It's 2024, we can do better than blurry horribly blown out pictures these days. Check for example https://mapper.acme.com/?ll=34.39719,113.94792&z=15&t=SL&mar... for cleaner shot of the site (zoom in few notches for extra details). Google Maps annoyingly cuts half-way through the factory site.
edit: that ACME mapper image looks to be from mid-2023, in more recent imagery the construction on the east side has been completed.
The thing about that image that amuses me the most is that there is a local grid pattern that isn't aligned north-south, and the factory goes "don't care" and instead smashes itself through everything on a straight cardinal direction alignment.
There is. In fact it's called a "land port" for a reason, the park has a huge freight yard connected to 2 rail lines it's just not shown in this picture because it's shared infrastructure of the industrial park.
Toggle the layer to "Map" and you can find the railway lines easily, although train in the depot looks like a high speed train (huge, long windscreen).
Yep, pretty common for different zoom levels to be different time points. ACME is using plane photography for its high zoom images. You could try zoom.earth for hourly/12hourly satellite imagery.
I'm 100% sure its a photo op. Think about the logistics of the trucks taking spoil away. How can there be one arriving and one leaving at each location at this time: the diggers near instantly fill their entire capacity?
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
A truck like this represents a substantial amount of investment that costs almost the same if its sitting there as it does doing actual work.
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.
Yeah, I have never seen something like that in America in my life. Always plenty of machines sitting around, and every few weeks some guys will hop on them for the day, but other than that they just sit there. It almost looks AI generated how densely packed those are - though I assume that this is real footage.
With China's real estate sector stagnating (because they've built enough housing for future demand to an excess, broadly speaking), all of that capacity is moving towards clean energy manufacturing.
They're building a large carwash facility near me and have taken over a year to get to the point of putting the roofs onto some steel framed sheds. I constantly think of the time when we were able to build the Empire State Building in 13 months.
And what blows my mind is that if I want to rent a tractor with a front loader for some landscaping work it’s hundreds a day. Yet even larger commercial earth moving equipment sits around unused for weeks.
I have, happens around 6 AM. They get all the generators started up, power tools and full power. All the heavy machinery at full throttle. A cacaphonous 6AM salute to the internal combustion engine. Old Zeke fills his truckbed full of rusty nails and drives aggressively around the neighborhood dropping this way and that. Well, not old Zeke nowadays, more like Senor Ramirez Carloz Gonzalez.
Question is, if it's 6 AM at a construction site, and nobody is around to hear it, do they make any noise?
US/German manufacturers just do assembly, they don't manufacture parts, so they only need assembly plants. BYD is a vertically integrated manufacturer. They make everything in-house which helps drive down costs. This huge footprint results in having all those different manufacturing lines under one roof. They depend on no one for finished parts, the only supply chain is raw materials.
I believe outsourcing can be a symptom of not innovating anymore.
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.
> 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.
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.
People are waking up, and to be fair, Tesla really led the way in the US for the last few years because they had no choice(no one would take them seriously). The question is can the West turn the ship around before its too late?
IMO the US really needs to do some house cleaning before anything real gets done. You can't expect the hand to cut itself out. I'm not sure if Trump could do that, TBH. He didn't have a lot of support in Military-Intelligence.
Not entirely correct. Boeing, despite all the bad press, actually reversed course on this recently. 787's wing was made by a supplier, but 777X's wing is actually built in-house, right next to the main factory, starting from carbon fiber fabric.
How much can Boeing do this though? My understanding is in the past they used moving some of their production to a country as leverage to win contracts. They are a company that moved their headquarters to DC because management treats the product as secondary as if they make widgets. Until they reverse that they aren't moving in the right direction.
So the factory accepts iron ore, crude oil, coal, lithium ore, bauxite, monazite, copper ores, rubber, and soy beans at one end and spits out finished cars at the other?
I don't know about elsewhere in the world, but the amount of BYD's I see on the streets of Bangkoks today compared to say two years ago must be an 1000% increase. They are absolutely everywhere.
They have definitively taken over in Thailand and Malaysia. All new cars are Chinese. I've asked one of the Grab drivers about it and it really boils down to cost. The Dolphin is really cheap and good.
I'm curious: Do Chinese cars have the stigma of being crap quality in other countries?
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.
To my knowledge the largest factory in the world is BASF Ludwigshafen (Germany) with 10 km². Here is an aerial photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:LudwigshafenBASF2017-0... Followed by Volkswagen Wolfsburg (also Germany) with 6.5 km². Seems the BYD factory is competing with it for rank #2.
American EV manufacturers should realize that designing aspirational products erodes their growth, even if it means short-term profits. BYD is building practical EVs at affordable prices, not fashion articles.
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.
Effectiveness of an employee measured by how much space he needs / occupies? If you send an employee to sit alone in a warehouse, you've increased his effectiveness by orders of magnitude by your logic.
So much roof space, so little PV. I guess in China they don't do rooftop PV as much because the regulations allow for cheaper installations somewhere on a meadow?
Since most solar panels, charging equipment, inverters and batteries are made in China, I would be very surprised if they did not utilize it on their own buildings, provided that they have sufficient money to fund it.
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.
China has more distributed/rooftop solar than the US, percentage-wise. It's hardly like every big building in the US has rooftop solar, and Zhengzhou is more to the north of the country where there is less incident light.
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.
China has extremely high installation rate for solar water heaters. Personally I have never observed any grid-tie solar electric installations on residential buildings. My travels are largely confined to Fujian province, so perhaps they have caught on in other regions.
they do a lot of rooftop PV in china. maybe not on this one factory but it's extremely common and even mandatory for all new industrial developments in some chinese cities now
Is there a list of the world's largest factories, in a liberal sense of the word? The ones I'm aware of only consider individual structures [0], which excludes industrial plants that span multiple buildings, like this one.
