It's 2024, we can do better than blurry horribly blown out pictures these days. Check for example https://mapper.acme.com/?ll=34.39719,113.94792&z=15&t=SL&mar... for cleaner shot of the site (zoom in few notches for extra details). Google Maps annoyingly cuts half-way through the factory site.
edit: that ACME mapper image looks to be from mid-2023, in more recent imagery the construction on the east side has been completed.
When you zoom out far enough in ACME mapper, the factory disappears. (I'm guessing that's an older image.)
Yep, pretty common for different zoom levels to be different time points. ACME is using plane photography for its high zoom images. You could try zoom.earth for hourly/12hourly satellite imagery.
Although it is generally true that aerial photography is used to supplant satellite imagery in these sorts of public map services, I'm pretty confident that the image of BYD factory here is actual satellite imagery.
The way Chinese towns are organized is incredible. I'm impressed by this map.
[dead]
The number of construction vehicles doing something versus sitting around waiting for labor in that shot is impressive.
I'm 100% sure its a photo op. Think about the logistics of the trucks taking spoil away. How can there be one arriving and one leaving at each location at this time: the diggers near instantly fill their entire capacity?
And the narrow access road is way too congested for all those to actually leave or arrive at that rate. Moments after the shot, the trucks will clearly all have to stop and wait.
This being said, there is power in that many machines in the same place at one time. They would cetainly be able to get work done quickly. Just not quite as quickly as it appears in that shot. Waiting is part of the process, you cant have a system where every component works at 100% capacity
Yeah, I have never seen something like that in America in my life. Always plenty of machines sitting around, and every few weeks some guys will hop on them for the day, but other than that they just sit there. It almost looks AI generated how densely packed those are - though I assume that this is real footage.
With China's real estate sector stagnating (because they've built enough housing for future demand to an excess, broadly speaking), all of that capacity is moving towards clean energy manufacturing.
The doubts about the size of the investment in that Wikipedia article are funny. It's a bit like "We cannot afford to invest in education", but the Chinese are saying "We cannot afford not to invest in education" (Famous quotes, it's more about R&D here). China's leadership is probably terrified of falling into the middle-income trap. It might be the biggest issue on their minds right now. At least I am watching from the sidelines, wondering "Are they gonna make it?".
Education has always been important in Chinese culture.
You could say it's central to their culture. Sort of goes for most Asian cultures, the education of children is something Asian parents will sacrifice greatly for.
- Definition of this is 12,000 2011 USD, BLS says thats 17,600 2024 USD. Looking like 2024 closes at a little under 13,000 24 USD. If we calculate out the 6% CCP standard GDP growth rate, it'd take 5 years
- GDP is not very likely to grow at the formerly-real 6% per year moving forward. Population peaked, trade is now a tailwind instead of a headwind, GDP per capita at 13,000 is 0.5x Russia and 2.5x India, and we're in year 2 of a deflationary crisis that's barely being held off, if it is, and is characterized by an significant oversupply in housing stock that'll take years to run down. So I'll tack on 2 years, make it 7 years, 2031.
China scaling and efficiency is really something else. it seems they've latched on to something that works better than even democracy and capitalism
And the rush to subsidize more capacity is a big contributor to local government debt burdens in China, which is estimated to leave Chinese debt to GDP at 117%.
You are never going to get exactly the right amount of capacity, so the question is whether you want to err on the side of too much or too little. Too little might often be more efficient, but there are undeniable strategic benefits to having too much. The events of the last few years have taught us all some painful lessons about the hidden costs of JIT and lean. China might have got the balance wrong, but they aren't prima facie wrong.
They are prima facie wrong, their overcapacity is bad and actively harmful, this isn't a sign of it succeeding, its a sign of desperation from it failing.
There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago.
Dazzled by the spectacle, this misses that their economy is characterized by deflationary headwinds due to a massive, massive over-investment in property, and this just squeezes the toothpaste (debt taken on to goose GDP) to another side of the tube. (housing to batteries)
> There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago
Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?!
There's also a type of western mind that automatically dismisses the odds of a different country succeeding, based on nothing but the fact that they are using a different approach (on the surface). It's a kind if circular reasoning: our system is the best because we're the best, because of the system we have. To subvert the Simpsons - "the best so far"
Edit: I'm far from a Sinophile, but there's a certain willful blindness, concerning an almost religious belief that the west will prevail because it's the west, regardless of all the systemic weaknesses that show up again and again. It would suck for a dictator-for-life leading the biggest economy in the world, but healthy minds would introspect to see how we can do better, like we should, right? I have no doubt out leaders will pick the wrong lessons, like social credit scores and pervasive surveillance
You don’t have to apologize, man. I was on a Pullman train once but it wasn’t quite a bullet train. I also rode a Western train named Orient Express.
> There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago.
The thing is, overcapacity combined with the 996 week and labor exploitation can be used to outcompete any Western company - especially the old ones, who are spread around the country. Look at the supply chain of the established (i.e. everyone but Tesla) companies... dozens of manufacturing plants, thousands of suppliers, almost zero vertical integration because "manufacturing batteries, ECUs or windshield wipers is not our core competency, let Bosch do that".
The only car manufacturer in the Western world not following that is Tesla. They have only very few, but very large factories that vertically integrate as much as possible on site, which not only gives them the advantage of cutting out the middlemen and their profit margin but also allows for much, much faster iteration cycles when everything is done in-house with no bureaucratic bullshit associated with change requests.
Typically, a car model, its design and parts are fixed for around 2-5 years after the prototype manufacturing run, no changes are possible at all outside of maybe the software, unless the design change is necessary to meet regulatory compliance or if it's something horribly defective. Then the model gets a "rebrush" integrating a few changes, which lives on for another 2-3 years, and then a fully new iteration crops up. Tesla (and SpaceX) in contrast, they do iteration times of weeks.
The disadvantage of that model is of course spare parts logistics and repair training, because holding stock for hundreds of subvariants and iterations is all but impossible, and that shows in every statistic for Tesla's average body shop waiting time.
And to come back to China's automotive sector - they're copying that model of iterative speed just as well. We've seen them come from piles of junk barely roadworthy (or not road-legal in Europe at all) a few years ago to be able to fight heads-on with the European car giants.
China’s debt load fluctuates if you consider just the central government, local governments, and SOEs owned by either the central or local governments. Then you have private sector debt. SOEs are where a lot of china’s shadow debt comes from (localities ask SOEs they control to fund public projects of their own books), this is what pushes China’s debt load over 100%.
There’s that and the LGFVs financed by land sales which are all off official balance sheets.
In the US this model is called venture capital - build lots of things knowing lots will fail.
It's a model that creates big winners and lots of losers.
Ironically of course the other alternative is central planning which is a hallmark of communist economic systems.
> estimated to leave Chinese debt to GDP at 117%
Japan is 264%, Singapore 168%, the US 129%, France 112%, Canada is 107%, UK 97%, Germany 66%, Australia 22%, Afghanistan 7.4%, Kuwait 2.1%.
A debt ratio isn't particularly useful to know on it's own.
Efficient yes, generates good quality of life for the average citizen? Not as much.
Plenty the west can learn from China on how to do large public works though.
