Comment by Animats
15 hours ago
The US is falling way behind in electric vehicles. If BYD could sell in the US, the US auto industry would be crushed.[1]
What went wrong is that 1) Tesla never made a low-end vehicle, despite announcements, and 2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product, resulting in the overpowered electric Hummer 2 and F-150 pickups with high price tags. The only US electric vehicle with comparable prices in electric and gasoline versions is the Ford Transit.
BYD says that their strategy for now is to dominate in every country that does not have its own auto industry. Worry about the left-behind countries later.
BYD did it by 1) getting lithium-iron batteries to be cheaper, safer, and faster-charging, although heavier than lithium-ion, 2) integrating rear wheels, differential, axle, and motor into an "e-axle" unit that's the entire mechanical part of the power train, and 3) building really big auto plants in China.
Next step is to get solid state batteries into volume production, and build a new factory bigger than San Francisco.
I think one of the biggest problems in the United States is the misallocation of ambitious people. The highly educated and ambitious people see finance, government, tech, and corporate executive tracks, as the way to convert their energies into social status.
Even startups these days seem to be a case of too many chiefs, not enough Indians.
When Elon gets excited about displacing his engineers on a whim with H1Bs, why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?
And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc. Or even given out million dollar scholarships for the very top students.
And he still would've been worth over 250 billion easily.
Instead he chose to buy the president and start "optimising" the government with AI.
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> (...) why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?
To that dimension I would add ethics as well. It's very hard to justify working for the likes of Tesla when being mindful of the attitude the company and company representatives have with regards to basic issues ranging from workers rights to totalitarianism.
I mean, that's one way to get Indians!
I think the bigger problem is we filter for conmen. You can become a billionaire for vaporware and are less likely to if you actually ship something.
There are plenty of smart people who are highly passionate about things other than money. The problem is a large portion aren't at top name universities and doing don't have the connections. Problem is, they spent all their time learning their craft and not how to market their ideas.
I disagree that it's just because those jobs pay well. Look at what people are investing in and how it works. We throw tons of money at obviously bad ideas, obvious cons, and anyone that took a semester at Stanford. There are plenty of Bitcoin billionaires! There's tons who have made riches off the VR hype wave before that.
I agree that we put too much focus on finance and the like but I think more importantly we have a system where you can get ultra wealthy for producing vaporware. It's much easier to build hype than build a product. You still get people who become millionaires & billionaires by shipping things, but we created a system where we reward conmen. Ultimately, the con is easier than the actual job.
There's a lot of that tech can do but let's be honest, our industry has capitalized on the boom and bust cycle and accelerated it. We're not the only ones, but we're a big player and it's easier to hold our own community accountable than get others to change.
Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers. And all we cared about is writing messenger apps. Totally missed the boat on building things, like houses, boats, and most of all new weird things we don't even have a concept for.
Agreed, and this is a somewhat recent phenomenon (see wtf happened in 1971)
For example, we have 100+ drone startups in the United States. But our overall drone production capacity (hammers in Civ) hasn't actually increased. We just have 100 companies buying grey market from Vietnam and Indonesia, many of which came from China originally.
The way the system should work is if you want to do a drone startup, you need to build a drone factory. That's what the money is for.
If the startup fails, maybe the market leader buys the factory for cheap. This is how the automobile industry was in the United States - a bunch of those companies went bust, but the factories were often kept online by the winners.
Watching nearly the entire software-financial complex burn to the ground when the vaunted "moats" dry up is going to be a hell of a sight. All this AI hype is just going to end up commodifying the very thing that the entire industry is built on: management of processes.
Places that understand that physical production cannot be abstracted forever will prevail.
The problem is that things like houses and boats became political tokens and/or don't have the same profit scaling as software. Housing is mostly restricted by political opposition that made it very hard or even illegal to build much. Building ships is labor intensive which is expensive here, but AFAIK at least construction of navy ships has become a bargaining ship that gets moved around to support senators rather than being allocated to the most efficient place. In general it also seems like unions in the US are somehow more of a problem than in Europe or at least Germany where I grew up. They seem less powerful here but somehow less reasonable.
> Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers.
I think the problem is more nuanced than that. The US was effectively "the world's managers", in the sense that their economic might, entrepreneur culture, and push for globalization resulted in a corporate structure where the ownership and executive levels were US whereas non-critical business domains reflected the local workforce, whether it was the US or not.