Volkswagen's main factory is also pretty large:
"Spanning more than 6.5 km², the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg is now the largest automotive plant in Europe, employing more than 60,000 people."[0]
It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change.
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.
> It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale
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.
Of course we can motivate ourselves. But they're acting like we did in the 1800s through the mid 1900s. They just build anywhere no matter what. They have no interest in dealing with environmental concerns. The officially released pollution levels in China are mind-boggling and they still do not represent how bad it really is.
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.
The bread and butter of progress is competition and I think a lot of American companies “won” like Boeing or Intel in the 90s and no one else could compete.
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.
> It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change.
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
Western country populations seem to be willfully falling for obvious fossil fuel propaganda over and over again. Future generations will rightfully curse our names. (Including today's children.)
> our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change
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.
Automation is transforming industries, and in marketing, tools like W3rocks can streamline lead generation, similar to how robots enhance coffee production.
They certain made a big bet, in particular the CCP see it as the single opportunity to surpass Japan and German manufacturers.
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.
LA purchased a few BYD e-Buses a few years ago and BYD is still trying to make a bus with a lifespan longer than about 1 month. While L.A. is trying to make the purchase work, most of their other U.S. transportation agency clients have simply demanded refunds.
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.
Albuquerque had a contract with BYD for buses. The first one arrived late and had tons of problems - the range was 1/3 less than contracted, there were broken welds, leaking axles, malfunctioning doors and wheelchair lifts, and brake problems. The second bus wasn't much better. They eventually canceled the contract and bought diesel buses from New Flyer, which was a step backwards, as most (if not all) of our other buses run on natural gas.
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.
My city in Sweden use BYD buses (I think they're pretty much the only option?). My impression is that they've worked pretty well, with more cities buying into them.
The ghost cities are more likely to be cities previously built for mining and other activities that were gradually abandoned by young generations throughout the years. Zhengzhou should be (relatively) fine as a provincial capital as well as a railway center but I'm sure there might be a few high rising abandoned buildings here and there.
The problem with the west is that it’s already developed. Everything in the west is a bit like the European automobile industry, it’s highly refined for what it is and we expect to milk it for some time to come.
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.
strongly disagree. the West has almost no manufacturing capability or labor force (at an affordable rate) at the moment. it's almost unsustainable even for a small business to be paying $20 an hour in some cities let alone run large factories
Define "the west". There was an interesting article here in HN the other day [0] "Almost 10% of South Korea's Workforce Is Now a Robot". China now surpasses all the west-aligned nations in terms of total industrial robots [1], however the west still has the upper-hand in terms of robot to population density ratio.
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.
I think another axis is an underlying cultural difference: balance of collectivism vs individualism. China can say “there will be a factory here” because it’s overall good to have one, even if a few noses are out of joint. In California it’s decades of fights to get a train. The trick to competing is to find the right balance for the next decades. China used to be all-central-planning, which was sluggish and not agile. Now it’s guided by central planning (great for overall alignment) over many years rather than jerky 4 year stints, combined with massively distributed efforts to generate high levels of competition and agility. What is the optimal balance for your country or state?
> however the west still has the upper-hand in terms of robot to population density ratio.
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.
> 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.
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.
Any big grouping can compete if there’s enough will. Look at how eg Russia has rejigged much of its war machine during the Ukraine war. Look at how Ukraine has turned themselves inside out to compete. At some level of pressure, countries transform. How much will it take? Is simple economic pressure enough? Can eg Europe gather enough of its massive educated population to transform?
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.
There is a sense in which China has made a sucker of itself, too. China has some serious internal economic structure issues and it remains to be seen how long those issues and the downstream problems it creates are sustainable.
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.
"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."
Didn't California shut down surfboard blank production? You can't even make traditional surfboards in California anymore. They don't want jobs that produce environmental waste. Not all states are like that.
What does "the west" even means ? You can't find two countries that agree on half of the topics of the day, no matter how small or meaningless the topic is
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
Not with NEPA (and CEQA and friends). The current environmental movements will have to be dismantled since they are extractive rent-seekers on production. Fortunately, a new administration will soon be power so there is an opportunity to remove the roadblocks to America’s future success.
A world with a Chinese hegemony is not going to be pretty, as online DoorDash hammer and sickle communists are about to discover.
west can compete. unlike byd’s, which get bricked all the time without infrastructure to maintain and repair them, west (and japan even more so) build cars that last. this is china we are talking about, the last thing I want is a car made by them… :)
People used to say the same things about things made in Taiwan, then Japan, and then China, for things like electronics and white goods. It was true - until suddenly it wasn't.
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.
As someone from Australia, which hasn't shut its self off from the China EV market. I drive a BYD Dolphin. You should be worried. They are cheaper, and more full-featured than European equivalent. They aren't junk.
Also, they aren't the only big player from China. Australia is soon getting GAC/Aion, Geely, Jaecoo, Leapmotor, Deepal, Xpeng.
There were many terrible electric cars out of China for years. Every province had its own little EV manufacturers. China's car industry is less concentrated than the US, but the big players are winning.
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.)
This can't be a serious take, right? Chinese consumers don't expect much less when it comes to maintenance and repair. And given their 3M+/year vehicle production output, they're not a small player.
Do you have any data about that? I have only heard the opposite from owners and it sounds a lot like the things Americans used to say about Japanese cars prior to getting stomped by them in the 80s.
I have a chinese EV (GMW, not BYD.) I am a very happy owner; huge features for the price. I am not sure i can see buying of a "mainstream" manafacturer again. (My country has no tarrifs/no domestic car building.)