Authoritarian governments have always been better at ordering top to underlings to get shit done, because if you don't get shit done your shit is getting undone. Which is to say erased from history and replaced by someone who will.
Basically, Chinese government wants a bigass factory and they will get a bigass factory because literally fuck you.
This is in contrast to liberal governments where governments can incentivize, plead and beg, and in certain extraordinary cases force the matter at court-point, but ultimately is at the mercy and pleasure of the people governed.
The flipside, of course, is that when authoritarian governments get it wrong they really get it wrong sometimes well past the point of recovery. Liberal governments getting it wrong have a lot more margin for error.
This factory is being built by BYD, not the government, and not a state-owned enterprise.
It's being built because BYD anticipates massive growth in demand for electric vehicles, not because of some arbitrary mandate.
BYD is known for its ruthless price-cutting and drive for efficiency, so they're a very bad example to illustrate government bloat.
There is a mandate, several interconnected mandates actually.
They're not arbitrary though, and many nations have them. China just seems to be translating that into action better.
There's a mandate for the government to support the development of the EV industry, and there are targets, but this factory is being built because BYD decided it makes economic sense for them, based on anticipated demand.
The Chinese government is doing many things that increase demand, make it easy to scale up production, etc. For example, many Chinese cities are making it difficult to register new internal-combustion-engine vehicles. I'm also sure the local government has rolled out the red carpet for BYD in terms of permits, tax incentives, and so on.
That's different from the government issuing a command, "Build us the largest EV factory in the world, regardless of economic viability!" That's how the previous comment came across.
No, it's when an authoritarian government wants something they'll get it. And by get it I mean "they'll take your house, ignore any local environment concerns and possibly just demolish entire villages and generational livelihoods".
Everyone seems to have some "oh how great it is they just get things done" as though they haven't diligently turned up to complain about some development application of the local council.
Yeah, sunshine and rainbows I suppose provided you're thousands of miles away.
From my visits to China, lI've come to conclude that Chinese people have more property rights than Westerners .
I saw roads built around houses because villagers refused to sell.
Eminent domain doesn't seem to exist there
Yes, actually. You repeated my argument only a bit more verbosely.
>Basically, Chinese government wants a bigass factory and they will get a bigass factory because literally fuck you.
> Basically, Chinese government wants a bigass factory and they will get a bigass factory because literally fuck you.
And what's the difference from the US government when it wants a bigass factory?
Isn't the difference that the US also wanted China to build bigass factories? They got too good at that.
>And what's the difference from the US government when it wants a bigass factory?
A normal business transaction, with all the good and bad parts thereof. The government can't force the issue unless they do it themselves which is usually not the case.
not just that, but the fact that the US gov't does hold elections means that what they do generally is in line with the people.
At this moment, what the chinese gov't is doing is _also_ (presumably) in line with their people's wishes - after all, factories and exports means jobs and economic growth. It remains to be seen if this continues to be in the face of a potential war, tariffs, or some other external shock.
> it seems they've latched on to something that works better than even democracy and capitalism
Wouldn’t this just be plain old fashioned authoritarianism? America can latch on to this too, and we might based on how the Trump admin turns out.
No. One required component is plain old fashioned oversupply of labor. America doesn't have that because all employable people are too rich. China also has an oversupply of skilled labor like engineers, in part because the threat of poverty is a strong motivator to get rich. America also lacks that which you can see in capable young people doing arts degrees with no thought to their future income because it doesn't matter - they'll still live comfortably even on minimum wage.
It's not that life on minimal wage is comfortable, it's that we have been told for a generation now that 'just get a college degree and it will be fine'. Happily amplified by for-profit education investing a lot of money lying to young people (ads).
Ask your local waiter with a college degree if they would have studied something else if they got the chance. My experience is that many would.
> Ask your local waiter with a college degree if they would have studied something else if they got the chance. My experience is that many would.
The problem of bad choices is orthogonal to the problem you are describing.
> they'll still live comfortably even on minimum wage.
You made a few good points until this one. No one in the US is living comfortably on minimum wage.
It's relative. Relative to the rest of the world (and China), you can still live comfortably on minimum wage.
You can still live comfortably on US minimum wage if your cost of living is like in China?
What question is this? With a US minimum wage with China CoL you are rich.
That’s an easy enough problem to solve if we had the appetite to solve it, why couldn’t we legitimize the roles illegal immigrants currently do right now with a Singapore style migrant worker program?
Probably because the average Chinese is far more skilled than your average illegal immigrant.
It's not just raw labor force. It's capable engineers, designers, architects, etc. How is illegal immigration going to solve this?
The amount of skilled people wanting to migrate to the US is almost infinite (unfortunately). If the US decided to open 20million green card spots, they would be filled.
To be clear, I think that there is an existing, legal migrant worker programme. They do most of the non-automated farm work in Central Valley California. Also, the Singapore system is a bit ugly if you look closely. I hope the US can do better.
There is an estimation of 11-30 million undocumented immigrants in the US. The biggest difference is that in the US they are working on fast food jobs, house cleaning, babysitting. Different priorities.
If the Trump administration (or the Biden administration) tried to enact an industrial policy like China, I think they would fail. It's not easy, and plenty of authoritarian governments fail at it.
And what blows my mind is that if I want to rent a tractor with a front loader for some landscaping work it’s hundreds a day. Yet even larger commercial earth moving equipment sits around unused for weeks.
Some of that may be due to the owner transporting it from job to job instead of storing it in their own yard.
Nonetheless, there's a lot of idle people/equipment in construction because things have to be done in the right order and sometimes it's more economical to over-provision than risk delaying the whole project because something wasn't available when it was needed.
Those hundreds per day will partly pay for all the sitting around unused in the hiring company's yard! You can see this in the pricing which is usually a lower rate if you hire it for a longer period.
They're building a large carwash facility near me and have taken over a year to get to the point of putting the roofs onto some steel framed sheds. I constantly think of the time when we were able to build the Empire State Building in 13 months.
They paid good wages but also kept a high bar on quality and performance. The workers in turn were incentivized to do a good job and gave feedback like ideas on how to improve efficiency, e.g. build an internal railroad to carry bricks up as they got higher and higher in height.
I have, happens around 6 AM. They get all the generators started up, power tools and full power. All the heavy machinery at full throttle. A cacaphonous 6AM salute to the internal combustion engine. Old Zeke fills his truckbed full of rusty nails and drives aggressively around the neighborhood dropping this way and that. Well, not old Zeke nowadays, more like Senor Ramirez Carloz Gonzalez.
Question is, if it's 6 AM at a construction site, and nobody is around to hear it, do they make any noise?
It does seem to have an AI look to it. The resolution is pretty poor.
It's amazing what happens when you don't have union inefficiencies holding back progress.
10% of workers are unionized today, vs. 30+% 1940-1960. Surely this isn’t the reason.
I'm sure that's the one and only reason
They don't have time to waste, they have to get as much cheap stuff out as possible before further tariffs.
The scale is just insane .. hard to comprehend a 3km/2mi wide factory.
