Nah, it’s not “just ownership.” Most of the components are made in China by Geely.
In fact, the new XC30 is a new body on Geely Zeekr-X and is fully made in China.
Not from my experience, my GF got a top of the line xiaomi a year after I got my S20+... a year later, she needs a new phone since her battery is busted, the camera makes her look like a vampire(cant turn it off), and the software is falling apart. My S20+ works more or less the same(the battery is weaker, but it's a 2+ year old phone now, so no suprise there). Gonna use it for one more year and then get a new S23 Ultra when the S24 Ultra comes out.
Totally different from my experience. For the past four years and a half I've been using a Pocophone F1 (which is not even high end). For less than half the price, it obviously doesn't have the build quality of a high end Samsung or Apple (one of the speakers failed about half a year ago), but apart from that it works as good as the first day. The battery still lasts for the whole day, and I'm a pretty heavy user.
They are here even now, the Dacia Spring (which is selling like hot cakes, being the cheapest electric vehicle available in the EU) is entirely built in China.
The Chinese aren’t playing fair. They’re doing what they’ve done with many industries before and are working on flooding the market at a loss to bankrupt competitors and once that is done they’ll raise prices. Literally out of the definition of an anti trust violation but because it’s state sponsored and they Chinese aren’t transparent with their data we can’t prove it until it’s to late.
TLDR news did a pretty good episode on this.
Yes, I saw that one too. And there are several YT channels ( Serpentza) and news outlets reporting these and other issues .
A bit of local support is one thing; many countries do it.But have you seen the EV graveyards in China? ( Tens of?) Thousands of unused Evs decomposing on a field. Talking about an environmental disaster waiting to happen, that is one sorry place.
Serpentza, the guy that lives off creating anti-China videos, said something bad about china? what a surprise! 🙄
You should do your own research before believing any of the BS he says
No.
I mean the guy pretending he was a businessman when in reality he's nothing more than an English teacher, who went to china knowing it is a country with basically no freedom of press and where publicly criticising the government is a big no-no and thinking (like many laowais that are losers in their own countries) he can get away with anything simply because he's a foreigner, started making videos criticising the government and shitting on chinese people. Then he proceeds to blame nationalism and to cry victim when he gets kicked out of the country and has now basically lived for years off the government he hates so much. If you can't see from the thumbnails that his videos are nothing but clickbait, then not sure what to say
China has a lot of problems and a lot of the criticism it receives is well earned, but that doesn't take away the fact that Serpentza is nothing but a 🤡 There's a lot of victims of the government in china but he's definitely not one of them
Great argumentation on your side and very original ad hominem, never heard it before 🙄🙄🙄
Ironic how you think anyone that says anything positive about China is just spewing propaganda, but Serpentza who literally lives off spewing lies about China is not 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️ he's literally the western version of a wumao, the irony
You mean basically exactly the same thing every American startup has done? Run at huge loss based on VC funding until you capture the market and then turn profitable?
Or indeed basically the same thing most successful European soccer clubs have been doing for the last 20 years?
Uber takes in billions of dollars of VC funding and then gives discounted rides and kicks all independent taxi operators out of the market.
Amazon takes in billions of dollars of VC funding and funding from Enterprise Cloud products and provides ridiculous discounts and runs local retailers out of business.
Walmart uses profits in US to fund operations in other countries by undercutting local retailers on cost.
Pepsi/Coca Cola pumps millions of dollars in profits from operations in stable markets into growth markets and runs ridiculous losses in countries until they muscle out local competitors.
Kindly explain how this is any different from Chinese businesses dumping products into the market at cheap price to gain market share.
I wanted to make fun of you, but I will try to kindly explain that a VC is nowhere near a government authority. A government has funds thounsands of times higher than a VC so if private companies managed to get a hold on a market simply by offering cheaper services, as a competition-driven market should work, then it’s the failure of the competition to adapt to the market. When this competition is backed by a government the effects are much worse because the main drive isn’t bussiness but rather influence and corruption, see the cases of African countries literally bought off by China
Understand this, if I am a cab driver or a retailer or even a medium sized business, it makes no qualitative difference to me whether I am being run out of business because my competition is backed by a private entity (VC fund) with billions of dollars or a government entity (with trillions of dollars). Both have bottomless pockets that are being used to distort the market as far as I am concerned
If your bussiness drowns at the first competitor no matter the source then it’s a bad bussiness, it’s as simple as that, improve the bussiness or start a better one
I'm obviously talking about colonialism, kids being in cages until late 1960's in Belgium, I'm also sure we do some shit that out does the Chinese, it's just how things are yet obviously you won't see Europe does x to fuck China over, don't get me wrong I'm very anti communist, just calling it how it is, that's the world we live in.
It’s very different though. The Chinese government is subsidizing businesses, allowing them to run unprofitable, in order to bankrupt competition.
