It's 2024, we can do better than blurry horribly blown out pictures these days. Check for example https://mapper.acme.com/?ll=34.39719,113.94792&z=15&t=SL&mar... for cleaner shot of the site (zoom in few notches for extra details). Google Maps annoyingly cuts half-way through the factory site.
edit: that ACME mapper image looks to be from mid-2023, in more recent imagery the construction on the east side has been completed.
Yep, pretty common for different zoom levels to be different time points. ACME is using plane photography for its high zoom images. You could try zoom.earth for hourly/12hourly satellite imagery.
Yeah, I have never seen something like that in America in my life. Always plenty of machines sitting around, and every few weeks some guys will hop on them for the day, but other than that they just sit there. It almost looks AI generated how densely packed those are - though I assume that this is real footage.
And what blows my mind is that if I want to rent a tractor with a front loader for some landscaping work it’s hundreds a day. Yet even larger commercial earth moving equipment sits around unused for weeks.
Some of that may be due to the owner transporting it from job to job instead of storing it in their own yard.
Nonetheless, there's a lot of idle people/equipment in construction because things have to be done in the right order and sometimes it's more economical to over-provision than risk delaying the whole project because something wasn't available when it was needed.
Those hundreds per day will partly pay for all the sitting around unused in the hiring company's yard! You can see this in the pricing which is usually a lower rate if you hire it for a longer period.
With China's real estate sector stagnating (because they've built enough housing for future demand to an excess, broadly speaking), all of that capacity is moving towards clean energy manufacturing.
The doubts about the size of the investment in that Wikipedia article are funny. It's a bit like "We cannot afford to invest in education", but the Chinese are saying "We cannot afford not to invest in education" (Famous quotes, it's more about R&D here). China's leadership is probably terrified of falling into the middle-income trap. It might be the biggest issue on their minds right now. At least I am watching from the sidelines, wondering "Are they gonna make it?".
And the rush to subsidize more capacity is a big contributor to local government debt burdens in China, which is estimated to leave Chinese debt to GDP at 117%.
China’s debt load fluctuates if you consider just the central government, local governments, and SOEs owned by either the central or local governments. Then you have private sector debt. SOEs are where a lot of china’s shadow debt comes from (localities ask SOEs they control to fund public projects of their own books), this is what pushes China’s debt load over 100%.
Authoritarian governments have always been better at ordering top to underlings to get shit done, because if you don't get shit done your shit is getting undone. Which is to say erased from history and replaced by someone who will.
Basically, Chinese government wants a bigass factory and they will get a bigass factory because literally fuck you.
This is in contrast to liberal governments where governments can incentivize, plead and beg, and in certain extraordinary cases force the matter at court-point, but ultimately is at the mercy and pleasure of the people governed.
The flipside, of course, is that when authoritarian governments get it wrong they really get it wrong sometimes well past the point of recovery. Liberal governments getting it wrong have a lot more margin for error.
>And what's the difference from the US government when it wants a bigass factory?
A normal business transaction, with all the good and bad parts thereof. The government can't force the issue unless they do it themselves which is usually not the case.
not just that, but the fact that the US gov't does hold elections means that what they do generally is in line with the people.
At this moment, what the chinese gov't is doing is _also_ (presumably) in line with their people's wishes - after all, factories and exports means jobs and economic growth. It remains to be seen if this continues to be in the face of a potential war, tariffs, or some other external shock.
No. One required component is plain old fashioned oversupply of labor. America doesn't have that because all employable people are too rich. China also has an oversupply of skilled labor like engineers, in part because the threat of poverty is a strong motivator to get rich. America also lacks that which you can see in capable young people doing arts degrees with no thought to their future income because it doesn't matter - they'll still live comfortably even on minimum wage.
That’s an easy enough problem to solve if we had the appetite to solve it, why couldn’t we legitimize the roles illegal immigrants currently do right now with a Singapore style migrant worker program?
There is a low estimation of 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US. The biggest difference is that in the US they are working on fast food jobs, house cleaning, babysitting. Different priorities.
To my knowledge the largest factory in the world is BASF Ludwigshafen (Germany) with 10 km². Here is an aerial photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:LudwigshafenBASF2017-0... Followed by Volkswagen Wolfsburg (also Germany) with 6.5 km². Seems the BYD factory is competing with it for rank #2.
The wording is confusing, but I believe the Zhengzhou International Land Port is 50sqkm, not the factory. That also fits the numbers they're giving [1]: "Zhengzhou International Land Port Project announced ——total area of around 50 square kilometers", and that includes a lot of "open-air warehouse" (parking lot). It's still massive, but not quite as crazy.
I was refering to the size of the factory premises = land + buildings.
It seems we need diffrent categories for a ranking: premises vs. base area of the buildings vs. floor area of the buildings vs. largest building per base area vs. largest building per floor area, etc. And then we would need to clarify what counts in each case ...
Anyway, I live about 20 km from BASF and it is quite an impressive sight, especially at night. Here is a photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Fackelschein_des_Steam... However, the red lights are probably an artefact of the camera; typically the lights looks rather bluesh in reality. And the photo was shot with a 400 mm lens: the television tower in the foreground is more than 4 km away from the factory, the house at the left about 3 km.
I've studied in the area and, as a bit of a night person, often drove past at night when driving to or from parents. A very cool sight, though the smell is often less pleasant :D - presumably nothing toxic, that would be illegal, but it does smell bad. Kind of like burning plastic, but without the harshest components of that smell.
Anyway, cool that Germany still has the biggest of something ~heavy industry.
It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change.
It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale, and nations that suffered similar disparities in industrial capacity (not to mention energy production) haven't done well in the past.
The bread and butter of progress is competition and I think a lot of American companies “won” like Boeing or Intel in the 90s and no one else could compete.
Unfortunately winning is disastrous because it makes you complacent.
Perhaps the most flagrant and dumbest example is Internet Explorer 6.
I do not approve of raising tariffs on foreign vehicles because it will dull our edge in the long term. Protectionism is a short term bandaid.
Tariffs are a good way to ensure you still have a domestic capability. If Germany/korea/japan/China outcompete all US auto makers and they die, along with it goes a ton of jobs, manufacturing knowledge & capacity, cultural influence, an ability to keep capital flowing domestically, downstream suppliers, and ability to change factories from autos to military equipment in wartime. If China just keeps taking industry, then all we have left is an outpouring of all capital and a bunch of “content creators” left. Not a good prospect.
US auto companies already try to compete globally in situations with/without tariffs. That provides plenty of competition too.
Intel was famously not complacent. Perhaps a long lapse starting a decade ago. But even then “complacence” was not the problem. Ditto for Boeing. Managerial focus on just milking the cow has been the fundamental problem: and they milked frantically—not complacently.
Of course we can motivate ourselves. But they're acting like we did in the 1800s through the mid 1900s. They just build anywhere no matter what. They have no interest in dealing with environmental concerns. The officially released pollution levels in China are mind-boggling and they still do not represent how bad it really is.
You think US manufacturers wouldn't be delighted to just buy a few hundred acres land and start building stuff? They'd do it in a heartbeat. For better and for worse, it is not a level playing field. Conforming to government regulations over here is stifling for a 100-house development in Arkansas, but it's almost impossible in California, Illinois, or New York. Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years.
Counterpoint: See the speed with which Colossus has been (is being) assembled in Memphis Tennessee. Yes, on an existing industrial site but this is still one damn impressive accomplishment.
This is why Trump has pushed for mass deregulating, America (let alone the west) can't compete against China when our politicians demand that we straight up don't.
> our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change
The US and EU are long off-peak carbon emissions (emissions even decreased during the Trump administration I, even using a trendline ignoring COVID). The biggest emitter right now is China, and it's emissions are growing not shrinking, and a considerable amount of that (including 90% of the worlds new coal plants) goes to projects like this.
Western country populations seem to be willfully falling for obvious fossil fuel propaganda over and over again. Future generations will rightfully curse our names. (Including today's children.)
I vote for change, but I don't have the money to buy electric. Even running costs don't make the difference when it comes to multiple tens of thousands of dollars in purchase price.
I'd love to "care for our environment by buying an electric car". I can't afford to.
We Americans have more to fear from economic and technological dominance than we do from military invasion.
As a budding superpower ready to unseat the US from it's throan. All China has to do is wait for progress and time to run it's coarse and emerge the victor. If anything, the US is the tigger happy country as we watch the inevitable, looking for any excuse to use to stop them.
Remember, why the hell does China give two shits about war if China can surpass the US simply through economic progress. They don't care, in fact they want to avoid war.
why does they have to be a winner and loser. everyone can thrive? except the United States is being buoyed by two main elements.
1) the ability of the internet to extract value overseas while untaxed in the client country 2) The H1B visa which funnels the best talent from struggling countries 3) strong institutions and financial and education centers and 4) military industrial complex that thrives on basically manufacturing conflicts with other countries
#4 is what is scary. not the dominance of any other country itself
So that I can afford cheap shit from poorer countries, if they stay poor they contribute less to climate change, less competition for finite rare resources
> why does they have to be a winner and loser. everyone can thrive? except the United States is being buoyed by two main elements.
Why can’t there be a winner and a loser and both the winner and the loser cooperate and thrive with loser having the humility to admit he’s a loser? Isn’t this the same peaceful consequence? Just say China is better and admit inferiority for the everlasting peace. Why can’t you do it?
Because competition and cooperation are intrinsic parts of natural selection and therefore evolutionary biology and therefore human nature. Don’t pretend to be above your own nature.
Or do pretend. We can all act according to our ideals and deny our basest instincts, but don’t expect the mob to act the same way in aggregate.
I don’t think anyone disputes that China can out-manufacture us. Does that make them “better”, they the winner and the West the loser? Obviously not; things don’t end, history continues and things can go in different directions in the future. Not to mention that there are other dimensions that matter besides manufacturing prowess, namely quality of life, individual freedom, etc.
Is there a list of the world's largest factories, in a liberal sense of the word? The ones I'm aware of only consider individual structures [0], which excludes industrial plants that span multiple buildings, like this one.
Volkswagen's main factory is also pretty large:
"Spanning more than 6.5 km², the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg is now the largest automotive plant in Europe, employing more than 60,000 people."[0]
US/German manufacturers just do assembly, they don't manufacture parts, so they only need assembly plants. BYD is a vertically integrated manufacturer. They make everything in-house which helps drive down costs. This huge footprint results in having all those different manufacturing lines under one roof. They depend on no one for finished parts, the only supply chain is raw materials.
I believe outsourcing can be a symptom of not innovating anymore.
Imagine having to contract out every prototype to a metal working shop — it slows down your ability to iterate because you can’t just go downstairs and try it.
But once you have a design set in stone, outsourcing is cheaper than doing it in-house. These companies specialize in producing parts with economies of scale.
But if you do it for too long, you kind of lose the ability to quickly iterate. Striking a balance is hard.
People are waking up, and to be fair, Tesla really led the way in the US for the last few years because they had no choice(no one would take them seriously). The question is can the West turn the ship around before its too late?
I doubt it. It's much easier to either launder or manufacture the goods in a third country, that benefits from most of the same incentives that made Chinese manufacturing go through the roof.
Americans will be buying Chinese goods with "made in Vietnam" or "made in Mexico" stamped on it. The American profit will be in setting up those laundering schemes
If the Trump tariffs are based on country of final assembly, then yes, final assembly will just occur somewhere else, but it will take a couple of years to setup, and the inflation shock by that time will have done a lot of damage to the economy (recession likely, depression possible). It makes sense that it took Trump forever to find a treasury secretary willing to go along with this.
