I bought BYD stock in 2025 before split in the hope that their market dominance will translate to great returns. The stock has pretty consistently traded down since then. Meanwhile Tesla stock soared purely on the air coming out of Elon’s mouth.
Auto manufacturing is low margin and capital intensive. BYD is valued as an auto manufacturer. Tesla is not.
Even all of that aside, the idea that foreign investors will be allowed to meaningfully participate in the upside of Chinese companies is questionable. Every Chinese company is one recapitalization away from zeroing out the common stock owned by foreigners. What are they gonna do, sue in Chinese court?
For quite some time, Warren Buffett was a BYD investor via Berkshire Hathaway. If you tried to get into EV stocks after the Tesla exuberance started, you were already mostly too late.
> The filing by Berkshire’s energy subsidiary recorded the value of its BYD investment as zero as of the end of March, down from $415 million at the end of 2024.
> Buffett’s company began investing in Shenzhen-based BYD in 2008, when it paid $230 million for about 225 million shares, equivalent to a 10% stake at the time.
> It began selling those shares in 2022 after BYD’s share price had risen more than twentyfold.
This is fascinating, because from what I've heard, Warren Buffett did not favor tech stocks. Does anyone know what gave Buffett the faith that this company was a real deal?
In the combination Keynesian Beauty Contest[1] and casino that passes for an equity market in the US, everyone knows that Tesla is ugly as hell, but everyone also knows that everyone knows that it will get votes, so the show goes on.
Anytime China targets an industry we get a situation where basically every major city has their own brand that they're backing. There's a lot more competition in China compared to western markets that tend to be dominated by a few major players. There's over 100 EV brands in China today, e.g. BYD (Shenzhen), NIO (Hefei), GAC Aion (Guangzhou), and SAIC (Shanghai)
There's been a lot written about China's "Fiscal Federalism"
How they do financial bailouts by printing their own debt-free money and having fine-grained control of the banking system is also something that the west doesn't do.
They usually go through a major, government driven consolidation phase to establish a handful of national champions. I would bet we’ll see the same in EVs. This ensures scale by which they can dominate the global industry-an explicit target of the CCP.
BYD's self-driving is free and much more widely available. Not to mention it uses LiDAR. I'm not gonna get into whether or not their God's Eye is better or worse than Tesla's FSD but it's at least widely acknowledged that they are at least comparable.
Tesla is also not very transparent so it's hard to cite statistics but a recent study found that Tesla had the highest rate of fatal accidents of any brand in the US
For the major part BYD sales performance is dependent on government subsidies in the country where they sell three quarters of all the cars they produce. That is a high risk factor investors don't like.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
But as another comment pointed out, they have tons of debt, and TFA states that their "revised" target was revised downward, meaning earlier stock valuations were priced for higher sales.
The Chinese economy isn't set up to endlessly create value for the capital-owning class, so you are never going to profit off of Chinese companies and stocks in the way we are used to in the west.
Chinese stock market is very different than US. In US you have like 62% of Americans reporting owning stock (including via mutual funds/retirement accounts) and in China, it's single digits participation.
And China's market is famously retail heavy one, there were some studies showing that Shanghai Stock Exchange retail trading is 80%+ of volume vs ~10% in the US.
There is less hype and they are also not affected as much as US if stock goes down or stays flat.
The Shanghai stock exchange is still too heavy on insider trading, and consumer investors feel it is more like gambling than investing. Like, you could wager some money on a mahjong game, or you could blindly pick a stock and hope you can get some money by riding in the wake of a connected insider trader.
If you just want to invest money, there is real estate or investing in a family member’s business. Pensions and other institutions in need of safe (in aggregate) investments won’t go near the SSE yet.
China is doing more things right but still has a long way to go on other things.
The explanation that I'm finding more and more compelling is that this is because there's actual competition in China, whereas in the west conglomerates have been able to carve up the market into fiefdoms and feast, with increasing amounts of cash that they can funnel into dividends and buybacks.
From the NA vehicle POV it doesn't look healthy. Stocks of the major auto makers have done well this year, while product gets more and more expensive and limited. Barely seems possible to buy anything but a F150like anymore.
Western corporations optimise for share price. The way to do that is by pulling strings at the government level to block your competitors and by getting nice tax breaks; not by having the best product for the consumer.
China and Chinese companies still want to shake off the "China means bad quality" image, so they actually want to make a great product at a good price for the consumer. To-the-moon share price growth doesn't happen by giving your customers a good deal.
Also the CCP doesn't want corporations forgetting who calls the shots, so there is some internal pressure keeping things less "frothy" than Western markets (where most governments are running scared of the big global corps).
It's not so much that the broader market is rigged. It's that every major industrial hub funds its own player: BYD (Shenzhen), NIO (Hefei), GAC Aion (Guangzhou), SAIC (Shanghai), etc. It might seem "rigged" to a westerner because it's so subsidized but China has a LOT of industrial hubs and therefore a lot of competition.
The US also heavily subsidizes EVs but the subsidies mostly only go to one company. Just take a look at the mind-boggling amount of subsidies we've given to Tesla both federally and on a state-by-state basis. Nevada's almost 2$ billion being the most blatant https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc
> Twelve are the factors related to four key aspects of the economic environment that are graded from 0 to 100 and averaged to determine a country’s score: rule of law (and related sub-categories: property rights, government integrity, judicial effectiveness); government size (government spending, tax burden, fiscal health); regulatory efficiency (business, labor and monetary freedom); open markets (trade, investment and financial freedom).
You could say that about the Chinese stock market in general. Neither the SSE Composite nor the Hang Seng correlate all that well with Chinese GDP growth.
Purely on the air coming out of Elon’s mouth as well as the 1 million cars sold world wide, 165 successful Falcon 9 launches and 9 million Starlink subscriptions
SpaceX’s success have no bearing on Tesla. And Tesla’s sales for the year are down for the second year in a row. Hardly a logical reason for the stock to go up.
Nice. Now take the car sales out of the vacuum and let’s see how great sales look year over across the world. Now let’s factor in how Elon’s government ended subsidies for electric cars. Should I go on?
> BYD's 2023 Corporate Social Responsibility Report initially lacked a human rights policy. However, the company later published a 2024 Human Rights Policy Statement.[67] This new policy also shows enhanced commitment to supply chain due diligence, including recognition of OECD Guidelines. Despite these improvements, the policy lacks details on battery material sourcing.
> BYD’s policies do not address gender-responsive due diligence. BYD states that it engages with stakeholders. However, it does not provide policies for engaging with communities affected by the battery supply chain or incorporating their views into decision-making processes. There is no reference to Indigenous Peoples or their rights in BYD’s reports.[68]
I don't at all disagree with the importance of these topics and I'm glad to see them addressed but this entire metric seems to be based on specific language/terminology in a company's public commitments. And this terminology seems to be biased towards a western audience. For example, the United States (a settler-colonial nation) is ofc going to have more discourse around the rights of indigenous people. Whereas the term "indigenous" isn't used very much at all in China.
I also feel like you've buried the lead here. Yes BYD ranks the lowest of the 13 brands they looked at but not by much and they also explicitly state that ALL of the brands they looked at failed to meet their minimum baselines. The report is more of a critique of the industry as a whole than any individual actor
You can pretty much replace BYD with any Chinese company (and to some extent, almost any company in the world) and the sentence would still make sense.
So I have mostly lost interest in the argument. Not that it is an incorrect or irrelevant argument, but none of that has really mattered.
A western org says out-group companies are at the bottom of the list of a report that is self reports and “transparency” aka trusting the companies words. Obviously their in-group companies will rank higher. That’s the entire purpose of the report.
Presumably you can't make the statement that almost all companies are below average on human rights. Mathematically at least half have to be above average.
Presumably most people also wouldn’t be particularly concerned with what the average is. If all companies have human rights records ranging from bad to terrible, surely it’s no compliment to be above average.
This. Most of the Chinese products met the definition of dumping. They over produce with suppressed wages, currency exchange rate, and government subsidies. The current generations of Chinese workers do not benefit from this. To clarify, they have top products, some are well paid. But the general trend is dumping.
I am curious when will other countries would actually start of defend their industries properly.
You don’t need to subsidize domestic companies to adjust for currency exchange rate manipulation.
The government could for example impose a tariff that covers half the difference thus maintaining an unfair advantage for Chinese companies. Thus profiting from the manipulation without placing excessive burden on domestic companies.
Agree subsidies does not seem like the correct incentive structure. But that's what the other guy is doing so I guess that's what we have to do.
In general, can the EV industry survive without government subsidies? Maybe now it can in the US.
Also not convinced EVs (as they are currently) are vastly superior to ICE cars. Not accounting for the potential for ICE cars to vastly improve if there wasn't so much vested interest. So the whole EV industry seems a bit unsustainable...
For almost everyone with home charging, EV’s are a substantial win even without subsidies. There’s so many little wins like being able to turn the car on to warm up in a garage without filling it with exhaust. That’s a long way from every driver, but the EV industry doesn’t need to make up every car sale to survive just fine.
ICE cars can’t get vastly better they are simply too close to fundamental limits. It’s quickly becoming a competition between hybrids and EV’s.
Tariffs are quite different than a sales tax because they can select winners and losers in a market. Cane sugar vs sugar beets etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet
However, they don’t have to be high enough to change who wins, even small ones adjust how much foreign subsidies manipulate the market. Foreign governments should consider how much US corn syrup impacts domestic consumption for example as a separate issue from how it impacts domestic sugar production.
China’s currency manipulation has second order effects that benefits Americans. We don’t necessarily want China to stop, instead the goal should be to minimize the harm while extracting maximum benefits. A small tariff that caused them to double down on currency manipulation would be a massive win.
> They over produce with suppressed wages, currency exchange rate, and government subsidies
I mean, so does Germany.
Technically, the USA only has the massive subsidies part since the IRA came to be but they also have tariffs so, not doing too bad distortion-wise.
At this point in time, pretty much everyone is already defending their industries. China is just playing its cards better than the others and with a head start when it comes to EV.
Tariffs aren’t the same thing as suppressing wages, overproduction, government subsidies, and managed currency to prevent deflation.
In the case of the US with respect to China they are mostly a retaliation to the above anti-competitive practices.
But I hear you on who is playing their cards better. I don’t think China is playing theirs very well. They pissed off both the US and EU, and even Mexico is enacting tariffs on Chinese products. American and European countries are taking action to stop Chinese anti-competitive practices. Nice factories you have there, too bad there’s nobody to sell those products to.
I also don’t know what you mean when you say for example the US and Germany are suppressing wages. I’m interested in what you mean by that specifically.
Claiming western companies are better because a western org said so based on self reports and western reporting is also weak sauce. “We investigated ourselves and found we are fine and our out-group isn’t”
At the end of the day, you aren’t going to convince consumers in Southeast Asia, South America or Africa to buy more-expensive American or European cars on account of human rights. Not while they’re middle-income economies.
Like many sibling comments, many companies are on a range that is on the bad side. There is a part of EV supply chain that is particularly bad and that is for all companies.
But what about the environmental costs that are being externalized? EV car production is likely worse or equal to ICE car production at each step. And the only arg seems to be that some day all EVs will be powered by solar/clean energy somehow.
Are BYD proponents allowed to say that this doesn’t matter much to them, or are they expected to measure themselves by your political views because they are the only correct ones?
I don’t think anything in particular “should” factor into everybody’s choices. Some are sensitive to price, some are sensitive to design, others to autonomy, others to speed, and then, yes, some will buy depending on human rights records.
The European Union can't fight everyone at once - we need partners, hence trying to mend fences with MERCOSUR, toning down the struggle for human rights in China and tolerating India's authoritarian drift. For now the utmost priorities are defeating Russia and achieving actual strategic autonomy by decoupling from the traitorous USA. So yes, better BYD than Tesla.
Why focus on BYD, China as a whole is effectively a totalitarian state that locks up millions because of their ethnicity and disappears or executes people who disagree with the government. They are also territoriality aggressive and routinely use trade as a weapon to pushing states that stand up to it.
Buying anything from China is supporting that regime.
While it definitely attacks threats and has perpetrated plenty of unjust deeds, it also is responsible for the food security of much of the world. It has lifted more people out of poverty than any other party. It has brought poor nations to the point of industrialization.
The US has been a far greater force for good in the world than evil.
The leadership changes frequently, so it's hard to point to any single responsible party. It's democratic, so its institutions are subject to scrutiny. The free press sheds light on corruption and rule breaking.
Despite changing immigration narratives, the US has been an early and strong proponent of multiculturalism and welcoming people.
With declining US hegemony, the world is likely to become a much more dangerous place. We'll see more economic strife, more war, higher costs, greater tensions.
but at least we will have alternative energy sources in Solar, wind, batteries and probably a Nuclear renaissance which might reduce the incentives on fight for Oil & Gas even if the fights move to other resources
Food (eg. protein, fisheries, etc.), water (eg. dams), materials (eg. rare earths), land, strategic geography, trade, labor, security, political upheaval, power struggles, sectarian violence, terrorism, religion, historical claims, climate, etc. etc. etc.
Under a single global order, disagreements were normally put aside to participate in global trade. As we begin to move to distributed trading blocs and factions, many of these disagreements will boil over. Parties won't step up to stop them.
Firstly it's not relevant to a discussion about China's behavior.
Yes the US under Trump has become increasingly authoritarian, but besides being not as oppressive as China, the US remains a democracy and there is a chance to vote bad people out of the White House and more importantly reverse the direction of the country.
Your description of China as authoritarian and repressive is largely accurate, but the conclusion you draw from it is far too binary and ignores major parts of reality on both sides.
China’s system has produced outcomes the US cannot come close to matching. In a few decades it lifted hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. It built nationwide high speed rail, dense urban transit, modern housing, and large scale infrastructure at a speed the US has not achieved since the mid 20th century. Many Chinese cities are cleaner, more connected, and more functional than American ones. Long term planning, industrial policy, and state coordination have delivered tangible improvements in daily life for a huge share of the population. Those are not propaganda achievements. They are measurable.
China’s downsides are also real. Political dissent is not protected. Surveillance is pervasive. Ethnic repression, especially in Xinjiang, is severe. There is no internal mechanism to safely challenge the regime when it abuses power. Prosperity is conditional on alignment. When the state decides someone or some group is a problem, there is no lawful way to resist.
Now look honestly at the US. The US has political freedoms China does not. Speech, courts, elections, civil society, and the ability to oppose the state without being erased are real advantages. That matters enormously. But the US also has a long record of extreme violence and moral failure. It slaughtered millions abroad in wars like Vietnam and Iraq, often based on lies. It overthrew governments, backed death squads, enforced sanctions that killed civilians, and built a mass incarceration system that destroyed entire communities. At home, it tolerates deep inequality, decaying infrastructure, and political paralysis. It cannot build basic transit or housing at scale, and millions live worse materially than citizens of far poorer countries.
