The size of BYD's factory
twitter.com
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edit: that ACME mapper image looks to be from mid-2023, in more recent imagery the construction on the east side has been completed.
I guess it makes sense to align the factory to this grid, and not to the older grid that followed the fields.
That area is called 郑州港区 (literal translation Zhengzhou "port area", full name: 郑州航空港经济综合实验区) is actually for it's closeness to the airport (ZHCC). English reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhengzhou_Airport_Economy_Zone .
Did a scientific project there. It was a whole thing. The local/city/regional CCP branch was not cooperative with even the most innocuous low altitude drone data gathering from foreigners for ecology studies, despite sponsorship by local & national universities.
There is even a random-geometric-distortion obfuscation layer that you have to apply to maps you're allowed to serve up publicly while doing business in China, like one of those distorted mesh grid paintings. Takes in WGS84 and spits out a nonsense projection a hundred meters away.
And the narrow access road is way too congested for all those to actually leave or arrive at that rate. Moments after the shot, the trucks will clearly all have to stop and wait.
This being said, there is power in that many machines in the same place at one time. They would cetainly be able to get work done quickly. Just not quite as quickly as it appears in that shot. Waiting is part of the process, you cant have a system where every component works at 100% capacity
Not to mention the opportunity cost of having other similarly well equipped crews having to wait on you finishing the job.
Why would you be surprised that no time and effort is spared in coordinating the work of these machines? Its like being surprised that items are constantly rolling off the factory production line, and its not just the occasional item showing up at irregular intervals.
it's not about simply "coordinating". Logistics requires that you have the capacity to absorb unforseen issues and delays. When you have a system with 100% utilisation, the slightest delay at one point ripples out upsetting the balance of everything else and suddenly everything grinds to a halt.
For a more techy example, it is a bad idea to have a server running at 100% CPU usage. If that is your "normal" state, any change in conditions for the worse (more customers want to buy your product because its a weekend) results in degraded experience or total failure for ALL the customers.
And construction (and large machines) just LOVE to throw delays at you.
I'm sure they have people who's job is coordinating. In fact to coordinate such a photo op would be an almighty feat in itself. It's just if those people are in any way good at planning (their job) then they would leave slack in the system, the exact amount is the real trick to avoid waste, but it's never 100% utilisation.
So why not coordinate the real thing instead of just a photo op. There plenty of idling equipment in the clip. This footage is pretty tame compared to rushed covid hospital construction, for which there were live streams and timelapse of activity greater than what's being shown. I've seen many PRC worksites like this IRL, it's about on par. Wouldn't be hard to launch a drone and flythrough through the busiest looking area for social media.
It may be that there is something going on in China that negates the exact reason that exists, and not in other countries, but you said nothing about that.
The fact is this construction site looks different than the way construction sites look usually. Your "trucks are expensive" argument explains nothing and provides no reason for this site to look different than others. Trucks are expensive everywhere, actually I think trucks are more expensive in the west than in China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
https://thediplomat.com/2024/04/how-china-became-the-worlds-...
Not really, there's 2 middle income traps:
1) the ACTUAL trap / thesis - countries fail to educate / upgrade workforce enough to move up supply chains to generate high income employment to bring up income, the TRAP is lack of advancement, to which PRC is basically the LEAST trapped country in the world, pursuing industrial development in all high end sectors. Issues is PRC being highly developed in every sector = still not enough high end jobs for 1.4B people.
2) the economic middle income trap, for last few years, PRC consisitly a foreskin (low single %) below world bank definition/revision of upper income, people need to ask why that is? IMO it's because PRC DOESN'T WANT to be definitionally upper income to play up developing status, and lose related perks. It would be absolutely trivial for PRC to revaluate FX by a few % and cross nominal USD high income and take a huge victory lap, but they don't.