To my knowledge the largest factory in the world is BASF Ludwigshafen (Germany) with 10 km². Here is an aerial photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:LudwigshafenBASF2017-0... Followed by Volkswagen Wolfsburg (also Germany) with 6.5 km². Seems the BYD factory is competing with it for rank #2.
I guess it depends on what qualifies as a factory. Azovstal in Mariupol is around 11 km^2 and certainly isn’t the largest in the world.
It will be 50 sq. km by the time the extension is finished [1].
The wording is confusing, but I believe the Zhengzhou International Land Port is 50sqkm, not the factory. That also fits the numbers they're giving [1]: "Zhengzhou International Land Port Project announced ——total area of around 50 square kilometers", and that includes a lot of "open-air warehouse" (parking lot). It's still massive, but not quite as crazy.
Agreed, the factories clearly aren't the same size as Manhattan.
I don't think BASF really counts, it's more of a factorio district and not one single insanely large building.
I was refering to the size of the factory premises = land + buildings.
It seems we need diffrent categories for a ranking: premises vs. base area of the buildings vs. floor area of the buildings vs. largest building per base area vs. largest building per floor area, etc. And then we would need to clarify what counts in each case ...
Anyway, I live about 20 km from BASF and it is quite an impressive sight, especially at night. Here is a photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Fackelschein_des_Steam... However, the red lights are probably an artefact of the camera; typically the lights looks rather bluesh in reality. And the photo was shot with a 400 mm lens: the television tower in the foreground is more than 4 km away from the factory, the house at the left about 3 km.
I've studied in the area and, as a bit of a night person, often drove past at night when driving to or from parents. A very cool sight, though the smell is often less pleasant :D - presumably nothing toxic, that would be illegal, but it does smell bad. Kind of like burning plastic, but without the harshest components of that smell.
Anyway, cool that Germany still has the biggest of something ~heavy industry.
I hope you appreciate how nice it is that you can reasonably assume that whatever you're smelling isn't particularly toxic.
I would be curious to know what chemical compounds that you are smelling. Germany has incredibly strict environmental protection laws. As an aside, the waterfront of Kawasaki, Japan is pretty similar, but not one single company. It looks straight from Factorio.
Like an image ripped from Blade Runner.
Nah, Blade Runner looks better.
So much roof space, so little PV. I guess in China they don't do rooftop PV as much because the regulations allow for cheaper installations somewhere on a meadow?
It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change.
It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale, and nations that suffered similar disparities in industrial capacity (not to mention energy production) haven't done well in the past.
> It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale
The sad thing is, we still can if we want to. When Russia throttled down the natural gas pipelines into the EU, it took them mere weeks until the first new floating natural gas terminal was put into operation. And they've collectively dumped an astonishing number of new terminals into the North Sea since then, all at the same time. Germany alone spent $6B in infrastructure investments before that first winter without Russian gas.
We could if we wanted to. But by and large, we don't want to.
Of course we can motivate ourselves. But they're acting like we did in the 1800s through the mid 1900s. They just build anywhere no matter what. They have no interest in dealing with environmental concerns. The officially released pollution levels in China are mind-boggling and they still do not represent how bad it really is.
You think US manufacturers wouldn't be delighted to just buy a few hundred acres land and start building stuff? They'd do it in a heartbeat. For better and for worse, it is not a level playing field. Conforming to government regulations over here is stifling for a 100-house development in Arkansas, but it's almost impossible in California, Illinois, or New York. Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years.
> Conforming to government regulations over here is stifling for a 100-house development in Arkansas, but it's almost impossible in California, Illinois, or New York. Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years
Reading this (and I completely agree, it's even worse in Europe), sounds like Chinese "management" implemented Agile on a whole new scale.
The upside of a planned economy is that it can work like the internals of a private company, with one drive, "do what needs to be done". The downside is that it can work like the internals of a private company where you bite the bullet or look for another employer. This is much harder with countries, especially because planned economies are more likely to have taller fences around them.
The air quality in China is lot better now than a decade ago. The smog was so bad in 2012 and I remembered the AQI hitting 999 (the max it would go) on more than one occasions during Beijing winter.
Went back again in early 2024 and it was so much better, pollution still noticeable on more days than not but at least half the time I spent had AQI below 100.
I was in Shenzhen in 2017 and again recently. The difference is huge. The air quality walking around the street is very good and you never smell gasoline.
I’d argue that vested interests in oil and coal have done more to damage the US’s ability to invest like this than any regulatory red tape.
Huge parts of America hate EVs. There is endless debate about nuclear vs clean energy vs coal, which prevents any change from happening.
Counterpoint: See the speed with which Colossus has been (is being) assembled in Memphis Tennessee. Yes, on an existing industrial site but this is still one damn impressive accomplishment.
A data center is much easier than building an industrial factory
They had to build themselves because third parties gave longer timelines.
This seems like an apples to oranges comparison. They are completely different. Can you provide some specific examples?
Is it your thought that is typical for large-scale development?
This is why Trump has pushed for mass deregulating, America (let alone the west) can't compete against China when our politicians demand that we straight up don't.
The bread and butter of progress is competition and I think a lot of American companies “won” like Boeing or Intel in the 90s and no one else could compete.
Unfortunately winning is disastrous because it makes you complacent.
Perhaps the most flagrant and dumbest example is Internet Explorer 6.
I do not approve of raising tariffs on foreign vehicles because it will dull our edge in the long term. Protectionism is a short term bandaid.
Tariffs are a good way to ensure you still have a domestic capability. If Germany/korea/japan/China outcompete all US auto makers and they die, along with it goes a ton of jobs, manufacturing knowledge & capacity, cultural influence, an ability to keep capital flowing domestically, downstream suppliers, and ability to change factories from autos to military equipment in wartime. If China just keeps taking industry, then all we have left is an outpouring of all capital and a bunch of “content creators” left. Not a good prospect.
US auto companies already try to compete globally in situations with/without tariffs. That provides plenty of competition too.
I completely agree with you, but it’s still funny how we were ok with the companies moving the jobs out of NA (so, we lost all the things you’ve listed) to save themselves money. But when it comes to saving money for the consumers, suddenly we’re not allowed to do the same thing, because it doesn’t help the bottom line.
Intel was famously not complacent. Perhaps a long lapse starting a decade ago. But even then “complacence” was not the problem. Ditto for Boeing. Managerial focus on just milking the cow has been the fundamental problem: and they milked frantically—not complacently.
I can't tell if I'm missing sarcasm here but ...
Intel was paying customers Billions a year not to use their competitors products in the early 2000s. So not complacent about breaking the law to stifle competition but also complacent about actually building competitive chips that could win in the market.
One could perhaps say that short-termism is complacency about the future.
Well even with 100% tariffs BYDs new sub 10k vehicles will be far cheapet than anything else the US market has to offer
> our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change
The US and EU are long off-peak carbon emissions (emissions even decreased during the Trump administration I, even using a trendline ignoring COVID). The biggest emitter right now is China, and it's emissions are growing not shrinking, and a considerable amount of that (including 90% of the worlds new coal plants) goes to projects like this.