So if the standard is “this regime has blood on its hands,” then the US fails that test as well. If the standard is “this regime produces good outcomes for its people,” China clearly succeeds in ways the US does not. If the standard is “this regime allows its citizens to challenge power and correct abuse,” the US is better.
That is the real comparison. Different systems optimize for different things and fail in different ways. One is not a moral fairy tale and the other is not a cartoon villain.
That’s why “buying anything from China is supporting evil” is not a serious ethical framework. Global trade does not map cleanly onto endorsement, and the same logic would implicate participation in much of the modern world, including the US led order that produced enormous suffering of its own. A coherent position is to argue for strategic decoupling or limits on state coupled firms. A black and white call for regime destruction or moral purity ignores both China’s real achievements and the US’s very real crimes.
Once you include the full ledger, the issue is not good versus evil. It’s tradeoffs between flawed systems, not a simple moral referendum.
It’s also worth noting that these are largely macroscopic, state level critiques. For most people living ordinary lives in China, many of these issues are not directly salient day to day, just as most Americans do not experience US foreign policy atrocities, coups, or wars as part of their daily existence. People judge their country primarily by stability, opportunity, safety, and whether life is improving, not by a moral audit of state behavior. Viewing China solely through its worst actions is no more complete than viewing the US solely through Vietnam, Iraq, or mass incarceration. Both perspectives flatten lived reality into ideology, and both miss why citizens of each country can hold nuanced, even positive, views of systems that are clearly flawed.
You really owe it to yourself to visit (or if possible live in) China for a while to see this other perspective.
You missed the part where we chose to move all of our industries to China to save money, exploitation was always part of the plan, it's just that people who came up with that genius plan didn't account for the fact that China would develop and want a part of the cake too
That report is basically made up. Why would non western companies be “transparent” with western organizations? A lot of it is self reports.
This is like looking at the freedom indexes and concluding that in the US women have the freedom to walk safely at night in cities because it ranks high on western freedom orgs but not in actually safe places like China.
BYD owns their own fleet of car carriers for export, with the capacity to have ~30k vehicles shipping to other markets at any one time on their vessels. From this piece:
> BYD Deliveries outside of China hit 1.05 million in 2025. The company has set a goal to expand overseas sales to between 1.5 million to 1.6 million units in 2026, according to a Citigroup Inc. report in November that cited a meeting with BYD management.
Edit: The debt is irrelevant, China isn’t America. They’ll nationalize and inflate away any institutional debt or wipe it out, but still have a third of the world’s manufacturing capacity. Tesla exists on vibes, Chinese EV makers build, for example. jmyeet’s comment mostly nails this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46456020
China has a huge deflation problem that they export to the world via cheap products. They have a lot of capacity and not enough consumers. So in China, an unstated mild Keynesian approach makes sense. They can sweep debt under the rug and take in inflation from net debtor countries
> They’ll nationalize and inflate away any institutional debt or wipe it out
This is just the reverse, actually, China isn’t afraid to go so far as to jail CEOs. There is no such thing as too big to fail in China, and all the Chinese domestic companies know it. The bailout playbook is a western thing.
China has been performing debt swaps with local governments to clean up their balance sheets [1], so used as an example. Agree with all of your comment. People make the mistake that China plays by artificial US capital market rules around profit and debt; they do not. They optimize for physical world success, not line go up.
Yes, exactly. Just as in the US, when an enterprise gets wiped out and recapitalized, all of the physical assets remain. In China’s case, they are the backstop of last resort, and will always recapitalize according to their nation state planning and target outcomes. They allow companies to operate the assets as long as the Chinese government is willing to allow it, but they remain assets of China.
From the outside, it appears that "upset the regime" includes "cheating your way into profits".
That said, it's very difficult to be sure if what I see from the outside is propaganda. Or rather, it is always propaganda even when it's true, and I can't tell how much of it is China's own self-promotion vs. other people giving negative propaganda.
I'm saying from the outside, it doesn't look like that. That's a much weaker statement, as should've been obvious from what I went on to say about propaganda.
Even with the sub-heading "It's legal, and that's the problem."*, and even though this kind of cheating is broader than this reply chain from "There is no such thing as too big to fail in China", this is absolutely within bounds for what I asked for :)
* and the not-proof-read AI generated image, that never helps…
A car transport holds thousands of ships. Therefore requiring temporary storage for thousands of cars is normal.
Even if you count the massive "hidden debt", BYD's debt load is still a small fraction of the big car makers, many of whom hold over $200 billion in debt.
Dumping notwithstanding, BYD is still selling cars into the Australian market in enormous numbers. Four of the top ten EVs sold this year are BYD, as are the top two PHEVs.
If you account for the fact that Australian market Teslas are built in China, then China is producing 8 of the top 10 EVs.
Which is direct evidence for what would happen if they were allowed to sell fairly into the US and Europe. The future of cars is Chinese, the US automakers can’t survive on protectionism forever
Dumping notwithstanding, they're still selling cars into the Australian market in enormous numbers. Four of the top ten EVs sold this year are BYD, as are the top two PHEVs.
A friend of mine works in the chemical industry in Europe. One reason European producers are currently facing challenges is that Chinese producers are dumping chemicals into the global market at heavy discounts.
The underlying cause of this is that the Chinese housing market, which previously absorbed almost all chemicals, has effectively stalled (Evergrande, et al.).
I wonder whether we're observing a similar effect in the automobile industry as well.
Yes, but causality is backwards: the Chinese housing market stalled because China took the debt punch-bowl away from housing and gave it to the industrial sector.
It's also worth mentioning that loan subsidies play a bigger role in Chinese capital markets: Chinese industry is largely capitalized with state debt rather than private debt/equity or public markets. Zooming out, as a response to Trump's 1st term tariffs China went on a big autarky push by redirecting its citizens' and companies' deposits into a loan bazooka for the industrial sector. We are now seeing the fruits of that. The big questions have to do with (true) profitability and (true) balance sheets: can the new industries service their debts well enough for the government to hold face?
Are they actually dumping, or extraction/refinement of materials is actually much cheaper in China, so it feels like dumping?
Frankly, I don’t mind it, because western companies should also engage in this behaviour, if they can. Sell physical items for cheaper than it takes to produce them! They’re doing it with services and etc. anyways, might as well do it with physical products too.
In my country over last 5 years the majority of new cars now from China, it happened so swift. I still think that Japan cars are the best, but it's hard to justify paying 2x and getting inferior (in terms on features) product, while reviews of new chinese cars are largely positive.
Interesting thank you. When I was there in 2012 or so I was surprised to see a huge number of small Daewoo branded cars, a long extinct brand in the west. Small getabouts seemed very popular. That was a long time ago I know, but I imagine some of these cheap Chinese small models are filling that segment now?
If you only travel to North America and Europe you’d never know but I went to South America and India and the former mostly had Chinese cars and the latter had big ads for a BYD MPV everywhere in Bangalore.
So the Chinese car makers are popular outside the West. I drove a couple of Changan cars and they weren’t even as nice as my Subaru in terms of handling but they functioned well as cars.
They've suddenly all appeared in Australia too - we had BYD for quite a while and brands like Volvo and Polestar (owned by China's Geeley), but suddenly we have Leapmotor, Deepal, Omoda Jaecoo and Geeley themselves (just the ones I can think of, probably others) having all appeared on our market in literally something like six months...
Can confirm. Colombia based, a year ago I had my first Uber trip in a BYD, now I would guess about 10% of my journeys are Chinese EVs. It's impressive how fast they've caught up and mostly surpased their competition. If the Japanese took 20 years, the Koreans 10, then the Chinese have done it in 5.
BYD is very much present in the UK (Telsa still seem the most common, but BYD are getting close), it must be the same in mainland Europe unless the EU is blocking them more aggressively. The Ford dealer down the road from me turned into a BYD service centre in the last couple of months.
> BYD has overtaken Tesla in overall European registrations for the first time in 2025 (BYD outsold Tesla across EU + EFTA + UK in several months)
> Across EU+EFTA+UK in October 2025, BYD’s registrations (~17 470) were ~2.5× Tesla’s (~6 964), and YTD BYD’s total (~138 390) was closing the gap on Tesla’s (~180 688).
Still not as strong as in other markets. In Finland, BYD is not even in top10:
- 1. Skoda Enyaq (~1614 units)
– 2. VW ID.4 (~1582)
– 3. Tesla Model Y (~1516)
- Other brands include VW ID.7, Kia EV3, Volvo, Audi, Polestar.
They also migrated 100s of millions of mopeds to electric bikes and shipped new ebikes over the last 10 years. That enormous scale no doubt fed directly to battery technology and assembly techniques that help with cars. Many Chinese don't own cars. (That's changing fast).
I'm not choosing sides here but if telecom equipment from e.g. HuaWei is not allowed on US/EU markets because of national security concerns, then should we allow cars?
Why not? We allow pretty much everything else. Appliances, consumer electronics, car parts, batteries, etc.
The one and only reason to not allow Chinese cars is to try and protect domestic auto industry, but considering how expensive and mismanaged domestic auto production is I don't see that as a good excuse. They won't die because they can't possibly compete, they will die for refusing to compete because they want higher profit margins now rather than bulk sales and good public perception 10 years down the line. They would rather fuck their future and bet on a bail-out than dare try making bulk cheap cars again with a bit lower margin.
Hell GM paid Toyota to come teach them how to make cars cheaper and better and build matrix platform cars in their factory. And what did they do when that happened and cars started rolling off the line? They complained that Toyota didn't produce them them in the same manner they would have, and then closed the plant down. Meanwhile Matrix platform cars like the Vibe are highly sought after on the used car market because they were known for reliability and ease of maintenance.
If we were actually worried about security, we would be doing FAR more than merely disallowing HuaWei products. Its like living next to an active volcano in a forest fire prone areas inside a log cabin and then screaming about how dangerous it would be to allow matches be sold in stores due to arsonists.
This is a national security concern but in a different way. It's about the de-industrialization of America. Palmer Lucky talks about this and how China's goal is to make sure America can't build anything. Once that happens we can never win a war against them.
Not just because of the assumed security issues (good point though).
But even w/o these,
- I rather have some European or American conglomerate gathering unnecessary data about me driving, than just hand it over to the Chinese state
- Buying Chinese means destroying our own base, as this market has been actively stealing IP for decades (BYD or Xiamoi just being copycats of Porsche); good luck winning piracy cases in Chinese courts
- unfair financial restrictions for redeeming returns on foreign investments fueled much of China‘s growth - and still persist
- western/asian manufacturers are de-facto not competing with mere manufacturers but the Chinese state itself since (almost?) all Chinese manufacturers are State-Owned-Companies
Now that is not to say that China‘s rise is not commendable and deserved, it is indeed. I‘m rather arguing for playing the same game as they are.
Legacy automakers EVs are just ICE cars with the engine swapped out. Whereas BYDs, teslas etc are a ground up rethink, vertically integrated with battery manufacturing and software.
Classic innovators dilemma - it seems to be almost impossible to align incentives inside legacy auto to do the necessary revolutionary change. Every individual and sub group are internally invested and short term focused on their legacy frames, drivetrains, layouts, electronics, software and supply chains. That’s why you keep getting offered the same car, but now as a sub par EV. So they will lose, because they can’t adapt.
The problem is that few people in "the west" wants EVs.
It's basic supply and demand - the sales are tanking, and without subsidies nobody will buy them, and the car companies are realizing that.
A few models (Teslas, for example) do okay with the upper class, but the lower and middle class can't afford them, don't have anywhere to charge them, and have to drive too much to depend on them.
Even in a trendy, wealthy city like Boulder, CO which is all about saving the environment and going green there isn't nearly enough charging capacity for everybody to use EVs.
An EV is better than no car at all, but they're a downgrade from an ICE in most cases.
Decades from now we're going to look at the oil patch lobbyists as the villains that killed countless jobs in NA and enabled China to take over whole industries.
You had some politicians like Justin Trudeau that tried to create a frame work that would guide and advantage capital toward investing in innovative green technology and future jobs, but then politicians saw the advantage in politicizing and opposing everything and they tore this all down.
Now China has continued to move ahead meanwhile NA remains at square one with increasingly backward technology, with no incentive to change.
Japanese engineers disassembled a BYD vehicle said BYD's E-Axle drive system was so advanced it would take them 10 years to replicate it. BYD's blade batteries are also a major competitive advantage.
Every car maker selling cars in the EU needs to comply with EU laws.
That's why Europe is mercifully free of Cybertrucks: they can't legally operate on roads within the EU, because they don't meet the safety requirements (one of your "little things").
It's like the 1970s all over again with how the US Big 3 makers are facing an existential threat held at bay only by protectionism. They're going to have to learn to compete yet again.
Did they ever learn to compete then? The only thing that protected them then was that Japan was a US “ally” and could be “persuaded” to go along with protectionism. China has no such need.
I would argue that the 70s were a trial run for whats happening today but instead of becoming more competitive the automakers focused on lobbying for Government help; a playbook that won’t help them today.
And even more stupidly, traditional American carmarkers are discontinuing EV models and shutting down factories JUST when they finally had an edge over their japanese competitors.
ford in particular seems to only ever give up on everything. they couldn't compete on compacts, so they killed the focus and fiesta. they couldn't compete on EVs, so they killed those too. next thing you know toyota will start carving away at the F-150's market share and they'll kill that, too.
Outside the purely electric vehicles (where I believe Tesla competes very well, where is BYD at with FSD?), is there a Chinese equivalent to:
- The upcoming EREV (mostly electric extended range hybrid) F-150 truck? This is expected to have ~700 mile range, and of course no charging hassles. It’s main advantage over the now defunct Lightning will be towing range.
- The Chevy Corvette Stingray? Say what you want, but the high end ICE sports cars have an appeal of their own…
I believe the USA still has an edge in some areas of the market.
> - The upcoming EREV (mostly electric extended range hybrid) F-150 truck? This is expected to have ~700 mile range, and of course no charging hassles. Its main advantage over the now defunct Lightning will be towing range.
Interesting question. Maybe this is the niche where existing auto makers can thrive though if China automakers have a blind spot to outdoors enthusiasts where range is more important.
The problem is that no one really needs or wants this outside of NA, Australia, maybe Russia and Africa? But there is a market.
Range anxiety and towing is a niche problem and companies will get rich selling the next Toyota Camry/VW Golf for the median consumer.
EREV is niche on niche and that's sort of where I expect the NA market to be going under the NA auto makers. We're going to have this protectionist wall where we have these bizarre (increasingly ICE dominated) market while the rest of the world moves on.
