Fear of cheap Chinese EVs spurs automaker dash for affordable cars
fear of competition spurs automakers to make competitive products. FTFY
Not “Asians”. Companies that follow the CCP’s policies and ways of doing business.
What you did was typical pro-CCP misdirection. You took “fear of cheap Chinese EVs” and ran with that to “Asians bad”. Chinese are not all Asians and the CCP is not a race.
What you did was typical pro-CCP misdirection
Idk, I didn’t feel like they were pushing an agenda, can’t say the same about you.
China is just the new Japan. And on copyright, the US was big on intellectual piracy for decades and even had government department dedicated to stealing intellectual property from the British Empire.
Honestly, just take a basic normal car, and replace its engine with an electric one. No on screen entertainment, no cameras, no AI bull shit, no self driving. Just as basic as it gets.
Backup cameras are required on all 2018 or newer vehicles in the US and Canada, so you will need at least one in the back and a small screen for that, maybe hide that screen in the review.
This imaginary basic car should also come with a double-din radio so it can be upgraded like the old days.
I wish they sold me just a double din hole with cables ready for connection. All stock radios single or double din suck ballsack for what they are charging.
Yes, the absolute basic required technology to make it road legal, physical switches and either physical gauges or a non-touch screen for gauges if that’s cheaper.
Physical switches > screens. It’s much harder to develop the muscle memory for a screen. I don’t have to look away from the road with switches.
The reason everything is on a touch screen now is that it’s cheaper than physical switches, as ridiculous as that seems. And yes, I greatly prefer physical switches.
Buy and wire multiple switches on every car, requiring wiring harnesses, ECM IO pins etc. or pay an intern a minimal sum once so he can put “designed Chevrolet in-dash console” on his resume. Then never update it even though it supports OTA updates and is a glitchy mess, Chevy
This is the same reason so many products come with a stupid Bluetooth app now rather than more than one button. Pay once rather than pay on every unit.
Hmm. In that case, physical buttons is the one luxury I’d pay a premium for.
They don’t know how to market something that doesn’t have a bunch of gimmicky bullshit.
The problem is you can’t efficiently electrify a vehicle designed for fossil fuels. The requirements differ too much.
Actually EV conversions were common before we got intentionally designed EVs and the original Tesla roadster was built on a standard Lotus body and frame, but luckily we’re beyond that now.
You can still choose to electrify a vehicle now but you get poor performance and range, unbalanced handling, and pay way too much for a mediocre vehicle. It’s bot worth it
They mean at the design/manufacturing level, not retrofitting.
They mean just creat a simple ev car with only the needed designs to house the battery, controller and electric motor(s).
They mean discard all ideas of “futuristic” interiors, techs, or anything. Just build a modest car with an electric powerplant and battery storage. Then stop.
Fire any designer who tells you AI could improve the product.
Think this is the idea behind the GM Ultium platform (and probably others). They always held out “skateboard” as the goal, although I don’t know if that’s still a thing. Create essentially wheels and a plank that include all the power and drive components, modify to a small set of sizes, and crank them out by the millions. Then each car is a unique body and interior on top of the “skateboard”. As the platform gets to scale, you can drive the cost down, while still making unique cars on top of it - including low end cars
Fire any designer who tells you AI could improve the product.
That would be pretty dumb. It’s entirely possible to use AI in the design and engineering phase without AI being in the product that’s delivered to the customer. It’s also entirely possible for AI to be used in areas like crash mitigation, improving the handling in poor road conditions, or optimizing charging speed to improve battery life. Those uses of AI are largely invisible but offer a tangible improvement to the vehicle without being what anyone would consider luxurious. Choosing to ignore a design option because it sounds like something trendy is a great way to design a product that’s a worse value for the money.
Batteries will need a frame change if you don’t want to sacrifice the trunk or something. And range will be bad unless you improve areo dynamics and heating. But I think the Bolt and the Nero are pretty close to their ice counterparts.
Yeah that was the problem with the Nissan Leaf. It basically used the same frame as an ICE car, (and it wasn’t like it was a big SUV either) so all the batteries had to go in the back, and you had no storage and also there wasn’t really enough space in the back to have enough batteries to make it have decent range.