Tariffs are a surcharge on imports added and demanded by the government, paid by the people or entities importing.
As an example, if an American buys a Chinese coffee maker priced at $100 and there is a 50% tariff, there is a $50 tariff that is paid by the importing American to the American government.
The total cost to the importing American is $150. Now, if this price is equal to or higher than an American coffee maker then the importing American is incentivized to purchase the American coffee maker instead.
As another example, if Tesla sells Model 3s for $50,000 and BYD comes in with a similar spec car priced at $25,000, then putting a 100% tariff on it will drive BYD's effective price up to $43,000 allowing Tesla to compete without undercutting or outright selling at a loss.
Essentially, tariffs are a way to ensure that the pricing floor of the domestic market is not driven down unreasonably by international markets at the cost of the importers.
Not entirely correct. Boeing, despite all the bad press, actually reversed course on this recently. 787's wing was made by a supplier, but 777X's wing is actually built in-house, right next to the main factory, starting from carbon fiber fabric.
How much can Boeing do this though? My understanding is in the past they used moving some of their production to a country as leverage to win contracts. They are a company that moved their headquarters to DC because management treats the product as secondary as if they make widgets. Until they reverse that they aren't moving in the right direction.
So the factory accepts iron ore, crude oil, coal, lithium ore, bauxite, monazite, copper ores, rubber, and soy beans at one end and spits out finished cars at the other?
The problem with the west is that it’s already developed. Everything in the west is a bit like the European automobile industry, it’s highly refined for what it is and we expect to milk it for some time to come.
Same thing happened with the financial institutions and internet infrastructure - those who had the early versions of it established early ended up lagging behind once the technology was superseded.
The poorest countries in Europe had the best internet for a while because the richest countries wanted to milk the copper wires they invested on.
The US for long had much worse payments systems than Europe and Africa because they were at advanced stage on adopting the early technology.
strongly disagree. the West has almost no manufacturing capability or labor force (at an affordable rate) at the moment. it's almost unsustainable even for a small business to be paying $20 an hour in some cities let alone run large factories
Is it maybe because centering divs was much better career choice than dealing with machines and chemicals for more than a decade now? If that’s changing and manufacturing becomes a need, it should correct by itself.
The west, especially the USA invested gargantuan money into high margin high scale businesses and the Chinese worked their way up in dealing with atoms with help of the west. Now they too can do many of the high margin stuff and the west will have to re-learn how to deal with atoms. It happened because the west’s rich were simply shittier than Chinese bureaucrats and invested badly by choosing wrong KPI or ideas. Wonder what happens if the AI thing doesn’t pan out after pouring enormous money on it(instead of on something strategically important but not as potentially lucrative).
IMHO things are reversible, especially for the USA. Europe is in a worse place as its demographics and energy situation is less favorable.
Any big grouping can compete if there’s enough will. Look at how eg Russia has rejigged much of its war machine during the Ukraine war. Look at how Ukraine has turned themselves inside out to compete. At some level of pressure, countries transform. How much will it take? Is simple economic pressure enough? Can eg Europe gather enough of its massive educated population to transform?
In economic competition, as with poker, if you don’t know who the sucker is…you’re it. China has been making suckers of many countries and they are slowly waking up.
There is a sense in which China has made a sucker of itself, too. China has some serious internal economic structure issues and it remains to be seen how long those issues and the downstream problems it creates are sustainable.
For an example, remember the amazing speed of construct demonstrated by the Chinese government building covid quarantine facilities? Hundreds of square miles of em across every province. They're all gone now.
I always hear this as a criticism of China but then I watch some footage of the actual place and it looks like it lives in the future (to be fair, it's uneven, but let me tell you I've traveled to the US enough times to be shocked at how uneven it can get). Sure, there's real problems I'm sure, where isn't there, but here in Canada by the time we've built a kilometer of an LRT line massively over budget, China has added a new high speed rail line.
Define "the west". There was an interesting article here in HN the other day [0] "Almost 10% of South Korea's Workforce Is Now a Robot". China now surpasses all the west-aligned nations in terms of total industrial robots [1], however the west still has the upper-hand in terms of robot to population density ratio.
I think it is a matter of strategy and it seems China's strategy is innovation, science and productivity. We on the west seem to like consumption before everything else and IMHO we are doing it wrong.
I think another axis is an underlying cultural difference: balance of collectivism vs individualism. China can say “there will be a factory here” because it’s overall good to have one, even if a few noses are out of joint. In California it’s decades of fights to get a train. The trick to competing is to find the right balance for the next decades. China used to be all-central-planning, which was sluggish and not agile. Now it’s guided by central planning (great for overall alignment) over many years rather than jerky 4 year stints, combined with massively distributed efforts to generate high levels of competition and agility. What is the optimal balance for your country or state?
"Between January 2022 and June 2024, employment in US private businesses increased by about 7.32 million jobs. Of these 7.32 million jobs, about 5,400 were jobs created in California businesses—representing about .07 percent of the US figure. Put differently, if California private-sector jobs grew at the same rate as in the rest of the country, they would have increased by over 970,000 during that period, about 180 times greater than the actual increase."
Didn't California shut down surfboard blank production? You can't even make traditional surfboards in California anymore. They don't want jobs that produce environmental waste. Not all states are like that.
west can compete. unlike byd’s, which get bricked all the time without infrastructure to maintain and repair them, west (and japan even more so) build cars that last. this is china we are talking about, the last thing I want is a car made by them… :)
As someone from Australia, which hasn't shut its self off from the China EV market. I drive a BYD Dolphin. You should be worried. They are cheaper, and more full-featured than European equivalent. They aren't junk.
Also, they aren't the only big player from China. Australia is soon getting GAC/Aion, Geely, Jaecoo, Leapmotor, Deepal, Xpeng.
People used to say the same things about things made in Taiwan, then Japan, and then China, for things like electronics and white goods. It was true - until suddenly it wasn't.
In engineering you ultimately have to build stuff. Over, and over, and over again. You'll mess it up a lot at first, and then one day you'll realize that you haven't.
China is not stuck in 1965 trying to make an EV out of a saucepan and a backyard forge. They learn, and they keep trying. They have a domestic market that their government allows to be used as a test bed for everything they are doing, which sounds more coercive than it really is, especially given the fierce Sino-centric patriotism they have.
If Xi can last another 20 years without a palace coup, or manage a smooth transition of power that does not whipsaw policy, the West is in serious trouble.
Yeah but Japan has long had a cultural obsession with delivering high quality products. I don't know if China ever did, but if it did, much of it was wiped out during cultural revolution and replaced with succeed at all costs.
And there is a difference between success and excellence.
For example there have been zero bullet train fatalities in its entire history, and several Chinese HSR fatal accidents already. For political reasons the quality of the HSR wheels in China took a sharp downturn so expect more accidents in the coming two years.
There were many terrible electric cars out of China for years. Every province had its own little EV manufacturers. China's car industry is less concentrated than the US, but the big players are winning.
BYD is only the 9th largest carmaker in China. SAIC, Changan, and Geeley are the top 3. SAIC and Changan are state-owned, but Geeley is private, as is BYD. SAIC makes about 5 million vehicles a year. General Motors, over 6 million. BYD, around 3 million. Tesla, a little less than BYD.
Reviews of newer BYD cars are quite favorable. It's not like five years ago, when China's electric cars were not very good.
BYD has a simplified design for electric cars. The main component is the "e-axle", with motor, axle, differential, and wheels in one unit. There's a power electronics box which controls battery, motor, and charging. And, of course, the battery, made of BYD lithium-iron-phosphate prismatic cells. Talks CANbus to the dashboard and driver controls. BYD offers this setup in a range of sizes, up to box truck scale.
BYD and CATL are spending huge amounts of money to get to solid state batteries. The consensus seems to be that they work fine but are very hard to make. The manufacturing problems will probably get solved.
(Somebody should buy Jeep from Stellantis and put Jeep bodies on BYD E-axles. Stellantis is pushing a terrible "mild hybrid" power train with 21 miles of electric range, and an insanely overpriced all-electric power train. Stellantis prices went through the roof under the previous (fired) CEO, and sales went through the floor. Jeep sales are way down, despite customers who want them.)
Chinese cars used to have lots of quality problems because they didn’t embrace automation, afraid that would take away jobs (Toyotas made in China 12-15 years ago were notoriously bad compared to ones made in Japan/usa). But in the last ten years, they’ve gone full speed ahead on it, as aggressive as the Japanese, and the quality increases are really noticeable. It’s not just a tech upgrade, they’ve really changed the way they are thinking about manufacturing (not just a jobs program).
Kia/hyundai went through that phase already, and just got through it with absurd 10 year warranties when they first came out. China could do the same in the states, although I think they will have enough traction in SEA/Africa/Russia//Australia by then that they won’t have to.
This can't be a serious take, right? Chinese consumers don't expect much less when it comes to maintenance and repair. And given their 3M+/year vehicle production output, they're not a small player.
reach out to countries that sell these cars, find people on social
media and/or if you have them in real life or travel… these cars are absolute garbage
I had the pleasure of seeing one in Mexico recently. If this car is garbage, sign me up! But alas, it's impossible because we decided that since we can't compete we'll just make them essentially illegal.
not sure what your perspective is based on. gi your persistence, it seems it's likely not rooted in actually talking to these people, but perhaps some slight unconscious bias?
most of the things you use in your kitchen and also your device. you're typing this on were manufactured in China
Do you have any data about that? I have only heard the opposite from owners and it sounds a lot like the things Americans used to say about Japanese cars prior to getting stomped by them in the 80s.
two friends in russia, traveled to mexico twice this year, boss from australia… story after story after story always the same, amazeballs for X number of days and then get bricked, interior issues, steering …
I have a chinese EV (GMW, not BYD.) I am a very happy owner; huge features for the price. I am not sure i can see buying of a "mainstream" manafacturer again. (My country has no tarrifs/no domestic car building.)
All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average) and maintain/develop car dependency infrastructures.
This is the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy and reducing massively our climate and biodiversity impact.
I want those kind of factories to produce trains, bicycles... everything that can move people in a more efficient way than those "cars".
There is a clear reason why such factories are being built in China and if you are a USA or German citizen, you wouldn't like it.
In a BBC article from a couple of days ago [0], they hinted that China intends to take the lead into transitioning developing countries from fossil fuels to green tech. They produce batteries, EVs and solar panels. Just this year alone Pakistan of all the countries, imported 13 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels. For context - the UK has 17GW of installed solar in total.
China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.
>China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.
it is classic case of new dominant players emergence when paradigm shift happens. PC vs. mainframe, GPU vs. CPU, clean energy economy vs. fossil fuel based.
60% coal, some baseload nuclear (5%), renewables (30%). They have massive dams (14% of electricity IIRC).
Coal share is shrinking, a lot.
Today, capacity factor of coal plants is below 50% (that's why you always see China builds coal plants... that stand idle) and their coal consumption has been more or less flat for a decade. The plan is to use coal plans when wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine. Natural gas is a national security risk due to imports, but they do have a lot of coal.
Out west coal drops a lot and green energy is more available. They are still limited by grid in getting green energy from west to east. They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.
> They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.
There are also other reasons. The name of western province is Xinjiang. They did have a plan to turn it into manufacturing hub, and it's one of the reasons why you see stuff you see.
> All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average)
Actually, if you pay attention to scales and sizes, it's so very little to achieve so much. What you're seeing is tremendous efficiencies concentrated on a small piece of land, affecting transportation on a vast scale.