This setup worked great while the US dominated the world's economy and influenced their allies and trading partners to actively engage in globalization.
Now that Trump is pushing for isolationism, of course things change.
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Andrew Yang launched a presidential campaign based on this idea, he wrote a book:
“Smart People Should Build Things”
Can you demonstrate that this misallocation is worse in the US than it is in other countries?
They go where it's feasible to go. As long as regulation hamstrings industries, it'd be idiotic to build there. Ambitious people just want everyone else to get out of their way so they (I) can build stuff - and they'll go where there's less resistance.
Oh, there's a "tax credit" to make it easier? Sounds like more paperwork & friction. No thanks!
That's one reason Tech is such an attactor. Low barrier to entry.
Because compensation?
>2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product, resulting in the overpowered electric Hummer 2 and F-150 pickups with high price tags
They had to in order to build the manufacturing capacity without literally bankrupting themselves. As GM has shown, once they had the expertise and manufacturing capabilities, they could quickly move downmarket. By all accounts GM's entry into the space has been a raging success, moving downmarket with the Equinox being available for as low as $27,500.
They obviously aren't to Tesla level sales numbers yet, but they're growing rapidly and I would not count them out of the fight.
https://insideevs.com/news/746177/general-motors-record-2024...
- "BYD did it by"
Also the many systemic, industry-wide factors discussed last week in
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692677 ("America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back (molsonhart.com)" — 1010 comments)
I agree with the gist of that piece; focusing on specific engineering choices (important as they are) is missing the forest for a particularly interesting tree. Any American EV maker is heavily disadvantaged right now, no matter how clever they are.
The US automakers lost the plot a long time ago, and have just been sucking out money without innovation or improvement since.
When California and the EPA tried to legislate lower emissions 9 years into the future, the US automakers sued to block saying it was impossible. Japanese automakers were already selling vehicles that met those standards.
When they badly, badly screw up, they just get bailed out with public funds and then go on to pay execs tens of millions of dollars a year and fat bonuses. Guaranteed profits no matter what made them lazy and uncompetitive.
They’re all dying
GM and Chrysler went bankrupt and were partially bailed out, the CEOs were replaced and the Government took a stake in the companies, which eventually paid off.
> When they badly, badly screw up, they just get bailed out with public funds
When this happens, I think it's only fair that the bailed-out company becomes publicly owned. If I'm forced to invest in a company with my tax dollars, then I damn well better be treated as an investor. Where are my shares? Where are my dividends?
When the USG bailed out banks via TARP during the 2008 financial crisis, it did so by buying shares in those companies. It later sold those shares for a $30.5 billion profit.
If GMC had been “publically owned” it would have been gutted for profits (kickbacks) by its bureaucracy and politicians and been long dead by at least a decade. Bureaucrats are not good at running companies and private companies should not be providing public services (prisons, toll roads). I don't know why Americans have become so unpragmatic and either all in on “government doing everything” or “private corps doing everything” when life is never ever that simple.
There also is the chicken tax which has been protecting US automakers in the pickup truck space which has lead to then leaning much more into that. Together with absurd CAFE rules that benefit huge cars and more beneficial tax write-off rules for vehicles over 3.5t regulation has lead to US automakers focusing on cars that are absurd by international standards.
BYD's allowed to sell in Europe. They're not crushing the market here. They're not substantially cheaper, or better for what they offer for the price compared to other manufacturers.
Within only a few months I see more Chinese Electric cars than Tesla (or us cars generally) on swiss streets.
Depending on what you are looking for they are WAY cheaper than comparable cars.
VW is selling more EVs in Europe than BYD.
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No way I'd trust them. When you crash them or they have a battery fault, the doors lock you inside before the battery catches fire. Many videos of this happening inside China with one recent event in the West.
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EU import taxes designed to make them less cheap than local cars do that.
China has one of the least free trade regimes in the world, their currency controls alone amount to potentially more than Euro tariffs on cars and that’s just one part of their governmental stacking of the deck for their manufacturers.
I think it’s easy to look at the outputs of their industries and compare them extremely favorably to the outputs elsewhere, especially in EV.
But once you start comparing tariff adjusted pricing it gets much trickier much faster.