Folks, those buildings can be empty, either as a mind!@#% or just crazy future capacity forecasts that may not be real.
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.
All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average) and maintain/develop car dependency infrastructures.
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".
There is a clear reason why such factories are being built in China and if you are a USA or German citizen, you wouldn't like it.
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.
>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.
For the 1000th time here, even extremely well developed public transport by US standards and various financial punishments for owning cars is simply not enough for people to drop them, the convenience is simply too high.
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.
>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.
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.
I don't think anyone envisions having no cars; public transportation make it so we don't need cars, and other nudges make it so we have fewer cars than we would otherwise have.
> All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average)
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 way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy
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.
World's response to the climate crisis is already dangerously delayed, and we're at a point where we need anything ASAP. We've ran out of time to massively overhaul infrastructure everywhere.
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.
I don't think it's a particularly different timescale to swap from ICE to EV than to drastically reduce car dependence. What makes you think there's a big difference to where swapping to electric cars is easier than avoiding cars?
Believe it or not, but the buses and trains are also being manufactured in China. if you'd visit, you'd see that they have excellent public infrastructure, with multiple redundancies
I’m a bike commuter, all on board for transit, etc. but too much of the world – especially North America – is built around cars exclusively and that’s not changing any time soon because doing so would require things like massive rezoning to avoid people needing to travel such long distances just to function.
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.
I agree that cars are at least double the mass they need to be. The size of cars needed for a school run or to drive to work are generally quite small, but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.
BYD make busses. They have something like a 20% market share in the EU and the number of EV busses in China is mind boggling and was an early sign that China was going to win the EV market:
Why can’t both be done? Bicycles are already cheap, and an electric bike can be purchased under $1000. Not everyone is capable of limiting their commute to the ~10 mile radius an e-bike easily permits. Some of us still need cars, unfortunately. Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move.
Is there some technology that enables high-speed travel and weighs less than a human, which seems to be an important criteria to you?
>Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move.
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.
You might as well wish that the factories produced teleporters. You're putting the cart before the horse. You have to fix the demand side first. I know there's an online demand for public transportation and bikes and if you are in that bubble it can feel like the whole world is with you, but in the real world, most people (obvs not everyone) prefers to have their own car.
I think there's hope since the only thing people like more than their cars is being glued to their phones, and public transport enables you to do that during your commute.
Unfortunately the only places in the world that I know of building new cities are UAE, Saudi, Egypt, China. I don’t think any of those are building for car-less.
A bicycle is not suitable for the 100km trip to see my parents, and the only country that can operate trains at a satisfactory level is Japan (and maybe China, but I don't trust their data).
So no, its either this or a gas car. Both are real solutions that work, today. Changing society from the bottom up is not.
Based on your comment, you've based your identity around something that requires packing the rest of us into traffic like cattle. Many people have died unnecessarily to support this lifestyle. Many more have their time utterly wasted as well. It continues to have drastic negative effects for all life on this planet.
I agree that development shouldn't be chosen based on political beliefs; however, your argument is not without that. I'd ask for you to look into your own biases here.
Do you truly have no individualism without owning a large metal structure and without forcing everyone else to as well? I find that difficult to understand. My individuality is so much more powerful than that.
You might get downvoted a lot, but I feel the exact same way as you do.
Trying to destroy cars is starting to become a political/religious belief.
A lot of people think that people stopped being religious, they dont go to the church.
But 24/7 Internet, TikTok, Youtube Shorts, etc, I think brought the Church to our homes in front of our eyes 24/7, the religion is different and there are many factions, but the obsession with trying to control every part of other people’s lives is starting to comeback.
The people who strongly try to take away other’s freedom to drive cars, eat meat, or so, often like hypocrites support almond milk that is made by mass murder of pollinating bees in california, gazillions worth of water just to grow oats for oatmilk, especially in a world, where in a lot of places, water is considered to become far more scarce in 20 yrs than Crude Oil will be.
Our world has societal problems sure, environmental too, but like always its technology, better, more advanced, much preferred ones, that can fix it, not this obsession with trying to take things away from people.
The internet and being constantly glued to our phones, desks, letting activists indoctrinate people create echo chambers, is leading people to impulsively downvote everyone they disagree with, without any discussion. It has become a religious doctrine, with “sides” to pick, and the apolitical and the agnostic, treated as villains who “support the status quo”.
I hope we can come out of this, what you said about boats and living by the sea, I’ve thought of it too, individualism is a beautiful thing, a human right hard fought across generations, passed on in our societies by our loved ones, who won this for us. I hope our democratic societies can keep it, defend it.
No, the initial goal of this factory is to achieve dominance over the global automotive industry but the ultimate goal is to convert it into a machine that can spit out drones to invade Taiwain, South Korea, and Japan.
I still see memes about how the large government is preventing progress and causing de-industrialisation being pushed on Twitter, usually putting some European countries graphs next to USA graphs and showing how EU performed worse than USA after 2008(I guess that's the year the regulations kicked in), however they never compare China and the USA on these graphs.
Because then the libertarian propaganda turns into communist propaganda.
I’m really surprised that there are people who still think China is really communist, and that the private companies that are succeeding are just stealth communist projects in disguise.
Do you deliberately ignore the fact that China has a mounting problem, not just in economy? And then please point out any other big government economy that works well for the long-run!?
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"
You are comparing a country that was probably less than 5% of China's current population during that peak. And not only is China 17.5% of the world's population, it is also the major manufacturing hub for the majority of the world. 10 times as much coal as the UK's peak is still a tiny number.
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.
Yes, China still uses a metric fuckton of a coal, but they are decarbonizing: every year, the % of energy generated by coal goes down 1%, and renewables go up 1%.
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.