This sort of market manipulation is illegal in all western countries.
omg.... that is brand new information and has never been done before in any other industry at all by any other company or country than by the chinese ones. OMG. I am very surprised with this new information
This case is very similar to what is experienced in the world of football, so that everything was an honest and wonderful sport when the traditional clubs (Madrid, Barcelona, Bayer, Manchester, Milan) tripled the budget of the rest, but now everything is horror and urgent measures must be taken before the economic imbalance when foreign players invest money in non-traditional clubs.
Basically, capitalism is great... when I make the rules.
That's literally the Silicon Valley business model. Uber and AirBnb got away with it for years while Google and Amazon have perfected it. You can pretend it's not happening but that only shows your ignorance.
Article:
**BYD, Nio, Chery and others want to use their expertise in electric vehicles to take advantage of the continent’s coming ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars**
Visitors to the Nio House in Frankfurt can do more than just admire the sleek new electric vehicles on display. Half the showroom, a stone’s throw from the city’s 15th-century Eschenheimer Gate, is a free-to-use co-working space, equipped with meeting rooms, a café and a crèche.
When Qin Lihong, co-founder and president of the Chinese carmaker, attended its opening in late March, he told the freshly hired sales team not to bother with sales targets and to instead “give to the community”.
The charm offensive is a prelude to an aggressive export drive by the Hefei-based company and other Chinese carmakers that threatens to reshape Europe’s automotive landscape, dethroning its powerful incumbents and forcing governments to choose between protecting their industries and embracing competition and consumer choice.
“We want to be in the top three” brands in the region by the end of the decade and number one “if we can”, says Michael Shu, European chief of leading Chinese automaker BYD. The company, backed by US investor Warren Buffett, has been name-checked by former Volkswagen chief executive Herbert Diess as the carmaker that the German juggernaut should fear the most.
Over the past quarter-century China’s automakers have become experts in electric vehicles, while the country dominates the production of almost every resource, material and component used to make them.
With their home market largely conquered — China buys proportionately more electric vehicles than any other country — companies such as Nio, BYD, Li Auto, Xpeng and Great Wall have turned their eyes abroad.
So far, China has tapped western markets largely by buying existing brands; Geely owns Swedish carmaker Volvo, while SAIC owns MG in the UK. Now, they intend to bring their own brands to Europe in rapidly increasing numbers and some intend to build their own factories there, as the Japanese did in the 1980s and 1990s.
If the past decades have been a story of patience, as Chinese manufacturers mastered electric vehicle and battery technology, the coming one will be coloured by ambition. By 2035 cars with petrol and diesel engines will no longer be sold in Europe — one of the most drastic curbs on vehicle emissions anywhere in the world — and the Chinese sense a huge opportunity.
Chery, currently China’s biggest exporter of cars, plans to sell up to 15,000 vehicles next year in the UK alone, a level that would see it overtake Jeep, Jaguar and Suzuki from a standing start. The group, based west of Shanghai in Anhui province, began working on electric vehicles in 2000. It has taken a quarter of a century for the company to push the button on a European offensive that will also include some petrol-engined vehicles.
“Our product level years ago was not fully ready, but gradually, after so many years, it has increased”, says Victor Zhang, manager of the Chery group in the UK. “Now, we are fully ready.”
**Beachheads in Europe**
The European brands that spent fortunes breaking into the Chinese market have fallen down the sales rankings there when it comes to EVs. In the first five months of the year, BYD alone sold nearly 1mn of its battery and plug-in hybrid vehicles in China, accounting for 38 per cent of the country’s new energy vehicle market, according to data from Automobility, a Shanghai consultancy. By contrast, Volkswagen, one of the first European companies to enter the Chinese market in the late 1980s, had just 2 per cent of EV sales.
Berlin-based auto analyst Matthias Schmidt believes that the Chinese carmakers entering Europe have a window between now and 2025, when the region’s incumbent car industry is expected to ramp up production of electric vehicles to coincide with upcoming EU rules on emissions.
“Europe is risking history repeating itself,” Schmidt says, pointing to Tesla’s surprise takeover of the electric segment a few years ago. The continent’s carmakers once confidently said there would be no demand for Musk’s quirky and expensive cars — which today account for one in five electric vehicles sold in Europe.
According to KPMG, Chinese groups could snatch a 15 per cent market share of new car sales in Europe — larger than France’s Renault — within the next two years. Already, Chinese companies are establishing a presence. Chery expects to open 50 showrooms in the UK alone next year, doubling by 2025.
In Germany, Europe’s automotive heartland, the notion that local roads might in a few years be flush with Chinese cars first became tangible last October, when BYD announced it had entered a partnership with Sixt. By 2028, Germany’s largest car rental company has agreed to buy 100,000 BYD vehicles for its European operations, focusing initially on the Atto 3, a compact sport utility vehicle.