The reality is "hiding strength" is going ot be increasingly hard with time - PRC per capita is being brought down by 600m low income. The TLDR is bottom 4-5 quantiles, i.e. 40% very undereducated population who got left behind during modernization and generates about only ~5% of GDP. They skew old and will eventually phase out of stats (die) in next couple decades, and numerator is going to be increasingly high educated new cohorts working high income. Low/high income divide is largely generational, the future educated populations are going to be in disproportionately high income high skill jobs i.e. PRC is replacing 200m subsistent farmers with 200m tertiary workforce. If most of the 2 bottom quantile dies by 2050, PRC per capita will nearly double to medium high income simply doing nothing, with PPP to rival upper-high income if they hold on to production. Short of unforseen catastrophe, it's statistic inevitability.
That's without mentioning FX, i.e. PRC securing enough economic clout = eventually ability to flex the FX lever to multiply nominal GDP faster than actual growth.
- Definition of this is 12,000 2011 USD, BLS says thats 17,600 2024 USD. Looking like 2024 closes at a little under 13,000 24 USD. If we calculate out the 6% CCP standard GDP growth rate, it'd take 5 years
- GDP is not very likely to grow at the formerly-real 6% per year moving forward. Population peaked, trade is now a tailwind instead of a headwind, GDP per capita at 13,000 is 0.5x Russia and 2.5x India, and we're in year 2 of a deflationary crisis that's barely being held off, if it is, and is characterized by an significant oversupply in housing stock that'll take years to run down. So I'll tack on 2 years, make it 7 years, 2031.
Those millions of unemployed youth didn't go through the gaokao to work in a BYD factory, it's the "useless" white collar jobs that everyone wants but there is short supply of. And the often unpredictable clampdowns on those industries don't help.
I feel like it's more of a case of how do they get out of it, rather than avoid falling into it, at this point. The demographics are shit and the country isn't particularly attractive to immigrants, nor (unlike, America and Canada, and honestly most of Europe, despite what the right wing say) do they really have room for more immigrants.
Actually utilizing that capacity is something else entirely; there are factories less than ten years old shuttering due to overcapacity. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/business/china-auto-facto...
And the rush to subsidize more capacity is a big contributor to local government debt burdens in China, which is estimated to leave Chinese debt to GDP at 117%.
Wouldn’t this just be plain old fashioned authoritarianism? America can latch on to this too, and we might based on how the Trump admin turns out.
They paid good wages but also kept a high bar on quality and performance. The workers in turn were incentivized to do a good job and gave feedback like ideas on how to improve efficiency, e.g. build an internal railroad to carry bricks up as they got higher and higher in height.
Of course car washes are a case where I could see someone building one to keep their crews busy between other better paying jobs. Thus have lots of stops as other projects come in. there isn't much investment sitting and there is value to a contractor to keep their crews busy (read paid!) even when there is no other work. I could see a car wash company agreeing to a build this over 2 years for a discount even though there are only a few months of work - for both it could be financially beneficial.
Nonetheless, there's a lot of idle people/equipment in construction because things have to be done in the right order and sometimes it's more economical to over-provision than risk delaying the whole project because something wasn't available when it was needed.
Those hundreds per day will partly pay for all the sitting around unused in the hiring company's yard! You can see this in the pricing which is usually a lower rate if you hire it for a longer period.
The rent/buy calculus can be incredibly shunted towards "buy" once you're using it even somewhat. It's even more so when you realize that labor costs is the main issue, and not having a skilled worker waiting around for an item to be delivered (by another slightly less skilled worker, perhaps) is a huge savings in its own part. Five guys on a site might have 15 machines total; even though they obviously can't use all 15 at the same time.
Question is, if it's 6 AM at a construction site, and nobody is around to hear it, do they make any noise?
Imagine having to contract out every prototype to a metal working shop — it slows down your ability to iterate because you can’t just go downstairs and try it.
But once you have a design set in stone, outsourcing is cheaper than doing it in-house. These companies specialize in producing parts with economies of scale.
But if you do it for too long, you kind of lose the ability to quickly iterate. Striking a balance is hard.
Except you need to ship the parts to your factory and still employ QA people who must check whether you got what you paid for.. If the supplier has a bad defect ratio, you must order more parts. It's not as cut-and-dry as you think.