They're making insane progress and they are decarbonizing in terms of their energy mix. Can you and others please stop with never letting china receive any praise for anything? it's so annoying when people seem incapable of pointing to ANYTHING in china and being like "nice". Is there anything positive you'll credit china with in this space or just nitpick?
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.
Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and many other countries turned sour on importing chinese EVs in favour of some kind of protectionism. Most developing countries dont have the infrastucture for EVs. Europe hit BYD with a 17 % tariff (10% being the standard)
Why do I read most tweets as if they are trying to sell me on something extremely urgent that I must know about? As if the thing they are telling me must be known or else I will be left behind? Something about the sentence structure? Anyone else have this feeling? It's why I had to uninstall Twitter in the end, I hate it.
Spoken like a true out of touch professional managerial class person. Regardless of country, your kind just got totally rebuked this past year. If you didn't realize, auto manufacturing was the last major home grown profession where you could have some semblance of stable middle class life. Once that is gone, the hollowing out of the middle class will be complete and there will be no money to transition to your garbage solution that the population clearly does not even want.
Cars only survive as a viable means of transportation due to vast subsidies and a total reorganization of society around them, the most inefficient mode of transport you could imagine. They are not the future of transport, they shouldn't even be the present.
Most of this is land being dug up, we don't know what it will be used for. Could just be holding area for stock, which is not a good thing. Premature to comment on the scale of BYD's factory.
EVs on the battlefield are as of yet untested. That makes the BYD factory at best possible dual use. A bad target for Taiwan and its allies for a host of reasons.
Drones seem to be quite an important facet of the current war in Ukraine and Russia.
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.
Look at a map of Taiwan. Or better, look at it in Google Earth. Taiwan is a narrow island with a mountain range running north-south down the middle. The developed areas are west of the mountains, facing China, in a strip 15 to 30km wide.
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.
Equally, China has enough missiles to blockade Taiwan permanently. There's no reason for them to attempt an amphibious landing or anything insane like that. It's unclear to me what the US response would be in a blockade situation, but Chinese hypersonic missiles do pose a threat to carriers.
This isn't Desert Storm we're talking about here, China is a real threat.
It's 2024, we can do better than blurry horribly blown out pictures these days. Check for example https://mapper.acme.com/?ll=34.39719,113.94792&z=15&t=SL&mar... for cleaner shot of the site (zoom in few notches for extra details). Google Maps annoyingly cuts half-way through the factory site.
edit: that ACME mapper image looks to be from mid-2023, in more recent imagery the construction on the east side has been completed.
The thing about that image that amuses me the most is that there is a local grid pattern that isn't aligned north-south, and the factory goes "don't care" and instead smashes itself through everything on a straight cardinal direction alignment.
Though you can see the same alignment as the factory in town further to the west, with newer streets.
I guess it makes sense to align the factory to this grid, and not to the older grid that followed the fields.
The way Chinese towns are organized is incredible. I'm impressed by this map.
No freight train connection to the factory??
There is. In fact it's called a "land port" for a reason, the park has a huge freight yard connected to 2 rail lines it's just not shown in this picture because it's shared infrastructure of the industrial park.
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Toggle the layer to "Map" and you can find the railway lines easily, although train in the depot looks like a high speed train (huge, long windscreen).
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When you zoom out far enough in ACME mapper, the factory disappears. (I'm guessing that's an older image.)
Yep, pretty common for different zoom levels to be different time points. ACME is using plane photography for its high zoom images. You could try zoom.earth for hourly/12hourly satellite imagery.
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The number of construction vehicles doing something versus sitting around waiting for labor in that shot is impressive.
I'm 100% sure its a photo op. Think about the logistics of the trucks taking spoil away. How can there be one arriving and one leaving at each location at this time: the diggers near instantly fill their entire capacity?
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
A truck like this represents a substantial amount of investment that costs almost the same if its sitting there as it does doing actual work.
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.
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Yeah, I have never seen something like that in America in my life. Always plenty of machines sitting around, and every few weeks some guys will hop on them for the day, but other than that they just sit there. It almost looks AI generated how densely packed those are - though I assume that this is real footage.
With China's real estate sector stagnating (because they've built enough housing for future demand to an excess, broadly speaking), all of that capacity is moving towards clean energy manufacturing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
https://thediplomat.com/2024/04/how-china-became-the-worlds-...
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They're building a large carwash facility near me and have taken over a year to get to the point of putting the roofs onto some steel framed sheds. I constantly think of the time when we were able to build the Empire State Building in 13 months.
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And what blows my mind is that if I want to rent a tractor with a front loader for some landscaping work it’s hundreds a day. Yet even larger commercial earth moving equipment sits around unused for weeks.
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I have, happens around 6 AM. They get all the generators started up, power tools and full power. All the heavy machinery at full throttle. A cacaphonous 6AM salute to the internal combustion engine. Old Zeke fills his truckbed full of rusty nails and drives aggressively around the neighborhood dropping this way and that. Well, not old Zeke nowadays, more like Senor Ramirez Carloz Gonzalez.
Question is, if it's 6 AM at a construction site, and nobody is around to hear it, do they make any noise?
It does seem to have an AI look to it. The resolution is pretty poor.
They don't have time to waste, they have to get as much cheap stuff out as possible before further tariffs.
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10% of workers are unionized today, vs. 30+% 1940-1960. Surely this isn’t the reason.
I'm sure that's the one and only reason
Yeah, to hell with living wages and working hours that allow a life outside of work.
US/German manufacturers just do assembly, they don't manufacture parts, so they only need assembly plants. BYD is a vertically integrated manufacturer. They make everything in-house which helps drive down costs. This huge footprint results in having all those different manufacturing lines under one roof. They depend on no one for finished parts, the only supply chain is raw materials.
I believe outsourcing can be a symptom of not innovating anymore.