Couldn’t agree more. And the niche market will only hold on because of protectionism. If the US let in the wave of cheap EVs that are coming, people would buy them - suddenly noone is going to care about “range anxiety” when you can get a 20k ev that does 300miles.
American car manufacturers don't play to their strengths e.g affordable sports cars - Chevy Corvette Stingray | Mustang GT how many are sold in foreign markets
the Bronco could make a killing in Africa but is it sold there NO. I understand here in the states the 4runner has no competition - yet ford wants to kill it using the Bronco. Why not use the Bronco to kill the land cruiser in markets where people default to a Land Cruiser / Fortuner and force Toyota to play defense.
E.g in Africa certain markets Ford started selling the Ford Ranger Raptor and they're making a killing - and actually starting to cause Toyota to compete and not bring their usual stale cars.
However Chinese have brought their A-game too - Tank 300, BYD Shark etc
There is no way that a land cruiser owner in Africa will ever consider anything made by Ford. That's like blasphemy. The LC has decades of proven reliability, that the bronco needs to compete with.
It's true, the Ranger is immensely popular. But Ranger owners and LC owners do not see eye to eye and you'll have a tough time convincing the LC owner to change allegiance.
For South Africa specifically, the Ranger is about as large as you can go in terms of personal vehicle, before it becomes a serious hassle. Our infrastructure does not really support bigger cars. How does the bronco compare with the Ranger size wise?
Lastly, the Ranger is built in South Africa, I think Ford knows and understands the Southern African market very well.
Setting aside the performances of similar systems, the more fundamental question is why is this even important to Chinese carmakers?
1. They are shutout of the U.S. market with tariffs from both parties, that doesn't seem likely to change.
2. Self driving systems are far more difficult to work well on the roads of Europe, Asia or Africa. The kind of wide roads and planned development only exists in U.S, Canada or Australia. On top of it the issues with weather handling are still on-going problems.
3. Labor is not near as expensive as in the U.S. in the rest of the world (dollar is expensive) so automation ROI is not as attractive given the costs.
I'm not sure about BYD, but other car makers have FSD that works like Tesla's FSD, and in some cases it even outperforms it. Here is a test from a few months ago:
> - The Chevy Corvette Stingray? Say what you want, but the high end ICE sports cars have an appeal of their own…
The world is moving to EVs, ICE will mostly be collectors cars in 20 years in developed countries. As to Chinese sports cars Xiaomi SU7 Ultra: "June 2025, an unmodified SU7 Ultra (with a maximum 1,139 kW (1,527 hp; 1,549 PS) power) lapped the Nürburgring in a hair under 7 minutes, 5 seconds. It is not only faster than the fastest Tesla Model S Plaid and Porsche Taycan versions, but also faster than a Rimac Nevera, one of the most high-end and expensive electric sportscars."
"It achieved a maximum speed of 496.22 km/h (308.33 mph) at Germany’s ATP Automotive Testing Papenburg, making it the fastest car in the world and breaking the record previously held by the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ at 490.484 km/h (304.773 mph)"
>I'm not sure about BYD, but other car makers have FSD that works like Tesla's FSD, and in some cases it even outperforms it. Here is a test from a few months ago:
From what I can see, Tesla did not passed every test scenario, but it passed most of them (so it won): 5/6 in the first table (highway test) and 8/9 for the Tesla Model X in the second table (urban test), the two Chinese cars placed second and third with one less passed test than Tesla (7/9), while the Tesla Model 3 passed only 5/9. Interestingly, both Chinese cars passed the test that Tesla failed. Considering Tesla has millions more miles of driving data and more years of development, it seems like it's only a matter of time (with more data and iteration) before the Chinese cars pass the rest of remaining tests, which is great because competition is healthy.
> Did they ever learn to compete then? The only thing that protected them then was that Japan was a US “ally” and could be “persuaded” to go along with protectionism. China has no such need.
Oh, indeed. I was attempting to be generous, but it's arguable whether they deserve that generosity.
> I would argue that the 70s were a trial run for whats happening today but instead of becoming more competitive the automakers focused on lobbying for Government help; a playbook that won’t help them today.
We're still paying for this today with the so-called "Chicken Tax" (and all of the other crash and emissions regulations) that has deprived us so many good Japanese trucks over the years.
If you had to pay US/EU prices for a Tesla vs BYD you'd go with BYD no question. But the majority of Teslas are made in China and when put a Chinese made Tesla alongside a Chinese made BYD it's a coin flip.
So as an Australian I'd roughly rate them the same with BYD high end matching Tesla's high end and BYD having a low end that Tesla doesn't compete with (the Atto which is ~USD $15000 for a small electric hatchback has no Tesla equivalent).
The point is the difficulty of the comparison. They are tariffed in the EU and NA to the point of near inviability so I don’t see that as a valid comparison. Outside the EU and NA they are Chinese made cars.
So basically you either compare current NA/EU Teslas to a hypothetical untariffed BYD (I don’t think this is fair) or you compare Chinese made Teslas to BYDs (which of course leads to similar prive perf ratios).
Ok, but "where the rubber meets the road", I've seen 0 BYDs in the wild in the US, including a recent 1,800 mile trip half way across the country. Earlier in 2025 I took a trip to Scotland and they had 2 dealerships I saw and I saw a couple of them on the roads.
BYD Sealion 7 is better than a 2025 Model Y Standard and worse than a Model Y Premium in terms of ride quality/suspension and driving dynamics.
The interior is more taste dependent, but the Model Y Standard is clearly a low budget version (with fabric seats) that's below the BYD. The Model Y Premium interior and seats felt higher quality to me, but it has a more minimalist design while the BYD has a more traditional setup with a screen behind the wheel.
The Tesla screen/app seem more responsive and premium. Also above for example VW where things are often sluggish and don't feel as well designed from a UX perspective.
We are seeing the culmination of the 50+ China industrialization project at the samme time as the West's 50+ year financialization and deindustrialization project, all to concentrate even more wealth in the hands of the 0.01%.
China is really the only country capable and willing to build infrastructure. The ban on selling lithography AND chips to China is massively backfiring. The chip ban in particular has created a captive market for Chinese chips. In 1945, American exceptionalists believed the USSR would take 20+ yars to copy the atomic bomb, if they could do it at all. It took 4 years. China will do the same thing with EUV in the coming years.
Tesla is a trillion dollar company that was created entirely by government subsidies that only continues to exist because of the tariffs and import bans on BYD in the US and much of Europe.
Additionally, Tesla is completely dependent on Chinese rare earth exports for its products.
As an example of how China uses state power, a famine in the 20th century caused China to decide that food security was a national security interest. The availability of cheap, quality food is viewed as essential and the state intervenes to ensure that continues. Likewise for housing.
Western companies seem increasingly focused on the top 10% because the bottom 90% have nothing left to eextract.
I've never seen a comment simultaneously be so right on some things and so wrong on others.
> The ban on selling lithography AND chips to China is massively backfiring
Agreed. We will be screwed once China surpasses us in chip fabs, and they will. The idea that we can get a "durable advantage" by reaching AGI a few years before China is ridiculous. Using that to justify bans that only slow them down a few years at the cost of creating a chip fab juggernaut later is folly.
> Tesla is a trillion dollar company that was created entirely by government subsidies that only continues to exist because of the tariffs
Tesla is not supported by subsidies significantly more than any other car company and less than many including BYD obviously. They also compete directly with BYD without tariff protection worldwide and in China and do well. They are worth a trillion dollars because of the potential of their self-driving software which is far ahead of any other car company's including those in China.
> Tesla is completely dependent on Chinese rare earth exports for its products.
Tesla has rare earth free alternatives. There is no urgent need for them right now but they can switch if necessary.
> Agreed. We will be screwed once China surpasses us in chip fabs, and they will. The idea that we can get a "durable advantage" by reaching AGI a few years before China is ridiculous. Using that to justify bans that only slow them down a few years at the cost of creating a chip fab juggernaut later is folly.
I’m quite sure advanced semiconductor fabs are considered a strategic necessity by China regardless of restrictions. Further, China is now getting the H200 chip…
> Tesla has rare earth free alternatives. There is no urgent need for them right now but they can switch if necessary.
There are also plenty of rare earth extraction projects coming online outside of China!
> Tesla is not supported by subsidies significantly more than any other car company
Tesla was saved by a DOE loan [1]. Tesla was kept afloat with carbon tax credits. Yes, the Big Three got bailouts in 2008. And now, most importantly, import barriers are the only thing keeping Tesla afloat.
"Tesla got some subsidies" does not refute my argument. All carmakers get subsidies. BYD gets tons! And Tesla is selling plenty of cars in places without import barriers protecting them including China itself.
As you mentioned EUV machine, I happened to read an article from a former Executive of ZhongXin, a domestic competitor of the famouse Huawei and also sanctioned by US. He said that China had no insentive to develop lithography technology including EUV until Trump blocked the sales of EUV machine in his first term. [1]
There are tons of other cases, like EDA software, etc. It used to be a bilateral business. Now China become more and more independent of the rest of the world due to external pressure.
BTW, I've been working and living in the West (more specifically , in Canada) for almost 30 years but also have access to Chinese language media. I've been watching a lot of misunderstanding or misinformation. It's less in recentl years. I have to stay way from some of the topics to avoid being downvote because misinformation believers strongly believe I'm wrong for those topics.
I think EU/NA residents are a little naive on how much Chinese cars are dominating the market. Chinese cars don't sell just in China. They utterly dominate globally outside of EU/NA where they face extreme tariffs. To the point where certain cars that you'd say were American (eg. Tesla) actually make most of their cars in China.
Right now around the world in non EU/NA countries Tesla's a bit on the nose. All Tesla's in Australia are Chinese made regardless but it's then a choice of Chinese made Tesla vs Chinese made BYD and the BYDs are by all reports excellent cars.
PS to Canadians: You could be paying ~50% less for the same car, even same model to same model by allowing Chinese made cars in and it'd help you screw over a country that threatened you.
> They utterly dominate globally outside of EU/NA where they face extreme tariffs.
Even inside of EU, seemingly BYD have reasonable prices, especially compared to their EU competitors. I'm an current Audi owner in Spain, who is currently very close of getting a BYD DM-i Touring, and compared to what I would get from Audi for the same price, BYD still offers a lot more in everything except "nice steering feeling", at least from what I've gathered from my test drives.
As a long term BMW driver instead of Audi I have the same. I'm swapping one of my two BMWs for a Model Y Premium. Also tried the BYD 7 but the Model Y felt nicer to drive and with more space.
The BMW iX1 is disappointing in range, interior luxury and power. It's below an older 6 series (that I'm switching from), and much less powerful than a Model Y AWD. No idea why BMW thinks they can price it like they do. The other option was the BMW i5 Touring but it's more expensive and feels "old" already.
> PS to Canadians: You could be paying ~50% less for the same car, even same model to same model by allowing Chinese made cars in and it'd help you screw over a country that threatened you.
The sheer irony of an Australian saying this! I mean you’re in danger, dude!
Your entire comment reads a bit like an ad for Chinese cars, conveniently omitting the damage these automakers are doing to the global car industry by dumping cheap supply wherever they can to secure market share, all enabled by heavy state subsidies. [0]
> PS to Canadians: You could be paying ~50% less for the same car, even same model to same model by allowing Chinese made cars in and it'd help you screw over a country that threatened you.
Because given the chance, China 100% would never do the same (or worse).
> dumping cheap supply wherever they can to secure market share, all enabled by heavy state subsidies
Assuming for a moment this is more true for China than for other countries. Why would the average Canadian prefer to pay more for their next car versus having a similar car subsidized by the Chinese taxpayer? Most Canadians do not work in the auto industry. Further, the protectionism practiced in the EU/US/Canada is not likely to be successful long-term, meaning those auto industries are doomed.
Best path forward is to let in competition, make the domestics stronger, and let consumers get cheaper cars in the meanwhile. Provide some additional temporary support if necessary. (This is more or less how the US absorbed Japanese and then Korean cars.)
To compete with China in the ”open market” now, Canada will need:
- 25 years of investments in infrastructure and education in STEM and manufacturing
- Targeted state subsidies of chosen branches, which will require
- transition to at least partially planned economy, which will require
- at least partially transitioning to some form of dictatorial governance
- increase population at least twofold (you need multiple multi-million metro areas to support large high-tech clusters)
- devaluate CAD about 2x and accept about the same drop in local purchasing power (which likely will happen anyway, but could be not that harsh and fast).
China at the moment has like 10x advantage in industry ober Canada, it’s impossible to compete. It’s like saying that your immune system must be able to handle bubonic plague, so let’s just inject the body with the pathogen and let it adapt without any external support. A noble idea, but you’ll likely die in the process.
The auto industry is a shockingly high percentage of the Canadian economy, somewhere around 10% of GDP. Direct auto manufacturing roles are themselves about 1% of jobs nationally. If we start counting everyone involved with the sector, it's >5% of people in Ontario. It's not a winning political move to make all of those people unemployed.
Let's be real, if Trump wants to reshore US auto factories from Ontario to Detroit, as he has stated explicitly, Canadian politicians can't do shit, USMCA be paper after all. Right now CAN just waiting for term to blow over and hope there's no Trump3. But ultimately if CA auto is going away / shrinking to irrelevance, at some point winning political move is to give masses cheap cars.
I feel like closing off access is a bad long term strategy. Instead of being forced to compete and match or outmatch competition Canadian manufacturing can get complacent and lean on restrictions. But the whole thing feels like a ticking bomb.
I mean you don’t have to go off vibes - this has historically happened in every protectionist industry. The protected companies make a worse and more expensive product
it's not like cars are necessities like food. and i doubt these companies are unprofitable - the chinese govt has no incentive to provide the world with free cars.
It's shocking how (presumably) free-market maximalists on HN, who usually tout the benefits of competition look at Chinese EVs and go "These low proces can't be due to competition and innovation. It has to be government intervention". Domestic competition in China is red in tooth and claw, while car manufacturers in the US manufacturers innovate on buyer financing.
The Chinese tax payer isn't voluntarily helping you though, it's China's forced resource extraction from its own citizens (wage and QoL suppression), to maintain a stranglehold on global manufacturing. Everybody (except your specific car purchase) would be better off if they used these resources domestically. Do you think they'll ever want payback? if not from you, then from the next generations.
I'm not really seeing the issue with this. Capitalists will tell you this is a good thing because consumers will benefit, or is that only capitalism if it benefits the American elites?
Why should I care that the CEO of Ford is struggling when he pays his workers so terrible? If they want another government bail it, we should just nationalize the industry and implement workplace democracy for the staff so they can be accountable to the workers + people in some fashion.