The EU has imposed tariffs and levies on BYD, totaling 27% [1].
[1] https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/chinese-e...
BYD could slash european prices by quite a bit. They price them competitively to take advantage of the margin. The increase in price compared to their domestic MSRP is pretty wild, 2x in some cases. In a race to the bottom, they will win.
You're right, but comparing Switzerland to America... You need a car to live in 90% of the USA. That said, talking only about specs or prices is pretty reductionist. If anyone on this forum could forecast car sales based on pre-delivery marketing, you know, become a billionaire investor.
What went wrong is that the federal government didn't build or legislate a national charging infrastructure to match the scale of the interstate highway system.
They could have strong-armed the states into it with a combination of funding the construction and the way they mandated the 21 drinking age: by threatening to withhold highway funds.
They definitely tried... $7.5 Billion worth. It's on pause now :-(
https://www.govtech.com/transportation/federal-funding-for-e...
And how many stations did that yield?
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> They could have strong-armed the states into it with a combination of funding the construction and the way they mandated the 21 drinking age: by threatening to withhold highway funds.
Yea let's give the federal government more power. That's going so well right now.
> Yea let's give the federal government more power. That's going so well right now.
Investing on a nation-wide infrastructure grid that fundamentally changes the nation's energy independence is hardly a reason to mindlessly parrot state rights cliches.
The current issue is the president ignoring legal limits of his power and breaking laws right and left. While his party cheers on.
While useful parts of the federal goverment are destroyed, because they dont serve ultra rich.
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Isn't this lack of forward thinking somewhat the general problem now?
From an EU perspective the world as it has existed in the living memory is a world shaped by decisive US-actions. The way EVs have been approached were anything but that. Arguably neither did Germany, because of the way their politicians are entangled with the car manufacturers.
Germany actively hampered it by promoting diesel as THE greeen fuel.
The Chevy Spark EV is an incredible vehicle and has been my around town go kart for the past 7 years. Cost me $11k (!!) as an off lease purchase.
I adored my Spark EV til it sadly died (fairly scarily, on a highway access road) one day. Chevy was never able to repair it and ultimately gave me a nice payout after paying for a rental for me for nearly a year.
But if you sold the Spark EV for 20k today with like 120mi of range, it would be perfect and would satisfy all my needs 99% of the time. Even mine (13k all in) was great here in LA with ~60mi of range. I loved how small and easy to park it was without feeling cramped to me at all. If it had CarPlay I'd've said it was the perfect car haha.
It's a shame they haven't rebooted it yet as a pure EV. It's right there in the name!
You're probably right about BYD, most people only see price and whether it's reputation is at least "ok". I personally will never buy that big of a purchase from a Chinese company until CCP is no longer in charge.
> dominate in every country that does not have its own auto industry.
That's because they plan to have a small number of huge factories to keep costs down.
But that means they need cheap ships, and can only sell to places with no car tariffs - which tends to be the countries without an auto industry.
BYD buses are operating in the US.
You missed a big elephant in the room 4) China did a significant subsidies for BYD factories. If USA did similar % wise thing to Tesla then we would’ve have $20k teslas driving.
It's more like BYD winning the race in China's auto industry. China has over a hundred automakers, most making low-end cars.[1] Some are state-owned, some are province-owned, some are privately owned. BYD is privately owned and doing well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacture...
China subsidized EVs in the same way that America did (tax credits), and less aggressively so. Unless you mean incentives from Shenzhen and getting taxi companies to early adopt? They also added incentives in getting a car at all in cities like Beijing (EVs started out in a different lottery allocation for plates)?
> 3) integrating rear wheels, differential, axle, and motor into an "e-axle" unit that's the entire mechanical part of the power train
Obviously an electric vehicle is so much simpler than one with a gasoline engine. We have seen it already with lawn mowers who shrank from huge tractors to nimble robots.
An in particular when you don't start from the Autobahn-eater type of cars.
They are doing a lot of advertisment and promo in Germany which has a active and kinda stable car Industrie.
Pretty sure they plan to disrupt any market
Do you own a BYD? It’s not that great. Build quality is subpar. Problem with investing in China is that once tech transfer ends, there’s no promise that these companies are capable of continued innovations. It’s basically an ecosystem dependent on outside innovations that they can “transfer” and tweak. That’s the whole “communist” economy in nutshell.