> the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy
The worst except the others. Like sure, retooling our metropolises might be nice. But it’s also not only expensive but incredibly carbon intensive, to say nothing of not wanted by most of the world.
The problem with car-dependent cities is that they are very spread out. Why does public transit suck and why don't many people use the bike lanes? Because everything is far away.
We've built our cities this way. Our tax system encourages it (by not taxing land value directly and exempting development from taxation), and our zoning requires it (my city is almost entirely zoned exclusively for single-family detached housing). Bike lanes are nice, but they don't make a 25-km ride through endless suburbia any shorter.
You can't just copy the superficial traits of bikeable European cities and hope to get the same results. We need to fundamentally rethink the way our cities are allowed and encouraged to grow.
"Building 101km of cycleways across Christchurch to cost $301m", population 405000, So that is $750 per person, which is about 1% of median earnings for a year. That is paid for mostly by car owners (via petrol tax and car tax) and a bit by home owners.
And the new infrastructure is visibly under-utilised - at best a few % of traffic. You could force people to bike using laws and economics I guess... I would be interested to see a per-trip cost analysis for cyclists.
There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere - bikes are great for some trips and some demographics.
Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...
The paper suggests biking only 118 days per year. The car ownership costs are not "saved" - the projected savings are wrong. Ownership car costs are 0.167/km and savings by riding a bicycle are 0.349/km.
Two ignored real costs of bicycling are lack of optionality (planning ahead for weather changes, locked into transport mode) and carrying capacity (groceries, children, sports equipment, etcetera). And I'd like to see other costs of cycling (wet weather gear, helmets, locks) included.
301 million dollars for 101km of infrastructure is cheap compared to building highways [0]. The price of the usual infrastructure is a burden on everyone as well, not just car owners.
You shouldn't have to force anyone to choose any particular mode of transport. I think people choose what is most convenient and that happens to be cycling in urban areas where there is safe infrastructure for it.
Your question reads pretty weird to me; building cycling infrastructure makes a city more ideal for cyclists, that's exactly the point. I didn't read it yet, but I found a paper that seems interesting and in the direction of your question. [1]
Bike lane construction tends to be lumped in with regular road maintenance, which makes it look expensive, but the really expensive part is doing repairs on the existing roads. "Building bike lanes" for 300M is more palatable than "fixing potholes and repainting" for 300M
Note that this is NZ dollars, and that spend is over ~16 years. I.e. ~NZ$46/year/person ≈ US$27/year/person at current rates. The article compares the costs to road and motorway costs in Christchurch.
30% of the US can’t drive, whether because of disability, age, financial hardship, immigration status, or any number of other reasons. Why don't you hold the current system of "motorized transport" to the same impossible standard of solving all transportation needs as you expect of bikes?
At least 80% of urban car trips could be replaced since the invention of the e-cargo bike. That doesn’t mean it works everywhere, of course, but there are millions and millions of people driving a single digit number of miles, usually at slower than bicycle doors-to-door speeds, and are never carrying 3+ kids and hundreds of pounds of cargo.
I am. Most of our road costs are for suburban car commuters and for subsidized car storage. If it was business usage and transit we’d need far fewer lanes, especially since businesses would use rail transportation more if the roads weren’t so heavily subsidized.
That still doesn't solve last mile supply of stores and offices, nor does it solve construction, policing, emergency services, etc.
Each of those likely has possible alternatives to motorized transport, but they're all different alternatives. Meanwhile, today, they all share the same road network with regular civilian commute, sharing costs and mutually improving efficiency.
Put differently: instead of imagining all passenger cars replaced by bikes, imagine all roads replaced by bike lanes, then extrapolate from that.
Comments like these need to be included in almost any discussion about transport or in fact any discussion about any change. Most people (or both sides) dismiss ideas because they are not 100% perfect. And ignore the fact that nothing can be perfect
Believe it or not, but the buses and trains are also being manufactured in China. if you'd visit, you'd see that they have excellent public infrastructure, with multiple redundancies
I agree that cars are at least double the mass they need to be. The size of cars needed for a school run or to drive to work are generally quite small, but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.
World's response to the climate crisis is already dangerously delayed, and we're at a point where we need anything ASAP. We've ran out of time to massively overhaul infrastructure everywhere.
The US and UK apparently can't even build a single high speed rail line any more.
Car dependency sucks, but we won't be able to fix that in the short term, but at least we can fix its oil dependence.
Cleaner grid will also need a lot of battery storage, and EV demand helps scale that up.
I don't think it's a particularly different timescale to swap from ICE to EV than to drastically reduce car dependence. What makes you think there's a big difference to where swapping to electric cars is easier than avoiding cars?
I’m a bike commuter, all on board for transit, etc. but too much of the world – especially North America – is built around cars exclusively and that’s not changing any time soon because doing so would require things like massive rezoning to avoid people needing to travel such long distances just to function.
If we are going to have cars, I’d prefer they be smaller, safer EVs contributing ⅓ the carbon footprint of the status quo. Every bit of savings buys years to make further changes, and it directly saves lives and improves quality of life for a billion people. Even if climate change was not happening, it’d be worth doing for the improvements in cardiovascular health, disruption of sleep patterns and other consequences of engine noise, local water and soil pollution, etc.
Unfortunately the only places in the world that I know of building new cities are UAE, Saudi, Egypt, China. I don’t think any of those are building for car-less.
For the 1000th time here, even extremely well developed public transport by US standards and various financial punishments for owning cars is simply not enough for people to drop them, the convenience is simply too high.
Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year.
Maybe some AI driven community (or even private fleet) of shared cars to be hailed in Uber style on demand would work, reducing number of cars overall and the need to own personal one(s). Not there yet.
I don't think anyone envisions having no cars; public transportation make it so we don't need cars, and other nudges make it so we have fewer cars than we would otherwise have.
You might as well wish that the factories produced teleporters. You're putting the cart before the horse. You have to fix the demand side first. I know there's an online demand for public transportation and bikes and if you are in that bubble it can feel like the whole world is with you, but in the real world, most people (obvs not everyone) prefers to have their own car.
I think there's hope since the only thing people like more than their cars is being glued to their phones, and public transport enables you to do that during your commute.
Why can’t both be done? Bicycles are already cheap, and an electric bike can be purchased under $1000. Not everyone is capable of limiting their commute to the ~10 mile radius an e-bike easily permits. Some of us still need cars, unfortunately. Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move.
Is there some technology that enables high-speed travel and weighs less than a human, which seems to be an important criteria to you?
A bicycle is not suitable for the 100km trip to see my parents, and the only country that can operate trains at a satisfactory level is Japan (and maybe China, but I don't trust their data).
So no, its either this or a gas car. Both are real solutions that work, today. Changing society from the bottom up is not.
No, the initial goal of this factory is to achieve dominance over the global automotive industry but the ultimate goal is to convert it into a machine that can spit out drones to invade Taiwain, South Korea, and Japan.
It's very questionable if America will play a role there. It's 50/50 that Xi will be able to do a personal favour to Trump or Musk that will keep America out of it.
When the times comes to defend Taiwan (or Japan/Korea) it will be life or death for the US to react and win. If they fail, the whole house of cards will collapse for the US. Trump as stupid as he is had gotten the ball rolling in the correct direction in his first term and I don't see how he will deviate this term.
In times of war factories will be retooled to best serve the needs of the military.
I anticipate that in a regional war China will need more aircraft than land vehicles, especially given that the regional adversaries they are facing are mostly island nations.
They abhor liberal democracies and seek to extend their domineering control over as many people as they can.
The CCP is an absolutely tyrannical organization that denies their own citizens the rights that you and I take for granted. Why would they ever desire their neighbours to have what they deny their own people?
Look no further than Hong Kong and North Korea to see what China wants for their neighbours.
South Korea only exists as it does today because Western forces repelled Chinese supported North Koreans from conquering it.
Japan only exists today because of American rebuilding after the destruction of Imperial Japan during World War 2.
Taiwan only exists as it is today because of American support.
China would have subjugated these entities and destroyed any chance of prosperity and independence that they had if not for the efforts of people who believe in individual autonomy and liberal democratic values.
China only has the power that they do to day because of authoritarians in the west who tricked the world into thinking that globalism means that we should engage in trade with undemocratic societies.
For reference, England consumed 1 billion tons of coal during it's peak coal consumption decade.
So please stop with the "China is decarbonizing" crap, because they are not. A more accurate statement is "China understands the importance of energy and is applying an as-much-of-everything-approach to achieve its industrial goals"
You are comparing a country that was probably less than 5% of China's current population during that peak. And not only is China 17.5% of the world's population, it is also the major manufacturing hub for the majority of the world. 10 times as much coal as the UK's peak is still a tiny number.
The reality is that China is emitting much less CO2 per capita than the US or Canada, and just a bit more than the more industrious EU countries like Germany. And this is territorial emissions: if you take into account what percentage of those emissions is going into goods produced in China but bought by those very countries, it's probably around the EU average if not lower.
Is China anywhere near a net 0 goal? No, not even close. But among industrial powers, it is one of the ones that went by far the most into green power.
Yes, China still uses a metric fuckton of a coal, but they are decarbonizing: every year, the % of energy generated by coal goes down 1%, and renewables go up 1%.
Just to underline, this is not notional capacity (which inflates solar/wind), but actual power generation. This is all the more impressive because China's total consumption is simultaneously increasing rapidly.
In order to build renewable infrastructure, you do need to expend a lot of energy: mining, processing, transporting. China is using coal to build up that infrastructure and converting that dirty energy into clean.
No, but when talking about whether a country is emitting more than its "fair" share of GHG for any reasonable definition of "fair" per capita is what matters, unless someone can make a convincing argument that some people have some kind of natural or divine right to contribute more to GHG emissions than others.
Its not just about population. The UK was the world's foremost manufacturing nation at the time, just as China is now. It was the centre of manufacturing of an empire so the relevant comparison is with the population of the empire. There were no real alternative sources of energy - no nuclear, no solar, no wind (in a form suitable for most industry).
The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.
And if you want to count the population consuming industrial goods as the population that "causes" those emissions, then China looks even better, because they are producing goods consumed by literally billions of people.
The US government bailed out GM under Obama. Do you know what GM did this month? They spent billions on stock buybacks and millions on bonuses while firing a ton of people. F'em. They aren't a car company, they are a stock company that happens to make cars, a route most large American companies seem to be taking (see also Boeing, whose management cares so much about/is detached from their product that they relocated their management away from the business and to Washington DC).
US auto makers have been on the ropes since the 1980s. My hypothesis is that their heyday was 50s and 60s “greaser” culture and they kinda got their heads stuck in that era. “Golden ages” are incredibly dangerous.
When people started wanting just practical small reliable affordable cars as the price of gas increased and cars became just an appliance they didn’t respond to that market and the Japanese did. It’s been either sideways or downhill since. The only thing keeping them alive now is unnecessarily large status symbol trucks and that is a limited market that will be trashed if oil spikes again. There’s got to be a limit somewhere to how much people will pay to show off or own the libs or whatever motivates one to buy an F-5000 Super Chungus.
They are still mostly missing the EV boat. First Tesla caught them asleep and now China. Culturally they still are not crazy about EVs because they do not go vroom vroom.
Trump might string them along a bit longer with protectionism and a pull back on EVs to push more vroom vroom but meanwhile BYD will eat the entire world.
Their downfall was earlier than that. Post WW2 everyone was looking to buy a new car (people kept their old one during the war because production was going to the war effort). The car companies had such demand they moved to a 'car salesman' sales structure to milk every customer as much as possible because demand was so much higher than production. They got hooked on the easy money and entrenched a lot of bad business practices/policies as a result.