China is building more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. At this point there is no “let’s just reduce our emissions by 30% or so and hope things work out” plan that’s compatible with stopping worst-case outcomes, there is only a “let’s replace every single energy and fuel source with non-emitting ones on a ridiculously short timescale” plan. Insofar as we have a chance of doing that, it’s because of what China is doing right now.
To the extent that they’re using fossil fuels to build the infrastructure for this renewable tech, I’m completely fine with that. That’s much better than using it to build iPhones or consumer nonsense. Insofar as they’re building a renewable grid backed by modern dispatchable coal and they’re also building out massive storage manufacturing capability and their emissions are on track to decline, I’m also fine with that.
Kinda, but we’re not really in a position to blame them right? To some extend, sure, but that’s easy to say when you’ve already got yours.
What does blame have to do with anything? Emissions are emissions.
The tone of the message feels kinda like ‘China bad, look at all those emissions’
It’s possible that was not the intent.
Western country populations seem to be willfully falling for obvious fossil fuel propaganda over and over again. Future generations will rightfully curse our names. (Including today's children.)
Sadly it comes down to "Show me the money."
I vote for change, but I don't have the money to buy electric. Even running costs don't make the difference when it comes to multiple tens of thousands of dollars in purchase price.
I'd love to "care for our environment by buying an electric car". I can't afford to.
Affordable EVs are a solved problem. China has solved it. The world responded by putting up tariffs.
I already own a car. An affordable EV is a thing I'll buy in like 15 more years when my already 20 year old Toyota finally dies maybe.
If I bought it sooner, then my car would just go into the second hand market and do the same thing.
"Affordable" isn't changing anything: I don't need another car, and I'm not going to prematurely crush mine into a cube.
We Americans have more to fear from economic and technological dominance than we do from military invasion.
As a budding superpower ready to unseat the US from it's throan. All China has to do is wait for progress and time to run it's coarse and emerge the victor. If anything, the US is the tigger happy country as we watch the inevitable, looking for any excuse to use to stop them.
Remember, why the hell does China give two shits about war if China can surpass the US simply through economic progress. They don't care, in fact they want to avoid war.
why does they have to be a winner and loser. everyone can thrive? except the United States is being buoyed by two main elements.
1) the ability of the internet to extract value overseas while untaxed in the client country 2) The H1B visa which funnels the best talent from struggling countries 3) strong institutions and financial and education centers and 4) military industrial complex that thrives on basically manufacturing conflicts with other countries
#4 is what is scary. not the dominance of any other country itself
> why does they have to be a winner and loser. everyone can thrive? except the United States is being buoyed by two main elements.
Why can’t there be a winner and a loser and both the winner and the loser cooperate and thrive with loser having the humility to admit he’s a loser? Isn’t this the same peaceful consequence? Just say China is better and admit inferiority for the everlasting peace. Why can’t you do it?
Because competition and cooperation are intrinsic parts of natural selection and therefore evolutionary biology and therefore human nature. Don’t pretend to be above your own nature.
Or do pretend. We can all act according to our ideals and deny our basest instincts, but don’t expect the mob to act the same way in aggregate.
I don’t think anyone disputes that China can out-manufacture us. Does that make them “better”, they the winner and the West the loser? Obviously not; things don’t end, history continues and things can go in different directions in the future. Not to mention that there are other dimensions that matter besides manufacturing prowess, namely quality of life, individual freedom, etc.
In the dimension of quality of life, technological prowess and economic GDP, China is likely going to match the US in western cities. Think about it. Manufacturing lies at the heart of everything. Do you think there's some universe where the US is good at designing things and then submits the design to China to manufacture and then suddenly China remains in the dark on how to design things?
Don't be deluded on the whole individual freedom or quality of life thing. 99% of Americans don't even exercise the right to protest. China doesn't let you protest and this fact doesn't really affect anyones life.
So that I can afford cheap shit from poorer countries, if they stay poor they contribute less to climate change, less competition for finite rare resources
frightening! depends on your perspective of who you are ;)
Is there a list of the world's largest factories, in a liberal sense of the word? The ones I'm aware of only consider individual structures [0], which excludes industrial plants that span multiple buildings, like this one.
Volkswagen's main factory is also pretty large:
"Spanning more than 6.5 km², the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg is now the largest automotive plant in Europe, employing more than 60,000 people."[0]
It becomes tricky because what does 'factory' mean? Especially once it's scaled to the size of a small town, you start to see town-like buildings popping up. There's some stuff which is arguably necessary for the factory itself, such as the train station and logistics facilities, a test track, and things which are necessary for the employees directly such as employee car parks and restaurants, but then there are other things like a visitor centres, shops, gardens, monuments, museums, a Ritz-Carlton hotel. Also, are power and water facilities part of the factory? Even if that means that we're counting a reservoir as 'part of the factory'[0]?
How would you come up with an exhaustive list of which buildings contribute to the size of the factory, and which should be excluded?
Otherwise, you're just looking at the land owned or leased by the company, which is obviously a valid measure somehow, but it's hard to say whether it would lead to fair comparisons. I don't have the answers, just throwing it out for debate.
Which if this BYD site is 2x2 miles for ~5sq km, BASF is twice as large at 10sq km! Wow
> ~5sq km
I get over 6 km^2.
Point still taken.
2x2 miles is over 10km^2. Barely.
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US/German manufacturers just do assembly, they don't manufacture parts, so they only need assembly plants. BYD is a vertically integrated manufacturer. They make everything in-house which helps drive down costs. This huge footprint results in having all those different manufacturing lines under one roof. They depend on no one for finished parts, the only supply chain is raw materials.
I believe outsourcing can be a symptom of not innovating anymore.
Imagine having to contract out every prototype to a metal working shop — it slows down your ability to iterate because you can’t just go downstairs and try it.
But once you have a design set in stone, outsourcing is cheaper than doing it in-house. These companies specialize in producing parts with economies of scale.
But if you do it for too long, you kind of lose the ability to quickly iterate. Striking a balance is hard.
> But once you have a design set in stone, outsourcing is cheaper than doing it in-house. These companies specialize in producing parts with economies of scale.
Except you need to ship the parts to your factory and still employ QA people who must check whether you got what you paid for.. If the supplier has a bad defect ratio, you must order more parts. It's not as cut-and-dry as you think.
Every time your assembly-line halts, you're paying people for twiddling their thumbs. The more external suppliers you have, the higher the risk.
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People are waking up, and to be fair, Tesla really led the way in the US for the last few years because they had no choice(no one would take them seriously). The question is can the West turn the ship around before its too late?
too late to dominate in the industry of electric vehicles and thus, control/own large % of the wealth generated.
When Trump ups everything from China by 100% I guess US would be able to make something with profit?
I doubt it. It's much easier to either launder or manufacture the goods in a third country, that benefits from most of the same incentives that made Chinese manufacturing go through the roof.
Americans will be buying Chinese goods with "made in Vietnam" or "made in Mexico" stamped on it. The American profit will be in setting up those laundering schemes
If the Trump tariffs are based on country of final assembly, then yes, final assembly will just occur somewhere else, but it will take a couple of years to setup, and the inflation shock by that time will have done a lot of damage to the economy (recession likely, depression possible). It makes sense that it took Trump forever to find a treasury secretary willing to go along with this.