But yeah, it's sad seeing the demise of US liberalism but what do you expect when the last 50 years was naked imperialism for corporations while denying any social responsibility for the country?
Selling that many cars despite intense competition at home and trade barriers abroad seems the more natural way to express that story.
They instead focused on how in evil communist China you need to continue to make better cars than rivals in order for your business to succeed and grow.
What a strange system they have over there. If only they were capitalist like the US and being an incumbent connected to the regime was all you needed to keep extracting money from the population despite product stagnation.
1. BYD has rapidly surpassed many western companies in terms of product quality / desirability
2. Chinese automotive industry is a strategic threat to Western military capabilities. If they are successful in usurping European / American auto manufacturers, it will be a death blow to an already hollowed-out industrial base that is critical to any sustained military engagement.
So, yes, western companies have stagnated, and yes, the West needs to keep these dinosaurs around through subsidies (which Chinese manufacturers also receieve from their regime).
Re #2 -- locking Chinese vehicles out of the market will also lead to the downfall of our industrial base over time. In general, Americans (including those who work in US manufacturing) do not understand that Chinese vehicles are very competitive. At some point, those vehicles are likely to surpass domestic capabilities (they are already there viewed through a price/performance lens).
All of this is down to the simple fact that essentially no American has ever driven a Chinese vehicle and does not know anybody who has. They are not even getting secondhand reports. This is worse than the '80s when the Japanese makers arrived in the sense that in the '80s everybody could see the quality of the Toyotas and assess quality/performance for themselves. It's much worse to not even know how good the competition is.
From a business standpoint, it's especially bad for the domestic industry because the majors actually do need to be competitive in fast-growing regions like Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It's not a viable strategy to depend on protectionism at home while ceding countries where most people live.
Everyone's take on the 1980s has been perverted by an internet viewpoint written by a bunch of weeb fanboys projecting the state of the car market in 2006 onto 1985. The actual cores components of the cars themselves are basically within spitting distance for Japan vs Domestic. These were not high quality cars. They were all low quality cars. But Japan was making the king of low quality cars that people wanted. (And by 1990 all these early 1980s platforms from all makes were all comparatively trash).
In the late 1970s early 1980s if you tried to buy a compact american car it was like buying the burger at a fish restaurant or the vegetarian option at a steakhouse. It was there to check a box. It wasn't well thought out or a core product they gave a shit about and they were almost always last to get any innovations. You want power widows AND an automatic, sorry we'll have to special order that, we don't stock those on the lot.
In contrast, the Japanese gave a shit about those product lines. So someone making "In better times I'd be buying a bigger car from Chevy" money could go to them and get something configured how they wanted without being told no a bunch of times and the sales guy trying to get them into something bigger car didn't want like would happen at the Chevy dealer. Toyota or Honda or whoever literally didn't have those products to upsell you into. Yeah I guess they could sell you a landcruiser but people didn't buy SUVs then. That would be like trying to sell an Econoline to some rich woman who's shopping for a 3row Landrover.
At the end of the 1980s the domestics were basically back with their own new "modern" FWD platforms (e.g. Taurus) and new larger stuff (minivans, midsize SUVs) which made money hand over fist for 10yr or so. The Japanese were basically on the sidelines for all of this. Like yeah they had the 4Runner and Pathfinnder and Passport and stuff but no amount of 2020s fanboyism is gonna make those sales numbers any less of a joke. What the Japanese did do very well though was give a crap about their smaller cheaper offerings, Rav4s and CRVs and small and midsize sedans which the domestics neglected. So when the SUV craze came to an end with the high gas prices and bad economy of the mid-late 2000s they were there ready to be bought. And it's this great success from the mid 2000s that every idiot on the internet seems to want to project back into the 1980s when the 1980s were far different.
Also, the U.S. auto makers had a well-deserved reputation for building unreliable vehicles, probably exacerbated by the phase-out of lead from gasoline, while Japanese vehicles were easily exceeding 100,000 miles without any significant breakdowns. This provided a tremendous advantage to Japanese makes and proved extremely attractive to American customers.
You're generally agreeing with me? You're making an argument that American makers improved by exposure to Japanese makers, and yes I am suggesting they also need exposure to Chinese makers for the same reasons.
> Japan was making the king of low quality cars that people wanted
This is China today, except by all accounts they are simply inexpensive and not low quality. Your bit about buying a compact car in the 80s has echoes in American automakers largely exiting the market for cars. (IIRC it's only Tesla, Lucid, the Mustang, and a couple Caddy models remaining.)
The main point is that in the 80s we could all see for ourselves Japanese cars. We could talk to people about how they liked them. People working at Ford could drive a Honda and figure out how to compete against it. That laid the ground for the resurgence of the American makers. Protectionism is depriving the automakers of this opportunity to retool to compete with the Chinese.
>You're generally agreeing with me? You're making an argument that American makers improved by exposure to Japanese makers, and yes I am suggesting they also need exposure to Chinese makers for the same reasons.
Partially. I agree on the economic lines. But disagreeing on the oft circle jerked quality bit.
These were not "high quality" cars even in their day nor were they "higher than the competing product" on any non-subjective axis (the Japanese and europeans did make very different decisions than the americans on some preference based things though). By "low quality" I do not mea low value. I mean low end. These were not designed to be "nice" cars. They were built to a price. These were not cars you got into and said "man, everything I touch feels solid" and "this is a pleasurable driving experience". They got called tin cans for a reason. They were inexpensive compacts and midsize vehicles but what they got right was they nailed the contribution of attributes everyone wanted and so they sold very well.
I absolutely agree that exposure let the other OEMs get better.
If the US had a competent government they would react by pulling the same playbook as China to compete. Heavily subsidize and incentivize production of EVs by new companies to replace the rotten core of existing US automakers to produce price competitive and quality competitive vehicles, then let the old guard burn down.
Subsidizing the rotten core of corrupt US automakers will not produce a new or functional industrial base. It will simply maintain the illusion of an industrial base until anything of importance needs done. But that’s basically the MO of any “mature” industry in the US.
What you’re proposing is basically the EV subsidy, which got gutted because Americans got pissy about lifting a single finger to benefit anyone slightly more fortunate than themselves
No it got gutted by Americans that were tragically fed a constant diet of misinformation as to the actual policies of the GOP. EVs still poll very well in the US and so does combating climate change.
we keep saying these things while industry-after-industry gets disrupted by the chinese
Next industry to be disrupted is housing, because seemingly the entire western world has is not even trying to provide housing (a necessity) to everyone.
Housing in the US is labor constrained. When I talk to GCs, subs, etc., they'll say that materials a bit more expensive, and labor is a bit more expensive; but what the complain about — and this can be for hours, if I get one going — is the complete lack of labor in all trades. This isn't a new problem; the "old hands" (GCs in the 60s and 70s) noted the labor drop out even 30+ years ago. The only saving grace we had was a strong trade force incoming population (immigrants); but, we've cut that off.
It wouldn't surprise me if our industry is also labor constrained? I know my brother had a machine shop to make aftermarket titanium parts for (motor)bikes, some cars, etc. He had a policy of nonstop looking for new machinists, even if he was fully staffed, because a machinist could just wander off at any time. With only 4 employees, he could find himself at at 25–50% loss of ship time in just a few days, at any time. It's not even like the machinists were getting more money. They'd just leave, because the new shop was 5m closer than his.
Fixing the labor pool issue is a decades long issue. More money in that pool won't fix things. I don't even know what's going on. Maybe I can just blame modern financialization for the issue? That seems easy, if wrong.
But, for sure, the complete lack of social safety net for labor can't be helping. Maybe if we guaranteed child care, 100% round-the-year safe spaces (we could use the fantastically expensive schools which are empty 75% of the time?), 3-free-meals-per-child, and free education through an associates degree? None of those are particularly expensive, even at the national scale.
In my 2+ decades in the trades, the biggest problem is low pay and shitty bosses. Trade unions are absolutely packed full of people wanting to join them because they pay better, have more training, and offer paths towards advancement/pay/benefits over their hiring wage. But outside of the unions people pay crackhead wages then wonder why only crackheads want to lose 20 years off their life and wear out their body for customer service wages despite having a specialized trade experience and skills. Everyone who works in the trades also knows its a boom and bust cycle and they will get the shaft as soon as it is convenient for their employer which isn't a significant risk in many other industries and jobs.
And things get confused more when people only look at the top inflated wages for trade workers in the most expensive cities in the world, completely ignoring that most trade workers can't afford to live in those places and commute into the cities for their work and they almost never actually get offered the kind of wages that are advertised.
Chinese party members reading this thread, please get into modular housing construction in a form that can be shipped to the USA and acceptable to the average person (so not mobile home/trailer park style stuff).
If you hit us with sucking funds from the housing market you will gut our economy even more, and there is zero support in the US to protect homebuilders right now when the two younger generations can't afford their product. If you offered a bad ass modular housing system that could quickly/cheaply build decent homes (current US Spec grade or higher) that might get really interesting.
The number of BYD on fire videos, and examples where the tires simply fall off because they don't use enough metal in the suspension. Makes me scared to be anywhere near one of their vehicles. please keep them out of the USA for safety sake. That's 4.6M state sponsored vehicles that should not be on the road. Don't forget the chinese gov'ts ability to lock you out from driving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWzbq-Q_oTc
https://archive.today/pFuU6
I bought BYD stock in 2025 before split in the hope that their market dominance will translate to great returns. The stock has pretty consistently traded down since then. Meanwhile Tesla stock soared purely on the air coming out of Elon’s mouth.
Auto manufacturing is low margin and capital intensive. BYD is valued as an auto manufacturer. Tesla is not.
Even all of that aside, the idea that foreign investors will be allowed to meaningfully participate in the upside of Chinese companies is questionable. Every Chinese company is one recapitalization away from zeroing out the common stock owned by foreigners. What are they gonna do, sue in Chinese court?
For quite some time, Warren Buffett was a BYD investor via Berkshire Hathaway. If you tried to get into EV stocks after the Tesla exuberance started, you were already mostly too late.
> The filing by Berkshire’s energy subsidiary recorded the value of its BYD investment as zero as of the end of March, down from $415 million at the end of 2024.
> Buffett’s company began investing in Shenzhen-based BYD in 2008, when it paid $230 million for about 225 million shares, equivalent to a 10% stake at the time.
> It began selling those shares in 2022 after BYD’s share price had risen more than twentyfold.
Warren Buffett’s fund exits BYD after a 17-year investment that grew over 20-fold in value - https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/investing/warren-buffet-berks... - September 22nd, 2025
This is fascinating, because from what I've heard, Warren Buffett did not favor tech stocks. Does anyone know what gave Buffett the faith that this company was a real deal?
Maybe he was more afraid of software dominated stocks?
BYD is at heart an automobile manufacturer and so maybe he felt more confident evaluating it using his normal tools.
They “just” were a battery company then. Is that considered tech?
That investment predates Xi Jinping's leadership.
In the combination Keynesian Beauty Contest[1] and casino that passes for an equity market in the US, everyone knows that Tesla is ugly as hell, but everyone also knows that everyone knows that it will get votes, so the show goes on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
It’s stock manipulation.
This is the story of nearly every Chinese stock ever. Their market is very different and even simple intuitions don't carry over.
Anytime China targets an industry we get a situation where basically every major city has their own brand that they're backing. There's a lot more competition in China compared to western markets that tend to be dominated by a few major players. There's over 100 EV brands in China today, e.g. BYD (Shenzhen), NIO (Hefei), GAC Aion (Guangzhou), and SAIC (Shanghai)
There's been a lot written about China's "Fiscal Federalism"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01475...
How they do financial bailouts by printing their own debt-free money and having fine-grained control of the banking system is also something that the west doesn't do.
They usually go through a major, government driven consolidation phase to establish a handful of national champions. I would bet we’ll see the same in EVs. This ensures scale by which they can dominate the global industry-an explicit target of the CCP.
No AI, self driving hype in BYD
BYD's self-driving is free and much more widely available. Not to mention it uses LiDAR. I'm not gonna get into whether or not their God's Eye is better or worse than Tesla's FSD but it's at least widely acknowledged that they are at least comparable.
Tesla is also not very transparent so it's hard to cite statistics but a recent study found that Tesla had the highest rate of fatal accidents of any brand in the US
https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study
For the major part BYD sales performance is dependent on government subsidies in the country where they sell three quarters of all the cars they produce. That is a high risk factor investors don't like.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
But as another comment pointed out, they have tons of debt, and TFA states that their "revised" target was revised downward, meaning earlier stock valuations were priced for higher sales.
> Meanwhile Tesla stock soared purely on the air coming out of Elon’s mouth.
Wrong orifice.
The Chinese economy isn't set up to endlessly create value for the capital-owning class, so you are never going to profit off of Chinese companies and stocks in the way we are used to in the west.
Chinese stock market is very different than US. In US you have like 62% of Americans reporting owning stock (including via mutual funds/retirement accounts) and in China, it's single digits participation. And China's market is famously retail heavy one, there were some studies showing that Shanghai Stock Exchange retail trading is 80%+ of volume vs ~10% in the US.
There is less hype and they are also not affected as much as US if stock goes down or stays flat.
The Shanghai stock exchange is still too heavy on insider trading, and consumer investors feel it is more like gambling than investing. Like, you could wager some money on a mahjong game, or you could blindly pick a stock and hope you can get some money by riding in the wake of a connected insider trader.
If you just want to invest money, there is real estate or investing in a family member’s business. Pensions and other institutions in need of safe (in aggregate) investments won’t go near the SSE yet.
China is doing more things right but still has a long way to go on other things.
Chinese stocks don’t seem to follow any reality either. BYD is basically flat over 5 years.
The explanation that I'm finding more and more compelling is that this is because there's actual competition in China, whereas in the west conglomerates have been able to carve up the market into fiefdoms and feast, with increasing amounts of cash that they can funnel into dividends and buybacks.
From the NA vehicle POV it doesn't look healthy. Stocks of the major auto makers have done well this year, while product gets more and more expensive and limited. Barely seems possible to buy anything but a F150like anymore.
Western corporations optimise for share price. The way to do that is by pulling strings at the government level to block your competitors and by getting nice tax breaks; not by having the best product for the consumer.
China and Chinese companies still want to shake off the "China means bad quality" image, so they actually want to make a great product at a good price for the consumer. To-the-moon share price growth doesn't happen by giving your customers a good deal.
Also the CCP doesn't want corporations forgetting who calls the shots, so there is some internal pressure keeping things less "frothy" than Western markets (where most governments are running scared of the big global corps).
Outside of EVs and more broadly China rates near the bottom for market freedom
https://gfmag.com/data/economic-freedom-by-country/
If the broader market is rigged, investors don’t rush in for just one segment.