GM for all intents and purposes died (remember we funded a whole new GM, a completely new business entity, during the 2008 financial crisis timeframe) and yet new GM just 'invested' 6 billion dollars in stock buybacks, millions in management bonuses while conducting employee layoffs. But they will have no problem coming and asking the government for billions 'to remain competitive' soon. F'm.
I think there’s a little bit more to the golden age story.
The “malaise era” started in the early 70s as a perfect storm of fuel economy restrictions and more widespread US economic woes. This lead to decades of low quality cars being made.
US automakers not only lost out on consumers looking for simple appliances to drive, but ALSO the enthusiasts that liked driving and cars. The car guys that came of age in this era have two choices: chase after the same American muscle cars your dad liked, or switch over to imported hot hatches and the JDM tuner scene
> This lead to decades of low quality cars being made.
Really, it was only a bit over one decade. Taking GM as an example, their last great cars were produced for the 1973 model year, after which point the economy, emissions, and efficiency requirements resulted in drastic (bad) changes. It only took until the late 1980s for them to make some genuinely good vehicles though. For instance, the Buick Regal/Oldsmobile Cutlass/Pontiac Grand Prix from 1988 were well built, comfortable, handled (relatively) well, and were very reliable - especially from 1990 with the introduction of the 3.8L V6, what is likely GM’s most reliable engine ever built (second possibly only to the small block V8). The same was tru for their sports cars (while not making much power out of the displacement, the TPI V8 firebird and corvette were similarly efficient to European sports cars at the time). Many GM cars from that era (late 1980s until early 2000s) are some of the most reliable American cars ever built.
The same is true for Ford; for example, the 1988 Probe, while not the most popular vehicle, was very reliable, comfortable, efficient, and well-built, likely in part due to their partnership with Mazda. It could reasonably be argued that as early as 1980, Ford was making pretty good vehicles, with the Mercury Grand Marquis/LTD Crown Victoria being well-built and reliable, if very down on power with questionable efficiency.
Not worth talking about Chrysler because they didn’t know how to make good/reliable cars before the fuel crisis and they certainly didn’t figure out how to afterwards.
I know this isn’t your main point but it’s worth considering that the US did actually figure out how to build really good cars again, and it didn’t take them that long. Mid-90s to early-00s American cars were, in my opinion, at the perfect point of technological advancement: CAD and high-precision/low-tolerance manufacturing resulting in engines that last well over 300k miles without major servicing; enough computer advancement to have high precision per-cylinder fuel and spark control with accurate air metering leading to better power, efficiency, and reliability; and enough material advancement to have interior and exterior build quality that makes the car look like it wasn’t built in a shed. But most importantly, they hadn’t figured out how or where to cheap out on components, so you end up with the “unreliable” components (like the 4L60e and 4T60e transmissions) “only” lasting 200k miles before requiring a rebuild - which in today’s money is still less than $1000, let alone 20-30 years ago.
From the birth of the US auto industry until about 2010, the only period where there wasn’t a single American car worth buying brand new was probably 1974-1981. The “malaise era” itself was by the loosest definitions only about 13 years, from 1974-1987.
> US auto makers have been on the ropes since the 1980s.
Without a doubt.
In about 2000 the US automakers sued the EPA because their proposed clean air regulations for about 2009 were "impossible".
They were actually more lax than what Japanese automakers were already selling cars for in the year 2000.
So the automakers sued the US government to admit that in 2009 they couldn't build cars that were as clean as cars Japan was already making in 2000. That says a lot.
As has been pointed out, they sure did in the 70's when there was a huge financial incentive.
I expect that acting like all American's want are $60K+ luxury cars is what is going to take the US auto industry into the next massive downward spiral.
I.m.o. consumer weight on safety has dramatically increased since the 70s. Frugality has decreased. Of course it is an arms race with all the other giant cars already on the road. Consequently GM etc. are trying to appease US consumers with giant EVs.
The US is trying to do industrial policy (like now in China, and previously in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, and in Germany before that), but without the key aspect -- export discipline -- that makes industrial policy work. I'm thinking about Joe Studwell's How Asia Works. Everything I'm seeing in the US reminds me more of the failures in Indonesia and India than of the successes in Japan and Korea. With the exceptions of -- "say what you will about Elon, but" -- Tesla and SpaceX. Bidenonics will take time to bear fruit, though, and could yet yield some successes.
Point is, using tariffs to protect "infant industry" is the opposite of export discipline.
(As a side note, most of those countries also had major land reform, whereas property rights -- sorry, "rule of law" -- are pretty sacred in the US )
Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and many other countries turned sour on importing chinese EVs in favour of some kind of protectionism. Most developing countries dont have the infrastucture for EVs. Europe hit BYD with a 17 % tariff (10% being the standard)
When they're locally built, tariffs don't apply. Like Japanese, Korean and European car manufacturers, BYD will do the same in Mexico and eventually the US if necessary.
EVs on the battlefield are as of yet untested. That makes the BYD factory at best possible dual use. A bad target for Taiwan and its allies for a host of reasons.
Drones seem to be quite an important facet of the current war in Ukraine and Russia.
I wonder how fast this factory could be converted produce drones and how fast it could spit them out.
Imagine a circular loop of larger carrier aircraft that load up FPV drones from this factory and fly to their destination to drop them off only to fly back to do it again.
The FPV drones could have object recognition to target people, artillery, infrastructure so they could operate autonomously.
I wonder if they will put the landing pads on the factory roof or next to the factory.
Equally, China has enough missiles to blockade Taiwan permanently. There's no reason for them to attempt an amphibious landing or anything insane like that. It's unclear to me what the US response would be in a blockade situation, but Chinese hypersonic missiles do pose a threat to carriers.
This isn't Desert Storm we're talking about here, China is a real threat.
Look at a map of Taiwan. Or better, look at it in Google Earth. Taiwan is a narrow island with a mountain range running north-south down the middle. The developed areas are west of the mountains, facing China, in a strip 15 to 30km wide.
There's no defensive depth. And nowhere for all the people to go in an attack. It's not like Ukraine, where the current fighting is like battling over Iowa, one farm at a time. It's more like Gaza, with too many people crammed into too little land. But bigger.
China has a large number of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles. Bringing US Navy ships in the Taiwan strait means losing many of them. The PLAN has more ships than the US Navy, and is building more at a high rate.
I still see memes about how the large government is preventing progress and causing de-industrialisation being pushed on Twitter, usually putting some European countries graphs next to USA graphs and showing how EU performed worse than USA after 2008(I guess that's the year the regulations kicked in), however they never compare China and the USA on these graphs.
Because then the libertarian propaganda turns into communist propaganda.
Can we get a vote on boycotting Twitter posts? I don't think it's right to support a platform that is now largely crazy right-wing nationalists, racists, transphobes and the like. Its owner regularly posts false information intended to stoke fears and manipulate people, and now this person is literally a government official. I don't want to see that platform advertised on HN.
It's 2024, we can do better than blurry horribly blown out pictures these days. Check for example https://mapper.acme.com/?ll=34.39719,113.94792&z=15&t=SL&mar... for cleaner shot of the site (zoom in few notches for extra details). Google Maps annoyingly cuts half-way through the factory site.
edit: that ACME mapper image looks to be from mid-2023, in more recent imagery the construction on the east side has been completed.
When you zoom out far enough in ACME mapper, the factory disappears. (I'm guessing that's an older image.)
Yep, pretty common for different zoom levels to be different time points. ACME is using plane photography for its high zoom images. You could try zoom.earth for hourly/12hourly satellite imagery.
The way Chinese towns are organized is incredible. I'm impressed by this map.
The number of construction vehicles doing something versus sitting around waiting for labor in that shot is impressive.
Yeah, I have never seen something like that in America in my life. Always plenty of machines sitting around, and every few weeks some guys will hop on them for the day, but other than that they just sit there. It almost looks AI generated how densely packed those are - though I assume that this is real footage.
And what blows my mind is that if I want to rent a tractor with a front loader for some landscaping work it’s hundreds a day. Yet even larger commercial earth moving equipment sits around unused for weeks.
Some of that may be due to the owner transporting it from job to job instead of storing it in their own yard.
Nonetheless, there's a lot of idle people/equipment in construction because things have to be done in the right order and sometimes it's more economical to over-provision than risk delaying the whole project because something wasn't available when it was needed.
Those hundreds per day will partly pay for all the sitting around unused in the hiring company's yard! You can see this in the pricing which is usually a lower rate if you hire it for a longer period.
With China's real estate sector stagnating (because they've built enough housing for future demand to an excess, broadly speaking), all of that capacity is moving towards clean energy manufacturing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
https://thediplomat.com/2024/04/how-china-became-the-worlds-...
The doubts about the size of the investment in that Wikipedia article are funny. It's a bit like "We cannot afford to invest in education", but the Chinese are saying "We cannot afford not to invest in education" (Famous quotes, it's more about R&D here). China's leadership is probably terrified of falling into the middle-income trap. It might be the biggest issue on their minds right now. At least I am watching from the sidelines, wondering "Are they gonna make it?".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41664312
China scaling and efficiency is really something else. it seems they've latched on to something that works better than even democracy and capitalism
They’re certainly good at building.
Actually utilizing that capacity is something else entirely; there are factories less than ten years old shuttering due to overcapacity. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/business/china-auto-facto...
And the rush to subsidize more capacity is a big contributor to local government debt burdens in China, which is estimated to leave Chinese debt to GDP at 117%.
China’s debt load fluctuates if you consider just the central government, local governments, and SOEs owned by either the central or local governments. Then you have private sector debt. SOEs are where a lot of china’s shadow debt comes from (localities ask SOEs they control to fund public projects of their own books), this is what pushes China’s debt load over 100%.
There’s that and the LGFVs financed by land sales which are all off official balance sheets.
Authoritarian governments have always been better at ordering top to underlings to get shit done, because if you don't get shit done your shit is getting undone. Which is to say erased from history and replaced by someone who will.
Basically, Chinese government wants a bigass factory and they will get a bigass factory because literally fuck you.
This is in contrast to liberal governments where governments can incentivize, plead and beg, and in certain extraordinary cases force the matter at court-point, but ultimately is at the mercy and pleasure of the people governed.
The flipside, of course, is that when authoritarian governments get it wrong they really get it wrong sometimes well past the point of recovery. Liberal governments getting it wrong have a lot more margin for error.
> Basically, Chinese government wants a bigass factory and they will get a bigass factory because literally fuck you.
And what's the difference from the US government when it wants a bigass factory?
Isn't the difference that the US also wanted China to build bigass factories? They got too good at that.
>And what's the difference from the US government when it wants a bigass factory?
A normal business transaction, with all the good and bad parts thereof. The government can't force the issue unless they do it themselves which is usually not the case.
not just that, but the fact that the US gov't does hold elections means that what they do generally is in line with the people.
At this moment, what the chinese gov't is doing is _also_ (presumably) in line with their people's wishes - after all, factories and exports means jobs and economic growth. It remains to be seen if this continues to be in the face of a potential war, tariffs, or some other external shock.
> it seems they've latched on to something that works better than even democracy and capitalism
Wouldn’t this just be plain old fashioned authoritarianism? America can latch on to this too, and we might based on how the Trump admin turns out.
No. One required component is plain old fashioned oversupply of labor. America doesn't have that because all employable people are too rich. China also has an oversupply of skilled labor like engineers, in part because the threat of poverty is a strong motivator to get rich. America also lacks that which you can see in capable young people doing arts degrees with no thought to their future income because it doesn't matter - they'll still live comfortably even on minimum wage.