You can bribe officials in Vietnam/Mexico. So they'll be your country of "final assembly".
I doubt the Americans will let them do that so easily.
They already are. Just one tiny well-explained example, although it's utterly rampant:
No bribery required though, at least in most cases.
They tried stockpiling aluminum in Mexico during the Trump ban and that was shutdown quickly. I guess they just have to be more convoluted about it. I wonder if Trump will do something like “tariff China and any country that doesn’t tariff China itself (transitive)”, but it feels like it might be futile to do that.
The Trump tariffs will turn the entire world to China. America may no longer be interested in free trade and go full isolationism but many smaller countries can not.
A painful truth is that for Europe the millions of containers with goods from Asia are a lifeline.
Couple of years for a western enterprise maybe, but in the east, things move fast. Really fast.
It depends if Trump tariffs just China or everyone. He promised high tariffs for China, but tariffs on all imports besides.
Vietnam and Mexico will massively profit.
That is not remotely how tariffs work.
Doesn't a tariff drive up prices? (or at least intended for that)
Tariffs are a surcharge on imports added and demanded by the government, paid by the people or entities importing.
As an example, if an American buys a Chinese coffee maker priced at $100 and there is a 50% tariff, there is a $50 tariff that is paid by the importing American to the American government.
The total cost to the importing American is $150. Now, if this price is equal to or higher than an American coffee maker then the importing American is incentivized to purchase the American coffee maker instead.
As another example, if Tesla sells Model 3s for $50,000 and BYD comes in with a similar spec car priced at $25,000, then putting a 100% tariff on it will drive BYD's effective price up to $50,000 allowing Tesla to compete without undercutting or outright selling at a loss.
Essentially, tariffs are a way to ensure that the pricing floor of the domestic market is not driven down unreasonably by international markets at the cost of the importers.
EDIT: Fixed some math. :V
Right, the coffee maker company in China has some options:
* Figures out how to make it even cheaper (unlikely)
* Figure out how to avoid the tariff legally: Maybe move the manufacture or assembly to Mexico for the US market.
* Claim the product is something else, just enough to avoid the tariff(i.e. claim it's a tea maker, not a coffee maker)
* Stop selling in the US since they won't get any sales
* etc.
The middle options are the most likely: avoiding the tariff somehow. Companies do the middle two all the time to varying degrees to get around/avoid tariffs, import fees, etc, even US companies.
Also the other issue: the first thing the American company does is ensure it sells coffee-makers for $149 and not a penny less.
In fact depending on your tarriff regime, this can incentivize a bunch industries to actually raise prices if the new import cost is higher then they would currently sell at.
The incentive to raise prices is pressured down by customers' desire to not spend more money than they have to. If businesses can get away with raising prices that means the price was too low to begin with, tariffs or no tariffs.
Not entirely correct. Boeing, despite all the bad press, actually reversed course on this recently. 787's wing was made by a supplier, but 777X's wing is actually built in-house, right next to the main factory, starting from carbon fiber fabric.
How much can Boeing do this though? My understanding is in the past they used moving some of their production to a country as leverage to win contracts. They are a company that moved their headquarters to DC because management treats the product as secondary as if they make widgets. Until they reverse that they aren't moving in the right direction.
Wasn’t always that way. Ford’s River Rouge plant took iron ore in one end, and rolled automobiles out the other end.
Don't forget USA auto companies also outsource their design work, CAD, etc. My understanding is that TATA used to have a whole floor at Chrysler.
So the factory accepts iron ore, crude oil, coal, lithium ore, bauxite, monazite, copper ores, rubber, and soy beans at one end and spits out finished cars at the other?
They don't even outsource their nylon zip ties?
the only supply chain is raw materials
Citation needed, this seems exaggerated. Eg. I'm sure they use IC's and I'd be very surprised if the facility includes a fab.
They, BYD, have their own semiconductor R&D and manufacturing subsidiary called BYD semiconductor.
EDIT: Seems like it is a division, so not a spin-off.
Just like Ford used to do.
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Can the west compete?
The problem with the west is that it’s already developed. Everything in the west is a bit like the European automobile industry, it’s highly refined for what it is and we expect to milk it for some time to come.
Same thing happened with the financial institutions and internet infrastructure - those who had the early versions of it established early ended up lagging behind once the technology was superseded.
The poorest countries in Europe had the best internet for a while because the richest countries wanted to milk the copper wires they invested on.
The US for long had much worse payments systems than Europe and Africa because they were at advanced stage on adopting the early technology.
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strongly disagree. the West has almost no manufacturing capability or labor force (at an affordable rate) at the moment. it's almost unsustainable even for a small business to be paying $20 an hour in some cities let alone run large factories
Is it maybe because centering divs was much better career choice than dealing with machines and chemicals for more than a decade now? If that’s changing and manufacturing becomes a need, it should correct by itself.
The west, especially the USA invested gargantuan money into high margin high scale businesses and the Chinese worked their way up in dealing with atoms with help of the west. Now they too can do many of the high margin stuff and the west will have to re-learn how to deal with atoms. It happened because the west’s rich were simply shittier than Chinese bureaucrats and invested badly by choosing wrong KPI or ideas. Wonder what happens if the AI thing doesn’t pan out after pouring enormous money on it(instead of on something strategically important but not as potentially lucrative).
IMHO things are reversible, especially for the USA. Europe is in a worse place as its demographics and energy situation is less favorable.
This is a ridiculous statement. The west has absolutely staggering manufacturing capacity.
China has more. And the trends are in the wrong direction, to be sure. But Germany and the US, among many others, have tremendous capacity.
Define "the west". There was an interesting article here in HN the other day [0] "Almost 10% of South Korea's Workforce Is Now a Robot". China now surpasses all the west-aligned nations in terms of total industrial robots [1], however the west still has the upper-hand in terms of robot to population density ratio.
I think it is a matter of strategy and it seems China's strategy is innovation, science and productivity. We on the west seem to like consumption before everything else and IMHO we are doing it wrong.
I think another axis is an underlying cultural difference: balance of collectivism vs individualism. China can say “there will be a factory here” because it’s overall good to have one, even if a few noses are out of joint. In California it’s decades of fights to get a train. The trick to competing is to find the right balance for the next decades. China used to be all-central-planning, which was sluggish and not agile. Now it’s guided by central planning (great for overall alignment) over many years rather than jerky 4 year stints, combined with massively distributed efforts to generate high levels of competition and agility. What is the optimal balance for your country or state?
Isn't robot density per 10,000 workers the standard metric used by
the International Federation of Robotics?
> however the west still has the upper-hand in terms of robot to population density ratio.
Considering that latest data shows that China industrial robot density is only lower than SG and SK (surpassing Japan and German recently), then the west doesn't have the upper hand anymore.
Depends if the Chinese need a market to export to.
The main issue with china is a reliance on exports and a declining population...
All work and productivity is ultimately an enabler of consumption.
> China's strategy is innovation, science and productivity. We on the west seem to like consumption before everything else and IMHO we are doing it wrong.
What is this even supposed to mean? You can't have productivity without consumption - who are you producing things for? Well, consumers - duh.
