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Comment by fidotron

4 days ago

What will be interesting are the restrictions on where the BYD vehicles are allowed to go.

e.g. https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/366599/chinese-evs-banned...

I'm also curious to see if we will see more "no drive zones".

We see this in other domains: I recently talked to someone from an asset inspection (think flying around bridges to check for fractures) company. They can't use DJI drones because of security concerns.

  • What has astounded me about all this is the extent to which so much of our industry fall crisply into one of two groups: 1. Chinese stuff is cheap incompetent rubbish anyway, anyone near it is by definition a loser, so who cares? 2. Chinese stuff is perfect, amazing and we should just stop doing everything and buy what they're selling. They'll totally open factories here and give us jobs too!

    The actual reality, which people like your asset inspection firm are dealing with, is the Chinese have leapfrogged the west in so many important respects, but to preserve security we have to live in an expensive technological backwater since the leaders of our society are so resistant to internal disruptive competition that may result in other people displacing them.

    • The security concerns are real, China restricts teslas from driving onto military installations for example. Anyhow, this is what we need data protection laws for, not trade protectionism. Canada should prevent exfiltration of data, not the sale of Chinese EVs in general