That’s an easy enough problem to solve if we had the appetite to solve it, why couldn’t we legitimize the roles illegal immigrants currently do right now with a Singapore style migrant worker program?
There is a low estimation of 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US. The biggest difference is that in the US they are working on fast food jobs, house cleaning, babysitting. Different priorities.
It does seem to have an AI look to it. The resolution is pretty poor.
Viewable link: https://nitter.poast.org/taylorogan/status/18591462425191672...
BYD 900k employees vs Tesla 122k
https://cnevpost.com/2024/09/13/byd-workforce-exceeds-900000...
The scale is just insane .. hard to comprehend a 3km/2mi wide factory.
To my knowledge the largest factory in the world is BASF Ludwigshafen (Germany) with 10 km². Here is an aerial photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:LudwigshafenBASF2017-0... Followed by Volkswagen Wolfsburg (also Germany) with 6.5 km². Seems the BYD factory is competing with it for rank #2.
It will be 50 sq. km by the time the extension is finished [1].
[1] https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1859149340897628545
The wording is confusing, but I believe the Zhengzhou International Land Port is 50sqkm, not the factory. That also fits the numbers they're giving [1]: "Zhengzhou International Land Port Project announced ——total area of around 50 square kilometers", and that includes a lot of "open-air warehouse" (parking lot). It's still massive, but not quite as crazy.
1: https://www.zzhkgq.gov.cn/2024/01-28/2944537.html
I don't think BASF really counts, it's more of a factorio district and not one single insanely large building.
I was refering to the size of the factory premises = land + buildings.
It seems we need diffrent categories for a ranking: premises vs. base area of the buildings vs. floor area of the buildings vs. largest building per base area vs. largest building per floor area, etc. And then we would need to clarify what counts in each case ...
Anyway, I live about 20 km from BASF and it is quite an impressive sight, especially at night. Here is a photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Fackelschein_des_Steam... However, the red lights are probably an artefact of the camera; typically the lights looks rather bluesh in reality. And the photo was shot with a 400 mm lens: the television tower in the foreground is more than 4 km away from the factory, the house at the left about 3 km.
I've studied in the area and, as a bit of a night person, often drove past at night when driving to or from parents. A very cool sight, though the smell is often less pleasant :D - presumably nothing toxic, that would be illegal, but it does smell bad. Kind of like burning plastic, but without the harshest components of that smell.
Anyway, cool that Germany still has the biggest of something ~heavy industry.
Like an image ripped from Blade Runner.
Wild, fascinating, frightening.
It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change.
It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale, and nations that suffered similar disparities in industrial capacity (not to mention energy production) haven't done well in the past.
The bread and butter of progress is competition and I think a lot of American companies “won” like Boeing or Intel in the 90s and no one else could compete.
Unfortunately winning is disastrous because it makes you complacent.
Perhaps the most flagrant and dumbest example is Internet Explorer 6.
I do not approve of raising tariffs on foreign vehicles because it will dull our edge in the long term. Protectionism is a short term bandaid.
Tariffs are a good way to ensure you still have a domestic capability. If Germany/korea/japan/China outcompete all US auto makers and they die, along with it goes a ton of jobs, manufacturing knowledge & capacity, cultural influence, an ability to keep capital flowing domestically, downstream suppliers, and ability to change factories from autos to military equipment in wartime. If China just keeps taking industry, then all we have left is an outpouring of all capital and a bunch of “content creators” left. Not a good prospect.
US auto companies already try to compete globally in situations with/without tariffs. That provides plenty of competition too.
Intel was famously not complacent. Perhaps a long lapse starting a decade ago. But even then “complacence” was not the problem. Ditto for Boeing. Managerial focus on just milking the cow has been the fundamental problem: and they milked frantically—not complacently.
One could perhaps say that short-termism is complacency about the future.
Of course we can motivate ourselves. But they're acting like we did in the 1800s through the mid 1900s. They just build anywhere no matter what. They have no interest in dealing with environmental concerns. The officially released pollution levels in China are mind-boggling and they still do not represent how bad it really is.
You think US manufacturers wouldn't be delighted to just buy a few hundred acres land and start building stuff? They'd do it in a heartbeat. For better and for worse, it is not a level playing field. Conforming to government regulations over here is stifling for a 100-house development in Arkansas, but it's almost impossible in California, Illinois, or New York. Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years.
Counterpoint: See the speed with which Colossus has been (is being) assembled in Memphis Tennessee. Yes, on an existing industrial site but this is still one damn impressive accomplishment.
https://www.servethehome.com/inside-100000-nvidia-gpu-xai-co...
A data center is much easier than building an industrial factory
This is why Trump has pushed for mass deregulating, America (let alone the west) can't compete against China when our politicians demand that we straight up don't.
> our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change
The US and EU are long off-peak carbon emissions (emissions even decreased during the Trump administration I, even using a trendline ignoring COVID). The biggest emitter right now is China, and it's emissions are growing not shrinking, and a considerable amount of that (including 90% of the worlds new coal plants) goes to projects like this.
Kinda, but we’re not really in a position to blame them right? To some extend, sure, but that’s easy to say when you’ve already got yours.
Western country populations seem to be willfully falling for obvious fossil fuel propaganda over and over again. Future generations will rightfully curse our names. (Including today's children.)
Sadly it comes down to "Show me the money."
I vote for change, but I don't have the money to buy electric. Even running costs don't make the difference when it comes to multiple tens of thousands of dollars in purchase price.
I'd love to "care for our environment by buying an electric car". I can't afford to.
frightening! depends on your perspective of who you are ;)
Frightening?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...
We Americans have more to fear from economic and technological dominance than we do from military invasion.
As a budding superpower ready to unseat the US from it's throan. All China has to do is wait for progress and time to run it's coarse and emerge the victor. If anything, the US is the tigger happy country as we watch the inevitable, looking for any excuse to use to stop them.
Remember, why the hell does China give two shits about war if China can surpass the US simply through economic progress. They don't care, in fact they want to avoid war.
why does they have to be a winner and loser. everyone can thrive? except the United States is being buoyed by two main elements.
1) the ability of the internet to extract value overseas while untaxed in the client country 2) The H1B visa which funnels the best talent from struggling countries 3) strong institutions and financial and education centers and 4) military industrial complex that thrives on basically manufacturing conflicts with other countries
#4 is what is scary. not the dominance of any other country itself
So that I can afford cheap shit from poorer countries, if they stay poor they contribute less to climate change, less competition for finite rare resources
> why does they have to be a winner and loser. everyone can thrive? except the United States is being buoyed by two main elements.
Why can’t there be a winner and a loser and both the winner and the loser cooperate and thrive with loser having the humility to admit he’s a loser? Isn’t this the same peaceful consequence? Just say China is better and admit inferiority for the everlasting peace. Why can’t you do it?
Because competition and cooperation are intrinsic parts of natural selection and therefore evolutionary biology and therefore human nature. Don’t pretend to be above your own nature.
Or do pretend. We can all act according to our ideals and deny our basest instincts, but don’t expect the mob to act the same way in aggregate.
I don’t think anyone disputes that China can out-manufacture us. Does that make them “better”, they the winner and the West the loser? Obviously not; things don’t end, history continues and things can go in different directions in the future. Not to mention that there are other dimensions that matter besides manufacturing prowess, namely quality of life, individual freedom, etc.
Is there a list of the world's largest factories, in a liberal sense of the word? The ones I'm aware of only consider individual structures [0], which excludes industrial plants that span multiple buildings, like this one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings
One of the old classics in this genre of largest factories, BASF, https://www.basf.com/jp/en/who-we-are/organization/locations...
Volkswagen's main factory is also pretty large: "Spanning more than 6.5 km², the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg is now the largest automotive plant in Europe, employing more than 60,000 people."[0]
[0]: https://www.volkswagen.de/de/marke-und-erlebnis/volkswagen-e...
Which if this BYD site is 2x2 miles for ~5sq km, BASF is twice as large at 10sq km! Wow
> ~5sq km
I get over 6 km^2.
Point still taken.
2x2 miles is over 10km^2. Barely.
US/German manufacturers just do assembly, they don't manufacture parts, so they only need assembly plants. BYD is a vertically integrated manufacturer. They make everything in-house which helps drive down costs. This huge footprint results in having all those different manufacturing lines under one roof. They depend on no one for finished parts, the only supply chain is raw materials.
I believe outsourcing can be a symptom of not innovating anymore.
Imagine having to contract out every prototype to a metal working shop — it slows down your ability to iterate because you can’t just go downstairs and try it.
But once you have a design set in stone, outsourcing is cheaper than doing it in-house. These companies specialize in producing parts with economies of scale.
But if you do it for too long, you kind of lose the ability to quickly iterate. Striking a balance is hard.
People are waking up, and to be fair, Tesla really led the way in the US for the last few years because they had no choice(no one would take them seriously). The question is can the West turn the ship around before its too late?
Depends if we keep the CHIPS act and the IRA. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-ira-...
too late for what??
too late relative to what?
too late to dominate in the industry of electric vehicles and thus, control/own large % of the wealth generated.
When Trump ups everything from China by 100% I guess US would be able to make something with profit?
I doubt it. It's much easier to either launder or manufacture the goods in a third country, that benefits from most of the same incentives that made Chinese manufacturing go through the roof.
Americans will be buying Chinese goods with "made in Vietnam" or "made in Mexico" stamped on it. The American profit will be in setting up those laundering schemes
If the Trump tariffs are based on country of final assembly, then yes, final assembly will just occur somewhere else, but it will take a couple of years to setup, and the inflation shock by that time will have done a lot of damage to the economy (recession likely, depression possible). It makes sense that it took Trump forever to find a treasury secretary willing to go along with this.
Couple of years for a western enterprise maybe, but in the east, things move fast. Really fast.
That is not remotely how tariffs work.
Doesn't a tariff drive up prices? (or at least intended for that)
Tariffs are a surcharge on imports added and demanded by the government, paid by the people or entities importing.
As an example, if an American buys a Chinese coffee maker priced at $100 and there is a 50% tariff, there is a $50 tariff that is paid by the importing American to the American government.
The total cost to the importing American is $150. Now, if this price is equal to or higher than an American coffee maker then the importing American is incentivized to purchase the American coffee maker instead.
As another example, if Tesla sells Model 3s for $50,000 and BYD comes in with a similar spec car priced at $25,000, then putting a 100% tariff on it will drive BYD's effective price up to $43,000 allowing Tesla to compete without undercutting or outright selling at a loss.
Essentially, tariffs are a way to ensure that the pricing floor of the domestic market is not driven down unreasonably by international markets at the cost of the importers.
Wasn’t always that way. Ford’s River Rouge plant took iron ore in one end, and rolled automobiles out the other end.
Not entirely correct. Boeing, despite all the bad press, actually reversed course on this recently. 787's wing was made by a supplier, but 777X's wing is actually built in-house, right next to the main factory, starting from carbon fiber fabric.
How much can Boeing do this though? My understanding is in the past they used moving some of their production to a country as leverage to win contracts. They are a company that moved their headquarters to DC because management treats the product as secondary as if they make widgets. Until they reverse that they aren't moving in the right direction.
Don't forget USA auto companies also outsource their design work, CAD, etc. My understanding is that TATA used to have a whole floor at Chrysler.
So the factory accepts iron ore, crude oil, coal, lithium ore, bauxite, monazite, copper ores, rubber, and soy beans at one end and spits out finished cars at the other?