Every time your assembly-line halts, you're paying people for twiddling their thumbs. The more external suppliers you have, the higher the risk.
I'm currently working at a supplier for some companies in mostly the automotive sector and the line halt fines per second seem to all be in the couple grand range so I always assumed it should be enough to cover the halt.
Though the QA part is real. There's so much theatre in tricking clients into believing their QA measurements are wrong when something happens it's kinda funny.
Making less than 10,000 of anything just doesn't seem to make economic sense unless you assume there is a chance no one will want any of them.
The amount of innovation in the automobile industry is staggering when you think of its history more holistically.
too late relative to what?
Americans will be buying Chinese goods with "made in Vietnam" or "made in Mexico" stamped on it. The American profit will be in setting up those laundering schemes
Basically everyone is already employed.
They don't even outsource their nylon zip ties?
Citation needed, this seems exaggerated. Eg. I'm sure they use IC's and I'd be very surprised if the facility includes a fab.
EDIT: Seems like it is a division, so not a spin-off.
Here in Mexico most anecdotes of people buying Chinese cars are that after less than a year something broke and they had to take it to the repair shop, where it stayed for a very long time due to a lack of pieces even by the manufacturer.
I'm pretty confident that once the Seagull lands we will see a lot more. I expect it to be the modern equivalent of the late 90s - early 00s Hyundai Excel. That was an entry level car that blew everything else out of the water in Australia due to low prices coupled with a crazy long and generous warranty. It really set Hyundai up in a market as a legitimate mainstream brand.
What I find especially interesting is that at the same time the North American brands have hitched their wagon to the 'bloated vehicle' trend here. They seem to be relying almost entirely on SUVs, and 'trucks'. Recently they are pushing models like the F150 and Ram on the back of their success with big utes like the Ford Ranger. Personally I think this is just going to make them vulnerable to the incoming wave of more sensible Chinese options.
Edit:
It just occurred to me that the idea of car share business using popular North American vehicles seems kind of absurd. Who would want a fleet of oversized SUVs and trucks? I think this says something about the true utility of these vehicles.
We'll see this pattern repeat with high tier engineering products going forward. Airbus and Boeing will be brutally mauled by China in a similar fashion, as nearly all domestic China planes switch over to being exclusively Chinese planes for nationalistic reasons (it'll cut Airbus and Boeing in half at a minimum). And China will use that scale and capability gain to conquer other markets like India et al.
https://thedriven.io/2024/09/04/the-biggest-electric-school-...
It seems we need diffrent categories for a ranking: premises vs. base area of the buildings vs. floor area of the buildings vs. largest building per base area vs. largest building per floor area, etc. And then we would need to clarify what counts in each case ...
Anyway, I live about 20 km from BASF and it is quite an impressive sight, especially at night. Here is a photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Fackelschein_des_Steam... However, the red lights are probably an artefact of the camera; typically the lights looks rather bluesh in reality. And the photo was shot with a 400 mm lens: the television tower in the foreground is more than 4 km away from the factory, the house at the left about 3 km.
Anyway, cool that Germany still has the biggest of something ~heavy industry.
[1] https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1859149340897628545
https://cnevpost.com/2024/09/13/byd-workforce-exceeds-900000...
If their offer wasn't a good deal, they wouldn't be growing so aggressively in Latin America. They're filling a niche western EVs have ignored for almost a decade.
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/715427/tesla-ev-production-shangh...
That being said, China still has very high air pollution levels, especially in the urban areas. As a result, it might not be as economical to build solar power installations in there.
That said a battery factory is a good place to put solar. The final stage of battery manufacturing is several priming charge/discharge cycles which build up resilient layers inside the battery. You can push power into/out of the grid (or use discharging batteries to charge other cells) but having a big DC source nearby is still going to be convenient.
[0]: https://www.volkswagen.de/de/marke-und-erlebnis/volkswagen-e...
How would you come up with an exhaustive list of which buildings contribute to the size of the factory, and which should be excluded?
