Comment by shevy-java
16 hours ago
The more interesting question is: why does the rest of the world not increase their production prowess? I am aware of most of the reasons, but I am getting tired of the "China is better than the rest of the world". It is more that China did a lot of things that the others either failed to do or no longer wanted to do. Case in point is Germany: from "our cars are best" to "hey, chinese cars are now better" (or, cheaper, for a comparative quality). This constant complaining is so strange. Would that energy not be better spent to try to become better?
50 years ago you could ask the same question about Europe, the USA and Japan: why are they so much more productive than everyone else?
So others did spend energy on becoming better and now you see a different picture when you look at the world.
The short answer is VW doesn't have the ability to compete with China's best EV car company on EV price, factory automation, or raw input (labor, electricity, metals) economies of scale. The complaining is to get politicians / regulators to prevent the Chinese EVs from being imported into their domestic markets.
Chinese structural advantages: monetary policy, lower cost of living, better infrastructure (electrical and transportation are all new within the last 20 years), lower cost of {concrete, factory machinery, metals, electrical} due to economies of scale.
Chinese EV manufacturers advantages: they don't sell ICE cars, so they don't have any legacy customers, factories to retool, or brand migration issues. And they mostly stole their technology from hiring Tesla factory workers to moonlight for them and share the design, technology, tooling, and RE the Tesla finished product.
Major Western legacy car company disadvantages: Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, etc... all have significant reasons why they can't or won't make the super risky attempt to go all-EV. They all have $10s of billions in debt they are still paying off for their current capital improvements. Those debts assume they contribute selling ICE because EVs last longer so they would sell fewer units per year. It's simply less risk to avoid making any EVs and pay politicians to protect their businesses than to try to compete with 10 year old Chinese phone-companies-turned-EV companies. On top of that, the worldwide demand for EVs is only about the volume of the single most popular model of Toyota. They would have to go into massive debt on a giant risk that consumers will want more EVs (and that the EVs they design/build will sell better than the current ICE cars they have meticulously crafted for 50-100 years).
> And they mostly stole their technology from hiring Tesla factory workers to moonlight for them and share the design, technology, tooling, and RE the Tesla finished product.
Did they successfully steal Tesla's low-cost EV plans too? Using the traditional definition of "steal" (depriving the owner of their property.) The argument that all China is good for is stealing falls apart[1] the second Chinese products become superior (see battery chemistry).
Perhaps Tesla should pay Chinese EV designers and PMs to moonlight for them to shorten their model development cycles.
Domestic Chinese EV competition is fierce, if one can survive or thrive in that boiler, dealing with VW, Ford, or even Tesla is a cake-walk.
1. Nevermind the growing body of fundamental research papers published. An area the US is turning it's back on because some people are gassing themselves up on they idea they are intrinsically, and immutably great/superior, therefore there is no cost to wrecking stuff to "own the libs"
Because the capitalist west doesn't have strategic view, beside maybe on the defense sector. Everything else must produce profits next quarter not in the next 3 years.
It's this. Wall Street won't allow american companies to make long term decisions and long term planning that cost money in the short term, because they want all that money immediately now. Like, right now now. If an executive promised they could deliver big profits in 5 years by spending the next two investing their profits, Wall Street would fire them and put in someone who will happily spend all the profit (plus debt) to do stock buybacks and dividend disbursals.
The stock market works that way, it's true.
But what about SpaceX, Blue Origin... there are also counter examples that show it is possible for investors to wait out the big profits.
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It's even worse, the entire ideology is that industrial policy can't, by definition, be better than what the market would decide without interference. So every kind of actual strategic decision making (i.e. investing a few hundred billions in the industries of importance for the next decade(s), or at least in the infrastructure supporting it) would actually make matters worse. That is essentially what neoliberalism is all about.
This is core reason why the German industry became so irrelevant in the last 2 decades: The rail infrastructure became pseudo privatized and now is in shambles (IIRC only about 60% of trains arrive on time). The PV industry was axed by the conservatives about 15 years ago and now is completely dominated by China. Even now, as the other EU countries demand strategic investments - and again the German conservatives say this ought to happen without any new debt. "We can only spend what we have", to quote Merz. Imagine China saying this about chip production, or even Sam Altman about compute hardware...
It is because in the west we suffer from self inflicted obstacles that make it impossible to get out of our own way. The Chinese gov must think they are playing on easy mode.
> Would that energy not be better spent to try to become better?
The problem is, shareholders have bled Western companies dry in the chase for returns on investments. There is no money left in the companies to retool them to be competitive with China.
Meanwhile, the CCP just pours dollars into their companies.
Unfortunately, there is no punishment in Western societies if you run a company into the ground as long as you pay your debts on the way out.
Private equity has mastered the art of running a company into the ground, hiding that fact, and handing the debt over to someone else. So there is no punishment even if your don't pay your debts.
The rest of the world is chasing models of investment in procurement of goods and services that get stuck on neoliberal capitalist antipatterns where every action demands a short-term profit motive. These are now very large-scale, highly-complex-supplychain manufacturing projects, and you cannot remain competitive if you are just Putting Faith In The Market to solve your problems. There's too much planning and sustained, structured goal-orientation required for investors or for the sort of contract-bid, public-private actions Western politicals are used to engaging with.
It takes 2 years in EU to get approval to build a shed. Imagine how long it takes to get approvals for a chip factory which uses a lot of water and very toxic chemicals.
UK has been trying to get approvals for a new runway at Heathrow airport for over 20 years !!! now.
The EU isn't monolithic, you could probably do this fairly easily in someplace like Poland where there isn't a bureaucratic hell and a large supply of skilled workers and engineers. But of course, Poland and co. are the "lessers" in Europe where you outsource for cheaper labor, a prestigious thing like a cutting-edge chip fab would need to be built somewhere like Germany or the Netherlands, and so it never shall exist.
Mostly self-inflicted wounds in form of climate pledges, climate taxes and such. Because of the goal to achieve zero emissions goal and climate neutrality, we abandoned cheap energy sources such as coal and pushed our heavy industries out of Europe to China. We still need those products, so we import them from China while wondering why European industrial segment isn't growing. Even in the clean energy sector, most solar panels come from China.
on the other hand, if those climate goals were stuck with, we could be just fine with $500 barrels of oil, and could just not-care about the middle east
solar and wind will always end up cheaper than coal because the fuel is free.
we certainly should be making our own solar panels and such, but we can get so much cheap electricity by building tons of renewables that that heavy industry can run in much-less-pollution fashions anyways
of course, having a liveable climate is up towards the most important things for having a good economy. france being 50C all summer isnt conducive to doing much of anything