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.
> 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.
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.
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I think its a symptom of economies of scale being able to go too far. Cost per unit seems to keep going down basically infinitely and it is a problem.
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.
Except when you've been working with suppliers who have already been iterating on <insert widget> for years in a competitive environment.
The amount of innovation in the automobile industry is staggering when you think of its history more holistically.
People are waking up, and to be fair, Tesla really led the way in the US for the last few years because they had no choice(no one would take them seriously). The question is can the West turn the ship around before its too late?
Depends if we keep the CHIPS act and the IRA. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-ira-...
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IMO the US really needs to do some house cleaning before anything real gets done. You can't expect the hand to cut itself out. I'm not sure if Trump could do that, TBH. He didn't have a lot of support in Military-Intelligence.
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too late for what??
too late relative to what?
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When Trump ups everything from China by 100% I guess US would be able to make something with profit?
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Not entirely correct. Boeing, despite all the bad press, actually reversed course on this recently. 787's wing was made by a supplier, but 777X's wing is actually built in-house, right next to the main factory, starting from carbon fiber fabric.
How much can Boeing do this though? My understanding is in the past they used moving some of their production to a country as leverage to win contracts. They are a company that moved their headquarters to DC because management treats the product as secondary as if they make widgets. Until they reverse that they aren't moving in the right direction.
Wasn’t always that way. Ford’s River Rouge plant took iron ore in one end, and rolled automobiles out the other end.
Don't forget USA auto companies also outsource their design work, CAD, etc. My understanding is that TATA used to have a whole floor at Chrysler.
So the factory accepts iron ore, crude oil, coal, lithium ore, bauxite, monazite, copper ores, rubber, and soy beans at one end and spits out finished cars at the other?
They don't even outsource their nylon zip ties?
the only supply chain is raw materials
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.
They, BYD, have their own semiconductor R&D and manufacturing subsidiary called BYD semiconductor.
EDIT: Seems like it is a division, so not a spin-off.
Just like Ford used to do.
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I don't know about elsewhere in the world, but the amount of BYD's I see on the streets of Bangkoks today compared to say two years ago must be an 1000% increase. They are absolutely everywhere.
Largest EV manufacturer in the world, of course you would see them everywhere.
My point was more in how fast it has gone from 0 to every other car I see in a very short time.
They have definitively taken over in Thailand and Malaysia. All new cars are Chinese. I've asked one of the Grab drivers about it and it really boils down to cost. The Dolphin is really cheap and good.
Same here in Brazil. Even in the countryside.
I'm curious: Do Chinese cars have the stigma of being crap quality in other countries?
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.
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Yep even in Oakland California where they don’t sell BYD cars, they recently replaced all the school busses with BYD electric.
https://thedriven.io/2024/09/04/the-biggest-electric-school-...
They aren’t everywhere yet here in the United States. The only one I’ve seen so far was a public bus in a rural town.
You won't see them in the US due to punitive tariffs.
The scale is just insane .. hard to comprehend a 3km/2mi wide factory.
To my knowledge the largest factory in the world is BASF Ludwigshafen (Germany) with 10 km². Here is an aerial photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:LudwigshafenBASF2017-0... Followed by Volkswagen Wolfsburg (also Germany) with 6.5 km². Seems the BYD factory is competing with it for rank #2.
I guess it depends on what qualifies as a factory. Azovstal in Mariupol is around 11 km^2 and certainly isn’t the largest in the world.
I don't think BASF really counts, it's more of a factorio district and not one single insanely large building.
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It will be 50 sq. km by the time the extension is finished [1].
[1] https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1859149340897628545
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BYD 900k employees vs Tesla 122k
https://cnevpost.com/2024/09/13/byd-workforce-exceeds-900000...
They make batteries, regular cars and hybrids and the cost of labor is lower
American EV manufacturers should realize that designing aspirational products erodes their growth, even if it means short-term profits. BYD is building practical EVs at affordable prices, not fashion articles.
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.
Doesn't Tesla make batteries and 51% of its cars in China [1]?
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/715427/tesla-ev-production-shangh...
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they're also one of the top suppliers for public transit busses.
So you're saying that since they have 24x the size of factory (pre-expansion), with just 5.3x the people, that Chinese workers are 4.52x as effective?
Effectiveness of an employee measured by how much space he needs / occupies? If you send an employee to sit alone in a warehouse, you've increased his effectiveness by orders of magnitude by your logic.
Viewable link: https://nitter.poast.org/taylorogan/status/18591462425191672...
So much roof space, so little PV. I guess in China they don't do rooftop PV as much because the regulations allow for cheaper installations somewhere on a meadow?
Since most solar panels, charging equipment, inverters and batteries are made in China, I would be very surprised if they did not utilize it on their own buildings, provided that they have sufficient money to fund it.
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.
China has more distributed/rooftop solar than the US, percentage-wise. It's hardly like every big building in the US has rooftop solar, and Zhengzhou is more to the north of the country where there is less incident light.
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.
China has extremely high installation rate for solar water heaters. Personally I have never observed any grid-tie solar electric installations on residential buildings. My travels are largely confined to Fujian province, so perhaps they have caught on in other regions.
I wonder if (partially) they use discharge current from one batch of batteries to charge the next?
they do a lot of rooftop PV in china. maybe not on this one factory but it's extremely common and even mandatory for all new industrial developments in some chinese cities now
Is there a list of the world's largest factories, in a liberal sense of the word? The ones I'm aware of only consider individual structures [0], which excludes industrial plants that span multiple buildings, like this one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings
One of the old classics in this genre of largest factories, BASF, https://www.basf.com/jp/en/who-we-are/organization/locations...