Otherwise, you're just looking at the land owned or leased by the company, which is obviously a valid measure somehow, but it's hard to say whether it would lead to fair comparisons. I don't have the answers, just throwing it out for debate.
But in the case of the Volkswagen factory the points you mention lead to something interesting: The city of Wolfsburg was created just before WW2 to house the workers of the factory created at the same time to produce the precursor of the VW beetle. Even today the city is dominated by the factory: it has a population of 120,000 and 60,000 work in the factory. So under a loose enough definition of "factory", the whole city of Wolfsburg is part of it.
I get over 6 km^2.
Point still taken.
It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale, and nations that suffered similar disparities in industrial capacity (not to mention energy production) haven't done well in the past.
The sad thing is, we still can if we want to. When Russia throttled down the natural gas pipelines into the EU, it took them mere weeks until the first new floating natural gas terminal was put into operation. And they've collectively dumped an astonishing number of new terminals into the North Sea since then, all at the same time. Germany alone spent $6B in infrastructure investments before that first winter without Russian gas.
We could if we wanted to. But by and large, we don't want to.
You think US manufacturers wouldn't be delighted to just buy a few hundred acres land and start building stuff? They'd do it in a heartbeat. For better and for worse, it is not a level playing field. Conforming to government regulations over here is stifling for a 100-house development in Arkansas, but it's almost impossible in California, Illinois, or New York. Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years.
Went back again in early 2024 and it was so much better, pollution still noticeable on more days than not but at least half the time I spent had AQI below 100.
https://www.servethehome.com/inside-100000-nvidia-gpu-xai-co...
Huge parts of America hate EVs. There is endless debate about nuclear vs clean energy vs coal, which prevents any change from happening.
Reading this (and I completely agree, it's even worse in Europe), sounds like Chinese "management" implemented Agile on a whole new scale.
The upside of a planned economy is that it can work like the internals of a private company, with one drive, "do what needs to be done". The downside is that it can work like the internals of a private company where you bite the bullet or look for another employer. This is much harder with countries, especially because planned economies are more likely to have taller fences around them.
This explains why the Tesla gigafactory in Nevada (announced in Sept 2014) still isn't operational...
Unfortunately winning is disastrous because it makes you complacent.
Perhaps the most flagrant and dumbest example is Internet Explorer 6.
I do not approve of raising tariffs on foreign vehicles because it will dull our edge in the long term. Protectionism is a short term bandaid.
US auto companies already try to compete globally in situations with/without tariffs. That provides plenty of competition too.
How so ?
There are 1.4b vehicles on earth, petrol or batteries it just doesn't work out, especially if we keep using 2000-3000kg metal boxes to move 80kg meat bags 1hr a day and let them rot in a parking for the remaining 23 hours.
Not even talking about the fact that cars are but a fraction of the problem anyways
I vote for change, but I don't have the money to buy electric. Even running costs don't make the difference when it comes to multiple tens of thousands of dollars in purchase price.
I'd love to "care for our environment by buying an electric car". I can't afford to.
The US and EU are long off-peak carbon emissions (emissions even decreased during the Trump administration I, even using a trendline ignoring COVID). The biggest emitter right now is China, and it's emissions are growing not shrinking, and a considerable amount of that (including 90% of the worlds new coal plants) goes to projects like this.
To the extent that they’re using fossil fuels to build the infrastructure for this renewable tech, I’m completely fine with that. That’s much better than using it to build iPhones or consumer nonsense. Insofar as they’re building a renewable grid backed by modern dispatchable coal and they’re also building out massive storage manufacturing capability and their emissions are on track to decline, I’m also fine with that.
ETA: China’s emissions appear to be peaking and entering a structural decline. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2453703-clean-energy-ro...
As a budding superpower ready to unseat the US from it's throan. All China has to do is wait for progress and time to run it's coarse and emerge the victor. If anything, the US is the tigger happy country as we watch the inevitable, looking for any excuse to use to stop them.
Remember, why the hell does China give two shits about war if China can surpass the US simply through economic progress. They don't care, in fact they want to avoid war.