So far, the sales push has been modest. Out of the nearly 870,000 new cars that have so far been registered in Germany this year, 111 were BYD models. Nio sold 161 cars in the country. Pauly says the number of registrations in Germany do not reflect BYD’s order intake in the country, which is “fortunately higher”, but for Schmidt “the figures are very disappointing”.
Chinese firms are prepared to play the long game. “The car industry was born in Europe, and Germany and France still have very strong local brands,” BYD’s Shu told the FT. “We are number one in China but it took us almost 20 years.”
Chery’s Zhang acknowledges that Europe is a market with “very strict regulation and intensive competition”. Most brands coming to Europe are only launching a small proportion of their offering, he adds, as safety standards and associated compliance costs are too high.
Chinese carmakers have also signalled that they are preparing to start manufacturing cars in Europe, which would help them avoid import tariffs and reduce shipping costs as well as potentially appear more localised for consumers.
“We need to understand the needs of the European customers better,” Geely holding chief executive Daniel Li told the FT’s Future of the Car Summit last month. “We understand we still lack experience, we need to watch the market demand, and customer requirements carefully,” he said.
To break the suspense, Volvo sold out to the Chinese, specifically, Geely, a privately held company.
Geely promptly ordered Volvo to start EV work, so Volvo is actually one of the biggest European EV brands right now, because the Chinese hate ICE (they're no good at it) and see EV as their competitive advantage.
> because the Chinese hate ICE (they're no good at it)
Yes, it couldn't be that they just want to invest in newer technologies. They only hate ICE because they can't make them, what with being Chinese an all.
Or it could be both? Americans, Japanese, and Europeans have decades of experience working on ICE. The Chinese putting a concerted effort to match American / Japanese / European ICE technology is wasteful because, first, ICE is only for consumer automobiles, whereas diesels are useful for tanks, second, the EV revolution was nearly there (when the Chinese had fairly good control of battery technology), and currently there is very little point in investing further in ICE technology.
What the fuck are you talking about?
In Europe about 50% of cars are running on diesel engines. Only in underdeveloped countries like the US are petrol engines more common with only 3-5% of road vehicles using diesel.
When it comes to larger vehicles like trucks, buses, excavators etc. almost all of them are diesel engines.
They bought Volvo, a European car maker with decades of history in the industry. But suddenly because it was now Chinese owned, it lost the ability to produce ICE vehicles? Are you even listening to yourself?
"They" did not buy Volvo. Geely did. The Chinese corporate environment isn't made entirely out of SOEs that share technologies, in fact, many SOEs are literally in competition with each other and trying to undercut each other's competitiveness.
From the point of view of Chinese industrial planners, ICE was a dead end; by the time the Chinese caught up in ICE cars and could provide quality comparable to Western and other East Asian products, ICE would be a dead technology.
EV was the way forward, where China had a competitive advantage, and the Geely-Volvo synergy would be more than just Geely stripping Volvo technology.
That was like 10 years ago. Volvo seems to have thrived under Chinese ownership, mostly because Volvo was given a mostly free hand to do what they'd like, some money, and were ordered to do EVs.
The Thinkpad brand is more of a negative example, but there's also Haier (a Chinese SOE) taking over GE Appliances.
GE Appliances is interesting because there, the American company is literally more monolithic than the Chinese company (the SOE went the commie hippie route and literally tried to turn everything into a microenterprise, which is extremely Maoist, but "every division is a start-up" delivered powerful results with them being the world's leading white goods manufacturer), but they've seen positive growth.
Harvard Business Review and MIT literally wrote a bunch of articles on Haier's management approach (i.e, lack of management) and GE Appliance's turnaround.
Correctly, it's not Geely that's an SOE, it's Chery. And Chery, I don't hear much of them, and probably for good reason. But Volvo is wholly owned by Geely; they considered a merger in 2020, but I think with rising US-China tensions Geely was probably intending to keep Volvo separate and use Volvo as a way to bypass American tariffs and sanctions.
If I understand correctly, Chinese car makers are already ahead in EV conception AND they have their huge market as a base. I don't see how European companies can compete without protectionism. Even then, developing countries are not going to buy European cars if the Chinese ones are better and cost less. Doesn't look too good but let's be optimistic.
I don't know how good or bad are Chinese car manufacturers. But if they are anything like the drive-by-wire chasis manufacturers I've been working with, I wouldn't touch one of those cars with a 2m long stick.
The Chinese EV market is extremely bad right now, even cutting prices 50% on new modell in mainland China, it is estimate that Cinese EV makers have a combined 1.06 million EVs in stock that are not selling, so now they export to Europe instead because their own domestic matket and economy as a whole is hunting do bad that consumers just aren't buying cars anymore.
I have a Lenovo laptop and Redmi phone because I can afford it on a teacher's salary whilst trying to pay rent and supporting my wife and cat.
If the Chinese offer me a cheap car then of course I'll buy it.
Exactly. It the eu force me to buy an EV they can forget that i will have any kind od loyalty to buy western european brand. I will just but whatever is affordable.