Volkswagen's main factory is also pretty large: "Spanning more than 6.5 km², the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg is now the largest automotive plant in Europe, employing more than 60,000 people."[0]
[0]: https://www.volkswagen.de/de/marke-und-erlebnis/volkswagen-e...
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Which if this BYD site is 2x2 miles for ~5sq km, BASF is twice as large at 10sq km! Wow
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Wild, fascinating, frightening.
It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change.
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.
> It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale
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.
Of course we can motivate ourselves. But they're acting like we did in the 1800s through the mid 1900s. They just build anywhere no matter what. They have no interest in dealing with environmental concerns. The officially released pollution levels in China are mind-boggling and they still do not represent how bad it really is.
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.
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The bread and butter of progress is competition and I think a lot of American companies “won” like Boeing or Intel in the 90s and no one else could compete.
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.
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> It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change.
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
Western country populations seem to be willfully falling for obvious fossil fuel propaganda over and over again. Future generations will rightfully curse our names. (Including today's children.)
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> our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change
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.
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Frightening?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...
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The first thing that came to mind with the word "frightening" was a battery fire there.
frightening? yeah you should be
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Automation is transforming industries, and in marketing, tools like W3rocks can streamline lead generation, similar to how robots enhance coffee production.
For a tech website HN has very little about the Chinese insane scale projects. There is so much wildly amusing and inspiring footage online.
I wonder if China could get into an EV bubble like with the real-estate.
They certain made a big bet, in particular the CCP see it as the single opportunity to surpass Japan and German manufacturers.
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.
LA purchased a few BYD e-Buses a few years ago and BYD is still trying to make a bus with a lifespan longer than about 1 month. While L.A. is trying to make the purchase work, most of their other U.S. transportation agency clients have simply demanded refunds.
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.
Albuquerque had a contract with BYD for buses. The first one arrived late and had tons of problems - the range was 1/3 less than contracted, there were broken welds, leaking axles, malfunctioning doors and wheelchair lifts, and brake problems. The second bus wasn't much better. They eventually canceled the contract and bought diesel buses from New Flyer, which was a step backwards, as most (if not all) of our other buses run on natural gas.
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.
My city in Sweden use BYD buses (I think they're pretty much the only option?). My impression is that they've worked pretty well, with more cities buying into them.
Copenhagen has Man, Mercedes and Yutong electric buses, I think.
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If you search Zhengzhou many of the results from mainstream media were about ghost cities
The rest are about Foxconn's factory.
This BYD factory were build further down south of downtown.
The ghost cities are more likely to be cities previously built for mining and other activities that were gradually abandoned by young generations throughout the years. Zhengzhou should be (relatively) fine as a provincial capital as well as a railway center but I'm sure there might be a few high rising abandoned buildings here and there.
"western" mainstream media
This feels very paperclip maximization
Twitter links no longer load at all on my iPhone. Can someone post an archive link or something?
You can replace all twitter.com (or x.com) links with xcancel.com:
https://xcancel.com/taylorogan/status/1859146242519167249
Thanks, that worked great. Crazy photos.
Can the west compete?
The problem with the west is that it’s already developed. Everything in the west is a bit like the European automobile industry, it’s highly refined for what it is and we expect to milk it for some time to come.
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.
strongly disagree. the West has almost no manufacturing capability or labor force (at an affordable rate) at the moment. it's almost unsustainable even for a small business to be paying $20 an hour in some cities let alone run large factories
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Define "the west". There was an interesting article here in HN the other day [0] "Almost 10% of South Korea's Workforce Is Now a Robot". China now surpasses all the west-aligned nations in terms of total industrial robots [1], however the west still has the upper-hand in terms of robot to population density ratio.
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://www.statista.com/chart/31337/new-installations-of-in...
I think another axis is an underlying cultural difference: balance of collectivism vs individualism. China can say “there will be a factory here” because it’s overall good to have one, even if a few noses are out of joint. In California it’s decades of fights to get a train. The trick to competing is to find the right balance for the next decades. China used to be all-central-planning, which was sluggish and not agile. Now it’s guided by central planning (great for overall alignment) over many years rather than jerky 4 year stints, combined with massively distributed efforts to generate high levels of competition and agility. What is the optimal balance for your country or state?
Isn't robot density per 10,000 workers the standard metric used by the International Federation of Robotics?
https://x.com/orikron/status/1859657159338025418?t=9J4ASQP_M...
> however the west still has the upper-hand in terms of robot to population density ratio.
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.
> 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.
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.
Depends if the Chinese need a market to export to.
The main issue with china is a reliance on exports and a declining population...
All work and productivity is ultimately an enabler of consumption.
Any big grouping can compete if there’s enough will. Look at how eg Russia has rejigged much of its war machine during the Ukraine war. Look at how Ukraine has turned themselves inside out to compete. At some level of pressure, countries transform. How much will it take? Is simple economic pressure enough? Can eg Europe gather enough of its massive educated population to transform?
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.
There is a sense in which China has made a sucker of itself, too. China has some serious internal economic structure issues and it remains to be seen how long those issues and the downstream problems it creates are sustainable.
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.
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I don't believe so anymore - at least not in California.
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."
Didn't California shut down surfboard blank production? You can't even make traditional surfboards in California anymore. They don't want jobs that produce environmental waste. Not all states are like that.
What does "the west" even means ? You can't find two countries that agree on half of the topics of the day, no matter how small or meaningless the topic is
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...
Not with NEPA (and CEQA and friends). The current environmental movements will have to be dismantled since they are extractive rent-seekers on production. Fortunately, a new administration will soon be power so there is an opportunity to remove the roadblocks to America’s future success.
A world with a Chinese hegemony is not going to be pretty, as online DoorDash hammer and sickle communists are about to discover.
