What China does hardly indicates economic sense, and you can be sure you won't hear about the down sides or failures. They already very agressively hide car lithium fires but they're very frequent. Economics over there are mostly investment driven with a large dose of ideology and vanity, not demand driven. You can see it everywhere including the massive amounts of empty housings for example
Being dependent on (cheap) oil can make economic sense as well. Unless you get cut off all of a sudden. Depending on local energy might make more sense in the long term. also for factor other than the economy.
and you are refuting with even less justification. I told you how to check for yourself if you actually cared about veracity. Best of luck trying to get funding to publish something academic anti-CCP though, but I'd love it if you did. Also this is just a conversation, not an academic debate
This ignores the fact that there are also things that China does better or equal than Western companies. Like robots, solar panels, electric cars (?), AI models, electronics.
They must be good at something, otherwise China wouldn't be where it is.
So flat out dismissing anything from China is not enough of an argument.
Mind you, I'm not saying you're generally wrong, just your "generally" is wrong. ;-)
I'd dispute they do any of those better, they stole the IP, then used public funds to make cheaper versions in the hope of leading the markets, including by being artificially more affordable while there is any competition. Besides electric cars and solar, it's very debatable wether those will actually be ecological in the end. For ex. they are still opening massive amounts of fossil based electric plants, so the truck that is half battery is actually running on coal anyway. It would take an incredible re-work of the electric grids to accomodate actually transitioning away from thermal cars, including some solution for seasonal storage. If you're impressed by their robots, I don't know what you're looking at, they seem to be ridiculous, not even at the tech level that boston dynamics had decades ago. Finally keep in mind that electric cars are fantastic spying devices, for collecting data, and if you're nefarious, imagine hacking into them. That's why teslas are banned near anything governmental in China. So there is a huge strategic advantage to cornering that market, but not really to save the planet. The AIs are all distilled, USA still leads by far there, and they too are strategic weapons
You're making a lot of assertions without citations here.
If I look at a BYD at my local dealership, and compare it to a comparable spec German car (I live in the UK, so tariffs are not the thing shifting the needle here), I can see where the cost savings are and the trade-offs.
I don't think they're artificially more affordable. I just think they're more affordable.
Using public funds to invest in capital expenditure is - outside of the US - considered a wise use of public funds. If the result is a more competitive industry, whether that's ship building (South Korea), steel production (recent UK nationalisation efforts), military hardware (United States), or medical research, physics, chemistry, computing (look at the history of all the G7 there), and so on, and so on... irrelevant.
China has decided to spend it on complex manufacturing that they've been the supply chain for to Western manufacturers for the last 30 years. That's not controversial - it's been obvious this is where they were heading for some time.
First off, I admit I have no idea what the EU and US car manufacturers are doing, their positions for the past decade don't make any sense to me in the electric market. Actually smells like hubris and inertia more than anything to be honest.
I'm not being super academic with citations, but the CCP investments in BYD, to the point it makes no sense to exist without aren't exactly hard to find secrets.
You're not comparing comparable things, in the UK, there is a great deal of expectations of what an employee has as rights for instance. There are extremely rigorous safety regulations that are very onerous. We can debate wether those are justified but it's a very complex topic you're brushing off. Their innovation seems mostly on small iterative gadgets, but look more closely into what they tolerate as self driving and the death it causes, and be sure you want that in the UK for profit margins.
I'm really not against neither subsidies nor artificially inflating one's strategic advantage at all to develop a market and corner the competition. I never said China is wrong to do what it's doing. What I am saying is that its dangerous for us outside of China to buy into it now. Beyond the security implications of chinese robots with sensors everywhere roaming about cities the CCP considers their ennemies, there's just the dependency risk, there's the "how much do you trust the people who fed paint to their babies to handle super dense explosives that cant be put out by water in dense cities", and the basic question, maybe its better to have the lightest car possible, not the most gadgetty with drones and ipads.
So the basic point above "China has more electric trucks therefore it makes economic sense" is helped by none of this
It's trivial to compete if you don't have R&D costs, and don't care about stuff like your employees, regulations or safety, or even sales since you can just use government money (this is not without consequence either). And it's not only about free market stuff, why do you think they're so excited for all countries to use their 5g products for example ? Don't think this is benign.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Chinese policy, but you should probably reread your arguments and check for coherence.
Chinese EV trucks make no economic sense even though they're 30% of China's fleet but also they're only investing all that as a trojan horse even though they use them almost exclusively domestically, plus the old "Asians don't innovate they just copy" canard even though there wasn't much Western IP on electric trucks to copy in the first place and China's battery technology is somehow not Alibaba knockoffs but more performant than Western equivalents (whilst state sponsored Chinese industries remain generations behind in stuff that's actually strategically critical for them to clone via industrial espionage like semiconductors and jet engines)
I really don't see the contradiction, if that 30% was true, which, really... but ok, it still would normal for the CCP to do stupid stuff because they think it makes them look modern or ecological or similar. That's why there's no need for economic sense to explain that development at all. There are also excellent non financial reasons to want to dominate that market. So to circle back, their use of trucks, which if you buy the 30% "omg lol" as they say, is in no way an argument to them making sense, neither economically nor ecologically.
> used public funds to make cheaper versions in the hope of leading the markets, including by being artificially more affordable while there is any competition
If you replace 'public' with 'VC', isn't that the exact same as the US does in Silicon Valley?
And opened about 80GW of coal last year alone. That's the only advantage to electric trucks, they can run on coal too, even though you can only carry half the capacity whilst moving the same total weight, it still can make sense, just not economic and certainly not ecological. They sure love people writing articles about it though, and how green and solar they are.
neither of those are true, if they were, remember when tesla wanted to sell trucks like 10 years ago ? if you use electric trucks, half the mass you pay to move around is useless. Also the grid isn't "half coal", the truck doesn't wait for the sun to come out to charge. Which is another cost to transporters: the hours of downtime to recharge. They only make very limited sense in very last mile scenarios in dense cities. Also coal is way worse to burn than petrol, and in China's case, it's mostly bituminous, one of the worst coals in terms of pollution.
Solar is only about 13% of China's power. They have hydro, wind, nuclear and gas too as well as coal.
Their off peak prices have generally been overnight, ideal for truck charging, though they have started having them around noon too like many other nations with growing solar share. Great for a mid shift top-up.
Coal is worse to burn than gasoline, but a car engine throws 80 percent of that away so you have to burn more compared with an efficient EV.
This has all been debated to death for over a decade, MIT has interactive tools to calculate figures, there's really no excuse for not knowing this about a subject you are so passionate about.
I never said anything about green. They don't have oil, they want to be less reliant on oil. Electricity allows them to adapt the mix in a way petrol doesn't.