It's not so much that the broader market is rigged. It's that every major industrial hub funds its own player: BYD (Shenzhen), NIO (Hefei), GAC Aion (Guangzhou), SAIC (Shanghai), etc. It might seem "rigged" to a westerner because it's so subsidized but China has a LOT of industrial hubs and therefore a lot of competition.
The US also heavily subsidizes EVs but the subsidies mostly only go to one company. Just take a look at the mind-boggling amount of subsidies we've given to Tesla both federally and on a state-by-state basis. Nevada's almost 2$ billion being the most blatant https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc
Interesting definition of freedom. The top three countries happen to be the places most permissive to international tax dodgers.
> produced by the Heritage Foundation
> Twelve are the factors related to four key aspects of the economic environment that are graded from 0 to 100 and averaged to determine a country’s score: rule of law (and related sub-categories: property rights, government integrity, judicial effectiveness); government size (government spending, tax burden, fiscal health); regulatory efficiency (business, labor and monetary freedom); open markets (trade, investment and financial freedom).
Quite the definition they made up.
You could say that about the Chinese stock market in general. Neither the SSE Composite nor the Hang Seng correlate all that well with Chinese GDP growth.
Chinese companies are optimized to grow and build stuff. US companies are optimized to deliver returns to shareholders.
Chinese stocks have historically done poorly due to poor governance and auditing failures.
Purely on the air coming out of Elon’s mouth as well as the 1 million cars sold world wide, 165 successful Falcon 9 launches and 9 million Starlink subscriptions
SpaceX’s success have no bearing on Tesla. And Tesla’s sales for the year are down for the second year in a row. Hardly a logical reason for the stock to go up.
Nice. Now take the car sales out of the vacuum and let’s see how great sales look year over across the world. Now let’s factor in how Elon’s government ended subsidies for electric cars. Should I go on?
your very mistake was trading stocks at all
stocks and the whole money-as-a-business is US thing - making actual product is the China thing
BYD ranks at the bottom for human rights. But interestingly, BYD’s proponents seem to brush it away.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...
> BYD's 2023 Corporate Social Responsibility Report initially lacked a human rights policy. However, the company later published a 2024 Human Rights Policy Statement.[67] This new policy also shows enhanced commitment to supply chain due diligence, including recognition of OECD Guidelines. Despite these improvements, the policy lacks details on battery material sourcing.
> BYD’s policies do not address gender-responsive due diligence. BYD states that it engages with stakeholders. However, it does not provide policies for engaging with communities affected by the battery supply chain or incorporating their views into decision-making processes. There is no reference to Indigenous Peoples or their rights in BYD’s reports.[68]
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ACT30/8544/2024/en/
I don't at all disagree with the importance of these topics and I'm glad to see them addressed but this entire metric seems to be based on specific language/terminology in a company's public commitments. And this terminology seems to be biased towards a western audience. For example, the United States (a settler-colonial nation) is ofc going to have more discourse around the rights of indigenous people. Whereas the term "indigenous" isn't used very much at all in China.
I also feel like you've buried the lead here. Yes BYD ranks the lowest of the 13 brands they looked at but not by much and they also explicitly state that ALL of the brands they looked at failed to meet their minimum baselines. The report is more of a critique of the industry as a whole than any individual actor
You can pretty much replace BYD with any Chinese company (and to some extent, almost any company in the world) and the sentence would still make sense.
So I have mostly lost interest in the argument. Not that it is an incorrect or irrelevant argument, but none of that has really mattered.
This is the standard “nothing can be done and everyone does it” argument when shown that BYD is literally at the bottom of the pile.
A western org says out-group companies are at the bottom of the list of a report that is self reports and “transparency” aka trusting the companies words. Obviously their in-group companies will rank higher. That’s the entire purpose of the report.
Presumably you can't make the statement that almost all companies are below average on human rights. Mathematically at least half have to be above average.
Presumably most people also wouldn’t be particularly concerned with what the average is. If all companies have human rights records ranging from bad to terrible, surely it’s no compliment to be above average.
I disagree. I find the notion that everyone is a little evil therefore it is ok to be any level of evil, to be morally repungent.
That’d be the median, not the average.
Torturers Inc, that operates in $country_i_hate & tortures over 10,000 people each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Fair point, although i would generally assume that ethical behaviour of companies is normally distributed.
Median/mean/mode/geometric are all types of averages.
This. Most of the Chinese products met the definition of dumping. They over produce with suppressed wages, currency exchange rate, and government subsidies. The current generations of Chinese workers do not benefit from this. To clarify, they have top products, some are well paid. But the general trend is dumping.
I am curious when will other countries would actually start of defend their industries properly.
Industry talking points, meant to convince you to subsidize them.
You don’t need to subsidize domestic companies to adjust for currency exchange rate manipulation.
The government could for example impose a tariff that covers half the difference thus maintaining an unfair advantage for Chinese companies. Thus profiting from the manipulation without placing excessive burden on domestic companies.
Agree subsidies does not seem like the correct incentive structure. But that's what the other guy is doing so I guess that's what we have to do.
In general, can the EV industry survive without government subsidies? Maybe now it can in the US.
Also not convinced EVs (as they are currently) are vastly superior to ICE cars. Not accounting for the potential for ICE cars to vastly improve if there wasn't so much vested interest. So the whole EV industry seems a bit unsustainable...
For almost everyone with home charging, EV’s are a substantial win even without subsidies. There’s so many little wins like being able to turn the car on to warm up in a garage without filling it with exhaust. That’s a long way from every driver, but the EV industry doesn’t need to make up every car sale to survive just fine.
ICE cars can’t get vastly better they are simply too close to fundamental limits. It’s quickly becoming a competition between hybrids and EV’s.
I assume you're joking, but this is just sales tax.
Tariffs are quite different than a sales tax because they can select winners and losers in a market. Cane sugar vs sugar beets etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet
However, they don’t have to be high enough to change who wins, even small ones adjust how much foreign subsidies manipulate the market. Foreign governments should consider how much US corn syrup impacts domestic consumption for example as a separate issue from how it impacts domestic sugar production.
China’s currency manipulation has second order effects that benefits Americans. We don’t necessarily want China to stop, instead the goal should be to minimize the harm while extracting maximum benefits. A small tariff that caused them to double down on currency manipulation would be a massive win.
> They over produce with suppressed wages, currency exchange rate, and government subsidies
I mean, so does Germany.
Technically, the USA only has the massive subsidies part since the IRA came to be but they also have tariffs so, not doing too bad distortion-wise.
At this point in time, pretty much everyone is already defending their industries. China is just playing its cards better than the others and with a head start when it comes to EV.
Tariffs aren’t the same thing as suppressing wages, overproduction, government subsidies, and managed currency to prevent deflation.
In the case of the US with respect to China they are mostly a retaliation to the above anti-competitive practices.
But I hear you on who is playing their cards better. I don’t think China is playing theirs very well. They pissed off both the US and EU, and even Mexico is enacting tariffs on Chinese products. American and European countries are taking action to stop Chinese anti-competitive practices. Nice factories you have there, too bad there’s nobody to sell those products to.
I also don’t know what you mean when you say for example the US and Germany are suppressing wages. I’m interested in what you mean by that specifically.
> and to some extent, almost any company in the world
This is weak sauce.
Claiming western companies are better because a western org said so based on self reports and western reporting is also weak sauce. “We investigated ourselves and found we are fine and our out-group isn’t”
> BYD’s proponents seem to brush it away
At the end of the day, you aren’t going to convince consumers in Southeast Asia, South America or Africa to buy more-expensive American or European cars on account of human rights. Not while they’re middle-income economies.
Like many sibling comments, many companies are on a range that is on the bad side. There is a part of EV supply chain that is particularly bad and that is for all companies.
But what about the environmental costs that are being externalized? EV car production is likely worse or equal to ICE car production at each step. And the only arg seems to be that some day all EVs will be powered by solar/clean energy somehow.
Are BYD proponents allowed to say that this doesn’t matter much to them, or are they expected to measure themselves by your political views because they are the only correct ones?
Shouldn’t human rights factor into consumers choices?
I don’t think anything in particular “should” factor into everybody’s choices. Some are sensitive to price, some are sensitive to design, others to autonomy, others to speed, and then, yes, some will buy depending on human rights records.
>But interestingly, BYD’s proponents seem to brush it away.
This feels like a rather lazy strawman to debate against. Not sure there's anything interesting about it.
"But Tesla bad so BYD is a necessary evil" seems to be a common sentiment.
The European Union can't fight everyone at once - we need partners, hence trying to mend fences with MERCOSUR, toning down the struggle for human rights in China and tolerating India's authoritarian drift. For now the utmost priorities are defeating Russia and achieving actual strategic autonomy by decoupling from the traitorous USA. So yes, better BYD than Tesla.
Why focus on BYD, China as a whole is effectively a totalitarian state that locks up millions because of their ethnicity and disappears or executes people who disagree with the government. They are also territoriality aggressive and routinely use trade as a weapon to pushing states that stand up to it.
Buying anything from China is supporting that regime.
I could make a good case for the United States fitting that description, especially the bits about trade and agression.
The US is complex antihero type.
While it definitely attacks threats and has perpetrated plenty of unjust deeds, it also is responsible for the food security of much of the world. It has lifted more people out of poverty than any other party. It has brought poor nations to the point of industrialization.
The US has been a far greater force for good in the world than evil.
The leadership changes frequently, so it's hard to point to any single responsible party. It's democratic, so its institutions are subject to scrutiny. The free press sheds light on corruption and rule breaking.
Despite changing immigration narratives, the US has been an early and strong proponent of multiculturalism and welcoming people.
With declining US hegemony, the world is likely to become a much more dangerous place. We'll see more economic strife, more war, higher costs, greater tensions.
but at least we will have alternative energy sources in Solar, wind, batteries and probably a Nuclear renaissance which might reduce the incentives on fight for Oil & Gas even if the fights move to other resources
> fights move to other resources
Food (eg. protein, fisheries, etc.), water (eg. dams), materials (eg. rare earths), land, strategic geography, trade, labor, security, political upheaval, power struggles, sectarian violence, terrorism, religion, historical claims, climate, etc. etc. etc.
Under a single global order, disagreements were normally put aside to participate in global trade. As we begin to move to distributed trading blocs and factions, many of these disagreements will boil over. Parties won't step up to stop them.
The inevitable whataboutism.
Firstly it's not relevant to a discussion about China's behavior.
Yes the US under Trump has become increasingly authoritarian, but besides being not as oppressive as China, the US remains a democracy and there is a chance to vote bad people out of the White House and more importantly reverse the direction of the country.
Your description of China as authoritarian and repressive is largely accurate, but the conclusion you draw from it is far too binary and ignores major parts of reality on both sides.
China’s system has produced outcomes the US cannot come close to matching. In a few decades it lifted hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. It built nationwide high speed rail, dense urban transit, modern housing, and large scale infrastructure at a speed the US has not achieved since the mid 20th century. Many Chinese cities are cleaner, more connected, and more functional than American ones. Long term planning, industrial policy, and state coordination have delivered tangible improvements in daily life for a huge share of the population. Those are not propaganda achievements. They are measurable.
China’s downsides are also real. Political dissent is not protected. Surveillance is pervasive. Ethnic repression, especially in Xinjiang, is severe. There is no internal mechanism to safely challenge the regime when it abuses power. Prosperity is conditional on alignment. When the state decides someone or some group is a problem, there is no lawful way to resist.
Now look honestly at the US. The US has political freedoms China does not. Speech, courts, elections, civil society, and the ability to oppose the state without being erased are real advantages. That matters enormously. But the US also has a long record of extreme violence and moral failure. It slaughtered millions abroad in wars like Vietnam and Iraq, often based on lies. It overthrew governments, backed death squads, enforced sanctions that killed civilians, and built a mass incarceration system that destroyed entire communities. At home, it tolerates deep inequality, decaying infrastructure, and political paralysis. It cannot build basic transit or housing at scale, and millions live worse materially than citizens of far poorer countries.
So if the standard is “this regime has blood on its hands,” then the US fails that test as well. If the standard is “this regime produces good outcomes for its people,” China clearly succeeds in ways the US does not. If the standard is “this regime allows its citizens to challenge power and correct abuse,” the US is better.
That is the real comparison. Different systems optimize for different things and fail in different ways. One is not a moral fairy tale and the other is not a cartoon villain.
That’s why “buying anything from China is supporting evil” is not a serious ethical framework. Global trade does not map cleanly onto endorsement, and the same logic would implicate participation in much of the modern world, including the US led order that produced enormous suffering of its own. A coherent position is to argue for strategic decoupling or limits on state coupled firms. A black and white call for regime destruction or moral purity ignores both China’s real achievements and the US’s very real crimes.
Once you include the full ledger, the issue is not good versus evil. It’s tradeoffs between flawed systems, not a simple moral referendum.
It’s also worth noting that these are largely macroscopic, state level critiques. For most people living ordinary lives in China, many of these issues are not directly salient day to day, just as most Americans do not experience US foreign policy atrocities, coups, or wars as part of their daily existence. People judge their country primarily by stability, opportunity, safety, and whether life is improving, not by a moral audit of state behavior. Viewing China solely through its worst actions is no more complete than viewing the US solely through Vietnam, Iraq, or mass incarceration. Both perspectives flatten lived reality into ideology, and both miss why citizens of each country can hold nuanced, even positive, views of systems that are clearly flawed.
You really owe it to yourself to visit (or if possible live in) China for a while to see this other perspective.
Change BYD with Tesla, China with US and say for an European or anybody all above is still perfectly true.
You missed the part where we chose to move all of our industries to China to save money, exploitation was always part of the plan, it's just that people who came up with that genius plan didn't account for the fact that China would develop and want a part of the cake too
That report is basically made up. Why would non western companies be “transparent” with western organizations? A lot of it is self reports. This is like looking at the freedom indexes and concluding that in the US women have the freedom to walk safely at night in cities because it ranks high on western freedom orgs but not in actually safe places like China.
> Source: company statements
Meanwhile they are dumping thousands of cars in public parking lots: https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/byd-australia-accused-...
And BYD sits on a pile of debt they use to pay suppliers expecting ever-increasing sales (Evergrande business model). https://medium.com/@davidsehyeonbaek/a-deep-dive-into-byds-s...
BYD owns their own fleet of car carriers for export, with the capacity to have ~30k vehicles shipping to other markets at any one time on their vessels. From this piece:
> BYD Deliveries outside of China hit 1.05 million in 2025. The company has set a goal to expand overseas sales to between 1.5 million to 1.6 million units in 2026, according to a Citigroup Inc. report in November that cited a meeting with BYD management.
