When China’s BYD recently overtook Elon Musk’s Tesla as the global leader in sales of electric vehicles, casual observers of the auto industry might have been surprised.
But what’s caught other carmakers around the world off-guard is something else about BYD, which is backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway: its low prices.
“No one can match BYD on price. Period,” Michael Dunne, CEO of Asia-focused car consultancy Dunne Insights, told the Financial Times. “Boardrooms in America, Europe, Korea and Japan are in a state of shock.”
BYD can keeps its costs low in part because it owns the entire supply chain of its EV batteries, from the raw materials to the finished battery packs. That matters because a battery accounts for about 40% of a new electric vehicle’s price.
Uh… yeah? China beats nearly everyone on price but you don’t go there for quality and durability.
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Oh, I find that even more hilarious. But that’s a Musk issue, not a place of manufacturing.
That’s what the British car industry said in the 60s and 70s about Japanese cars. Everyone bad mouthed anything made in Japan as being poor quality.
The Japanese succeeded through good products and their domestic rivals (in Britain) being arrogant, xenophobic and letting standards slide thinking they were great and couldn’t be beaten.
I’ve a Japanese Honda CRV (ironically built in UK) and a Chinese built MG5 EV. The EV is best built car I’ve owned in 35 years.
Many established car brands are going to disappear Tesla, I believe, being one.
That view is unfortunately out of date. Many Chinese products are of equal or superior quality to their global counterparts. Think Lenovo laptops and OnePlus smartphones. Chinese stuff can be cheap and high quality.
Lenovo has lost all sense of reputation for me after the whole superfish fiasco.
In my own experience trying the waters for a business importing and selling LED Light Bulbs from China, they’re a mix of little crappy companies and large more well established ones and the larger ones are perfectly capable of designing and making good products but due to the market pressure for “make it as cheap as possible” end up mainly cutting down on component quality and using cheaper designs to make it cheaper.
Sure, the tiny companies are generally crap and the local culture (at least in Electronics, and at the time which was a decade ago) was to expect things to be cheap and break down often, but the larger companies are professional and can actually make quality products, its just that they generally are very weak in branding so can’t really get people to pay them for quality, hence end up either mainly competing on price or working as suppliers for non-Chinese companies which are little more than Brand-management outfits (which is pretty what all big name Brands in the West are nowadays - managers of one or more famous brands, not creators of superior products).
I’ve heard the exact same thing before: Chinese manufacturers will build to whatever quality you pay for, but almost everyone just asks for the absolute cheapest. The profit margins on the absolute cheapest quality are better than competing with other countries who can also produce higher quality goods.
Yeah but lots more Chinese stuff is cheap shiny trash. If there’s a way to lie and cut a corner they’ll ,do it…not that America would be any different but they dont make anything here anymore.
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That’s true but these cars aren’t. There are consumer protections in China. They just tend to be a lot less noticeable.
Both Lenovo and OnePlus are garbage. Out of all the shitty companies and you go to those two for an example of quality?
Sources or stfu
👌👍
Your iPhone / Samsung is manufactured there. So no, that’s a bad take. You get what you pay for, and good quality is still cheaper than made elsewhere.
Samsung is slowly moving some production from China though. For instance, my phone is manufactured in Vietnam instead.
Samsung isn’t building their phones in South Korea anymore?
Not to mention: I’ll eat my hat if the CCP isn’t providing some sort of subsidization, for no other reason than the fact that it’s a national pride thing for them
Most carmakers get heavily subsidized. All the German ones for example. It’s a big industry and states like to keep their brands competitive.
You gotta be a special kind of innocent to think Americans make quality automobiles.
Sweden makes quality automobiles. Both their brands were/are good.
They produce a lot of quality and durable products in China. Apple and Tesla are both producing there, as do many thousands of other companies.
Quality and durable (produced under slave labor)
Do you have any proof of that? I’ve seen people say the same thing about Adidas and Nike, yet I have friends working for their factories and have never seen or heard of such a thing.
BYD is better quality than the shit Stellantis puts out
furiously typed into their Chinese Assembled IPhone…
South Korea Samsung…
Samsung phones are largely assembled in Vietnam. It looks like they’re one of the few phone companies not relying on China though.
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Depends on what you are buying and the price you pay.
Are these even street legal in the US? Our safety standards are obscene. Air bags alone cost 5k.
It’s why Tata never released a vehicle here.
Another example of America costing loads of money for little to know benefit.
Yeah! Airbags suck! Wait, what?
Clown take if I’ve ever seen one lol
But America bad! If America has airbags then airbags bad, too.
No not the airbags, the safety standards being “obscene”, cost prohibitive and not yield good results.
So if American standards are preventing additional competition it should be because they have a very high standard which should bare out in terms of road and pedestrian deaths and injuries. It does not. Therefore the “obscene” standards are another example of poor results to cost.
What a silly thing to say. On what basis have you decided they don’t yield good results?
Not really conclusive as there have been increases in speeding and drunk driving that cause total accident numbers to go up. A more relevant stat would be fatality or injury rates per accident.
You’ve changed your tune from it being silly to needing more granular data.
Pedestrian deaths are on the rise and decent safety regulations could impact speeding and drunk driving.
Jesus what is going on in Russia
Sounds like what the Oceangate CEO said about industry safety requirements for submersibles.
I’m saying they’re not fit for purpose, America has a shit ton of road and pedestrian deaths. The safety regulations don’t do enough.
Hey since you seem to be ignorant of old car safety hazards ive got a '78 Ford pinto to sell you.
But seriously modern American cars (or atleast the post 80s ones) are a shitton safer than their old counterparts. And this is coming from someone who loves old piece of shit cars (Id drive the Homer).
Modern American safety features to a point were paid in blood. Tuna canning in small cars is isnt nearly as common as it once was, and the pealing the smashed in head of the drive off of the stearing wheel isnt all that common anymore.
There are certainly some so called safety features that are laregly pointless IMO but my hatred of back up cams aside, survivability of car crashes have skyrocketed.
this comment has “little to know”
Also why all the new cars suck.
New cars suck because planned obscelensce has been catered to by regulations and industry.
Safety standards are not bad, they just don’t have decent standards in America.
If you want people to buy new cars every year wouldn’t you make the new cars look different? More exiting or whatever? We used to have awesome fins on the back of cars now we just get a shiny grill. “planned obscelensce” doesn’t force them to make cars that all look the same. That’s safety regulations.
Fins and spoilers are cool but like if their removal saves lives then I’m all for it.
Cars all looking the same is because of the tightening of supply chains, it is cheaper to make everything apply to as many models as possible.
I can’t remember which brand it is, whichever supercar brand is under VW, but they have parts shared with golfs and audis. This efficient but doesn’t make for huge variations.
This is why Americans hate China. It’s legitimate competition for them.
This is good, nice to finally have competition.
Tesla is extremely overrated (as can be seen by them repeatedly lowering prices now that any competiton exists).
And the BYD is a nice little car. I test drove one and was quite surprised how many features it had.
Hopefully others will follow suit. The EV market up till now has just been overly expensive cars unfortunately which hurts adoption.