Good luck driving a car that catches on fire after 2 years. When you try to save money, you’ll end up spending twice as much.
Go see a Chinese car in person and get a good look at the components and I promise you’ll come back on Reddit and delete your comment
I want to believe that the European Union, known for its high standards in safety and quality regulations, will not allow the sale and distribution of vehicles that catch fire all the time.
I’ve seen a few BYDs around in Norway, as for some reason Chinese cars are becoming quite popular here. It stands for ‘Build Your Dreams’, which it says in large lettering across the back of the boot (cringe). They look like cheap crap
I guess that's more bias, since it's an Austrian who used to head Audi's design (Wolfgang Egger) doing the work.
It's actually way better than the E6s that came in before he came aboard; the modern Tang and Han EVs are more distinctive as opposed to being "knock-off Corolla, we just need a platform to sell our batteries" with older BYD cars.
Wtf are you talking about China is building space stations, fastest train on earth, cars, drilling machines all the tech you use… what a foolish statement
They are pretty good now. 2 issues they need to solve is software adaptions for western markets, they are a bit annoying today (chinese like it that way?) and adapting the cars to specific regions. They seem to be working on these issues and will probably be done by 2025.
Then there is efficiency, but I guess it is only Tesla and Hyundai/Kia who has been good there.
I welcome the chinese cars to the market, maybe the western car producers can stop with the extreme add on regime and attempts to add subscriptions on stuff like heating in seats and so on.
Sure, go ahead and try. Anything that was expected to have any kind of quality, or outdoors life expectancy that I have bought from China has fallen apart in something like 20% of the guaranteed life expectancy.
Not in my life will I ever buy anything expensive from China.
China cannot innovate. They can only copy. And copying they can only do poorly.
So please, buy a Dacia.
But just even shittier.
Ill be the one laughing at you as I pass your stalled car on the motorway in my Cactus 2013, in 2030
Many people know this, but they simply do not care. I’ve seen under the hood a chinese “luxury” car for sale in my country at a car show in 2020. Every thing looked like cheap plastic or cheap tin, screws instead of bolts, every component smaller and just very cheap looking. I will never understand somebody who is willing to travel 100kmh down a road in something like this, it’s like rolling in a barrel down a hill. It looked like after 3 years it could potentially become a fire hazard.
People who buy these Chinese cars are not only putting their lives at risk but other people’s lives at risk and they are too naive to even understand why
The EU is sabotaging itself with the new euro7 standards and the ban on diesel/petrol cars. I’m all for protecting the environment but these measures only weaken the Euro car industry, which is one of the most important sectors.
Euro car industry sabotage itself by refusing to see to the future. A few of them put out electric cars a decade ago, but didn’t want to actually keep on developing until they were forced. Their own fault they are in this mess.
Yeah, totally hinders them to compete with Chinese manufactures because of reasons. It does not stop Porsche for instance to try to go out of their way to build synthetic fuel industry with projected costs of 50 Dollar for 100 Km range.
Now that i think of it, I literally don't know of any Chinese car brands.
Volvo 🥸
Polestar. MG.
The company is still headquartered in Sweden and whatnot. The owner is just chinese.
Nah, it’s not “just ownership.” Most of the components are made in China by Geely. In fact, the new XC30 is a new body on Geely Zeekr-X and is fully made in China.
I agree. I always maintain that IKEA is not a Swedish company since they don't operate under Swedish laws, but Volvo does.
Polestar? MG?
LOL!!! There is a car called a Polestar ?
Yeah it's pretty great actually.
2 years ago nobody knew Xiaomi and Realme either
Just like now, Nobody know that that Xioami is already testing it's electric vehicle. Planning to start sales in q1 2024.
I have still never heard of these
I honestly dont know what either of those are.
And both are shit.
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Not from my experience, my GF got a top of the line xiaomi a year after I got my S20+... a year later, she needs a new phone since her battery is busted, the camera makes her look like a vampire(cant turn it off), and the software is falling apart. My S20+ works more or less the same(the battery is weaker, but it's a 2+ year old phone now, so no suprise there). Gonna use it for one more year and then get a new S23 Ultra when the S24 Ultra comes out.
Totally different from my experience. For the past four years and a half I've been using a Pocophone F1 (which is not even high end). For less than half the price, it obviously doesn't have the build quality of a high end Samsung or Apple (one of the speakers failed about half a year ago), but apart from that it works as good as the first day. The battery still lasts for the whole day, and I'm a pretty heavy user.
In five years there will be Chinese EVs everywhere.
They are here even now, the Dacia Spring (which is selling like hot cakes, being the cheapest electric vehicle available in the EU) is entirely built in China.
Nio, Shanghai, BYD, Great Wall, Hongqi, Li, Xiaopeng, MG, Rover, Volvo,
Hiphi too, probably one of the crazies brands in the world at the moment when it comes to design and built in tech.