No. Nixon et al handed us to CCP whole. But hey, cheap TVs, clothes and what not.
west can compete. unlike byd’s, which get bricked all the time without infrastructure to maintain and repair them, west (and japan even more so) build cars that last. this is china we are talking about, the last thing I want is a car made by them… :)
People used to say the same things about things made in Taiwan, then Japan, and then China, for things like electronics and white goods. It was true - until suddenly it wasn't.
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.
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As someone from Australia, which hasn't shut its self off from the China EV market. I drive a BYD Dolphin. You should be worried. They are cheaper, and more full-featured than European equivalent. They aren't junk.
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...
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There were many terrible electric cars out of China for years. Every province had its own little EV manufacturers. China's car industry is less concentrated than the US, but the big players are winning.
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.)
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This can't be a serious take, right? Chinese consumers don't expect much less when it comes to maintenance and repair. And given their 3M+/year vehicle production output, they're not a small player.
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Do you have any data about that? I have only heard the opposite from owners and it sounds a lot like the things Americans used to say about Japanese cars prior to getting stomped by them in the 80s.
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I have a chinese EV (GMW, not BYD.) I am a very happy owner; huge features for the price. I am not sure i can see buying of a "mainstream" manafacturer again. (My country has no tarrifs/no domestic car building.)
your iPhone is manufactured in China :). your view is very outdated, or maybe even willfully. I'm sure they're plenty capable
Looks like a picture of a motherboard
Folks, those buildings can be empty, either as a mind!@#% or just crazy future capacity forecasts that may not be real.
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.
Why bother discussing anything with this sort of attitude? Just shut the site down.
The power of centralized planning.
All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average) and maintain/develop car dependency infrastructures.
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".
There is a clear reason why such factories are being built in China and if you are a USA or German citizen, you wouldn't like it.
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.
0 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rx2drd8x8o
>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.
Pakistan has better geography for solar.
How is the power being generated for all this manufacturing capacity?
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For the 1000th time here, even extremely well developed public transport by US standards and various financial punishments for owning cars is simply not enough for people to drop them, the convenience is simply too high.
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.
>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.
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.
I don't think anyone envisions having no cars; public transportation make it so we don't need cars, and other nudges make it so we have fewer cars than we would otherwise have.
> All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average)
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 way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy
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.
It's not that expensive to put down a bike lane.
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World's response to the climate crisis is already dangerously delayed, and we're at a point where we need anything ASAP. We've ran out of time to massively overhaul infrastructure everywhere.
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.
I don't think it's a particularly different timescale to swap from ICE to EV than to drastically reduce car dependence. What makes you think there's a big difference to where swapping to electric cars is easier than avoiding cars?
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Believe it or not, but the buses and trains are also being manufactured in China. if you'd visit, you'd see that they have excellent public infrastructure, with multiple redundancies
There is a downside.
You need to show your identity card to buy a ticket.
(or use an app which does this for you.)
I’m a bike commuter, all on board for transit, etc. but too much of the world – especially North America – is built around cars exclusively and that’s not changing any time soon because doing so would require things like massive rezoning to avoid people needing to travel such long distances just to function.
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.
I agree that cars are at least double the mass they need to be. The size of cars needed for a school run or to drive to work are generally quite small, but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.
> but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.
This is the reality in United States, but not in most of the world.
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BYD make busses. They have something like a 20% market share in the EU and the number of EV busses in China is mind boggling and was an early sign that China was going to win the EV market:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231206-climate-change-h...
BYD also have some kind of monorail product!
Why can’t both be done? Bicycles are already cheap, and an electric bike can be purchased under $1000. Not everyone is capable of limiting their commute to the ~10 mile radius an e-bike easily permits. Some of us still need cars, unfortunately. Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move.
Is there some technology that enables high-speed travel and weighs less than a human, which seems to be an important criteria to you?
In Japan electric bikes were relatively cheap as you say but in Canada, a bike to carry my family costs more than 5-6k, closer to 10k.
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.
>Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move.
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.
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Not sure about the weights-less-than-human part, but definitely bikes in trains
You might as well wish that the factories produced teleporters. You're putting the cart before the horse. You have to fix the demand side first. I know there's an online demand for public transportation and bikes and if you are in that bubble it can feel like the whole world is with you, but in the real world, most people (obvs not everyone) prefers to have their own car.
I think there's hope since the only thing people like more than their cars is being glued to their phones, and public transport enables you to do that during your commute.
Unfortunately the only places in the world that I know of building new cities are UAE, Saudi, Egypt, China. I don’t think any of those are building for car-less.
Saudi Arabia's "The Line" is car-free.
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A bicycle is not suitable for the 100km trip to see my parents, and the only country that can operate trains at a satisfactory level is Japan (and maybe China, but I don't trust their data).
So no, its either this or a gas car. Both are real solutions that work, today. Changing society from the bottom up is not.
or a bus.
But then again it's amazing how we ignore the infrastructure costs of building and maintaining the roads to run the cars everywhere.
Next weigh up your house, get ashamed, tear it down and live in a tent.
Sounds swell. But people like cars. Not realistic.
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Based on your comment, you've based your identity around something that requires packing the rest of us into traffic like cattle. Many people have died unnecessarily to support this lifestyle. Many more have their time utterly wasted as well. It continues to have drastic negative effects for all life on this planet.
I agree that development shouldn't be chosen based on political beliefs; however, your argument is not without that. I'd ask for you to look into your own biases here.
Do you truly have no individualism without owning a large metal structure and without forcing everyone else to as well? I find that difficult to understand. My individuality is so much more powerful than that.
You might get downvoted a lot, but I feel the exact same way as you do. Trying to destroy cars is starting to become a political/religious belief.