They don't even outsource their nylon zip ties?
the only supply chain is raw materials
Citation needed, this seems exaggerated. Eg. I'm sure they use IC's and I'd be very surprised if the facility includes a fab.
They, BYD, have their own semiconductor R&D and manufacturing subsidiary called BYD semiconductor.
EDIT: Seems like it is a division, so not a spin-off.
Just like Ford used to do.
This feels very paperclip maximization
Can the west compete?
The problem with the west is that it’s already developed. Everything in the west is a bit like the European automobile industry, it’s highly refined for what it is and we expect to milk it for some time to come.
Same thing happened with the financial institutions and internet infrastructure - those who had the early versions of it established early ended up lagging behind once the technology was superseded.
The poorest countries in Europe had the best internet for a while because the richest countries wanted to milk the copper wires they invested on.
The US for long had much worse payments systems than Europe and Africa because they were at advanced stage on adopting the early technology.
strongly disagree. the West has almost no manufacturing capability or labor force (at an affordable rate) at the moment. it's almost unsustainable even for a small business to be paying $20 an hour in some cities let alone run large factories
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_assembly_pl...
Is it maybe because centering divs was much better career choice than dealing with machines and chemicals for more than a decade now? If that’s changing and manufacturing becomes a need, it should correct by itself.
The west, especially the USA invested gargantuan money into high margin high scale businesses and the Chinese worked their way up in dealing with atoms with help of the west. Now they too can do many of the high margin stuff and the west will have to re-learn how to deal with atoms. It happened because the west’s rich were simply shittier than Chinese bureaucrats and invested badly by choosing wrong KPI or ideas. Wonder what happens if the AI thing doesn’t pan out after pouring enormous money on it(instead of on something strategically important but not as potentially lucrative).
IMHO things are reversible, especially for the USA. Europe is in a worse place as its demographics and energy situation is less favorable.
This is a ridiculous statement. The west has absolutely staggering manufacturing capacity.
China has more. And the trends are in the wrong direction, to be sure. But Germany and the US, among many others, have tremendous capacity.
Any big grouping can compete if there’s enough will. Look at how eg Russia has rejigged much of its war machine during the Ukraine war. Look at how Ukraine has turned themselves inside out to compete. At some level of pressure, countries transform. How much will it take? Is simple economic pressure enough? Can eg Europe gather enough of its massive educated population to transform?
In economic competition, as with poker, if you don’t know who the sucker is…you’re it. China has been making suckers of many countries and they are slowly waking up.
There is a sense in which China has made a sucker of itself, too. China has some serious internal economic structure issues and it remains to be seen how long those issues and the downstream problems it creates are sustainable.
For an example, remember the amazing speed of construct demonstrated by the Chinese government building covid quarantine facilities? Hundreds of square miles of em across every province. They're all gone now.
I always hear this as a criticism of China but then I watch some footage of the actual place and it looks like it lives in the future (to be fair, it's uneven, but let me tell you I've traveled to the US enough times to be shocked at how uneven it can get). Sure, there's real problems I'm sure, where isn't there, but here in Canada by the time we've built a kilometer of an LRT line massively over budget, China has added a new high speed rail line.
Define "the west". There was an interesting article here in HN the other day [0] "Almost 10% of South Korea's Workforce Is Now a Robot". China now surpasses all the west-aligned nations in terms of total industrial robots [1], however the west still has the upper-hand in terms of robot to population density ratio.
I think it is a matter of strategy and it seems China's strategy is innovation, science and productivity. We on the west seem to like consumption before everything else and IMHO we are doing it wrong.
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42225091
1 - https://www.statista.com/chart/31337/new-installations-of-in...
I think another axis is an underlying cultural difference: balance of collectivism vs individualism. China can say “there will be a factory here” because it’s overall good to have one, even if a few noses are out of joint. In California it’s decades of fights to get a train. The trick to competing is to find the right balance for the next decades. China used to be all-central-planning, which was sluggish and not agile. Now it’s guided by central planning (great for overall alignment) over many years rather than jerky 4 year stints, combined with massively distributed efforts to generate high levels of competition and agility. What is the optimal balance for your country or state?
Depends if the Chinese need a market to export to.
The main issue with china is a reliance on exports and a declining population...
All work and productivity is ultimately an enabler of consumption.
I don't believe so anymore - at least not in California.
https://www.hoover.org/research/californias-businesses-stop-...
"Between January 2022 and June 2024, employment in US private businesses increased by about 7.32 million jobs. Of these 7.32 million jobs, about 5,400 were jobs created in California businesses—representing about .07 percent of the US figure. Put differently, if California private-sector jobs grew at the same rate as in the rest of the country, they would have increased by over 970,000 during that period, about 180 times greater than the actual increase."
Didn't California shut down surfboard blank production? You can't even make traditional surfboards in California anymore. They don't want jobs that produce environmental waste. Not all states are like that.
No. Nixon et al handed us to CCP whole. But hey, cheap TVs, clothes and what not.
west can compete. unlike byd’s, which get bricked all the time without infrastructure to maintain and repair them, west (and japan even more so) build cars that last. this is china we are talking about, the last thing I want is a car made by them… :)
As someone from Australia, which hasn't shut its self off from the China EV market. I drive a BYD Dolphin. You should be worried. They are cheaper, and more full-featured than European equivalent. They aren't junk.
Also, they aren't the only big player from China. Australia is soon getting GAC/Aion, Geely, Jaecoo, Leapmotor, Deepal, Xpeng.
Here is an article if interested. https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/which-chinese-car-bran...
People used to say the same things about things made in Taiwan, then Japan, and then China, for things like electronics and white goods. It was true - until suddenly it wasn't.
In engineering you ultimately have to build stuff. Over, and over, and over again. You'll mess it up a lot at first, and then one day you'll realize that you haven't.
China is not stuck in 1965 trying to make an EV out of a saucepan and a backyard forge. They learn, and they keep trying. They have a domestic market that their government allows to be used as a test bed for everything they are doing, which sounds more coercive than it really is, especially given the fierce Sino-centric patriotism they have.
If Xi can last another 20 years without a palace coup, or manage a smooth transition of power that does not whipsaw policy, the West is in serious trouble.
Yeah but Japan has long had a cultural obsession with delivering high quality products. I don't know if China ever did, but if it did, much of it was wiped out during cultural revolution and replaced with succeed at all costs.
And there is a difference between success and excellence.
For example there have been zero bullet train fatalities in its entire history, and several Chinese HSR fatal accidents already. For political reasons the quality of the HSR wheels in China took a sharp downturn so expect more accidents in the coming two years.
There were many terrible electric cars out of China for years. Every province had its own little EV manufacturers. China's car industry is less concentrated than the US, but the big players are winning.
BYD is only the 9th largest carmaker in China. SAIC, Changan, and Geeley are the top 3. SAIC and Changan are state-owned, but Geeley is private, as is BYD. SAIC makes about 5 million vehicles a year. General Motors, over 6 million. BYD, around 3 million. Tesla, a little less than BYD.
Reviews of newer BYD cars are quite favorable. It's not like five years ago, when China's electric cars were not very good.
BYD has a simplified design for electric cars. The main component is the "e-axle", with motor, axle, differential, and wheels in one unit. There's a power electronics box which controls battery, motor, and charging. And, of course, the battery, made of BYD lithium-iron-phosphate prismatic cells. Talks CANbus to the dashboard and driver controls. BYD offers this setup in a range of sizes, up to box truck scale.
BYD and CATL are spending huge amounts of money to get to solid state batteries. The consensus seems to be that they work fine but are very hard to make. The manufacturing problems will probably get solved.
(Somebody should buy Jeep from Stellantis and put Jeep bodies on BYD E-axles. Stellantis is pushing a terrible "mild hybrid" power train with 21 miles of electric range, and an insanely overpriced all-electric power train. Stellantis prices went through the roof under the previous (fired) CEO, and sales went through the floor. Jeep sales are way down, despite customers who want them.)
Chinese cars used to have lots of quality problems because they didn’t embrace automation, afraid that would take away jobs (Toyotas made in China 12-15 years ago were notoriously bad compared to ones made in Japan/usa). But in the last ten years, they’ve gone full speed ahead on it, as aggressive as the Japanese, and the quality increases are really noticeable. It’s not just a tech upgrade, they’ve really changed the way they are thinking about manufacturing (not just a jobs program).
it will take years before they can prove that their cars are made to last. I won’t be lining up to buy them but in 5-10 years perhaps
Mine comes with a 5 year warranty, and a 7 year battery replacement warranty. I'm fine with not waiting.
Kia/hyundai went through that phase already, and just got through it with absurd 10 year warranties when they first came out. China could do the same in the states, although I think they will have enough traction in SEA/Africa/Russia//Australia by then that they won’t have to.
This can't be a serious take, right? Chinese consumers don't expect much less when it comes to maintenance and repair. And given their 3M+/year vehicle production output, they're not a small player.
reach out to countries that sell these cars, find people on social media and/or if you have them in real life or travel… these cars are absolute garbage
I had the pleasure of seeing one in Mexico recently. If this car is garbage, sign me up! But alas, it's impossible because we decided that since we can't compete we'll just make them essentially illegal.
not sure what your perspective is based on. gi your persistence, it seems it's likely not rooted in actually talking to these people, but perhaps some slight unconscious bias?
most of the things you use in your kitchen and also your device. you're typing this on were manufactured in China
Do you have any data about that? I have only heard the opposite from owners and it sounds a lot like the things Americans used to say about Japanese cars prior to getting stomped by them in the 80s.
two friends in russia, traveled to mexico twice this year, boss from australia… story after story after story always the same, amazeballs for X number of days and then get bricked, interior issues, steering …
I have a chinese EV (GMW, not BYD.) I am a very happy owner; huge features for the price. I am not sure i can see buying of a "mainstream" manafacturer again. (My country has no tarrifs/no domestic car building.)
your iPhone is manufactured in China :). your view is very outdated, or maybe even willfully. I'm sure they're plenty capable
All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average) and maintain/develop car dependency infrastructures.
This is the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy and reducing massively our climate and biodiversity impact.
I want those kind of factories to produce trains, bicycles... everything that can move people in a more efficient way than those "cars".
There is a clear reason why such factories are being built in China and if you are a USA or German citizen, you wouldn't like it.
In a BBC article from a couple of days ago [0], they hinted that China intends to take the lead into transitioning developing countries from fossil fuels to green tech. They produce batteries, EVs and solar panels. Just this year alone Pakistan of all the countries, imported 13 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels. For context - the UK has 17GW of installed solar in total.
China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.
0 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rx2drd8x8o
Pakistan has better geography for solar.
>China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.
it is classic case of new dominant players emergence when paradigm shift happens. PC vs. mainframe, GPU vs. CPU, clean energy economy vs. fossil fuel based.
How is the power being generated for all this manufacturing capacity?
60% coal, some baseload nuclear (5%), renewables (30%). They have massive dams (14% of electricity IIRC).
Coal share is shrinking, a lot.
Today, capacity factor of coal plants is below 50% (that's why you always see China builds coal plants... that stand idle) and their coal consumption has been more or less flat for a decade. The plan is to use coal plans when wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine. Natural gas is a national security risk due to imports, but they do have a lot of coal.
Out west coal drops a lot and green energy is more available. They are still limited by grid in getting green energy from west to east. They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.
> They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.
There are also other reasons. The name of western province is Xinjiang. They did have a plan to turn it into manufacturing hub, and it's one of the reasons why you see stuff you see.
> All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average)
Actually, if you pay attention to scales and sizes, it's so very little to achieve so much. What you're seeing is tremendous efficiencies concentrated on a small piece of land, affecting transportation on a vast scale.