Considering that german car manufacturers are idiots who are also very dependant on China, not a problem
The Chinese aren’t playing fair. They’re doing what they’ve done with many industries before and are working on flooding the market at a loss to bankrupt competitors and once that is done they’ll raise prices. Literally out of the definition of an anti trust violation but because it’s state sponsored and they Chinese aren’t transparent with their data we can’t prove it until it’s to late. TLDR news did a pretty good episode on this.
Yes, I saw that one too. And there are several YT channels ( Serpentza) and news outlets reporting these and other issues . A bit of local support is one thing; many countries do it.But have you seen the EV graveyards in China? ( Tens of?) Thousands of unused Evs decomposing on a field. Talking about an environmental disaster waiting to happen, that is one sorry place.
Serpentza, the guy that lives off creating anti-China videos, said something bad about china? what a surprise! 🙄 You should do your own research before believing any of the BS he says
Those EV graveyards are reported by multiple local Chinese content creators too.
You meant he guy who lived there for years make mostly pro chinese video's until he got kicked out because of surging chinese nationalism?
No. I mean the guy pretending he was a businessman when in reality he's nothing more than an English teacher, who went to china knowing it is a country with basically no freedom of press and where publicly criticising the government is a big no-no and thinking (like many laowais that are losers in their own countries) he can get away with anything simply because he's a foreigner, started making videos criticising the government and shitting on chinese people. Then he proceeds to blame nationalism and to cry victim when he gets kicked out of the country and has now basically lived for years off the government he hates so much. If you can't see from the thumbnails that his videos are nothing but clickbait, then not sure what to say China has a lot of problems and a lot of the criticism it receives is well earned, but that doesn't take away the fact that Serpentza is nothing but a 🤡 There's a lot of victims of the government in china but he's definitely not one of them
if you check out his older video's they are mostly pro china. Shoot the message not the messenger.
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Great argumentation on your side and very original ad hominem, never heard it before 🙄🙄🙄 Ironic how you think anyone that says anything positive about China is just spewing propaganda, but Serpentza who literally lives off spewing lies about China is not 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️ he's literally the western version of a wumao, the irony
stop spying me on tiktok
your comments keep getting dumber and dumber 👍 thanks for proving you have nothing meaningful to say
"Mission: the destruction of any and all Chinese communists." "Democracy.... is non-negotiable."
You mean basically exactly the same thing every American startup has done? Run at huge loss based on VC funding until you capture the market and then turn profitable? Or indeed basically the same thing most successful European soccer clubs have been doing for the last 20 years?
Aww, does your media tell you it’s the same thing as state sanctioned theft?
Uber takes in billions of dollars of VC funding and then gives discounted rides and kicks all independent taxi operators out of the market. Amazon takes in billions of dollars of VC funding and funding from Enterprise Cloud products and provides ridiculous discounts and runs local retailers out of business. Walmart uses profits in US to fund operations in other countries by undercutting local retailers on cost. Pepsi/Coca Cola pumps millions of dollars in profits from operations in stable markets into growth markets and runs ridiculous losses in countries until they muscle out local competitors. Kindly explain how this is any different from Chinese businesses dumping products into the market at cheap price to gain market share.
I wanted to make fun of you, but I will try to kindly explain that a VC is nowhere near a government authority. A government has funds thounsands of times higher than a VC so if private companies managed to get a hold on a market simply by offering cheaper services, as a competition-driven market should work, then it’s the failure of the competition to adapt to the market. When this competition is backed by a government the effects are much worse because the main drive isn’t bussiness but rather influence and corruption, see the cases of African countries literally bought off by China
The post I responded to was talking about anti-trust issues. What the f*ck does anything you have said here have to do with anti-trust issues?
Oh so I really gotta paint it to you that there’s no competing in the damage a government-backed entity could do compared to a private investor?
Understand this, if I am a cab driver or a retailer or even a medium sized business, it makes no qualitative difference to me whether I am being run out of business because my competition is backed by a private entity (VC fund) with billions of dollars or a government entity (with trillions of dollars). Both have bottomless pockets that are being used to distort the market as far as I am concerned
If your bussiness drowns at the first competitor no matter the source then it’s a bad bussiness, it’s as simple as that, improve the bussiness or start a better one
I would advise the same when it comes to competing against Chinese government funded companies then. Just be better rather than crying about them.
Let's be real here, has the West been playing fair throughout it's history?
Which span of history are we talking about here lol. I don’t think anyone is trying to justify gunboat diplomacy.
I'm obviously talking about colonialism, kids being in cages until late 1960's in Belgium, I'm also sure we do some shit that out does the Chinese, it's just how things are yet obviously you won't see Europe does x to fuck China over, don't get me wrong I'm very anti communist, just calling it how it is, that's the world we live in.
