Comment by qwertox
2 days ago
What I don't understand is how Elon will ever compete with Chinese humanoid robot pricing and output. He's known for not caring about privacy, so there's no real difference between buying a Tesla one or a Chinese one. Both will look and listen into your home and transfer as much data as possible to their true owners.
He congratulates Jeff Bezos for New Glenn, and rightly so, but he's absolutely silent about the Chinese robots. One has to admit that they're already ahead of the US. This comes from a German who well recognizes how far behind Germany is in comparison to the US, in regards to any digital technology.
Oh that's easy: as soon as China gets good enough to compete at any market seen as vital, "the west" either makes up some nebulous national security threat to cut them off or imposes high enough import taxes to make the home-made versions cheaper in comparison. The same way "the west" has done it with cars, phones, and social media in recent years.
There is no free market competition between "the west" and China, they're two completely separate markets for a reason. You're only allowed to cross that isle in a limited capacity, as soon as you get big enough to be seen as a legit threat, you're getting cut off. Works both ways, Tesla can sell in China, but they can't beat BYD. Apple can sell iPhones, but only because their market share is not big enough to matter.
If you capitalize "West" (the West), it becomes a proper noun and you don't need the quotes anymore.
> market seen as vital, the West either makes up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
Other than that, I think China also has a barrier to entry which the West does not have towards China, where companies had to have a Chinese "babysitter" in Western companies having factories in China. If VW wanted to have a factory there, the only way to archive this was to partner with a Chinese company and do 50/50 split, so that VW could not own more than 50% of the factory. While this is no longer valid since 2022, there are now other mechanisms for getting strong control over foreign factories.
In contrast, China can do whatever the German legal system allows them to do in Germany, for example with Kuka. They have the same rights as German or US companies.
I'm not really against your point but I just quickly checked (and it agrees with my personal observation), iPhone have been the very most popular phone brand in China for many years and recently the market share grew beyond 25%. I would not say that's not big enough to matter.
You're confusing recent sales figures with overall market shares. Both Tesla and Apple use this neat little trick to their advantage, not just in China, but also in the EU and I'm sure in other places.
They both sell only like 2-3 models at a time, always heavily preferencing one of them in marketing, and then use that to claim they have the "best selling phone in the market". Which is true, but is not the same as having that percentage of the overall market share as a brand.
Nearly every Tesla sale is a Model Y sale, and nearly every Apple sale is an iPhone 17 sale. This does not apply to other brands such as BYD, Geely, Huawei, Oppo, (Samsung, Volkswagen,) where you can walk into a store and pick between about a dozen models targeting different niches.
On top of that, Apple just started selling iPhone 17, so yes, if you Google it, you find out that they've "reached 25% of the Chinese market" and not realise that this is what happens every Q4 simply because that's when they start selling new models. That is not the same as having 25% of the overall market share at all. Overall, both Tesla and Apple are around fifth most popular brands.
Yeah, considering Teslas upload imagery from their cars to datasets their employees have been known to access (and abuse that access as well) there's practically 0% chance I'd ever let a Tesla camera inside my home. Its bad enough they're recording me when my neighbors drive by and when I walk around, I wouldn't want them in my home on a device that's designed to be able to go through my stuff.
Probably China is building useful robots, not gimmicky "humanoid" ones. For any given task or set of tasks I'm very sure there are vastly better robot designs than mimicking a human.
> how Elon will ever compete with Chinese humanoid robot pricing and output?
... with said humanoid robots?
While it's true China's manufacturing sector can outproduce the west's right now, ubiquitous autonomous humanoid robots can level the playing field to a meaningful extent.
Which is why China is investing a lot of resources into developing those while the west just kind of continues on with muted efforts.