On the other hand, the adoption of EV is slower than expected, especially in key markets such as the EU. Charging network, green electricity supply are major headaches, which are not easily to solve in 5-10 years. The adoption in developing countries is however a surprise. Driven by much lower fuel cost compared to a combustion engine, people in developing countries could be swayed by cheap EV-models. They can accept the longer charging time and a bit of inconvenience (like the air-con is not so cold) for a cheap, working car. However, once the adoption of EV is sizable, I’ll expect a significant burden on the national grid of those countries and the tension arise from it is not easily to solve, especially when their nascent industry is already power hungry. Inextinguishable Li-Ion battery fire is another major concern as well.
Then there is a third variable: the hydro full cells cars and trucks. When the extraction of hydrogen from newly discovered deposits is efficient enough, full cells technology could experience a big boom and of course, they would displace EV tech.
BYD succeeds in places where quality and safety doesn't matter. It's why they've taken off in Asia but have made minimal inroads in countries with strong automobile safety regulations.
The most frustrating part was that these were for a new dedicated bus lane which required the passenger door on the opposite side of the bus, so the city couldn't just use buses they already had in the meanwhile. Instead the lane went unused for nearly two years after it was built, in which we lost a lane of car traffic but were still having to share the remaining lanes with buses.
The rest are about Foxconn's factory.
This BYD factory were build further down south of downtown.
Same thing happened with the financial institutions and internet infrastructure - those who had the early versions of it established early ended up lagging behind once the technology was superseded.
The poorest countries in Europe had the best internet for a while because the richest countries wanted to milk the copper wires they invested on.
The US for long had much worse payments systems than Europe and Africa because they were at advanced stage on adopting the early technology.
China has more. And the trends are in the wrong direction, to be sure. But Germany and the US, among many others, have tremendous capacity.
The west, especially the USA invested gargantuan money into high margin high scale businesses and the Chinese worked their way up in dealing with atoms with help of the west. Now they too can do many of the high margin stuff and the west will have to re-learn how to deal with atoms. It happened because the west’s rich were simply shittier than Chinese bureaucrats and invested badly by choosing wrong KPI or ideas. Wonder what happens if the AI thing doesn’t pan out after pouring enormous money on it(instead of on something strategically important but not as potentially lucrative).
IMHO things are reversible, especially for the USA. Europe is in a worse place as its demographics and energy situation is less favorable.
I think it is a matter of strategy and it seems China's strategy is innovation, science and productivity. We on the west seem to like consumption before everything else and IMHO we are doing it wrong.
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42225091
1 - https://www.statista.com/chart/31337/new-installations-of-in...
https://x.com/orikron/status/1859657159338025418?t=9J4ASQP_M...
Considering that latest data shows that China industrial robot density is only lower than SG and SK (surpassing Japan and German recently), then the west doesn't have the upper hand anymore.
What is this even supposed to mean? You can't have productivity without consumption - who are you producing things for? Well, consumers - duh.
China is the beneficiary of having relatively low marginal costs, but it's worth noting that's been changing and production has been moving out of China and into other cheaper regions - i.e. Vietnam.
The main issue with china is a reliance on exports and a declining population...
All work and productivity is ultimately an enabler of consumption.
In economic competition, as with poker, if you don’t know who the sucker is…you’re it. China has been making suckers of many countries and they are slowly waking up.
For an example, remember the amazing speed of construct demonstrated by the Chinese government building covid quarantine facilities? Hundreds of square miles of em across every province. They're all gone now.
https://www.hoover.org/research/californias-businesses-stop-...
"Between January 2022 and June 2024, employment in US private businesses increased by about 7.32 million jobs. Of these 7.32 million jobs, about 5,400 were jobs created in California businesses—representing about .07 percent of the US figure. Put differently, if California private-sector jobs grew at the same rate as in the rest of the country, they would have increased by over 970,000 during that period, about 180 times greater than the actual increase."