Edit: The debt is irrelevant, China isn’t America. They’ll nationalize and inflate away any institutional debt or wipe it out, but still have a third of the world’s manufacturing capacity. Tesla exists on vibes, Chinese EV makers build, for example. jmyeet’s comment mostly nails this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46456020
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46424124 (citations)
(global light vehicle TAM is ~90M units/year, and Chinese EV automakers are going to soak the market with their production capacity)
China has a huge deflation problem that they export to the world via cheap products. They have a lot of capacity and not enough consumers. So in China, an unstated mild Keynesian approach makes sense. They can sweep debt under the rug and take in inflation from net debtor countries
Which on the one hand is great because through that China exports material wealth to the world.
At the same time production capacity outside of China has to compete with this "rigged" system, which is near impossible to do.
Falling prices, sounds like the way things should be as real technology and markets develop. Inflation is not natural.
> They’ll nationalize and inflate away any institutional debt or wipe it out
This is just the reverse, actually, China isn’t afraid to go so far as to jail CEOs. There is no such thing as too big to fail in China, and all the Chinese domestic companies know it. The bailout playbook is a western thing.
China has been performing debt swaps with local governments to clean up their balance sheets [1], so used as an example. Agree with all of your comment. People make the mistake that China plays by artificial US capital market rules around profit and debt; they do not. They optimize for physical world success, not line go up.
[1] Why China Is Hoping $1.6 Trillion Can Fix Its Hidden Debt Problem - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-16/china-eco... | https://archive.today/HsaHV - April 16th, 2025
Ah, I think I get it. Are you saying that regardless of BYD’s continued existence, China will still have 1/3 of the world’s manufacturing capacity?
Yes, exactly. Just as in the US, when an enterprise gets wiped out and recapitalized, all of the physical assets remain. In China’s case, they are the backstop of last resort, and will always recapitalize according to their nation state planning and target outcomes. They allow companies to operate the assets as long as the Chinese government is willing to allow it, but they remain assets of China.
So, essentially, there is a root company called China, Inc. Correct?
They only jail the people that upset the regime.
From the outside, it appears that "upset the regime" includes "cheating your way into profits".
That said, it's very difficult to be sure if what I see from the outside is propaganda. Or rather, it is always propaganda even when it's true, and I can't tell how much of it is China's own self-promotion vs. other people giving negative propaganda.
You don’t think president Xi:s family and friends cheated? Of course they have. Yet they don’t go to prison.
I'm saying from the outside, it doesn't look like that. That's a much weaker statement, as should've been obvious from what I went on to say about propaganda.
Example of cheating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Officials_implicated_by_the_an...
And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal#Arre...
Nevertheless, it would be interesting if someone could, you know, prove, and not merely allege, that Xi Jinping's family or friends cheated.
https://panamapapers.org/case-study-china
Yup, that's the kind of thing I have in mind.
Even with the sub-heading "It's legal, and that's the problem."*, and even though this kind of cheating is broader than this reply chain from "There is no such thing as too big to fail in China", this is absolutely within bounds for what I asked for :)
* and the not-proof-read AI generated image, that never helps…
A car transport holds thousands of ships. Therefore requiring temporary storage for thousands of cars is normal.
Even if you count the massive "hidden debt", BYD's debt load is still a small fraction of the big car makers, many of whom hold over $200 billion in debt.
Which car makers? Ford, GMC, Chevrolet are all closer to $100 billion. Tesla holds $13b.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/automakers/automakers-with-th...
Wow! Toyota $269B debt vs BYD $5.6B debt
> its Net Debt/EBITDA was around 3.7x, indicating strong earnings cover for its debt
TLDR: Toyota can afford it
They have $5.6B in debt, around the same as Mazda and Polestar and roughly half Tesla's $13B.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/automakers/automakers-with-th...
And vast parking lots full of cars isn't dumping, it where they put them before sending them to dealers:
> its parking areas are still brimming with new BYDs fresh from arriving at nearby Port Kembla ahead of their delivery to BYD dealers.
Dumping notwithstanding, BYD is still selling cars into the Australian market in enormous numbers. Four of the top ten EVs sold this year are BYD, as are the top two PHEVs.
If you account for the fact that Australian market Teslas are built in China, then China is producing 8 of the top 10 EVs.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/australias-best-selling-cars-b...
Which is direct evidence for what would happen if they were allowed to sell fairly into the US and Europe. The future of cars is Chinese, the US automakers can’t survive on protectionism forever
Also their abysmal human rights record
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...
Dumping notwithstanding, they're still selling cars into the Australian market in enormous numbers. Four of the top ten EVs sold this year are BYD, as are the top two PHEVs.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/australias-best-selling-cars-b...
A friend of mine works in the chemical industry in Europe. One reason European producers are currently facing challenges is that Chinese producers are dumping chemicals into the global market at heavy discounts.
The underlying cause of this is that the Chinese housing market, which previously absorbed almost all chemicals, has effectively stalled (Evergrande, et al.).
I wonder whether we're observing a similar effect in the automobile industry as well.
Yes, but causality is backwards: the Chinese housing market stalled because China took the debt punch-bowl away from housing and gave it to the industrial sector.
It's also worth mentioning that loan subsidies play a bigger role in Chinese capital markets: Chinese industry is largely capitalized with state debt rather than private debt/equity or public markets. Zooming out, as a response to Trump's 1st term tariffs China went on a big autarky push by redirecting its citizens' and companies' deposits into a loan bazooka for the industrial sector. We are now seeing the fruits of that. The big questions have to do with (true) profitability and (true) balance sheets: can the new industries service their debts well enough for the government to hold face?
Are they actually dumping, or extraction/refinement of materials is actually much cheaper in China, so it feels like dumping?
Frankly, I don’t mind it, because western companies should also engage in this behaviour, if they can. Sell physical items for cheaper than it takes to produce them! They’re doing it with services and etc. anyways, might as well do it with physical products too.
How is extraction/refinement of materials much cheaper in China?
I have been told they are reaching wage parity with the west, so not labor cost.
Reuters agrees with op: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-goods-dumping-st...
regarding: "Meanwhile they are dumping thousands of cars in public parking lots" Sure you can post a speculative article, but this link is far more informative. https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-news/byd-car-park-mystery-s...
It doesn't really appear to be anything of grand significance.
It seems that BYD are storing cars improperly but there’s nothing in the first link about financial engineering.
Compare at the same scale:
Vantor Legion-2 image of the BYD plant in Zhengzhou as captured on 18 January 2025: https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/wayback/#mapCenter=113.9361%2...
Vantor WorldView-3 image of the Tesla plant in Austin as captured on 31 January 2024: https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/wayback/#mapCenter=-97.6189%2...
The size of BYD's factory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228138 - November 2024 (615 comments)
I’ve been hearing about the rise of the Chinese car industry for 20 years, judging by the number of BYDs I’m now seeing it has finally happened.
In my country over last 5 years the majority of new cars now from China, it happened so swift. I still think that Japan cars are the best, but it's hard to justify paying 2x and getting inferior (in terms on features) product, while reviews of new chinese cars are largely positive.
Which country?
Kazakhstan
Interesting thank you. When I was there in 2012 or so I was surprised to see a huge number of small Daewoo branded cars, a long extinct brand in the west. Small getabouts seemed very popular. That was a long time ago I know, but I imagine some of these cheap Chinese small models are filling that segment now?
Xiaomi is another maker. I saw a good review on Xiaomi SU7 - https://youtu.be/Mb6H7trzMfI by Marques Brownlee
China is the largest car market in the world. Almost twice as large as the United States.
China is also over 70% of the world's EV production
If you only travel to North America and Europe you’d never know but I went to South America and India and the former mostly had Chinese cars and the latter had big ads for a BYD MPV everywhere in Bangalore.
So the Chinese car makers are popular outside the West. I drove a couple of Changan cars and they weren’t even as nice as my Subaru in terms of handling but they functioned well as cars.
They've suddenly all appeared in Australia too - we had BYD for quite a while and brands like Volvo and Polestar (owned by China's Geeley), but suddenly we have Leapmotor, Deepal, Omoda Jaecoo and Geeley themselves (just the ones I can think of, probably others) having all appeared on our market in literally something like six months...
Can confirm. Colombia based, a year ago I had my first Uber trip in a BYD, now I would guess about 10% of my journeys are Chinese EVs. It's impressive how fast they've caught up and mostly surpased their competition. If the Japanese took 20 years, the Koreans 10, then the Chinese have done it in 5.
BYD is very much present in the UK (Telsa still seem the most common, but BYD are getting close), it must be the same in mainland Europe unless the EU is blocking them more aggressively. The Ford dealer down the road from me turned into a BYD service centre in the last couple of months.
> BYD has overtaken Tesla in overall European registrations for the first time in 2025 (BYD outsold Tesla across EU + EFTA + UK in several months)
> Across EU+EFTA+UK in October 2025, BYD’s registrations (~17 470) were ~2.5× Tesla’s (~6 964), and YTD BYD’s total (~138 390) was closing the gap on Tesla’s (~180 688).
Still not as strong as in other markets. In Finland, BYD is not even in top10:
- 1. Skoda Enyaq (~1614 units)
– 2. VW ID.4 (~1582)
– 3. Tesla Model Y (~1516)
- Other brands include VW ID.7, Kia EV3, Volvo, Audi, Polestar.
They also migrated 100s of millions of mopeds to electric bikes and shipped new ebikes over the last 10 years. That enormous scale no doubt fed directly to battery technology and assembly techniques that help with cars. Many Chinese don't own cars. (That's changing fast).
China has all this manufacturing capacity, and no market to sell.
Really the only option they have is to swap the products to military ones so that they can create the global markets they need.
It’s gonna be a bumpy decade.
Hrm? They can and are selling to the rest of the world (except NA and Europe)
They're selling in Europe, plenty of BYD cars in Greece.
I'm not choosing sides here but if telecom equipment from e.g. HuaWei is not allowed on US/EU markets because of national security concerns, then should we allow cars?
Why not? We allow pretty much everything else. Appliances, consumer electronics, car parts, batteries, etc.
The one and only reason to not allow Chinese cars is to try and protect domestic auto industry, but considering how expensive and mismanaged domestic auto production is I don't see that as a good excuse. They won't die because they can't possibly compete, they will die for refusing to compete because they want higher profit margins now rather than bulk sales and good public perception 10 years down the line. They would rather fuck their future and bet on a bail-out than dare try making bulk cheap cars again with a bit lower margin.
Hell GM paid Toyota to come teach them how to make cars cheaper and better and build matrix platform cars in their factory. And what did they do when that happened and cars started rolling off the line? They complained that Toyota didn't produce them them in the same manner they would have, and then closed the plant down. Meanwhile Matrix platform cars like the Vibe are highly sought after on the used car market because they were known for reliability and ease of maintenance.
If we were actually worried about security, we would be doing FAR more than merely disallowing HuaWei products. Its like living next to an active volcano in a forest fire prone areas inside a log cabin and then screaming about how dangerous it would be to allow matches be sold in stores due to arsonists.
We allow everything else from iPhone to your microwave. National security seems awfully like a veil for regulatory capture
This is a national security concern but in a different way. It's about the de-industrialization of America. Palmer Lucky talks about this and how China's goal is to make sure America can't build anything. Once that happens we can never win a war against them.
We shouldn’t.
Not just because of the assumed security issues (good point though).
But even w/o these,
- I rather have some European or American conglomerate gathering unnecessary data about me driving, than just hand it over to the Chinese state
- Buying Chinese means destroying our own base, as this market has been actively stealing IP for decades (BYD or Xiamoi just being copycats of Porsche); good luck winning piracy cases in Chinese courts
- unfair financial restrictions for redeeming returns on foreign investments fueled much of China‘s growth - and still persist
- western/asian manufacturers are de-facto not competing with mere manufacturers but the Chinese state itself since (almost?) all Chinese manufacturers are State-Owned-Companies
Now that is not to say that China‘s rise is not commendable and deserved, it is indeed. I‘m rather arguing for playing the same game as they are.
I see electric/hybrid BYD cars more and more every day. Meanwhile, US/EU automakers are still struggling to offer anything barely competitive.
Legacy automakers EVs are just ICE cars with the engine swapped out. Whereas BYDs, teslas etc are a ground up rethink, vertically integrated with battery manufacturing and software.
Classic innovators dilemma - it seems to be almost impossible to align incentives inside legacy auto to do the necessary revolutionary change. Every individual and sub group are internally invested and short term focused on their legacy frames, drivetrains, layouts, electronics, software and supply chains. That’s why you keep getting offered the same car, but now as a sub par EV. So they will lose, because they can’t adapt.
I know that "laziness" is kind of a generic/useless criticism to throw at a company or sector, but there really is that vibe for EVs in the West.
The problem is that few people in "the west" wants EVs.
It's basic supply and demand - the sales are tanking, and without subsidies nobody will buy them, and the car companies are realizing that.
A few models (Teslas, for example) do okay with the upper class, but the lower and middle class can't afford them, don't have anywhere to charge them, and have to drive too much to depend on them.
Even in a trendy, wealthy city like Boulder, CO which is all about saving the environment and going green there isn't nearly enough charging capacity for everybody to use EVs.
An EV is better than no car at all, but they're a downgrade from an ICE in most cases.
Triffin Dilemma, not laziness. This is a macroeconomic problem.
Not angering the oligarchs who profit from oil appears to be the root cause.
This then flows downstream to inconsistent and patchwork government support for the transition to EVs.
The short term incentives aren't all properly aligned for car makers to fully commit to build EVs and support the supply chain to do that.
Decades from now we're going to look at the oil patch lobbyists as the villains that killed countless jobs in NA and enabled China to take over whole industries.
You had some politicians like Justin Trudeau that tried to create a frame work that would guide and advantage capital toward investing in innovative green technology and future jobs, but then politicians saw the advantage in politicizing and opposing everything and they tore this all down.
Now China has continued to move ahead meanwhile NA remains at square one with increasingly backward technology, with no incentive to change.
It's going to get really bad!
I really wonder what are the parts where BYD gets its competitiveness from vs where it might be behind
Software explains a lot, dumping explains some of it but it might not be all of it
Isn't China at the forefront of battery technology (and BYD was initially a battery company).
Japanese engineers disassembled a BYD vehicle said BYD's E-Axle drive system was so advanced it would take them 10 years to replicate it. BYD's blade batteries are also a major competitive advantage.
EU car makers need to confirm to insane EU laws regarding every little thing.
Every car maker selling cars in the EU needs to comply with EU laws.
That's why Europe is mercifully free of Cybertrucks: they can't legally operate on roads within the EU, because they don't meet the safety requirements (one of your "little things").