China is the beneficiary of having relatively low marginal costs, but it's worth noting that's been changing and production has been moving out of China and into other cheaper regions - i.e. Vietnam.
Any big grouping can compete if there’s enough will. Look at how eg Russia has rejigged much of its war machine during the Ukraine war. Look at how Ukraine has turned themselves inside out to compete. At some level of pressure, countries transform. How much will it take? Is simple economic pressure enough? Can eg Europe gather enough of its massive educated population to transform?
In economic competition, as with poker, if you don’t know who the sucker is…you’re it. China has been making suckers of many countries and they are slowly waking up.
There is a sense in which China has made a sucker of itself, too. China has some serious internal economic structure issues and it remains to be seen how long those issues and the downstream problems it creates are sustainable.
For an example, remember the amazing speed of construct demonstrated by the Chinese government building covid quarantine facilities? Hundreds of square miles of em across every province. They're all gone now.
I always hear this as a criticism of China but then I watch some footage of the actual place and it looks like it lives in the future (to be fair, it's uneven, but let me tell you I've traveled to the US enough times to be shocked at how uneven it can get). Sure, there's real problems I'm sure, where isn't there, but here in Canada by the time we've built a kilometer of an LRT line massively over budget, China has added a new high speed rail line.
I don't believe so anymore - at least not in California.
"Between January 2022 and June 2024, employment in US private businesses increased by about 7.32 million jobs. Of these 7.32 million jobs, about 5,400 were jobs created in California businesses—representing about .07 percent of the US figure. Put differently, if California private-sector jobs grew at the same rate as in the rest of the country, they would have increased by over 970,000 during that period, about 180 times greater than the actual increase."
Didn't California shut down surfboard blank production? You can't even make traditional surfboards in California anymore. They don't want jobs that produce environmental waste. Not all states are like that.
Not with NEPA (and CEQA and friends). The current environmental movements will have to be dismantled since they are extractive rent-seekers on production. Fortunately, a new administration will soon be power so there is an opportunity to remove the roadblocks to America’s future success.
A world with a Chinese hegemony is not going to be pretty, as online DoorDash hammer and sickle communists are about to discover.
No. Nixon et al handed us to CCP whole. But hey, cheap TVs, clothes and what not.
west can compete. unlike byd’s, which get bricked all the time without infrastructure to maintain and repair them, west (and japan even more so) build cars that last. this is china we are talking about, the last thing I want is a car made by them… :)
As someone from Australia, which hasn't shut its self off from the China EV market. I drive a BYD Dolphin. You should be worried. They are cheaper, and more full-featured than European equivalent. They aren't junk.
Also, they aren't the only big player from China. Australia is soon getting GAC/Aion, Geely, Jaecoo, Leapmotor, Deepal, Xpeng.
People used to say the same things about things made in Taiwan, then Japan, and then China, for things like electronics and white goods. It was true - until suddenly it wasn't.
In engineering you ultimately have to build stuff. Over, and over, and over again. You'll mess it up a lot at first, and then one day you'll realize that you haven't.
China is not stuck in 1965 trying to make an EV out of a saucepan and a backyard forge. They learn, and they keep trying. They have a domestic market that their government allows to be used as a test bed for everything they are doing, which sounds more coercive than it really is, especially given the fierce Sino-centric patriotism they have.
If Xi can last another 20 years without a palace coup, or manage a smooth transition of power that does not whipsaw policy, the West is in serious trouble.
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Yeah but Japan has long had a cultural obsession with delivering high quality products. I don't know if China ever did, but if it did, much of it was wiped out during cultural revolution and replaced with succeed at all costs.
And there is a difference between success and excellence.
For example there have been zero bullet train fatalities in its entire history, and several Chinese HSR fatal accidents already. For political reasons the quality of the HSR wheels in China took a sharp downturn so expect more accidents in the coming two years.
Japanese-American here. This is revisionism. Japan was absolutely known for low quality products in the past. Probably the best "pop-culture" reference to this is "Back to the Future" when Marty travels back in time to 1955 and shows Doc a Made in Japan product (camera, I think?) Doc says its junk because its Made in Japan, but Marty sees it as high quality because its from the 80s.
Thats correct but it's hard to argue that it isn't a postwar blip in Japanese history as many companies of renown have lineages spanning both sides of the war, producing high quality product, anyways it feels like more than your median country.
Obviously quite literally survivorship bias, but since that's literal, it counts.
Japanese cameras became popular with pros during the Korean War precisely because they used high-quality materials and had great quality control. A good Leica was still better at the time, but you were much more likely to get a good Nikon.
There were many terrible electric cars out of China for years. Every province had its own little EV manufacturers. China's car industry is less concentrated than the US, but the big players are winning.
BYD is only the 9th largest carmaker in China. SAIC, Changan, and Geeley are the top 3. SAIC and Changan are state-owned, but Geeley is private, as is BYD. SAIC makes about 5 million vehicles a year. General Motors, over 6 million. BYD, around 3 million. Tesla, a little less than BYD.
Reviews of newer BYD cars are quite favorable. It's not like five years ago, when China's electric cars were not very good.
BYD has a simplified design for electric cars. The main component is the "e-axle", with motor, axle, differential, and wheels in one unit. There's a power electronics box which controls battery, motor, and charging. And, of course, the battery, made of BYD lithium-iron-phosphate prismatic cells. Talks CANbus to the dashboard and driver controls. BYD offers this setup in a range of sizes, up to box truck scale.
BYD and CATL are spending huge amounts of money to get to solid state batteries. The consensus seems to be that they work fine but are very hard to make. The manufacturing problems will probably get solved.
(Somebody should buy Jeep from Stellantis and put Jeep bodies on BYD E-axles. Stellantis is pushing a terrible "mild hybrid" power train with 21 miles of electric range, and an insanely overpriced all-electric power train. Stellantis prices went through the roof under the previous (fired) CEO, and sales went through the floor. Jeep sales are way down, despite customers who want them.)
Chinese cars used to have lots of quality problems because they didn’t embrace automation, afraid that would take away jobs (Toyotas made in China 12-15 years ago were notoriously bad compared to ones made in Japan/usa). But in the last ten years, they’ve gone full speed ahead on it, as aggressive as the Japanese, and the quality increases are really noticeable. It’s not just a tech upgrade, they’ve really changed the way they are thinking about manufacturing (not just a jobs program).
> BYD is only the 9th largest carmaker in China. SAIC, Changan, and Geeley are the top 3
Protip: when you calc Chinese numbers, be sure to lookup the latest data. 1 year or 2 means landslide difference.
SAIC sales dropped > 11% and profit down by 27% in the first two quaters 2024. Think about that for a second.
it will take years before they can prove that their cars are made to last. I won’t be lining up to buy them but in 5-10 years perhaps
Kia/hyundai went through that phase already, and just got through it with absurd 10 year warranties when they first came out. China could do the same in the states, although I think they will have enough traction in SEA/Africa/Russia//Australia by then that they won’t have to.
Mine comes with a 5 year warranty, and a 7 year battery replacement warranty. I'm fine with not waiting.