Nope, we're too busy talking about our tiny little problems now (which flavor of politician will get to pillage the gold chest for themselves and their little friends for the next X years, ecology, genders, migration, &c.), and we already sold/moved all our heavy industries to... well... China. We're left with services but guess what, you don't build an healthy/sustainable economy on uber eats, airbnb and a crumbling public service system on the verge of dying due to demographic issues
Meanwhile China's totalitarian regime allows them to do things 10-100x times more efficiently than we could, mixed in with a bit of state capitalism, add the fact that they became our factories for pretty much everything, that they have access to most raw materials needed for pretty much anything. Sprinkle with a bit of spirit of revenge for the century of humiliation and you got a pretty good cocktail.
They have a long term vision, no counter powers, a fraction of our regulations and the will we lost sometimes in the last 50 years
Temu and Shein are 25% of packages transiting in France for example, they'll do the same things with their car, until they destroyed local companies, then they'll buy them for scraps. Can't blame them, we're letting them do it
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexandre-Monnin/public...
A world with a Chinese hegemony is not going to be pretty, as online DoorDash hammer and sickle communists are about to discover.
In engineering you ultimately have to build stuff. Over, and over, and over again. You'll mess it up a lot at first, and then one day you'll realize that you haven't.
China is not stuck in 1965 trying to make an EV out of a saucepan and a backyard forge. They learn, and they keep trying. They have a domestic market that their government allows to be used as a test bed for everything they are doing, which sounds more coercive than it really is, especially given the fierce Sino-centric patriotism they have.
If Xi can last another 20 years without a palace coup, or manage a smooth transition of power that does not whipsaw policy, the West is in serious trouble.
And there is a difference between success and excellence.
For example there have been zero bullet train fatalities in its entire history, and several Chinese HSR fatal accidents already. For political reasons the quality of the HSR wheels in China took a sharp downturn so expect more accidents in the coming two years.
Also, they aren't the only big player from China. Australia is soon getting GAC/Aion, Geely, Jaecoo, Leapmotor, Deepal, Xpeng.
Here is an article if interested. https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/which-chinese-car-bran...
BYD is only the 9th largest carmaker in China. SAIC, Changan, and Geeley are the top 3. SAIC and Changan are state-owned, but Geeley is private, as is BYD. SAIC makes about 5 million vehicles a year. General Motors, over 6 million. BYD, around 3 million. Tesla, a little less than BYD.
Reviews of newer BYD cars are quite favorable. It's not like five years ago, when China's electric cars were not very good.
BYD has a simplified design for electric cars. The main component is the "e-axle", with motor, axle, differential, and wheels in one unit. There's a power electronics box which controls battery, motor, and charging. And, of course, the battery, made of BYD lithium-iron-phosphate prismatic cells. Talks CANbus to the dashboard and driver controls. BYD offers this setup in a range of sizes, up to box truck scale.
BYD and CATL are spending huge amounts of money to get to solid state batteries. The consensus seems to be that they work fine but are very hard to make. The manufacturing problems will probably get solved.
(Somebody should buy Jeep from Stellantis and put Jeep bodies on BYD E-axles. Stellantis is pushing a terrible "mild hybrid" power train with 21 miles of electric range, and an insanely overpriced all-electric power train. Stellantis prices went through the roof under the previous (fired) CEO, and sales went through the floor. Jeep sales are way down, despite customers who want them.)
Protip: when you calc Chinese numbers, be sure to lookup the latest data. 1 year or 2 means landslide difference.
SAIC sales dropped > 11% and profit down by 27% in the first two quaters 2024. Think about that for a second.
Watching a bunch of arm-chair experts guess that this building means more than it is is a wastes of time. (Approx) 3% of comments here make sense, are enlightening, 97% are just self-assured "Dunning Kruger effect" amateurs guessing they can deduct real info from this is weird. Good waste of 10 minutes for me though.
This is the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy and reducing massively our climate and biodiversity impact.
I want those kind of factories to produce trains, bicycles... everything that can move people in a more efficient way than those "cars".