> 2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product
This is because the LITERALLY CAN'T make money of a non premium product.
And for Tesla is just because Musk is stupid and went ALL-IN on self driving. They literally believe that the market will drop by 80% because of self driving. That's why the only build robotaxi and no model 2. Against the advice of basically everybody in Tesla leadership.
Exactly how will BYD's 400k vehicals "crush" the US auto industry? They could give them away for free and not even make a dent.
In terms of BYD dominance, one needs to keep in mind the subsidy that the Chinese government is providing, such that they can sell cars below cost.
https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/pdf/2024/27...
Just 2018 to 2022, BYD received $5.9B. And that doesn't include all the indirect subsidies that went to suppliers like the battery manufacturers.
It's a part of Chinese government strategy of "build it and they will come". Massively subsidize select industries, dominate the market.
Which is why the EU has put high tariff's on the cars.
That is not that much in terms of subsidy for a critical industry. I tried finding the awards for Tesla but the articles lump in government contracts and report the figure to be in tens of billions. I am sure they have received a comparable amount of funding. BYD has just been able to make better use of it I suppose.
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Did you mean to say sodium batteries instead of lithium in your "BYD did it" sentence?
No. Five years ago BYD introduced their "blade battery", which is a lithium iron phosphate battery built up of plate-like "blades" in rectangular casings.[1] Wh/L is about the same as lithium ion, Wh/Kg is not as good, and Wh/$ is better. It will survive the "nail test" and does not not go into thermal runaway.
Today, most of BYD's products use this technology. It's been improved to handle higher charging rates. Seems to work fine. Lithium-ion has better Wh/Kg, and it's still used in some high-end cars, mostly Teslas. BYD's approach has captured the low and medium priced markets.
BYD has announced that they plan first shipments of cars with solid state batteries (higher Wh/Kg) in 2027. Price will be high at first, and they will first appear in BYD's high-end cars. Like these.[3] BYD has the Yangwang U8, a big off-road SUV comparable to the Rivian, and the Yangwang U9, a "hypercar". Just to show that they can make them, probably.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIt5z4wT9RE
[2] https://electrek.co/2025/02/17/byd-confirms-evs-all-solid-st...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHWXx1KsvVY
> Like these.[3] BYD has the Yangwang U8, a big off-road SUV comparable to the Rivian, and the Yangwang U9, a "hypercar".
I really did not expect to open this and have it be presented by Kryten! Fun surprise! :)
By 4) stealing patents and technology off of American companies
I was curious about this statement and did a search and could not find anything about it.
It appears that EV technology is new enough that it's Chinese companies that are the ones innovating, especially in battery technology.
I don't really see how any car company can "fall behind" in EV.
Fundamentally, IMO, EVs are such a simple concept mechanically that any company capable of building a conventional ICE vehicle can build an EV.
It's glib to say that - obviously there's a lot of unsaid complexity (battery back cooling, fitting into the frame, and so on), but the actual drivetrain component is just so simple. That EVs are still expensive is to me a sign that production hasn't ramped up yet. So long as production is limited EVs will remain a luxury product - but I can't imagine that's going to continue for all that much longer with an increasing backlog of used EVs on the market and decreasing battery prices.
Even if there were no improvements to be had in the vehicle itself, improvements in manufacturing processes determine how expensive the product is and thus how competitively priced the vehicle can be. Falling behind on price means falling behind on market share which means falling behind on efficiencies of scale which often means going out of business or at best becoming a niche producer.
Honda and Toyota weren't able to outcompete US manufacturers in the 1980s by offering higher performance vehicles but by delivering similar quality products at lower prices by making use of superior production techniques like Lean and JIT inventory management.
Are you serious? EVs have been the biggest disruption in the auto industry. It has created major corporations who made the attempts of traditional manufacturers seem obsolete.
VW Group and Stellantis totally failed to compete with Chinese manufacturers and were driven out of the Chinese EV market almost entirely. Competition is extremely fierce.
>That EVs are still expensive
Look up what they cost in China.
>So long as production is limited EVs will remain a luxury product
Around 50% of new sales in China. Not "luxury" in any meaningful way.
The issue is that EVs do not differentiate themselves by power train. They differentiate themselves by battery and software.