They did make the leaf plus that has decent range with the same formfactor though. Also I’m quite sure the batteries are not in the trunk, unless that’s where they put the extras in the plus version or something? Our 2015 leaf had significantly more trunk space than our brand new bolt despite being of similar dimensions. The bolt does have better rear leg room though.
The main issues with the leaf stem from not having any active heating/cooling for the battery and using an uncommon plug for level 3 charging that is going the way of the dodo. If you live in a temporate climate and don’t need to fast charge for road trips the leaf is a totally acceptable car IMO.
The Citroen ec3 would be the car for you, but Stelantis doesn’t sell it in the US… Just the overpriced Fiat 500e that is pretty worthless
What’s the incentive? Most people will have to buy a car anyways, so without a different incentive, it’s better for every manufacturer to sell you a 60k+ car where the margins are way higher. If profit is the sole motive it’s a no brainer.
That’s basically the Mini Cooper EV. Took the guts of a BMW i3 and dropped it in the shell of a Cooper S. They even left the engine vent on the hood.
It’s a fun car, and relatively inexpensive for the current crop of EVs, but its range is limited. We’re already moving past the era where this is a good idea.
Its a nice idea which probably has a lot of complex implications. It would probably be a huge pain to figure out dimensions and compatible electric motors for every brand of non-electric vehicle, so the production of replacements would become very wide. Typically, the battery of an EV isn’t just a brick in the engine room, but it’s a whole range of cells along the length of the vehicle. Using the same space as the combustion engine might leave you with a vehicle with terrible range. Also, the safety of a car takes the engine into account. Replacing a combustion engine with an electrical engine would likely require a whole new safety overview for each individual model.
I honestly really hope that your suggestion would work, but I’m not expecting to see this becoming a wide solution before EVs dominate the market anyway.
I don’t think he meant to literally take the ice out of a camera and replace it with a motor and battery.
But rather he meant, make a new ev, on an EV chassis, but without all the nonsense that drives up costs without adding significant value.
I don’t need touch screen everything with 3d gaming built in, gull wing doors, and custom flush door handles that don’t work if you have a hand injury or any type of disability.
If you see that European car makers sell the same car in China for less than half than they charge at home, you know they are basically milking us just for extra profit.
Not true. Most products aren’t the cost of the materials. There are a lot of included expenses in the price of a product like the cost of labor. They’re also not the same cars.
I am well aware that there are costs beside materials and labor. In my company, I’m part of those other costs - I’m R&D. The point is still: Why shall we bear all those costs and others don’t? Don’t expect people being happy about being handled gross unfair.
They’re also not the same cars.
Yes, there are differences. But they are small, and could be incorporated in a low-cost version of European cars, too - if they actually want a low cost version here.
Why shall we bear all those costs and others don’t
That sounds like standard supply demand. If you can bear it, and there is no alternative, you will. But moreover as was mentioned there are reasons that may require a product being different prices in different markets as operating expenses are not the same. The simple cost of launching a product in different markets incurs different costs, and thus different prices. That’s a trivial example, and with vehicles it gets really complex at the regulatory level, especially in regulatory-rich countries which are common in the EU.
Except it’s rarely the “same car”. For example a Tesla Model 3 manufactured in China has an LFP lithium-ion battery, while the US manufactured ones use an NCA lithium-ion battery. It’s by far the most expensive component of the car and LFP batteries are much cheaper.
There are often other differences too - such as optional extras being standard in one market. And warranties vary (those are not free - it costs money to fix faulty cars and they factor it into the sale price).
Sounds like what I’d like is whatever options or differences that make the car half as cheap.
I think their implication is that whenever they’re selling in China is kind of trash, and you wouldn’t think it’s a good deal if you looked closely.
There‘s a word for that „Greedflation.“ This is what western car makers do. Luckily, the Cinese car makers grasp their chance and disrupt the market
While that is part of it, the other, bigger part is that Western countries actually do have higher labour costs: better salaries and conditions for our workers.
When China was outcompeting us on undesirable, low productivity, jobs, we accepted that. It was better to raise a billion Chinese out of poverty than to protect our lowest productivity factory workers. And those workers mostly transitioned to other jobs with higher productivity.