In a BBC article from a couple of days ago [0], they hinted that China intends to take the lead into transitioning developing countries from fossil fuels to green tech. They produce batteries, EVs and solar panels. Just this year alone Pakistan of all the countries, imported 13 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels. For context - the UK has 17GW of installed solar in total.
China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.
it is classic case of new dominant players emergence when paradigm shift happens. PC vs. mainframe, GPU vs. CPU, clean energy economy vs. fossil fuel based.
Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year.
Maybe some AI driven community (or even private fleet) of shared cars to be hailed in Uber style on demand would work, reducing number of cars overall and the need to own personal one(s). Not there yet.
It sounds like Switzerland is very poorly managed then. Here in Tokyo, we have absolutely the best rail network in the world, and no, people aren't buying more cars and making the roads more crowded at all. The key here is that owning a car in the city is extremely inconvenient: the roads are frequently very narrow and slow, there's no convenient place to park, the few parking lots available are expensive (and likely not near your destination anyway, unless you're going to some large building (like a mall), and you're not even allowed to own a car in the city unless you have a place to park it, and can prove this to the police. There's almost no street parking. So trying to use a car to get around the city is just not very convenient at all, except for certain trips (e.g., going to a mall that has a parking garage, from your apartment where you're spending a huge extra amount every month for the privilege of a parking space). Taxis are a different matter, though: they exist and are somewhat popular, but they're pretty expensive.
Actually, if you pay attention to scales and sizes, it's so very little to achieve so much. What you're seeing is tremendous efficiencies concentrated on a small piece of land, affecting transportation on a vast scale.
The worst except the others. Like sure, retooling our metropolises might be nice. But it’s also not only expensive but incredibly carbon intensive, to say nothing of not wanted by most of the world.
We've built our cities this way. Our tax system encourages it (by not taxing land value directly and exempting development from taxation), and our zoning requires it (my city is almost entirely zoned exclusively for single-family detached housing). Bike lanes are nice, but they don't make a 25-km ride through endless suburbia any shorter.
You can't just copy the superficial traits of bikeable European cities and hope to get the same results. We need to fundamentally rethink the way our cities are allowed and encouraged to grow.
The US and UK apparently can't even build a single high speed rail line any more.
Car dependency sucks, but we won't be able to fix that in the short term, but at least we can fix its oil dependence.
Cleaner grid will also need a lot of battery storage, and EV demand helps scale that up.
The first one is a major infrastructure project, the latter is largely unpopular with the people already living there (and Republicans react to the concept of 15-minute cities like it was a gulag).
Infrastructure is still built as if it was business as usual, so can easily get blocked and delayed by decades on budgeting, bidding, consultations, NIMBYs, environmental surveys, etc.
OTOH we've already got EVs, we have already been building infrastructure for them, and it's a smaller change more acceptable to people.
You need to show your identity card to buy a ticket.
(or use an app which does this for you.)
If we are going to have cars, I’d prefer they be smaller, safer EVs contributing ⅓ the carbon footprint of the status quo. Every bit of savings buys years to make further changes, and it directly saves lives and improves quality of life for a billion people. Even if climate change was not happening, it’d be worth doing for the improvements in cardiovascular health, disruption of sleep patterns and other consequences of engine noise, local water and soil pollution, etc.
This is the reality in United States, but not in most of the world.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231206-climate-change-h...
BYD also have some kind of monorail product!
Is there some technology that enables high-speed travel and weighs less than a human, which seems to be an important criteria to you?
I can't even import those electric mama charis because of unwarranted concern about batteries.
Hard to support bike infrastructure when safetyism means bike routes are only for singles and the rich.
150cm-tall women here in Tokyo have no trouble with all of the above on a bicycle. If they can do it, so can you. They have e-bikes with child seats and cargo baskets, and they wear rain gear when it's raining.
Things are changing in the US. Car-centrism is on its way out, and walkable cities designed for humans are in. I’m really inspired by the new developments in my area. After covid, many US downtowns permanently shut down car traffic on core interior roads, and it’s made the experience 10x better.