There are some cybertrucks in EU, registered using loopholes like T3b title meant for farming equipment, quads etc
Don't Chinese makers need to conform to the same EU laws when selling cars in the EU? That's how it works in the US.
Exactly the same rules for BYD, Tesla etc (maybe with the exception of second hand private import)
BYD selling to Europe would also need to conform to these
> every little thing
ie, killing people and polluting the planet, mostly.
It's like the 1970s all over again with how the US Big 3 makers are facing an existential threat held at bay only by protectionism. They're going to have to learn to compete yet again.
Did they ever learn to compete then? The only thing that protected them then was that Japan was a US “ally” and could be “persuaded” to go along with protectionism. China has no such need.
I would argue that the 70s were a trial run for whats happening today but instead of becoming more competitive the automakers focused on lobbying for Government help; a playbook that won’t help them today.
And even more stupidly, traditional American carmarkers are discontinuing EV models and shutting down factories JUST when they finally had an edge over their japanese competitors.
ford in particular seems to only ever give up on everything. they couldn't compete on compacts, so they killed the focus and fiesta. they couldn't compete on EVs, so they killed those too. next thing you know toyota will start carving away at the F-150's market share and they'll kill that, too.
Outside the purely electric vehicles (where I believe Tesla competes very well, where is BYD at with FSD?), is there a Chinese equivalent to:
- The upcoming EREV (mostly electric extended range hybrid) F-150 truck? This is expected to have ~700 mile range, and of course no charging hassles. It’s main advantage over the now defunct Lightning will be towing range.
- The Chevy Corvette Stingray? Say what you want, but the high end ICE sports cars have an appeal of their own…
I believe the USA still has an edge in some areas of the market.
> - The upcoming EREV (mostly electric extended range hybrid) F-150 truck? This is expected to have ~700 mile range, and of course no charging hassles. Its main advantage over the now defunct Lightning will be towing range.
Interesting question. Maybe this is the niche where existing auto makers can thrive though if China automakers have a blind spot to outdoors enthusiasts where range is more important.
The problem is that no one really needs or wants this outside of NA, Australia, maybe Russia and Africa? But there is a market.
Range anxiety and towing is a niche problem and companies will get rich selling the next Toyota Camry/VW Golf for the median consumer.
EREV is niche on niche and that's sort of where I expect the NA market to be going under the NA auto makers. We're going to have this protectionist wall where we have these bizarre (increasingly ICE dominated) market while the rest of the world moves on.
Couldn’t agree more. And the niche market will only hold on because of protectionism. If the US let in the wave of cheap EVs that are coming, people would buy them - suddenly noone is going to care about “range anxiety” when you can get a 20k ev that does 300miles.
American car manufacturers don't play to their strengths e.g affordable sports cars - Chevy Corvette Stingray | Mustang GT how many are sold in foreign markets
the Bronco could make a killing in Africa but is it sold there NO. I understand here in the states the 4runner has no competition - yet ford wants to kill it using the Bronco. Why not use the Bronco to kill the land cruiser in markets where people default to a Land Cruiser / Fortuner and force Toyota to play defense.
E.g in Africa certain markets Ford started selling the Ford Ranger Raptor and they're making a killing - and actually starting to cause Toyota to compete and not bring their usual stale cars.
However Chinese have brought their A-game too - Tank 300, BYD Shark etc
There is no way that a land cruiser owner in Africa will ever consider anything made by Ford. That's like blasphemy. The LC has decades of proven reliability, that the bronco needs to compete with.
It's true, the Ranger is immensely popular. But Ranger owners and LC owners do not see eye to eye and you'll have a tough time convincing the LC owner to change allegiance.
For South Africa specifically, the Ranger is about as large as you can go in terms of personal vehicle, before it becomes a serious hassle. Our infrastructure does not really support bigger cars. How does the bronco compare with the Ranger size wise?
Lastly, the Ranger is built in South Africa, I think Ford knows and understands the Southern African market very well.
also American car manufacturers have a good advantage in diesel engines: Duramax etc
The BYD Shark, which is a PHEV ute, sold like hotcakes last year in Australia.
> BYD at with FSD?
Setting aside the performances of similar systems, the more fundamental question is why is this even important to Chinese carmakers?
1. They are shutout of the U.S. market with tariffs from both parties, that doesn't seem likely to change.
2. Self driving systems are far more difficult to work well on the roads of Europe, Asia or Africa. The kind of wide roads and planned development only exists in U.S, Canada or Australia. On top of it the issues with weather handling are still on-going problems.
3. Labor is not near as expensive as in the U.S. in the rest of the world (dollar is expensive) so automation ROI is not as attractive given the costs.
> where is BYD at with FSD?
I'm not sure about BYD, but other car makers have FSD that works like Tesla's FSD, and in some cases it even outperforms it. Here is a test from a few months ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuDSz06BT2g
> - The Chevy Corvette Stingray? Say what you want, but the high end ICE sports cars have an appeal of their own…
The world is moving to EVs, ICE will mostly be collectors cars in 20 years in developed countries. As to Chinese sports cars Xiaomi SU7 Ultra: "June 2025, an unmodified SU7 Ultra (with a maximum 1,139 kW (1,527 hp; 1,549 PS) power) lapped the Nürburgring in a hair under 7 minutes, 5 seconds. It is not only faster than the fastest Tesla Model S Plaid and Porsche Taycan versions, but also faster than a Rimac Nevera, one of the most high-end and expensive electric sportscars."
U9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangwang_U9 is a supercar produced by BYD, fastest in the world.
"It achieved a maximum speed of 496.22 km/h (308.33 mph) at Germany’s ATP Automotive Testing Papenburg, making it the fastest car in the world and breaking the record previously held by the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ at 490.484 km/h (304.773 mph)"
>I'm not sure about BYD, but other car makers have FSD that works like Tesla's FSD, and in some cases it even outperforms it. Here is a test from a few months ago:
This one is imo better comparison https://www.dongchedi.com/video/7530078571931435566 https://carnewschina.com/2025/07/24/chinas-massive-adas-test... Tesla won every category despite this being a test performed in China by Chinese outfit.
From what I can see, Tesla did not passed every test scenario, but it passed most of them (so it won): 5/6 in the first table (highway test) and 8/9 for the Tesla Model X in the second table (urban test), the two Chinese cars placed second and third with one less passed test than Tesla (7/9), while the Tesla Model 3 passed only 5/9. Interestingly, both Chinese cars passed the test that Tesla failed. Considering Tesla has millions more miles of driving data and more years of development, it seems like it's only a matter of time (with more data and iteration) before the Chinese cars pass the rest of remaining tests, which is great because competition is healthy.
> Did they ever learn to compete then? The only thing that protected them then was that Japan was a US “ally” and could be “persuaded” to go along with protectionism. China has no such need.
Oh, indeed. I was attempting to be generous, but it's arguable whether they deserve that generosity.
> I would argue that the 70s were a trial run for whats happening today but instead of becoming more competitive the automakers focused on lobbying for Government help; a playbook that won’t help them today.
We're still paying for this today with the so-called "Chicken Tax" (and all of the other crash and emissions regulations) that has deprived us so many good Japanese trucks over the years.
For anyone who has tried cars from both automakers, how does BYD compare to Tesla on similar trim vehicles?
If you had to pay US/EU prices for a Tesla vs BYD you'd go with BYD no question. But the majority of Teslas are made in China and when put a Chinese made Tesla alongside a Chinese made BYD it's a coin flip.
So as an Australian I'd roughly rate them the same with BYD high end matching Tesla's high end and BYD having a low end that Tesla doesn't compete with (the Atto which is ~USD $15000 for a small electric hatchback has no Tesla equivalent).
Isn't the seagull the cheapest model at like $8k?
Same car, called the Atto 1 in Australia and with the steering wheel on the other side and slightly better than base specs in Australia.
BYD doesn't sell in USA.
The point is the difficulty of the comparison. They are tariffed in the EU and NA to the point of near inviability so I don’t see that as a valid comparison. Outside the EU and NA they are Chinese made cars.
So basically you either compare current NA/EU Teslas to a hypothetical untariffed BYD (I don’t think this is fair) or you compare Chinese made Teslas to BYDs (which of course leads to similar prive perf ratios).
Byd Auto Motor, Inc. 1800 S Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA 90015 https://www.byd.international/city/los-angeles
Leasing a building and having an english section on the website doesn't mean they're available here yet.
The pricing page shows none available in the USA:
https://www.byd.international/pricing
Ok, but "where the rubber meets the road", I've seen 0 BYDs in the wild in the US, including a recent 1,800 mile trip half way across the country. Earlier in 2025 I took a trip to Scotland and they had 2 dealerships I saw and I saw a couple of them on the roads.
BYD Sealion 7 is better than a 2025 Model Y Standard and worse than a Model Y Premium in terms of ride quality/suspension and driving dynamics.
The interior is more taste dependent, but the Model Y Standard is clearly a low budget version (with fabric seats) that's below the BYD. The Model Y Premium interior and seats felt higher quality to me, but it has a more minimalist design while the BYD has a more traditional setup with a screen behind the wheel.
The Tesla screen/app seem more responsive and premium. Also above for example VW where things are often sluggish and don't feel as well designed from a UX perspective.
Thank you for answering the question
We are seeing the culmination of the 50+ China industrialization project at the samme time as the West's 50+ year financialization and deindustrialization project, all to concentrate even more wealth in the hands of the 0.01%.
China is really the only country capable and willing to build infrastructure. The ban on selling lithography AND chips to China is massively backfiring. The chip ban in particular has created a captive market for Chinese chips. In 1945, American exceptionalists believed the USSR would take 20+ yars to copy the atomic bomb, if they could do it at all. It took 4 years. China will do the same thing with EUV in the coming years.
Tesla is a trillion dollar company that was created entirely by government subsidies that only continues to exist because of the tariffs and import bans on BYD in the US and much of Europe.
Additionally, Tesla is completely dependent on Chinese rare earth exports for its products.
As an example of how China uses state power, a famine in the 20th century caused China to decide that food security was a national security interest. The availability of cheap, quality food is viewed as essential and the state intervenes to ensure that continues. Likewise for housing.
Western companies seem increasingly focused on the top 10% because the bottom 90% have nothing left to eextract.
I've never seen a comment simultaneously be so right on some things and so wrong on others.
> The ban on selling lithography AND chips to China is massively backfiring
Agreed. We will be screwed once China surpasses us in chip fabs, and they will. The idea that we can get a "durable advantage" by reaching AGI a few years before China is ridiculous. Using that to justify bans that only slow them down a few years at the cost of creating a chip fab juggernaut later is folly.
> Tesla is a trillion dollar company that was created entirely by government subsidies that only continues to exist because of the tariffs
Tesla is not supported by subsidies significantly more than any other car company and less than many including BYD obviously. They also compete directly with BYD without tariff protection worldwide and in China and do well. They are worth a trillion dollars because of the potential of their self-driving software which is far ahead of any other car company's including those in China.
> Tesla is completely dependent on Chinese rare earth exports for its products.
Tesla has rare earth free alternatives. There is no urgent need for them right now but they can switch if necessary.
> Agreed. We will be screwed once China surpasses us in chip fabs, and they will. The idea that we can get a "durable advantage" by reaching AGI a few years before China is ridiculous. Using that to justify bans that only slow them down a few years at the cost of creating a chip fab juggernaut later is folly.
I’m quite sure advanced semiconductor fabs are considered a strategic necessity by China regardless of restrictions. Further, China is now getting the H200 chip…
> Tesla has rare earth free alternatives. There is no urgent need for them right now but they can switch if necessary.
There are also plenty of rare earth extraction projects coming online outside of China!
> Tesla is not supported by subsidies significantly more than any other car company
Tesla was saved by a DOE loan [1]. Tesla was kept afloat with carbon tax credits. Yes, the Big Three got bailouts in 2008. And now, most importantly, import barriers are the only thing keeping Tesla afloat.
[1]: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/573148-dept-o...
"Tesla got some subsidies" does not refute my argument. All carmakers get subsidies. BYD gets tons! And Tesla is selling plenty of cars in places without import barriers protecting them including China itself.
China is a food importer and Chinese housing, especially in the tier 1 cities, is as expensive as anywhere in the world.
As you mentioned EUV machine, I happened to read an article from a former Executive of ZhongXin, a domestic competitor of the famouse Huawei and also sanctioned by US. He said that China had no insentive to develop lithography technology including EUV until Trump blocked the sales of EUV machine in his first term. [1]
There are tons of other cases, like EDA software, etc. It used to be a bilateral business. Now China become more and more independent of the rest of the world due to external pressure.
BTW, I've been working and living in the West (more specifically , in Canada) for almost 30 years but also have access to Chinese language media. I've been watching a lot of misunderstanding or misinformation. It's less in recentl years. I have to stay way from some of the topics to avoid being downvote because misinformation believers strongly believe I'm wrong for those topics.
[1]https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/VCEbmtljCS6jRCLaGxCa1A
I think EU/NA residents are a little naive on how much Chinese cars are dominating the market. Chinese cars don't sell just in China. They utterly dominate globally outside of EU/NA where they face extreme tariffs. To the point where certain cars that you'd say were American (eg. Tesla) actually make most of their cars in China.
Right now around the world in non EU/NA countries Tesla's a bit on the nose. All Tesla's in Australia are Chinese made regardless but it's then a choice of Chinese made Tesla vs Chinese made BYD and the BYDs are by all reports excellent cars.
PS to Canadians: You could be paying ~50% less for the same car, even same model to same model by allowing Chinese made cars in and it'd help you screw over a country that threatened you.
> They utterly dominate globally outside of EU/NA where they face extreme tariffs.
Even inside of EU, seemingly BYD have reasonable prices, especially compared to their EU competitors. I'm an current Audi owner in Spain, who is currently very close of getting a BYD DM-i Touring, and compared to what I would get from Audi for the same price, BYD still offers a lot more in everything except "nice steering feeling", at least from what I've gathered from my test drives.
> offers a lot more in everything except "nice steering feeling"
Isn’t it wise to prefer a nice steering feeling? Your body is, after all, going to be feeling it every time you drive.
As a long term BMW driver instead of Audi I have the same. I'm swapping one of my two BMWs for a Model Y Premium. Also tried the BYD 7 but the Model Y felt nicer to drive and with more space.
The BMW iX1 is disappointing in range, interior luxury and power. It's below an older 6 series (that I'm switching from), and much less powerful than a Model Y AWD. No idea why BMW thinks they can price it like they do. The other option was the BMW i5 Touring but it's more expensive and feels "old" already.
That's because the car lobby only cared about electric vehicle tariffs, the petrol cars from China are tax free
(There's also anti-dumping tariffs on electric bikes from China, I wonder if it's the same lobby...)
