this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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They creates this mess. This is a perfect "LeopardAteMyFace" situation.
For the last 15 to 20 years car makers have been fighting over themselves to get a foothold into the domestic Chinese market. To do so, the Chinese government required these foreign carmakers partner with a local company. Those local Chinese companies then had access to intellectual property, engineering data, design, planning and a whole host of other internal manufacturing data that was decades ahead of them.
Chinese carmakers were a good 50 years behind the rest of the industrialized world at the turn of the millennium. These days, they are roughly only a few years behind, to actually beijg ahead of them in some ways. All while still having some big labor savings. These Western car makers essentially trained their replacements and they did it for that sweet, sweet short term profit, while the Chinese government was playing the long game.
It's quite a bit more complicated than that. Those joint ventures were for traditional cars, and even today Chinese automakers aren't that great at making internal combustion engines. But in EVs, the Chinese didn't get significant help from joint ventures; their EV industry predates foreign involvement (Tesla only set up there in 2018, a decade after BYD already started making their own EVs).
Sure, the Chinese probably picked up a lot of general industrial know-how from foreign investors, but a lot of their EV expertise is also based on figuring things out for themselves, and seizing an opportunity to exploit a new technology and disrupt slow moving incumbents.
Yeah, it was both. The european brands avoided electric cars for a long time, while the chinese pushed hard for them. And because electric motors and car batteries were a new technology, this was a great opportunity for the chinese to pull ahead(everyone started from 0).
And the chinese also used their cooperations and acquisitions(Volvo and Lotus are owned by the chinese brand Geely), in order to improve the conventional car making part production(everything other than the electric engine and batteries). Tesla followed a similar arc. Their motors/batteries are great, the other parts started as bad but they are improving all the time.