I agree, Tokyo is one of the most incredible places I’ve ever visited. I’ve tried to retain some of the sensibilities I observed there, and incorporate them into my lifestyle. Amsterdam similarly inspired me to revisit my lifestyle. If you hate the system you live in, make improvements!
So no, its either this or a gas car. Both are real solutions that work, today. Changing society from the bottom up is not.
But then again it's amazing how we ignore the infrastructure costs of building and maintaining the roads to run the cars everywhere.
Because then the libertarian propaganda turns into communist propaganda.
China is rapidly de-carbonizing and leaving the West behind.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
For reference, England consumed 1 billion tons of coal during it's peak coal consumption decade.
So please stop with the "China is decarbonizing" crap, because they are not. A more accurate statement is "China understands the importance of energy and is applying an as-much-of-everything-approach to achieve its industrial goals"
The reality is that China is emitting much less CO2 per capita than the US or Canada, and just a bit more than the more industrious EU countries like Germany. And this is territorial emissions: if you take into account what percentage of those emissions is going into goods produced in China but bought by those very countries, it's probably around the EU average if not lower.
Is China anywhere near a net 0 goal? No, not even close. But among industrial powers, it is one of the ones that went by far the most into green power.
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
Just to underline, this is not notional capacity (which inflates solar/wind), but actual power generation. This is all the more impressive because China's total consumption is simultaneously increasing rapidly.
In order to build renewable infrastructure, you do need to expend a lot of energy: mining, processing, transporting. China is using coal to build up that infrastructure and converting that dirty energy into clean.
However, BYD still has the entire rest of the world to sell to. They will be fine.
And they know this is --- hence they are doubling the size of their already massive factory.
Guess who won't be fine? US auto manufacturers. They won't be able to compete anywhere other than the USA. And China loves it.
When people started wanting just practical small reliable affordable cars as the price of gas increased and cars became just an appliance they didn’t respond to that market and the Japanese did. It’s been either sideways or downhill since. The only thing keeping them alive now is unnecessarily large status symbol trucks and that is a limited market that will be trashed if oil spikes again. There’s got to be a limit somewhere to how much people will pay to show off or own the libs or whatever motivates one to buy an F-5000 Super Chungus.
They are still mostly missing the EV boat. First Tesla caught them asleep and now China. Culturally they still are not crazy about EVs because they do not go vroom vroom.
Trump might string them along a bit longer with protectionism and a pull back on EVs to push more vroom vroom but meanwhile BYD will eat the entire world.
The US is trying to do industrial policy (like now in China, and previously in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, and in Germany before that), but without the key aspect -- export discipline -- that makes industrial policy work. I'm thinking about Joe Studwell's How Asia Works. Everything I'm seeing in the US reminds me more of the failures in Indonesia and India than of the successes in Japan and Korea. With the exceptions of -- "say what you will about Elon, but" -- Tesla and SpaceX. Bidenonics will take time to bear fruit, though, and could yet yield some successes.
Point is, using tariffs to protect "infant industry" is the opposite of export discipline.
(As a side note, most of those countries also had major land reform, whereas property rights -- sorry, "rule of law" -- are pretty sacred in the US )
I also wonder how fast it can be converted to spit out drones.
I wonder how fast this factory could be converted produce drones and how fast it could spit them out.
Imagine a circular loop of larger carrier aircraft that load up FPV drones from this factory and fly to their destination to drop them off only to fly back to do it again.
The FPV drones could have object recognition to target people, artillery, infrastructure so they could operate autonomously.
I wonder if they will put the landing pads on the factory roof or next to the factory.
There's no defensive depth. And nowhere for all the people to go in an attack. It's not like Ukraine, where the current fighting is like battling over Iowa, one farm at a time. It's more like Gaza, with too many people crammed into too little land. But bigger.
China has a large number of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles. Bringing US Navy ships in the Taiwan strait means losing many of them. The PLAN has more ships than the US Navy, and is building more at a high rate.
This isn't Desert Storm we're talking about here, China is a real threat.