> PS to Canadians: You could be paying ~50% less for the same car, even same model to same model by allowing Chinese made cars in and it'd help you screw over a country that threatened you.
The sheer irony of an Australian saying this! I mean you’re in danger, dude!
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/24/world/china-live-fire-drills-...
The naivety of the comments here is just astonishing.
Your entire comment reads a bit like an ad for Chinese cars, conveniently omitting the damage these automakers are doing to the global car industry by dumping cheap supply wherever they can to secure market share, all enabled by heavy state subsidies. [0]
> PS to Canadians: You could be paying ~50% less for the same car, even same model to same model by allowing Chinese made cars in and it'd help you screw over a country that threatened you.
Because given the chance, China 100% would never do the same (or worse).
[0] https://www.csis.org/blogs/trustee-china-hand/chinese-ev-dil...
> dumping cheap supply wherever they can to secure market share, all enabled by heavy state subsidies
Assuming for a moment this is more true for China than for other countries. Why would the average Canadian prefer to pay more for their next car versus having a similar car subsidized by the Chinese taxpayer? Most Canadians do not work in the auto industry. Further, the protectionism practiced in the EU/US/Canada is not likely to be successful long-term, meaning those auto industries are doomed.
Best path forward is to let in competition, make the domestics stronger, and let consumers get cheaper cars in the meanwhile. Provide some additional temporary support if necessary. (This is more or less how the US absorbed Japanese and then Korean cars.)
> Best path forward is to let in competition
To compete with China in the ”open market” now, Canada will need:
- 25 years of investments in infrastructure and education in STEM and manufacturing
- Targeted state subsidies of chosen branches, which will require
- transition to at least partially planned economy, which will require
- at least partially transitioning to some form of dictatorial governance
- increase population at least twofold (you need multiple multi-million metro areas to support large high-tech clusters)
- devaluate CAD about 2x and accept about the same drop in local purchasing power (which likely will happen anyway, but could be not that harsh and fast).
China at the moment has like 10x advantage in industry ober Canada, it’s impossible to compete. It’s like saying that your immune system must be able to handle bubonic plague, so let’s just inject the body with the pathogen and let it adapt without any external support. A noble idea, but you’ll likely die in the process.
The auto industry is a shockingly high percentage of the Canadian economy, somewhere around 10% of GDP. Direct auto manufacturing roles are themselves about 1% of jobs nationally. If we start counting everyone involved with the sector, it's >5% of people in Ontario. It's not a winning political move to make all of those people unemployed.
Fair for Canada. In the US, the entire auto production economy employs fewer people than Amazon does in the US.
Let's be real, if Trump wants to reshore US auto factories from Ontario to Detroit, as he has stated explicitly, Canadian politicians can't do shit, USMCA be paper after all. Right now CAN just waiting for term to blow over and hope there's no Trump3. But ultimately if CA auto is going away / shrinking to irrelevance, at some point winning political move is to give masses cheap cars.
I feel like closing off access is a bad long term strategy. Instead of being forced to compete and match or outmatch competition Canadian manufacturing can get complacent and lean on restrictions. But the whole thing feels like a ticking bomb.
I mean you don’t have to go off vibes - this has historically happened in every protectionist industry. The protected companies make a worse and more expensive product
it's not like cars are necessities like food. and i doubt these companies are unprofitable - the chinese govt has no incentive to provide the world with free cars.
It's shocking how (presumably) free-market maximalists on HN, who usually tout the benefits of competition look at Chinese EVs and go "These low proces can't be due to competition and innovation. It has to be government intervention". Domestic competition in China is red in tooth and claw, while car manufacturers in the US manufacturers innovate on buyer financing.
It does if it meant everyone else went out of business and became dependent then on China
that's like saying that apple should sell the iphone for $10 to capture the market. meanwhile apple does the opposite
The chinese are not entering a saturated market here, they are building it and apparently dominating it by creating the best value
They did the same with PV panels, their plan was to make PV cheap for china, and in the process they became supercheap for the rest of the world too.
Are the big capitalist car companies scared of some strong competition? Maybe they should innovate instead of lobby against international competition
Lets assume all this is true, why should i be concerned about it?
If the Chinese tax payer is going to help me buy a new car then thanks, my own government isn't going to do that.
The Chinese tax payer isn't voluntarily helping you though, it's China's forced resource extraction from its own citizens (wage and QoL suppression), to maintain a stranglehold on global manufacturing. Everybody (except your specific car purchase) would be better off if they used these resources domestically. Do you think they'll ever want payback? if not from you, then from the next generations.
Because over time when your own industries suffer and then become jobless, your country is less secure and wealthy.
I'm not really seeing the issue with this. Capitalists will tell you this is a good thing because consumers will benefit, or is that only capitalism if it benefits the American elites?
Why should I care that the CEO of Ford is struggling when he pays his workers so terrible? If they want another government bail it, we should just nationalize the industry and implement workplace democracy for the staff so they can be accountable to the workers + people in some fashion.
But yeah, it's sad seeing the demise of US liberalism but what do you expect when the last 50 years was naked imperialism for corporations while denying any social responsibility for the country?
Selling that many cars despite intense competition at home and trade barriers abroad seems the more natural way to express that story.
They instead focused on how in evil communist China you need to continue to make better cars than rivals in order for your business to succeed and grow.
What a strange system they have over there. If only they were capitalist like the US and being an incumbent connected to the regime was all you needed to keep extracting money from the population despite product stagnation.
Two things can be true at once:
1. BYD has rapidly surpassed many western companies in terms of product quality / desirability
2. Chinese automotive industry is a strategic threat to Western military capabilities. If they are successful in usurping European / American auto manufacturers, it will be a death blow to an already hollowed-out industrial base that is critical to any sustained military engagement.
So, yes, western companies have stagnated, and yes, the West needs to keep these dinosaurs around through subsidies (which Chinese manufacturers also receieve from their regime).
Re #2 -- locking Chinese vehicles out of the market will also lead to the downfall of our industrial base over time. In general, Americans (including those who work in US manufacturing) do not understand that Chinese vehicles are very competitive. At some point, those vehicles are likely to surpass domestic capabilities (they are already there viewed through a price/performance lens).
All of this is down to the simple fact that essentially no American has ever driven a Chinese vehicle and does not know anybody who has. They are not even getting secondhand reports. This is worse than the '80s when the Japanese makers arrived in the sense that in the '80s everybody could see the quality of the Toyotas and assess quality/performance for themselves. It's much worse to not even know how good the competition is.
From a business standpoint, it's especially bad for the domestic industry because the majors actually do need to be competitive in fast-growing regions like Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It's not a viable strategy to depend on protectionism at home while ceding countries where most people live.
Everyone's take on the 1980s has been perverted by an internet viewpoint written by a bunch of weeb fanboys projecting the state of the car market in 2006 onto 1985. The actual cores components of the cars themselves are basically within spitting distance for Japan vs Domestic. These were not high quality cars. They were all low quality cars. But Japan was making the king of low quality cars that people wanted. (And by 1990 all these early 1980s platforms from all makes were all comparatively trash).
In the late 1970s early 1980s if you tried to buy a compact american car it was like buying the burger at a fish restaurant or the vegetarian option at a steakhouse. It was there to check a box. It wasn't well thought out or a core product they gave a shit about and they were almost always last to get any innovations. You want power widows AND an automatic, sorry we'll have to special order that, we don't stock those on the lot.
In contrast, the Japanese gave a shit about those product lines. So someone making "In better times I'd be buying a bigger car from Chevy" money could go to them and get something configured how they wanted without being told no a bunch of times and the sales guy trying to get them into something bigger car didn't want like would happen at the Chevy dealer. Toyota or Honda or whoever literally didn't have those products to upsell you into. Yeah I guess they could sell you a landcruiser but people didn't buy SUVs then. That would be like trying to sell an Econoline to some rich woman who's shopping for a 3row Landrover.
At the end of the 1980s the domestics were basically back with their own new "modern" FWD platforms (e.g. Taurus) and new larger stuff (minivans, midsize SUVs) which made money hand over fist for 10yr or so. The Japanese were basically on the sidelines for all of this. Like yeah they had the 4Runner and Pathfinnder and Passport and stuff but no amount of 2020s fanboyism is gonna make those sales numbers any less of a joke. What the Japanese did do very well though was give a crap about their smaller cheaper offerings, Rav4s and CRVs and small and midsize sedans which the domestics neglected. So when the SUV craze came to an end with the high gas prices and bad economy of the mid-late 2000s they were there ready to be bought. And it's this great success from the mid 2000s that every idiot on the internet seems to want to project back into the 1980s when the 1980s were far different.
Also, the U.S. auto makers had a well-deserved reputation for building unreliable vehicles, probably exacerbated by the phase-out of lead from gasoline, while Japanese vehicles were easily exceeding 100,000 miles without any significant breakdowns. This provided a tremendous advantage to Japanese makes and proved extremely attractive to American customers.
> Everyone's take on the 1980s
Nope, I was there.
You're generally agreeing with me? You're making an argument that American makers improved by exposure to Japanese makers, and yes I am suggesting they also need exposure to Chinese makers for the same reasons.
> Japan was making the king of low quality cars that people wanted
This is China today, except by all accounts they are simply inexpensive and not low quality. Your bit about buying a compact car in the 80s has echoes in American automakers largely exiting the market for cars. (IIRC it's only Tesla, Lucid, the Mustang, and a couple Caddy models remaining.)
The main point is that in the 80s we could all see for ourselves Japanese cars. We could talk to people about how they liked them. People working at Ford could drive a Honda and figure out how to compete against it. That laid the ground for the resurgence of the American makers. Protectionism is depriving the automakers of this opportunity to retool to compete with the Chinese.
>You're generally agreeing with me? You're making an argument that American makers improved by exposure to Japanese makers, and yes I am suggesting they also need exposure to Chinese makers for the same reasons.
Partially. I agree on the economic lines. But disagreeing on the oft circle jerked quality bit.
These were not "high quality" cars even in their day nor were they "higher than the competing product" on any non-subjective axis (the Japanese and europeans did make very different decisions than the americans on some preference based things though). By "low quality" I do not mea low value. I mean low end. These were not designed to be "nice" cars. They were built to a price. These were not cars you got into and said "man, everything I touch feels solid" and "this is a pleasurable driving experience". They got called tin cans for a reason. They were inexpensive compacts and midsize vehicles but what they got right was they nailed the contribution of attributes everyone wanted and so they sold very well.
I absolutely agree that exposure let the other OEMs get better.
If the US had a competent government they would react by pulling the same playbook as China to compete. Heavily subsidize and incentivize production of EVs by new companies to replace the rotten core of existing US automakers to produce price competitive and quality competitive vehicles, then let the old guard burn down.
Subsidizing the rotten core of corrupt US automakers will not produce a new or functional industrial base. It will simply maintain the illusion of an industrial base until anything of importance needs done. But that’s basically the MO of any “mature” industry in the US.
What you’re proposing is basically the EV subsidy, which got gutted because Americans got pissy about lifting a single finger to benefit anyone slightly more fortunate than themselves
No it got gutted by Americans that were tragically fed a constant diet of misinformation as to the actual policies of the GOP. EVs still poll very well in the US and so does combating climate change.
So the free hand of the market isn’t quite as free after all
If the 20th century was a repudiation of soviet communism vs capitalism, the 21st century seems to put capitalism on the backfoot
we keep saying these things while industry-after-industry gets disrupted by the chinese
Next industry to be disrupted is housing, because seemingly the entire western world has is not even trying to provide housing (a necessity) to everyone.
Subsidies are dangerous in the long term
Housing in the US is labor constrained. When I talk to GCs, subs, etc., they'll say that materials a bit more expensive, and labor is a bit more expensive; but what the complain about — and this can be for hours, if I get one going — is the complete lack of labor in all trades. This isn't a new problem; the "old hands" (GCs in the 60s and 70s) noted the labor drop out even 30+ years ago. The only saving grace we had was a strong trade force incoming population (immigrants); but, we've cut that off.
It wouldn't surprise me if our industry is also labor constrained? I know my brother had a machine shop to make aftermarket titanium parts for (motor)bikes, some cars, etc. He had a policy of nonstop looking for new machinists, even if he was fully staffed, because a machinist could just wander off at any time. With only 4 employees, he could find himself at at 25–50% loss of ship time in just a few days, at any time. It's not even like the machinists were getting more money. They'd just leave, because the new shop was 5m closer than his.
Fixing the labor pool issue is a decades long issue. More money in that pool won't fix things. I don't even know what's going on. Maybe I can just blame modern financialization for the issue? That seems easy, if wrong.
But, for sure, the complete lack of social safety net for labor can't be helping. Maybe if we guaranteed child care, 100% round-the-year safe spaces (we could use the fantastically expensive schools which are empty 75% of the time?), 3-free-meals-per-child, and free education through an associates degree? None of those are particularly expensive, even at the national scale.
In my 2+ decades in the trades, the biggest problem is low pay and shitty bosses. Trade unions are absolutely packed full of people wanting to join them because they pay better, have more training, and offer paths towards advancement/pay/benefits over their hiring wage. But outside of the unions people pay crackhead wages then wonder why only crackheads want to lose 20 years off their life and wear out their body for customer service wages despite having a specialized trade experience and skills. Everyone who works in the trades also knows its a boom and bust cycle and they will get the shaft as soon as it is convenient for their employer which isn't a significant risk in many other industries and jobs.
And things get confused more when people only look at the top inflated wages for trade workers in the most expensive cities in the world, completely ignoring that most trade workers can't afford to live in those places and commute into the cities for their work and they almost never actually get offered the kind of wages that are advertised.
Add in giving people guaranteed healthcare so that people were comfortable exploring job options more.
Chinese party members reading this thread, please get into modular housing construction in a form that can be shipped to the USA and acceptable to the average person (so not mobile home/trailer park style stuff).
If you hit us with sucking funds from the housing market you will gut our economy even more, and there is zero support in the US to protect homebuilders right now when the two younger generations can't afford their product. If you offered a bad ass modular housing system that could quickly/cheaply build decent homes (current US Spec grade or higher) that might get really interesting.
The number of BYD on fire videos, and examples where the tires simply fall off because they don't use enough metal in the suspension. Makes me scared to be anywhere near one of their vehicles. please keep them out of the USA for safety sake. That's 4.6M state sponsored vehicles that should not be on the road. Don't forget the chinese gov'ts ability to lock you out from driving. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWzbq-Q_oTc
> and examples where the tires simply fall off because they don't use enough metal in the suspension
As opposed to using too much metal in the airbags of our cars ;)
> Don't forget the chinese gov'ts ability to lock you out from driving.
I remain less scared of a foreign government than I do of my government that has effectively total control over my life.