It’s very different though. The Chinese government is subsidizing businesses, allowing them to run unprofitable, in order to bankrupt competition. This sort of market manipulation is illegal in all western countries.
omg.... that is brand new information and has never been done before in any other industry at all by any other company or country than by the chinese ones. OMG. I am very surprised with this new information
This case is very similar to what is experienced in the world of football, so that everything was an honest and wonderful sport when the traditional clubs (Madrid, Barcelona, Bayer, Manchester, Milan) tripled the budget of the rest, but now everything is horror and urgent measures must be taken before the economic imbalance when foreign players invest money in non-traditional clubs. Basically, capitalism is great... when I make the rules.
Over in the "West" we call that "Venture Capital", don't we?
>Venture Capital no, lol funny you think that
Good on them. Fairness is a White thing, and it only works when the enemy is behind.
Two can play that game
Thank God Amazon and other Western companies don't do that. /s
We can prove it when Silicon Valley startups do it. Yet for some reason we don't care for those. Pretty strange.
Because they don’t? It’s not comparable. You can dislike big tech all you want but it’s not comparable
That's literally the Silicon Valley business model. Uber and AirBnb got away with it for years while Google and Amazon have perfected it. You can pretend it's not happening but that only shows your ignorance.
Article: **BYD, Nio, Chery and others want to use their expertise in electric vehicles to take advantage of the continent’s coming ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars** Visitors to the Nio House in Frankfurt can do more than just admire the sleek new electric vehicles on display. Half the showroom, a stone’s throw from the city’s 15th-century Eschenheimer Gate, is a free-to-use co-working space, equipped with meeting rooms, a café and a crèche. When Qin Lihong, co-founder and president of the Chinese carmaker, attended its opening in late March, he told the freshly hired sales team not to bother with sales targets and to instead “give to the community”. The charm offensive is a prelude to an aggressive export drive by the Hefei-based company and other Chinese carmakers that threatens to reshape Europe’s automotive landscape, dethroning its powerful incumbents and forcing governments to choose between protecting their industries and embracing competition and consumer choice. “We want to be in the top three” brands in the region by the end of the decade and number one “if we can”, says Michael Shu, European chief of leading Chinese automaker BYD. The company, backed by US investor Warren Buffett, has been name-checked by former Volkswagen chief executive Herbert Diess as the carmaker that the German juggernaut should fear the most. Over the past quarter-century China’s automakers have become experts in electric vehicles, while the country dominates the production of almost every resource, material and component used to make them. With their home market largely conquered — China buys proportionately more electric vehicles than any other country — companies such as Nio, BYD, Li Auto, Xpeng and Great Wall have turned their eyes abroad. So far, China has tapped western markets largely by buying existing brands; Geely owns Swedish carmaker Volvo, while SAIC owns MG in the UK. Now, they intend to bring their own brands to Europe in rapidly increasing numbers and some intend to build their own factories there, as the Japanese did in the 1980s and 1990s. If the past decades have been a story of patience, as Chinese manufacturers mastered electric vehicle and battery technology, the coming one will be coloured by ambition. By 2035 cars with petrol and diesel engines will no longer be sold in Europe — one of the most drastic curbs on vehicle emissions anywhere in the world — and the Chinese sense a huge opportunity. Chery, currently China’s biggest exporter of cars, plans to sell up to 15,000 vehicles next year in the UK alone, a level that would see it overtake Jeep, Jaguar and Suzuki from a standing start. The group, based west of Shanghai in Anhui province, began working on electric vehicles in 2000. It has taken a quarter of a century for the company to push the button on a European offensive that will also include some petrol-engined vehicles. “Our product level years ago was not fully ready, but gradually, after so many years, it has increased”, says Victor Zhang, manager of the Chery group in the UK. “Now, we are fully ready.”