But now China is richer and their labour force is shrinking, so they will compete with highly productive factory jobs.
Politically, it is unlikely that car workers will accept unemployment. Nor will other highly paid workers.
So a trade war is brewing, you better brace yourself for it.
China wasn’t “outcompeting us on undesirable, low productivity, jobs”. Corporations were shipping jobs to China to undercut highly productive factory jobs back then, too, so they could save on labor costs. It’s only now that China is undercutting corporate profits that these same corporations come crying and shitting their pants. That’s also why you see a ramping up of negative media pieces on China. It was never about charitably raising people out of poverty. It was always about corporations undercutting labor to gain greater profits. Fuck 'em, bring on the cheap cars.
I hate it when corpos use the “oh we can’t lower prices because our staff is getting paid too much”-narrative. What about the CEO who takes half the profits for himself?
It’s the workers who create value for a company, they don’t take it away by getting paid for their work.
Dude, I’m old enough to have lived through it.
Making toys and other plastic shit was never a high paying job in the West.
And no, it wasn’t charity, it was a win-win that increased living standards on both sides.
But it did have an impact on low paying manufacturing jobs in the West and that impact was accepted by Labour unions for the two reasons I gave: we (rightfully) concluded there were enough other, better jobs available and didn’t want to keep Chinese workers poor.
Don’t think labor costs is a big factor. Car production is the sector that is most automated. Just think of this endless bands of hanging cars with robot arms working on it. Tesla even topped this.
It’s mainly the unwillingness to design and sell cheap cars due to less profits. In Germany we had electric cars for 20k€ or even combustion cars under 15k€. But they stopped building it. Although it was sold out in weeks.
In my region there was a Startup by the Aachen University RWTH (which is an elite university in Germany) bulding small EVs for around 20k€. They simply bought all parts from suppliers and just assembled it. And engineered and designed it first. Unionized and still competitive. Unfortunately, they didn’t fly.
EV building is rather simple. The software is key. And this is the missing part at car makers capabilities.
I second your thoughts on trade war. However, I guess it will be much simpler with high taxes, high quality regulations, and may be less support by car workshops. We will see…
There is still a shit ton of people working in a car factory. Tesla had to scale back their amount of robot workers since humans could work much faster. Tesla expects to have 60,000 people working in their Gigafactory in Texas when the production of the Cybertruck ramps up.
Chinese manufacturers are being heavily subsidised and even making a loss on their cars.
They’re trying to kill off our domestic car industries.
No reason why western countries also can’t subsidize EV car companies to remain competitive.
Like…what are we supposed to do? Be content with ridiculously priced EVs and be willing to pay a small fortune for them? Fuck off with that noise.
Western corporations have had no problems fucking over the average consumer for decades or laying off thousands of employees at the first sign of trouble. Let them adapt or die I say. Competition is always good. Western corporations have the smarts and the resources to compete, they just need to be forced to.
Controversial take: the problem isn’t car prices. They haven’t increased that much when compared to inflation, and you’re getting far more and far better cars for your money when adjusted for inflation.
The problem is wages haven’t risen and housing prices have risen too much, meaning people have less to spend on a car.
E: I googled. In the US the cost of a median house was 18k in 1953. An average car cost 3.5k.
Now, the median house costs 400k.
400k/18k x 3.5k = If car prices had risen as much as house prices, the median car would cost 77k.
A lot of western countries are subsidizing EV sales. Most western auto companies just waited a decade longer than they should have to start making EVs and are in the thick of developing technology when the early movers are hitting maturity.
On top of subsidies at the national level, most legacy automakers are selling their EVs at a significant loss, but that is because they haven’t reached economies of scale yet… not because they are trying to undercut competition. It’s hard to develop new products and even harder to get them to scale production. Ford has been making cars for 120 years, but that isn’t the same thing as making an EV. They effectively have to start over in a new field… a decade behind companies that invested early.