> the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy
The worst except the others. Like sure, retooling our metropolises might be nice. But it’s also not only expensive but incredibly carbon intensive, to say nothing of not wanted by most of the world.
It's not that expensive to put down a bike lane.
The problem with car-dependent cities is that they are very spread out. Why does public transit suck and why don't many people use the bike lanes? Because everything is far away.
We've built our cities this way. Our tax system encourages it (by not taxing land value directly and exempting development from taxation), and our zoning requires it (my city is almost entirely zoned exclusively for single-family detached housing). Bike lanes are nice, but they don't make a 25-km ride through endless suburbia any shorter.
You can't just copy the superficial traits of bikeable European cities and hope to get the same results. We need to fundamentally rethink the way our cities are allowed and encouraged to grow.
It is outrageously expensive.
"Building 101km of cycleways across Christchurch to cost $301m", population 405000, So that is $750 per person, which is about 1% of median earnings for a year. That is paid for mostly by car owners (via petrol tax and car tax) and a bit by home owners.
And the new infrastructure is visibly under-utilised - at best a few % of traffic. You could force people to bike using laws and economics I guess... I would be interested to see a per-trip cost analysis for cyclists.
There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere - bikes are great for some trips and some demographics.
Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...
> It is outrageously expensive.
Quite the opposite.
> Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...
https://www.benelux.int/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Report_Cy...
The paper suggests biking only 118 days per year. The car ownership costs are not "saved" - the projected savings are wrong. Ownership car costs are 0.167/km and savings by riding a bicycle are 0.349/km.
Two ignored real costs of bicycling are lack of optionality (planning ahead for weather changes, locked into transport mode) and carrying capacity (groceries, children, sports equipment, etcetera). And I'd like to see other costs of cycling (wet weather gear, helmets, locks) included.
About the quality I expected.
301 million dollars for 101km of infrastructure is cheap compared to building highways [0]. The price of the usual infrastructure is a burden on everyone as well, not just car owners.
You shouldn't have to force anyone to choose any particular mode of transport. I think people choose what is most convenient and that happens to be cycling in urban areas where there is safe infrastructure for it.
Your question reads pretty weird to me; building cycling infrastructure makes a city more ideal for cyclists, that's exactly the point. I didn't read it yet, but I found a paper that seems interesting and in the direction of your question. [1]
[0]https://www.worldhighways.com/news/european-highway-construc... [1]https://economics.acadiau.ca/tl_files/sites/economics/resour...
> is cheap compared to building highways
How about cycleways are cheap compared to building airports?
Cycle lanes are not substitutes for highways nor airports.
Bike lane construction tends to be lumped in with regular road maintenance, which makes it look expensive, but the really expensive part is doing repairs on the existing roads. "Building bike lanes" for 300M is more palatable than "fixing potholes and repainting" for 300M
Depends on where you live I guess. "Fixing potholes" would be far more palatable than "bike lanes" over here.
This seems to be the source of that quote: https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/124611551/building-10...
Note that this is NZ dollars, and that spend is over ~16 years. I.e. ~NZ$46/year/person ≈ US$27/year/person at current rates. The article compares the costs to road and motorway costs in Christchurch.
Bike lanes and bikes aren't alternatives to most of what motorized transport is providing.
30% of the US can’t drive, whether because of disability, age, financial hardship, immigration status, or any number of other reasons. Why don't you hold the current system of "motorized transport" to the same impossible standard of solving all transportation needs as you expect of bikes?
At least 80% of urban car trips could be replaced since the invention of the e-cargo bike. That doesn’t mean it works everywhere, of course, but there are millions and millions of people driving a single digit number of miles, usually at slower than bicycle doors-to-door speeds, and are never carrying 3+ kids and hundreds of pounds of cargo.
Think roads, not cars.
I am. Most of our road costs are for suburban car commuters and for subsidized car storage. If it was business usage and transit we’d need far fewer lanes, especially since businesses would use rail transportation more if the roads weren’t so heavily subsidized.
Most car trips are very short, and commuting to a CBD is easily served by transit.
That still doesn't solve last mile supply of stores and offices, nor does it solve construction, policing, emergency services, etc.
Each of those likely has possible alternatives to motorized transport, but they're all different alternatives. Meanwhile, today, they all share the same road network with regular civilian commute, sharing costs and mutually improving efficiency.
Put differently: instead of imagining all passenger cars replaced by bikes, imagine all roads replaced by bike lanes, then extrapolate from that.
> not that expensive to put down a bike lane
Scale-wise insufficient. We aren’t going to get to net zero with bike lanes.
Who said net zero? Perfect is the enemy of good.
Comments like these need to be included in almost any discussion about transport or in fact any discussion about any change. Most people (or both sides) dismiss ideas because they are not 100% perfect. And ignore the fact that nothing can be perfect
If we only do a little bit, we'll only accomplish a little bit.
Believe it or not, but the buses and trains are also being manufactured in China. if you'd visit, you'd see that they have excellent public infrastructure, with multiple redundancies
I agree that cars are at least double the mass they need to be. The size of cars needed for a school run or to drive to work are generally quite small, but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.
> but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.
This is the reality in United States, but not in most of the world.
Sadly though, other countries are trending the same way.
World's response to the climate crisis is already dangerously delayed, and we're at a point where we need anything ASAP. We've ran out of time to massively overhaul infrastructure everywhere.
The US and UK apparently can't even build a single high speed rail line any more.
Car dependency sucks, but we won't be able to fix that in the short term, but at least we can fix its oil dependence.
Cleaner grid will also need a lot of battery storage, and EV demand helps scale that up.
I don't think it's a particularly different timescale to swap from ICE to EV than to drastically reduce car dependence. What makes you think there's a big difference to where swapping to electric cars is easier than avoiding cars?
I’m a bike commuter, all on board for transit, etc. but too much of the world – especially North America – is built around cars exclusively and that’s not changing any time soon because doing so would require things like massive rezoning to avoid people needing to travel such long distances just to function.
If we are going to have cars, I’d prefer they be smaller, safer EVs contributing ⅓ the carbon footprint of the status quo. Every bit of savings buys years to make further changes, and it directly saves lives and improves quality of life for a billion people. Even if climate change was not happening, it’d be worth doing for the improvements in cardiovascular health, disruption of sleep patterns and other consequences of engine noise, local water and soil pollution, etc.
Unfortunately the only places in the world that I know of building new cities are UAE, Saudi, Egypt, China. I don’t think any of those are building for car-less.
Saudi Arabia's "The Line" is car-free.
Next weigh up your house, get ashamed, tear it down and live in a tent.
For the 1000th time here, even extremely well developed public transport by US standards and various financial punishments for owning cars is simply not enough for people to drop them, the convenience is simply too high.
Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year.
Maybe some AI driven community (or even private fleet) of shared cars to be hailed in Uber style on demand would work, reducing number of cars overall and the need to own personal one(s). Not there yet.
I don't think anyone envisions having no cars; public transportation make it so we don't need cars, and other nudges make it so we have fewer cars than we would otherwise have.
You might as well wish that the factories produced teleporters. You're putting the cart before the horse. You have to fix the demand side first. I know there's an online demand for public transportation and bikes and if you are in that bubble it can feel like the whole world is with you, but in the real world, most people (obvs not everyone) prefers to have their own car.
I think there's hope since the only thing people like more than their cars is being glued to their phones, and public transport enables you to do that during your commute.
Why can’t both be done? Bicycles are already cheap, and an electric bike can be purchased under $1000. Not everyone is capable of limiting their commute to the ~10 mile radius an e-bike easily permits. Some of us still need cars, unfortunately. Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move.
Is there some technology that enables high-speed travel and weighs less than a human, which seems to be an important criteria to you?
In Japan electric bikes were relatively cheap as you say but in Canada, a bike to carry my family costs more than 5-6k, closer to 10k.
I can't even import those electric mama charis because of unwarranted concern about batteries.
Hard to support bike infrastructure when safetyism means bike routes are only for singles and the rich.
A bicycle is not suitable for the 100km trip to see my parents, and the only country that can operate trains at a satisfactory level is Japan (and maybe China, but I don't trust their data).
So no, its either this or a gas car. Both are real solutions that work, today. Changing society from the bottom up is not.
or a bus.
But then again it's amazing how we ignore the infrastructure costs of building and maintaining the roads to run the cars everywhere.
Sounds swell. But people like cars. Not realistic.
No, the initial goal of this factory is to achieve dominance over the global automotive industry but the ultimate goal is to convert it into a machine that can spit out drones to invade Taiwain, South Korea, and Japan.
Source? Zhengzhou doesn’t seem like where you’d put a factory you want to protect from the combined forces of Japan, Korea and America.
You build the drones in advance of the conflict.
It's very questionable if America will play a role there. It's 50/50 that Xi will be able to do a personal favour to Trump or Musk that will keep America out of it.
When the times comes to defend Taiwan (or Japan/Korea) it will be life or death for the US to react and win. If they fail, the whole house of cards will collapse for the US. Trump as stupid as he is had gotten the ball rolling in the correct direction in his first term and I don't see how he will deviate this term.
Where do you think the Chinese will build the factories that spit out drones en masse to invade their neighbours?
> Where do you think the Chinese will build the factories that spit out drones en masse to invade their neighbours?
Where they're currently building drones.
In times of war factories will be retooled to best serve the needs of the military.
I anticipate that in a regional war China will need more aircraft than land vehicles, especially given that the regional adversaries they are facing are mostly island nations.
Why do you think the Chinese will invade their neighbors?
Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.
They abhor liberal democracies and seek to extend their domineering control over as many people as they can.
The CCP is an absolutely tyrannical organization that denies their own citizens the rights that you and I take for granted. Why would they ever desire their neighbours to have what they deny their own people?
Look no further than Hong Kong and North Korea to see what China wants for their neighbours.
South Korea only exists as it does today because Western forces repelled Chinese supported North Koreans from conquering it.
Japan only exists today because of American rebuilding after the destruction of Imperial Japan during World War 2.
Taiwan only exists as it is today because of American support.
China would have subjugated these entities and destroyed any chance of prosperity and independence that they had if not for the efforts of people who believe in individual autonomy and liberal democratic values.
China only has the power that they do to day because of authoritarians in the west who tricked the world into thinking that globalism means that we should engage in trade with undemocratic societies.
Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.
Did they invade Hong Kong? It's a very western viewpoint that invasion is the only way to affect change.
Just wait till Trump hits 'em with tariffs. That'll fix 'em --- NOT!
China is rapidly de-carbonizing and leaving the West behind.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...
For reference, England consumed 1 billion tons of coal during it's peak coal consumption decade.
So please stop with the "China is decarbonizing" crap, because they are not. A more accurate statement is "China understands the importance of energy and is applying an as-much-of-everything-approach to achieve its industrial goals"
You are comparing a country that was probably less than 5% of China's current population during that peak. And not only is China 17.5% of the world's population, it is also the major manufacturing hub for the majority of the world. 10 times as much coal as the UK's peak is still a tiny number.
The reality is that China is emitting much less CO2 per capita than the US or Canada, and just a bit more than the more industrious EU countries like Germany. And this is territorial emissions: if you take into account what percentage of those emissions is going into goods produced in China but bought by those very countries, it's probably around the EU average if not lower.
Is China anywhere near a net 0 goal? No, not even close. But among industrial powers, it is one of the ones that went by far the most into green power.
Also please stop comparing absolute numbers between countries with more than an order of magnitude population difference.
