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Comment by bogrollben | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm out of touch. What did china do to german cars?

Outcompeted them badly. Sent Porsche packing and BMW bawling.

By being subsidised by the government.

Are German manufacturers not subsidised? There are plenty of electrification grants, direct to manufactures and to consumers that end up improving sales for them

Yes, but not nearly to the same extent.

First, the subsidies to consumers for electric vehicles in Germany apply to all cars, not just those built in Europe. This effectively subsidizes the competition from China.

For subsidies to manufacturer, as I didn't quickly find any source making the direct comparison, I asked LLM to research it (I apologize for for this, but doing it manually would take too much time).

   BYD: ~15% producer-focused economic benefit under the Commission's methodology; 17.0% including the legacy NEV fiscal scheme.

   VW Europe: ~0.2–0.7% is my best public-data-based estimate of currently observable and allocatable producer support; roughly 0.7–1.3% if we deliberately make aggressive assumptions favorable to VW.

   VW extreme stress test: ~2.5–3.2%, obtained by implausibly allocating essentially all VW Group grants and tax credits to European BEVs.

EU Commission's investigation calculated countervailable subsidy rates for Chinese BEVs: see "3.10.3. Calculation of subsidy rates" for a aggregate subsidy rates.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=17382497...

That argument doesn't hold much water in my opinion. VW AG is partially state-owned, with a double-digit percentage held by the federal state of Lower Saxony.

Meanwhile, in the US, companies like Boeing, GM, and Intel will never be allowed to experience more than minor financial inconvenience before the government bails them out with protectionism, guaranteed loans, and outright subsidies.

I don't see a material difference between how the Chinese government treats their strategically-important industries and the way we do here in the West. Terms like "socialism," "Communism," and "capitalism" are just fodder for Fox News camp-followers.

> VW AG is partially state-owned, with a double-digit percentage held by the federal state of Lower Saxony.

Yes, but those are two separate things. Lower Saxony owning part of VW doesn’t mean VW gets extra public money because of it.

High subsidy rates alter market dynamics. Can we agree on that?

For sure.

The biggest subsidies for EV in Germany are subsidies to consumers, which apply also to Chinese cars.

Subsidies to manufacturers in Germany are much smaller than both: subsidies to consumers in Germany, and subsidies to manufacturers in China.

So, there are different subsidy types with different subsidy rates which all impact the market. Higher rates usually have a higher impact, but type of subsidy can also change what kind of an impact they have. Any comparison quickly becomes complex.

I posted some numbers in an other post [0], but the numbers are not exact.

Subsidy is also one of many factors. Of course you also need capable people and manufacturing capabilities which China has. So, subsidy alone is not enough, but if needed capabilities exist, subsidy at high rates can help tip the scales.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49920502

What they'll do to LLMs. Keep up

There's still a sizable gap between OpenAI, Anthropic, and the Chinese labs. If anything, it's getting bigger. We haven't seen Chinese models solve the types of problems that ChatGPT and Claude are able to solve.

But 95% of all problems are fairly banal, i.e. if the AI in my dish washer, fridge, radio, bicycle computer, etc. just have GPT 5.5 intelligence for making sure temperature, water, direction, etc. are 20% better controlled than yesterday it will be an enormous win for ordinary people (and the ressources we consume).

Correct the implicit gamble of frontier labs is to displace humans - and the only firm you should trust with this is an American one.

It’s not happening and the imminent bust is coming. Strap in while the music gets turned up (dots, ipo etc) and people decide to leave the partayyy!

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