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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

Have no clue about Geely, but I’ve driven the BYD Seal and Sealion. Seal especially is a fantastic car. Really can’t find much wrong with it

Chinese EVs seem like they’re operating a notch above the competition right now - very little in the market with the same value for money

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I got a Seal for 40k EUR (after the subsidy), and it's a great car in general, but absolutely fantastic for that price. I don't think you can find a comparable car for anywhere near that amount of money.

Geely acquired Volvo Cars around 2010, and there is certainly not much wrong with modern Volvos (aside for the regular stuff that is wrong with all modern vehicles).

Given Geely's various acquisitions, it makes sense that their cars would benefit from shared technologies so I wouldn't expect their vehicles to be much worse than westerns.

Seems like the main problem if you dislike China taking over the industry is that the automobile companies keep voluntarily selling their brands to them.

My question is whether these new chinese EV makers are deliberately lowering their profit margins to push out competitors, or are they _actually_ super efficient at capital deployment and operations (as well as economies of scale) such that their value generation do come from their lowered costs compared to their western competitors.

this YouTube channel called “Inside Business China” by supply-chain specialist and industry analyst Kevin Walmsley has regular videos on how and why various Chinese industrial sectors are eating our lunch:

“Detroit auto engineers tear down BYD's Seagull: "An extinction-level event"”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGgo_wpV1ug

is one such example. I recommend a deep dive of his vids to understand what's actually going on.

Recommend watching a bunch of

Would assume its a bit of both. It would make sense that the country with deep expertise in manufacturing at scale AND battery tech would be able to offer EVs cheaper than the competition

Same thing should be asked about the whole American tech sector since the late 90s, the only difference being the USA had VCs throwing gobs of money for tech companies to do price dumping and capture market share while China has the State doing similarly.

long time ago ~80ies, when japanese Hi-fi brands were going strong, some mass-public so-called "cheapish" makers , like Technics and Kenwood, were makeing cheaper and cheaper amplifiers while being still-very-good.. then one day tried their hands at the high-end - like, how it would be, if, given all the engineering constraints, price is not a constraint anymore? And they made some simply fantastic devices from that time..

so i am thinking.. if chinese EVs are better while being much cheaper, what would be if they did not have to be cheaper?

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