A lot of people think that people stopped being religious, they dont go to the church. But 24/7 Internet, TikTok, Youtube Shorts, etc, I think brought the Church to our homes in front of our eyes 24/7, the religion is different and there are many factions, but the obsession with trying to control every part of other people’s lives is starting to comeback.
The people who strongly try to take away other’s freedom to drive cars, eat meat, or so, often like hypocrites support almond milk that is made by mass murder of pollinating bees in california, gazillions worth of water just to grow oats for oatmilk, especially in a world, where in a lot of places, water is considered to become far more scarce in 20 yrs than Crude Oil will be.
Our world has societal problems sure, environmental too, but like always its technology, better, more advanced, much preferred ones, that can fix it, not this obsession with trying to take things away from people.
The internet and being constantly glued to our phones, desks, letting activists indoctrinate people create echo chambers, is leading people to impulsively downvote everyone they disagree with, without any discussion. It has become a religious doctrine, with “sides” to pick, and the apolitical and the agnostic, treated as villains who “support the status quo”.
I hope we can come out of this, what you said about boats and living by the sea, I’ve thought of it too, individualism is a beautiful thing, a human right hard fought across generations, passed on in our societies by our loved ones, who won this for us. I hope our democratic societies can keep it, defend it.
No, the initial goal of this factory is to achieve dominance over the global automotive industry but the ultimate goal is to convert it into a machine that can spit out drones to invade Taiwain, South Korea, and Japan.
Source? Zhengzhou doesn’t seem like where you’d put a factory you want to protect from the combined forces of Japan, Korea and America.
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Are you a Russian bot account?
I still see memes about how the large government is preventing progress and causing de-industrialisation being pushed on Twitter, usually putting some European countries graphs next to USA graphs and showing how EU performed worse than USA after 2008(I guess that's the year the regulations kicked in), however they never compare China and the USA on these graphs.
Because then the libertarian propaganda turns into communist propaganda.
I’m really surprised that there are people who still think China is really communist, and that the private companies that are succeeding are just stealth communist projects in disguise.
Do you deliberately ignore the fact that China has a mounting problem, not just in economy? And then please point out any other big government economy that works well for the long-run!?
I just got rickrolled into X.
Just wait till Trump hits 'em with tariffs. That'll fix 'em --- NOT!
China is rapidly de-carbonizing and leaving the West behind.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...
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"
You are comparing a country that was probably less than 5% of China's current population during that peak. And not only is China 17.5% of the world's population, it is also the major manufacturing hub for the majority of the world. 10 times as much coal as the UK's peak is still a tiny number.
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.
Yes, China still uses a metric fuckton of a coal, but they are decarbonizing: every year, the % of energy generated by coal goes down 1%, and renewables go up 1%.
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.
Also please stop comparing absolute numbers between countries with more than an order of magnitude population difference.
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https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/china-continues-to-le...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/18/climate/climate-china-solar-w...
They're making insane progress and they are decarbonizing in terms of their energy mix. Can you and others please stop with never letting china receive any praise for anything? it's so annoying when people seem incapable of pointing to ANYTHING in china and being like "nice". Is there anything positive you'll credit china with in this space or just nitpick?
cool now compare the population difference.
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.
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The 100% tariffs are already in place under the Biden administration. Trump only needs to prevent a Mexico manufacturing loophole.
However, BYD still has the entire rest of the world to sell to. They will be fine.
Yes, BYD 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.
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Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and many other countries turned sour on importing chinese EVs in favour of some kind of protectionism. Most developing countries dont have the infrastucture for EVs. Europe hit BYD with a 17 % tariff (10% being the standard)
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Why do I read most tweets as if they are trying to sell me on something extremely urgent that I must know about? As if the thing they are telling me must be known or else I will be left behind? Something about the sentence structure? Anyone else have this feeling? It's why I had to uninstall Twitter in the end, I hate it.
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Spoken like a true out of touch professional managerial class person. Regardless of country, your kind just got totally rebuked this past year. If you didn't realize, auto manufacturing was the last major home grown profession where you could have some semblance of stable middle class life. Once that is gone, the hollowing out of the middle class will be complete and there will be no money to transition to your garbage solution that the population clearly does not even want.
Cars only survive as a viable means of transportation due to vast subsidies and a total reorganization of society around them, the most inefficient mode of transport you could imagine. They are not the future of transport, they shouldn't even be the present.
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Thanks, I hate it.
What is BYD?
Chinese car manufacturer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Auto
Factory square footage is the new crowd sizes. Tell your friends.
Most of this is land being dug up, we don't know what it will be used for. Could just be holding area for stock, which is not a good thing. Premature to comment on the scale of BYD's factory.
I wonder if they built that factory to be resistant to bombing and how much air defense they plan to put around it when they take Taiwan.
I also wonder how fast it can be converted to spit out drones.
EVs on the battlefield are as of yet untested. That makes the BYD factory at best possible dual use. A bad target for Taiwan and its allies for a host of reasons.
In past wars factories making steel pots made helmets. I can definitely imagine an ev plant making drones.
Drones seem to be quite an important facet of the current war in Ukraine and Russia.
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.
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They won’t be able to take Taiwan. Taiwan has enough missiles to wipe out China’s navy 10x over before the US steps in with our navy
Look at a map of Taiwan. Or better, look at it in Google Earth. Taiwan is a narrow island with a mountain range running north-south down the middle. The developed areas are west of the mountains, facing China, in a strip 15 to 30km wide.
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.
Equally, China has enough missiles to blockade Taiwan permanently. There's no reason for them to attempt an amphibious landing or anything insane like that. It's unclear to me what the US response would be in a blockade situation, but Chinese hypersonic missiles do pose a threat to carriers.
This isn't Desert Storm we're talking about here, China is a real threat.