it is a system of gap-filling. Or, in a sense, it's a system that the 9th and 10th Amendments of the US Constitution anticipated and therefore needed to be addressed, 200 years early)
Yes there de facto is, especially due to the post-Mao reforms.
If you want to dig into how Chinese federalism works, I'd recommend these sources [0][1]
[0] - https://cjil.uchicago.edu/print-archive/cooperative-federali...
[1] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262534246/how-reform-worked-in-...
Given that most of these governments are now in a pinch with this debt, it remains to be seen if this was a good idea.
As though there isn’t a glut of underutilized parking lots littering literally every American metro where the local forests were bulldozed decades ago
> paying workers prevailing wage
Subsidies are there to pay for wages and for automation to be less reliant on labor costs, of which China automates waaaay more than the USA does
> running a low government deficit
Industrial subsidies have the potential to pay back far more than the government puts in, and would be much smaller in size than other boondoggles the US government pays for
Honestly I think this is all just excuses and China just took advantage of the incompetence of our leadership to leapfrog us. Since when did Americans not want to be #1?
The other dirty secret is that government debt is actually very high in China and it’s a bit of a problem. Local and provincial governments in China have very little taxing power and so have been financing via opaque off-balance-sheet shell companies, and the exact number is not known but estimated at $8T. And now local government services are cutting back or even collapsing since the Chinese property market that was the collateral for a lot of this debt is in dire straits. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/China-debt-crunch/C...
But I’m optimistic that if the federal government could wrest control away from (selfish) local governments and set a national agenda people can get behind, progress will happen. The CHIPS act demonstrated some amount of this, but it can go much farther, both into other industrial verticals but also in reversing dumb local NIMBY policies.
The USA can do this in a more fiscally responsible way than China did if they can get corruption under control. Anyway if there’s anything the USA has a lot of, it’s money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country
Even though the prevalence and availability of EV Charging stations is a general issue across countries, having 220V AC makes the current state more bearable especially for residential charging use cases. For many in the US, adding a new 220V circuit, or having the option to add one, ends up being a cost-driven obstacle for adoption.
Electrification in China has happened across all modalities of motor-vehicles, where all the previously hyper-prevalent gas-powered motor scooters of yesterday are also EVs.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/
My take is that:
- we, the west, are failed. Chapter 11 if you are from the USA;
- current BEVs ALL are national security and citizens serious threats because they are rolling surveillance stations able do create strategic disruption targeting specific people or a whole country;
- Chinese EVs have even BETTER design the westerners (which are (more than) half Chinese anyway in most cases) but have a terribly crappy crapware, so to came back to the first point, we are failed but we still have some point of excellence only usable to save us IF we annihilate the current finance-focused management to came back to an industry focused one.
Just as an anecdote: having a p.v. system and working from home I want an integrated system to charge "my" car. Well, first of all there is exactly NO ONE able to charge DC-to-DC directly even if cars and p.v. batteries are normally 400V lithium with similar BMS and a direct DC-to-DC charge exists since years (CCS in EU, I do not know in USA the correspondent name, ChaDeMo in JP etc). This alone means around 30% of wasted energy, much more electronics, much bigger costs for nothing.
Anyway in the whole market of a gazillion of domestic charging station ONLY TWO VENDOR exists with LIMITED p.v. integration Fronius and Victron. All the others talk about green new deal in advertisement but have no p.v. integration and even worse they are cloud-bound and hyper priced for what they are.
Anyway, having already a Victron battery inverter to be semi-autonomous in case of blackouts (AC coupled p.v., when I build my p.v. hybrid inverters was not a thing) I choose Victron EVC, formally a semi-FLOSS Debian based platform... Well... The EVC it's as open as a bank vault for it's customer, I can't set a gazillion of useful stuff like "hey I want to charge from p.v. as much as possible BUT I also want to charge from the grid if needed at this amount of amps", not to count all issues (not start charging from the p.v. even if power is available demanding manual actions to make it so, charge from the grid while in p.v. mode stating the contrary for a non-settable amps and hard-coded time and so on).
The car itself allow for a LIMITED V2L usage, but have no integration with a home inverter, so no way to simply "plug in the big battery on wheel" and keep the home powered during an outage even if it's damn simple to do so. Anti-islandic devices (to decouple the home "microgrid" from the national grid, to avoid feeding the grid during an outage) are potentially cheap, small and simple enough anyone with p.v. should be mandate to own one with a standard protocol so it's damn simple plug in the car and being on battery and eventually available p.v. The tech is there since years, simply nobody have enforced or even sell this option.
Long story sort it seems 99% of those who push electric convergence, like those who have pushed the similar all-to-IP convergence, have no damn clue on how to proper implement the green new deal and damn really going all-electric. OR maybe they have a clue but they do dislike the fact that such new deal only work if in end-user ownership, hands, not as a service...