Yes, China still uses a metric fuckton of a coal, but they are decarbonizing: every year, the % of energy generated by coal goes down 1%, and renewables go up 1%.
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
Just to underline, this is not notional capacity (which inflates solar/wind), but actual power generation. This is all the more impressive because China's total consumption is simultaneously increasing rapidly.
cool now compare the population difference.
In order to build renewable infrastructure, you do need to expend a lot of energy: mining, processing, transporting. China is using coal to build up that infrastructure and converting that dirty energy into clean.
So when GHG absorbs energy from the sun, it's on a per capita basis?
No, but when talking about whether a country is emitting more than its "fair" share of GHG for any reasonable definition of "fair" per capita is what matters, unless someone can make a convincing argument that some people have some kind of natural or divine right to contribute more to GHG emissions than others.
More details are in this comment [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42229636
Why didn't you include England's total historical contributions to GHG emissions and technologies in your comparison then?
Its not just about population. The UK was the world's foremost manufacturing nation at the time, just as China is now. It was the centre of manufacturing of an empire so the relevant comparison is with the population of the empire. There were no real alternative sources of energy - no nuclear, no solar, no wind (in a form suitable for most industry).
The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.
And if you want to count the population consuming industrial goods as the population that "causes" those emissions, then China looks even better, because they are producing goods consumed by literally billions of people.
> The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.
Most of those did not use coal in most of the empire in the year of peak consumption: 1913.
It was providing a lot of raw materials.
The 100% tariffs are already in place under the Biden administration. Trump only needs to prevent a Mexico manufacturing loophole.
However, BYD still has the entire rest of the world to sell to. They will be fine.
Yes, BYD will be fine.
And they know this is --- hence they are doubling the size of their already massive factory.
Guess who won't be fine? US auto manufacturers. They won't be able to compete anywhere other than the USA. And China loves it.
The US government bailed out GM under Obama. Do you know what GM did this month? They spent billions on stock buybacks and millions on bonuses while firing a ton of people. F'em. They aren't a car company, they are a stock company that happens to make cars, a route most large American companies seem to be taking (see also Boeing, whose management cares so much about/is detached from their product that they relocated their management away from the business and to Washington DC).
US auto makers have been on the ropes since the 1980s. My hypothesis is that their heyday was 50s and 60s “greaser” culture and they kinda got their heads stuck in that era. “Golden ages” are incredibly dangerous.
When people started wanting just practical small reliable affordable cars as the price of gas increased and cars became just an appliance they didn’t respond to that market and the Japanese did. It’s been either sideways or downhill since. The only thing keeping them alive now is unnecessarily large status symbol trucks and that is a limited market that will be trashed if oil spikes again. There’s got to be a limit somewhere to how much people will pay to show off or own the libs or whatever motivates one to buy an F-5000 Super Chungus.
They are still mostly missing the EV boat. First Tesla caught them asleep and now China. Culturally they still are not crazy about EVs because they do not go vroom vroom.
Trump might string them along a bit longer with protectionism and a pull back on EVs to push more vroom vroom but meanwhile BYD will eat the entire world.
Their downfall was earlier than that. Post WW2 everyone was looking to buy a new car (people kept their old one during the war because production was going to the war effort). The car companies had such demand they moved to a 'car salesman' sales structure to milk every customer as much as possible because demand was so much higher than production. They got hooked on the easy money and entrenched a lot of bad business practices/policies as a result.
GM for all intents and purposes died (remember we funded a whole new GM, a completely new business entity, during the 2008 financial crisis timeframe) and yet new GM just 'invested' 6 billion dollars in stock buybacks, millions in management bonuses while conducting employee layoffs. But they will have no problem coming and asking the government for billions 'to remain competitive' soon. F'm.
I think there’s a little bit more to the golden age story.
The “malaise era” started in the early 70s as a perfect storm of fuel economy restrictions and more widespread US economic woes. This lead to decades of low quality cars being made.
US automakers not only lost out on consumers looking for simple appliances to drive, but ALSO the enthusiasts that liked driving and cars. The car guys that came of age in this era have two choices: chase after the same American muscle cars your dad liked, or switch over to imported hot hatches and the JDM tuner scene
> This lead to decades of low quality cars being made.
Really, it was only a bit over one decade. Taking GM as an example, their last great cars were produced for the 1973 model year, after which point the economy, emissions, and efficiency requirements resulted in drastic (bad) changes. It only took until the late 1980s for them to make some genuinely good vehicles though. For instance, the Buick Regal/Oldsmobile Cutlass/Pontiac Grand Prix from 1988 were well built, comfortable, handled (relatively) well, and were very reliable - especially from 1990 with the introduction of the 3.8L V6, what is likely GM’s most reliable engine ever built (second possibly only to the small block V8). The same was tru for their sports cars (while not making much power out of the displacement, the TPI V8 firebird and corvette were similarly efficient to European sports cars at the time). Many GM cars from that era (late 1980s until early 2000s) are some of the most reliable American cars ever built.
The same is true for Ford; for example, the 1988 Probe, while not the most popular vehicle, was very reliable, comfortable, efficient, and well-built, likely in part due to their partnership with Mazda. It could reasonably be argued that as early as 1980, Ford was making pretty good vehicles, with the Mercury Grand Marquis/LTD Crown Victoria being well-built and reliable, if very down on power with questionable efficiency.
Not worth talking about Chrysler because they didn’t know how to make good/reliable cars before the fuel crisis and they certainly didn’t figure out how to afterwards.
I know this isn’t your main point but it’s worth considering that the US did actually figure out how to build really good cars again, and it didn’t take them that long. Mid-90s to early-00s American cars were, in my opinion, at the perfect point of technological advancement: CAD and high-precision/low-tolerance manufacturing resulting in engines that last well over 300k miles without major servicing; enough computer advancement to have high precision per-cylinder fuel and spark control with accurate air metering leading to better power, efficiency, and reliability; and enough material advancement to have interior and exterior build quality that makes the car look like it wasn’t built in a shed. But most importantly, they hadn’t figured out how or where to cheap out on components, so you end up with the “unreliable” components (like the 4L60e and 4T60e transmissions) “only” lasting 200k miles before requiring a rebuild - which in today’s money is still less than $1000, let alone 20-30 years ago.
From the birth of the US auto industry until about 2010, the only period where there wasn’t a single American car worth buying brand new was probably 1974-1981. The “malaise era” itself was by the loosest definitions only about 13 years, from 1974-1987.
So in your opinion, what hat would be the standout 80s American cars for enthusiasts and collectors?
Off the top of my head, there’s:
- fox body mustang
- fiero
- gnx
- bronco
Anything else would be selected primarily for idiosyncratic nostalgia reasons (eg “this is the faux-wood station wagon I grew up with”)
> US auto makers have been on the ropes since the 1980s.
Without a doubt.
In about 2000 the US automakers sued the EPA because their proposed clean air regulations for about 2009 were "impossible".
They were actually more lax than what Japanese automakers were already selling cars for in the year 2000.
So the automakers sued the US government to admit that in 2009 they couldn't build cars that were as clean as cars Japan was already making in 2000. That says a lot.
The US consumer does not buy small new cars.
As has been pointed out, they sure did in the 70's when there was a huge financial incentive.
I expect that acting like all American's want are $60K+ luxury cars is what is going to take the US auto industry into the next massive downward spiral.
I.m.o. consumer weight on safety has dramatically increased since the 70s. Frugality has decreased. Of course it is an arms race with all the other giant cars already on the road. Consequently GM etc. are trying to appease US consumers with giant EVs.
I agree with you. I.m.o. consumer preference is the root cause of the issue.
The 2008 bailout had some strings attached to modernize. I believe the Chevrolet Spark was one of these strings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Spark#Third_generati.... It was eventually discontinued.
> Guess who won't be fine? US auto manufacturers.
The US is trying to do industrial policy (like now in China, and previously in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, and in Germany before that), but without the key aspect -- export discipline -- that makes industrial policy work. I'm thinking about Joe Studwell's How Asia Works. Everything I'm seeing in the US reminds me more of the failures in Indonesia and India than of the successes in Japan and Korea. With the exceptions of -- "say what you will about Elon, but" -- Tesla and SpaceX. Bidenonics will take time to bear fruit, though, and could yet yield some successes.
Point is, using tariffs to protect "infant industry" is the opposite of export discipline.
(As a side note, most of those countries also had major land reform, whereas property rights -- sorry, "rule of law" -- are pretty sacred in the US )
Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and many other countries turned sour on importing chinese EVs in favour of some kind of protectionism. Most developing countries dont have the infrastucture for EVs. Europe hit BYD with a 17 % tariff (10% being the standard)
BYD has factories in Brazil: https://valorinternational.globo.com/business/news/2024/09/0... https://en.byd.com/news/byd-company-announces-first-factory-...
why does that matter?! :)
When they're locally built, tariffs don't apply. Like Japanese, Korean and European car manufacturers, BYD will do the same in Mexico and eventually the US if necessary.
Thanks, I hate it.
I wonder if they built that factory to be resistant to bombing and how much air defense they plan to put around it when they take Taiwan.
I also wonder how fast it can be converted to spit out drones.
EVs on the battlefield are as of yet untested. That makes the BYD factory at best possible dual use. A bad target for Taiwan and its allies for a host of reasons.
In past wars factories making steel pots made helmets. I can definitely imagine an ev plant making drones.
Drones seem to be quite an important facet of the current war in Ukraine and Russia.
I wonder how fast this factory could be converted produce drones and how fast it could spit them out.
Imagine a circular loop of larger carrier aircraft that load up FPV drones from this factory and fly to their destination to drop them off only to fly back to do it again.
The FPV drones could have object recognition to target people, artillery, infrastructure so they could operate autonomously.
I wonder if they will put the landing pads on the factory roof or next to the factory.
DJI is already the worlds largest drone maker, better to let them continue then rebuild a car factory.
They won’t be able to take Taiwan. Taiwan has enough missiles to wipe out China’s navy 10x over before the US steps in with our navy
Equally, China has enough missiles to blockade Taiwan permanently. There's no reason for them to attempt an amphibious landing or anything insane like that. It's unclear to me what the US response would be in a blockade situation, but Chinese hypersonic missiles do pose a threat to carriers.
This isn't Desert Storm we're talking about here, China is a real threat.
Look at a map of Taiwan. Or better, look at it in Google Earth. Taiwan is a narrow island with a mountain range running north-south down the middle. The developed areas are west of the mountains, facing China, in a strip 15 to 30km wide.
There's no defensive depth. And nowhere for all the people to go in an attack. It's not like Ukraine, where the current fighting is like battling over Iowa, one farm at a time. It's more like Gaza, with too many people crammed into too little land. But bigger.
China has a large number of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles. Bringing US Navy ships in the Taiwan strait means losing many of them. The PLAN has more ships than the US Navy, and is building more at a high rate.
I still see memes about how the large government is preventing progress and causing de-industrialisation being pushed on Twitter, usually putting some European countries graphs next to USA graphs and showing how EU performed worse than USA after 2008(I guess that's the year the regulations kicked in), however they never compare China and the USA on these graphs.
Because then the libertarian propaganda turns into communist propaganda.
Can we get a vote on boycotting Twitter posts? I don't think it's right to support a platform that is now largely crazy right-wing nationalists, racists, transphobes and the like. Its owner regularly posts false information intended to stoke fears and manipulate people, and now this person is literally a government official. I don't want to see that platform advertised on HN.
>transphobes
So, you don't like people who believe in reality?
Calling for an entire social media platform to be banned because there are people on there who acknowledge biology is batshit insane extremism.