Comment by yorwba
3 hours ago
The Reuters article focuses on exports because that's what their target audience is likely to be interested in, but the People's Daily article they reference in passing https://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/pc/content/202506/10/conten... is treating it as a domestic problem, highlighting the appearance of "zero-mileage used cars" on the second-hand market, specifically calls out EV companies for putting quantity over quality, and floats stimulating used car exports as part of the solution.
Also, at least the EU doesn't distinguish between new and old cars when importing from outside the EU https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/buying-and-selling-car... presumably precisely to avoid creating the kind of loophole you imagine exporters are exploiting. But they aren't; they just hurt their own profitability to juice their numbers and chase growth.
Domestic problem as in domestic involution problem not a EV overcapacity problem. I'm pointing out important to distinguish between ICE and EV, ICE is structural overcapacity, EV is under capacity but involution. ICE zero mile shenanigans is to liquidate/ unload excess inventory that doesn't have demand in PRC, mostly targeting loopholes in russia, central asia, mena. There's (less regulates) markets other than EU.
BYD/EV zero mile hack is more for subsidy harvesting, they're trying to dip on domestic subsidies for new sales then skip on stuff like servicing/warranty because used sale, i.e. shady involution behavior that abuse national policies, hence crackdown. It's not because EV are excess capacity, but so many EV players involuting and accountants find creative ways to carve margin. It's not EV sector makes 100 cars can only sell 50, because overcapacity, so discount to sell 100. It's EV sector makes 100 cars, sell 100 @1% margin but with some engineering they sell 100 @2% margin.
Yes, there are some brands that does use it for price cuts, premium brands, i.e. nio/xpeng, who won't lower sticker price, so they have to flip to lower price in used market. But that's also less overcapacity, more PRC EV moving so fast last few years no one wants 12 month old models. AKA tech stack progressing so fast / involution pressures so hard consumers won't pay sticker for anything older than 1 gen. What happens PRC manufacturing turns car cycles into phones obsolescence cycles. The broader the point here is EV makers are generally not doing accounting tricks to sell more cars due overcapacity / lack of demand (what over capacity implies), they're doing accounting tricks to sell the same amount of cars to make their razer thin involution margins slightly less razer thin, at the expense of the government.