A lot of the press you hear about EV manufacturers cutting back because demand is low has to do with them cutting back because they are losing $50-70k per vehicle they are selling and can’t stomach the losses. The demand is there, they just can’t make an EV at a price that generates profit. They trim commissions at dealerships to try to help defray cost, but that minimizes incentive for sales teams to try to move them and exacerbates the problem. On top of that, their ICE sales are diminished due to high interest rates and an overall market slowdown in large purchases so every vehicle they sell at a loss hurts the bottom line that much more.
They’re trying to wait to push the cost involved in getting to scale until interest rates go down and it’s more affordable to invest in new technology. They are fucked. Tesla is currently the only American company that is profitable at scale and Elon can’t shut the fuck up on eX-Twitter long enough to stop pissing off the marketplace. The table is set for Chinese EVs to flood the US market, but I don’t think people will be as open to Chinese vehicles with the current data privacy issues and the tense geo-political position between the US and China.
I’m thinking that, if it gets bad enough, the federal government will disincentivize Chinese EVs with tariffs to offset the Chinese gov’t subsidies… if the current US EV tax incentives don’t do enough to spur legacy automakers to kick it into high gear… which it doesn’t seem to be doing. It’s going to be a rough decade for legacy automakers.
That‘s a terrible idea. Just because China throws irresponsible amounts of cash at cars doesn‘t mean we have to do the same mistake. We can simply say it‘s not OK to sell products under manufacturing costs to gain market share and that‘s that. Let‘s not inflate the already oversized car market even more.
Selling at a loss to enter a market or gain market share is a time honored tradition at this point.
It is, but as the article mentions some manufacturers are making a loss of 35k per car.
If those cars are then sold for 5k less than the US/EU/Japanese equivalent, despite lower wages and environmental standards, you have to ask yourself questions.
Yep. They‘re doing exactly what we usually call hostile underbidding to heavily inflate prices later when they‘re a top dog. A practice that is not quite legal in most parts of the west. And whoever wants to know when things still don‘t work out for the car maker because subsidies dry up: Search for Chinese manufacturer ‚Weltmeister‘. That will make you think thrice about ever coming near a Chinese EV.
It’s also called dumping:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
The kind of thing usually results in a trade war, sanctions and tariffs.
The problem in Europe, is that our manufacturers are so reliant on Chinese parts and manufacturing, that they’ve asked our government NOT to intervene. China has them by the nuts, because they’ve outsourced too much. IRC they can’t even make batteries without using Chinese parts.
Nooooo anything but more environmentally friendly vehicles that people can actually afford. Won’t somebody think of the profits?
not sure about environmentally friendly,friendlier sure, but a well developed public transit system and biking infrastructure beats any kind of car based infrastructure
Complements. The reason we’re stuck in this auto-dystopia (are we auto-asphyxiating? ;-) is people wanting one size fits all infrastructure. Let’s apply this more intelligently this time - recognize that some areas are more built up than others and different solutions scale differently . In general that can be a good thing, but we need interconnected services for everyone. That does include cars in many areas, although I agree a worthwhile goal for cities/town centers is that people not need a car
The reason we’re stuck in this auto-dystopia (are we auto-asphyxiating? ;-) is people wanting one size fits all infrastructure.
The reason the US is a car dependent dystopia is because they let the auto industry dismantle a shitton of public infrastructure.
Just because you build public transport infrastructure doesn’t mean you can’t have your car, look at switzerland, netherlands, they have good public transport/bike infrastructure and still have cars.
Having great public transportation actually makes it better for people who only want to use cars, because it takes off a lot of people from the road who now have alternative options.
Holy based someone on Lemmy not blindly advocating for public transport literally everywhere.
We need the incrementally more eco-friendly options as well. Most pickup truck driving office workers won’t suddenly get a bike and change their ways, so a more eco friendly personal vehicle is probably a lot more likely to reduce emissions for that demography.
I am not sure that buying a brand new car offsets more than just using your existing car, so there is time to make those people change their ways
Trains and trans are a more cost effective and environmentally friendly way to transport the masses. It can work to a surprisingly small populations as evidenced by all of the small disparate towns in Switzerland, Norway and Denmark that depend on them.
Of course no solution works everywhere but cars should never be our first option.
more environmentally friendly vehicles
I wouldn’t call what’s coming out of China environmentally friendly
