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.
EVs are easily.
They are considerably less complicated than ICE cars. And since they've been building iPhones and Playstations and TVs for a couple of decades now, they have the expertise to manufacture electrical components which is where they have learned about the E in EVs.
This the real truth. Anyone can make a BEV. It implies nothing when someone does. European car makers can do so if they wanted to. The problem is that people don't want BEVs. They're just too expensive and limiting.