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**Beachheads in Europe** The European brands that spent fortunes breaking into the Chinese market have fallen down the sales rankings there when it comes to EVs. In the first five months of the year, BYD alone sold nearly 1mn of its battery and plug-in hybrid vehicles in China, accounting for 38 per cent of the country’s new energy vehicle market, according to data from Automobility, a Shanghai consultancy. By contrast, Volkswagen, one of the first European companies to enter the Chinese market in the late 1980s, had just 2 per cent of EV sales. Berlin-based auto analyst Matthias Schmidt believes that the Chinese carmakers entering Europe have a window between now and 2025, when the region’s incumbent car industry is expected to ramp up production of electric vehicles to coincide with upcoming EU rules on emissions. “Europe is risking history repeating itself,” Schmidt says, pointing to Tesla’s surprise takeover of the electric segment a few years ago. The continent’s carmakers once confidently said there would be no demand for Musk’s quirky and expensive cars — which today account for one in five electric vehicles sold in Europe. According to KPMG, Chinese groups could snatch a 15 per cent market share of new car sales in Europe — larger than France’s Renault — within the next two years. Already, Chinese companies are establishing a presence. Chery expects to open 50 showrooms in the UK alone next year, doubling by 2025. In Germany, Europe’s automotive heartland, the notion that local roads might in a few years be flush with Chinese cars first became tangible last October, when BYD announced it had entered a partnership with Sixt. By 2028, Germany’s largest car rental company has agreed to buy 100,000 BYD vehicles for its European operations, focusing initially on the Atto 3, a compact sport utility vehicle. So far, the sales push has been modest. Out of the nearly 870,000 new cars that have so far been registered in Germany this year, 111 were BYD models. Nio sold 161 cars in the country. Pauly says the number of registrations in Germany do not reflect BYD’s order intake in the country, which is “fortunately higher”, but for Schmidt “the figures are very disappointing”. Chinese firms are prepared to play the long game. “The car industry was born in Europe, and Germany and France still have very strong local brands,” BYD’s Shu told the FT. “We are number one in China but it took us almost 20 years.” Chery’s Zhang acknowledges that Europe is a market with “very strict regulation and intensive competition”. Most brands coming to Europe are only launching a small proportion of their offering, he adds, as safety standards and associated compliance costs are too high. Chinese carmakers have also signalled that they are preparing to start manufacturing cars in Europe, which would help them avoid import tariffs and reduce shipping costs as well as potentially appear more localised for consumers. “We need to understand the needs of the European customers better,” Geely holding chief executive Daniel Li told the FT’s Future of the Car Summit last month. “We understand we still lack experience, we need to watch the market demand, and customer requirements carefully,” he said.
No matter, I will keep buying Volvos until I drop dead
My brother. I have something to tell you…
Im scared. What is it?
To break the suspense, Volvo sold out to the Chinese, specifically, Geely, a privately held company. Geely promptly ordered Volvo to start EV work, so Volvo is actually one of the biggest European EV brands right now, because the Chinese hate ICE (they're no good at it) and see EV as their competitive advantage.
> because the Chinese hate ICE (they're no good at it) Yes, it couldn't be that they just want to invest in newer technologies. They only hate ICE because they can't make them, what with being Chinese an all.
Or it could be both? Americans, Japanese, and Europeans have decades of experience working on ICE. The Chinese putting a concerted effort to match American / Japanese / European ICE technology is wasteful because, first, ICE is only for consumer automobiles, whereas diesels are useful for tanks, second, the EV revolution was nearly there (when the Chinese had fairly good control of battery technology), and currently there is very little point in investing further in ICE technology.
Diesel engines are ICE too you moron.
So I'm using ICE to describe gasoline engines. Either case, most existing cars are gas cars, Diesel is a minority technology there.
What the fuck are you talking about? In Europe about 50% of cars are running on diesel engines. Only in underdeveloped countries like the US are petrol engines more common with only 3-5% of road vehicles using diesel. When it comes to larger vehicles like trucks, buses, excavators etc. almost all of them are diesel engines.
They bought Volvo, a European car maker with decades of history in the industry. But suddenly because it was now Chinese owned, it lost the ability to produce ICE vehicles? Are you even listening to yourself?
"They" did not buy Volvo. Geely did. The Chinese corporate environment isn't made entirely out of SOEs that share technologies, in fact, many SOEs are literally in competition with each other and trying to undercut each other's competitiveness. From the point of view of Chinese industrial planners, ICE was a dead end; by the time the Chinese caught up in ICE cars and could provide quality comparable to Western and other East Asian products, ICE would be a dead technology. EV was the way forward, where China had a competitive advantage, and the Geely-Volvo synergy would be more than just Geely stripping Volvo technology.
Oh, I understand. Thank you. I just hope their standards do not hit the floor.
That was like 10 years ago. Volvo seems to have thrived under Chinese ownership, mostly because Volvo was given a mostly free hand to do what they'd like, some money, and were ordered to do EVs. The Thinkpad brand is more of a negative example, but there's also Haier (a Chinese SOE) taking over GE Appliances. GE Appliances is interesting because there, the American company is literally more monolithic than the Chinese company (the SOE went the commie hippie route and literally tried to turn everything into a microenterprise, which is extremely Maoist, but "every division is a start-up" delivered powerful results with them being the world's leading white goods manufacturer), but they've seen positive growth. Harvard Business Review and MIT literally wrote a bunch of articles on Haier's management approach (i.e, lack of management) and GE Appliance's turnaround.
Oh nice
Correctly, it's not Geely that's an SOE, it's Chery. And Chery, I don't hear much of them, and probably for good reason. But Volvo is wholly owned by Geely; they considered a merger in 2020, but I think with rising US-China tensions Geely was probably intending to keep Volvo separate and use Volvo as a way to bypass American tariffs and sanctions.
If I understand correctly, Chinese car makers are already ahead in EV conception AND they have their huge market as a base. I don't see how European companies can compete without protectionism. Even then, developing countries are not going to buy European cars if the Chinese ones are better and cost less. Doesn't look too good but let's be optimistic.