This can't be a serious take, right? Chinese consumers don't expect much less when it comes to maintenance and repair. And given their 3M+/year vehicle production output, they're not a small player.
reach out to countries that sell these cars, find people on social
media and/or if you have them in real life or travel… these cars are absolute garbage
I had the pleasure of seeing one in Mexico recently. If this car is garbage, sign me up! But alas, it's impossible because we decided that since we can't compete we'll just make them essentially illegal.
not sure what your perspective is based on. gi your persistence, it seems it's likely not rooted in actually talking to these people, but perhaps some slight unconscious bias?
most of the things you use in your kitchen and also your device. you're typing this on were manufactured in China
Do you have any data about that? I have only heard the opposite from owners and it sounds a lot like the things Americans used to say about Japanese cars prior to getting stomped by them in the 80s.
two friends in russia, traveled to mexico twice this year, boss from australia… story after story after story always the same, amazeballs for X number of days and then get bricked, interior issues, steering …
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I have a chinese EV (GMW, not BYD.) I am a very happy owner; huge features for the price. I am not sure i can see buying of a "mainstream" manafacturer again. (My country has no tarrifs/no domestic car building.)
your iPhone is manufactured in China :). your view is very outdated, or maybe even willfully. I'm sure they're plenty capable
This feels very paperclip maximization
Most of this is land being dug up, we don't know what it will be used for. Could just be holding area for stock, which is not a good thing. Premature to comment on the scale of BYD's factory.
The power of centralized planning.
All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average) and maintain/develop car dependency infrastructures.
This is the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy and reducing massively our climate and biodiversity impact.
I want those kind of factories to produce trains, bicycles... everything that can move people in a more efficient way than those "cars".
There is a clear reason why such factories are being built in China and if you are a USA or German citizen, you wouldn't like it.
In a BBC article from a couple of days ago [0], they hinted that China intends to take the lead into transitioning developing countries from fossil fuels to green tech. They produce batteries, EVs and solar panels. Just this year alone Pakistan of all the countries, imported 13 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels. For context - the UK has 17GW of installed solar in total.
China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.
>China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.
it is classic case of new dominant players emergence when paradigm shift happens. PC vs. mainframe, GPU vs. CPU, clean energy economy vs. fossil fuel based.
How is the power being generated for all this manufacturing capacity?
60% coal, some baseload nuclear (5%), renewables (30%). They have massive dams (14% of electricity IIRC).
Coal share is shrinking, a lot.
Today, capacity factor of coal plants is below 50% (that's why you always see China builds coal plants... that stand idle) and their coal consumption has been more or less flat for a decade. The plan is to use coal plans when wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine. Natural gas is a national security risk due to imports, but they do have a lot of coal.
Out west coal drops a lot and green energy is more available. They are still limited by grid in getting green energy from west to east. They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.
> They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.
There are also other reasons. The name of western province is Xinjiang. They did have a plan to turn it into manufacturing hub, and it's one of the reasons why you see stuff you see.
I actually went to changji before, and visited my friend’s brother furniture factory, so they have manufacturing in Xinjiang. They have more potential for it than any other western province if we go by culture since Uighurs are just as industrious and educated as Han (economic competition is where a lot of the conflict stems from, if they could fix that the autonomous region would boom).
BYD make busses. They have something like a 20% market share in the EU and the number of EV busses in China is mind boggling and was an esrly sign that China was going to win the EV market:
World's response to the climate crisis is already dangerously delayed, and we're at a point where we need anything ASAP. We've ran out of time to massively overhaul infrastructure everywhere.
The US and UK apparently can't even build a single high speed rail line any more.
Car dependency sucks, but we won't be able to fix that in the short term, but at least we can fix its oil dependence.
Cleaner grid will also need a lot of battery storage, and EV demand helps scale that up.
I don't think it's a particularly different timescale to swap from ICE to EV than to drastically reduce car dependence. What makes you think there's a big difference to where swapping to electric cars is easier than avoiding cars?
> the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy
The worst except the others. Like sure, retooling our metropolises might be nice. But it’s also not only expensive but incredibly carbon intensive, to say nothing of not wanted by most of the world.
It's not that expensive to put down a bike lane.
The problem with car-dependent cities is that they are very spread out. Why does public transit suck and why don't many people use the bike lanes? Because everything is far away.
We've built our cities this way. Our tax system encourages it (by not taxing land value directly and exempting development from taxation), and our zoning requires it (my city is almost entirely zoned exclusively for single-family detached housing). Bike lanes are nice, but they don't make a 25-km ride through endless suburbia any shorter.
You can't just copy the superficial traits of bikeable European cities and hope to get the same results. We need to fundamentally rethink the way our cities are allowed and encouraged to grow.
I don't use the bike lanes because most of the places I go don't have secure bike parking. I'm worried my bike will be stolen, and the local police don't take bike theft seriously. Some of the local dedicated bike trails have been essentially taken over as homeless camps, which are ironically full of stolen bike parts.
It is outrageously expensive.
"Building 101km of cycleways across Christchurch to cost $301m", population 405000, So that is $750 per person, which is about 1% of median earnings for a year. That is paid for mostly by car owners (via petrol tax and car tax) and a bit by home owners.
And the new infrastructure is visibly under-utilised - at best a few % of traffic. You could force people to bike using laws and economics I guess... I would be interested to see a per-trip cost analysis for cyclists.
There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere - bikes are great for some trips and some demographics.
Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...
301 million dollars for 101km of infrastructure is cheap compared to building highways [0]. The price of the usual infrastructure is a burden on everyone as well, not just car owners.
You shouldn't have to force anyone to choose any particular mode of transport. I think people choose what is most convenient and that happens to be cycling in urban areas where there is safe infrastructure for it.
Your question reads pretty weird to me; building cycling infrastructure makes a city more ideal for cyclists, that's exactly the point. I didn't read it yet, but I found a paper that seems interesting and in the direction of your question. [1]
The paper suggests biking only 118 days per year. The car ownership costs are not "saved" - the projected savings are wrong. Ownership car costs are 0.167/km and savings by riding a bicycle are 0.349/km.
Two ignored real costs of bicycling are lack of optionality (planning ahead for weather changes, locked into transport mode) and carrying capacity (groceries, children, sports equipment, etcetera). And I'd like to see other costs of cycling (wet weather gear, helmets, locks) included.
About the quality I expected.
Bike lane construction tends to be lumped in with regular road maintenance, which makes it look expensive, but the really expensive part is doing repairs on the existing roads. "Building bike lanes" for 300M is more palatable than "fixing potholes and repainting" for 300M
Depends on where you live I guess. "Fixing potholes" would be far more palatable than "bike lanes" over here.
Note that this is NZ dollars, and that spend is over ~16 years. I.e. ~NZ$46/year/person ≈ US$27/year/person at current rates. The article compares the costs to road and motorway costs in Christchurch.
> not that expensive to put down a bike lane
Scale-wise insufficient. We aren’t going to get to net zero with bike lanes.
Who said net zero? Perfect is the enemy of good.
> Who said net zero?
OP is expressing dismay at EVs and suggesting building bike lanes instead. (Not in addition to.) The latter doesn’t solve the problem the former is being built to address. More bikes is nice. More EVs are necessary.
Suggesting more bikes as an alternative to EVs isn’t perfect versus good, it’s fielding rubber ducks against battleships.