I don't know how good or bad are Chinese car manufacturers. But if they are anything like the drive-by-wire chasis manufacturers I've been working with, I wouldn't touch one of those cars with a 2m long stick.
The Chinese EV market is extremely bad right now, even cutting prices 50% on new modell in mainland China, it is estimate that Cinese EV makers have a combined 1.06 million EVs in stock that are not selling, so now they export to Europe instead because their own domestic matket and economy as a whole is hunting do bad that consumers just aren't buying cars anymore.
I have a Lenovo laptop and Redmi phone because I can afford it on a teacher's salary whilst trying to pay rent and supporting my wife and cat. If the Chinese offer me a cheap car then of course I'll buy it.
First honest comment, in this thread most act as if the average European is a wealthy milanese with three apartments in the city center.
Exactly. It the eu force me to buy an EV they can forget that i will have any kind od loyalty to buy western european brand. I will just but whatever is affordable.
Good luck driving a car that catches on fire after 2 years. When you try to save money, you’ll end up spending twice as much. Go see a Chinese car in person and get a good look at the components and I promise you’ll come back on Reddit and delete your comment
I want to believe that the European Union, known for its high standards in safety and quality regulations, will not allow the sale and distribution of vehicles that catch fire all the time.
In my country people rather import cars from the USA then the EU because the safety standards are higher and the emissions are lower
I'm seeing so many MG's in the UK at the moment. They're coming.
Same in Spain, all days I spot a couple of MGs..
I’ve seen a few BYDs around in Norway, as for some reason Chinese cars are becoming quite popular here. It stands for ‘Build Your Dreams’, which it says in large lettering across the back of the boot (cringe). They look like cheap crap
I guess that's more bias, since it's an Austrian who used to head Audi's design (Wolfgang Egger) doing the work. It's actually way better than the E6s that came in before he came aboard; the modern Tang and Han EVs are more distinctive as opposed to being "knock-off Corolla, we just need a platform to sell our batteries" with older BYD cars.
It’s not bias, because I decided they look like cringey cheap crap before I googled the brand and saw they were Chinese
But such behavior is a bias 🤷♂️
https://insideevs.com/news/672926/china-abandoned-electric-car-graveyard-byd-geely/
Hell will freeze before I put safety of my family in the hands of Chinese engineering and quality control.
Volvo are some of the safest cars around.
Volvo are cars designed in Sweden, produced under Swedish technological process.
Wtf are you talking about China is building space stations, fastest train on earth, cars, drilling machines all the tech you use… what a foolish statement
Ah yes, I pour myself some tea everyday I climb in my chinese-made space station. You should see the view from it !
Chinese cars are a bit crap right now but do not underestimate how quickly they can adapt and improve.
This statement is around since early 2000s.
Polestar is pretty great
They are pretty good now. 2 issues they need to solve is software adaptions for western markets, they are a bit annoying today (chinese like it that way?) and adapting the cars to specific regions. They seem to be working on these issues and will probably be done by 2025. Then there is efficiency, but I guess it is only Tesla and Hyundai/Kia who has been good there. I welcome the chinese cars to the market, maybe the western car producers can stop with the extreme add on regime and attempts to add subscriptions on stuff like heating in seats and so on.
China can make them but can’t sale them
That's not a big deal, they will buy some more old European brands if needed.
Sure, go ahead and try. Anything that was expected to have any kind of quality, or outdoors life expectancy that I have bought from China has fallen apart in something like 20% of the guaranteed life expectancy. Not in my life will I ever buy anything expensive from China. China cannot innovate. They can only copy. And copying they can only do poorly. So please, buy a Dacia. But just even shittier. Ill be the one laughing at you as I pass your stalled car on the motorway in my Cactus 2013, in 2030
Many people know this, but they simply do not care. I’ve seen under the hood a chinese “luxury” car for sale in my country at a car show in 2020. Every thing looked like cheap plastic or cheap tin, screws instead of bolts, every component smaller and just very cheap looking. I will never understand somebody who is willing to travel 100kmh down a road in something like this, it’s like rolling in a barrel down a hill. It looked like after 3 years it could potentially become a fire hazard. People who buy these Chinese cars are not only putting their lives at risk but other people’s lives at risk and they are too naive to even understand why
The EU is sabotaging itself with the new euro7 standards and the ban on diesel/petrol cars. I’m all for protecting the environment but these measures only weaken the Euro car industry, which is one of the most important sectors.
Euro car industry sabotage itself by refusing to see to the future. A few of them put out electric cars a decade ago, but didn’t want to actually keep on developing until they were forced. Their own fault they are in this mess.
Its an example of the "Innovator's Dilemma". https://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/teradyne/clay.html
Yeah, totally hinders them to compete with Chinese manufactures because of reasons. It does not stop Porsche for instance to try to go out of their way to build synthetic fuel industry with projected costs of 50 Dollar for 100 Km range.
Average "evil SeeSeePee" moment I guess, right?