Comments like these need to be included in almost any discussion about transport or in fact any discussion about any change. Most people (or both sides) dismiss ideas because they are not 100% perfect. And ignore the fact that nothing can be perfect
If we only do a little bit, we'll only accomplish a little bit.
Yes, we'd better not do a little bit. Surely then, we'll accomplish a lot.
Bike lanes and bikes aren't alternatives to most of what motorized transport is providing.
30% of the US can’t drive, whether because of disability, age, financial hardship, immigration status, or any number of other reasons. Why don't you hold the current system of "motorized transport" to the same impossible standard of solving all transportation needs as you expect of bikes?
Because your groceries are delivered by truck. Your houses are built with materials delivered by truck. In fact your entire lifestyle and the existence of the services which support those people, is provisioned and delivered by local road transport.
At least 80% of urban car trips could be replaced since the invention of the e-cargo bike. That doesn’t mean it works everywhere, of course, but there are millions and millions of people driving a single digit number of miles, usually at slower than bicycle doors-to-door speeds, and are never carrying 3+ kids and hundreds of pounds of cargo.
Think roads, not cars.
I am. Most of our road costs are for suburban car commuters and for subsidized car storage. If it was business usage and transit we’d need far fewer lanes, especially since businesses would use rail transportation more if the roads weren’t so heavily subsidized.
Most car trips are very short, and commuting to a CBD is easily served by transit.
That still doesn't solve last mile supply of stores and offices, nor does it solve construction, policing, emergency services, etc.
Each of those likely has possible alternatives to motorized transport, but they're all different alternatives. Meanwhile, today, they all share the same road network with regular civilian commute, sharing costs and mutually improving efficiency.
Put differently: instead of imagining all passenger cars replaced by bikes, imagine all roads replaced by bike lanes, then extrapolate from that.
Most middle-class people, especially parents of small children, aren't going straight back and forth between home and work. They're making other stops for day care, school, shopping, after-school activities, gym, etc. Often there are tight time constraints which make public transit unusable. Like it would be impossible to use transit to pick my daughter up from school and get her to practice on time. It's a constant juggle and the childless young urbanites who dominate HN seem to be ignorant of how regular people live.
I find it so weird that people constantly speak as though public transport is this hypothetical maybe like a moon base or something. I use exclusively public transport, bikes, and walking. My whole family (with children) does. It's just not a problem.
Children walk or cycle to and from school. By themselves. When they're very young their parents did go and pick them up sure, but then its a small school within walking distance.
We rented a car and a trailer for a couple hours recently to move a double bed. It posed no problem, and was dramatically cheaper than owning a car for a month would be even if the car itself was free.
I got a nice cabinet for my friend recently. We are going to take the drawers out and move it to his place on a bus. I don't think it would fit in your car.
> All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average)
Actually, if you pay attention to scales and sizes, it's so very little to achieve so much. What you're seeing is tremendous efficiencies concentrated on a small piece of land, affecting transportation on a vast scale.
Believe it or not, but the buses and trains are also being manufactured in China. if you'd visit, you'd see that they have excellent public infrastructure, with multiple redundancies
I’m a bike commuter, all on board for transit, etc. but too much of the world – especially North America – is built around cars exclusively and that’s not changing any time soon because doing so would require things like massive rezoning to avoid people needing to travel such long distances just to function.
If we are going to have cars, I’d prefer they be smaller, safer EVs contributing ⅓ the carbon footprint of the status quo. Every bit of savings buys years to make further changes, and it directly saves lives and improves quality of life for a billion people. Even if climate change was not happening, it’d be worth doing for the improvements in cardiovascular health, disruption of sleep patterns and other consequences of engine noise, local water and soil pollution, etc.
I agree that cars are at least double the mass they need to be. The size of cars needed for a school run or to drive to work are generally quite small, but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.
> but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.
This is the reality in United States, but not in most of the world.
Sadly though, other countries are trending the same way.
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Unfortunately the only places in the world that I know of building new cities are UAE, Saudi, Egypt, China. I don’t think any of those are building for car-less.
Saudi Arabia's "The Line" is car-free.
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For the 1000th time here, even extremely well developed public transport by US standards and various financial punishments for owning cars is simply not enough for people to drop them, the convenience is simply too high.
Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year.
Maybe some AI driven community (or even private fleet) of shared cars to be hailed in Uber style on demand would work, reducing number of cars overall and the need to own personal one(s). Not there yet.
I don't think anyone envisions having no cars; public transportation make it so we don't need cars, and other nudges make it so we have fewer cars than we would otherwise have.
Next weigh up your house, get ashamed, tear it down and live in a tent.
You might as well wish that the factories produced teleporters. You're putting the cart before the horse. You have to fix the demand side first. I know there's an online demand for public transportation and bikes and if you are in that bubble it can feel like the whole world is with you, but in the real world, most people (obvs not everyone) prefers to have their own car.
I think there's hope since the only thing people like more than their cars is being glued to their phones, and public transport enables you to do that during your commute.
Why can’t both be done? Bicycles are already cheap, and an electric bike can be purchased under $1000. Not everyone is capable of limiting their commute to the ~10 mile radius an e-bike easily permits. Some of us still need cars, unfortunately. Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move.
Is there some technology that enables high-speed travel and weighs less than a human, which seems to be an important criteria to you?
In Japan electric bikes were relatively cheap as you say but in Canada, a bike to carry my family costs more than 5-6k, closer to 10k.
I can't even import those electric mama charis because of unwarranted concern about batteries.
Hard to support bike infrastructure when safetyism means bike routes are only for singles and the rich.
A bicycle is not suitable for the 100km trip to see my parents, and the only country that can operate trains at a satisfactory level is Japan (and maybe China, but I don't trust their data).
So no, its either this or a gas car. Both are real solutions that work, today. Changing society from the bottom up is not.
or a bus.
But then again it's amazing how we ignore the infrastructure costs of building and maintaining the roads to run the cars everywhere.
Sounds swell. But people like cars. Not realistic.
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Based on your comment, you've based your identity around something that requires packing the rest of us into traffic like cattle. Many people have died unnecessarily to support this lifestyle. Many more have their time utterly wasted as well. It continues to have drastic negative effects for all life on this planet.
I agree that development shouldn't be chosen based on political beliefs; however, your argument is not without that. I'd ask for you to look into your own biases here.
Do you truly have no individualism without owning a large metal structure and without forcing everyone else to as well? I find that difficult to understand. My individuality is so much more powerful than that.
You might get downvoted a lot, but I feel the exact same way as you do.
Trying to destroy cars is starting to become a political/religious belief.
A lot of people think that people stopped being religious, they dont go to the church.
But 24/7 Internet, TikTok, Youtube Shorts, etc, I think brought the Church to our homes in front of our eyes 24/7, the religion is different and there are many factions, but the obsession with trying to control every part of other people’s lives is starting to comeback.
The people who strongly try to take away other’s freedom to drive cars, eat meat, or so, often like hypocrites support almond milk that is made by mass murder of pollinating bees in california, gazillions worth of water just to grow oats for oatmilk, especially in a world, where in a lot of places, water is considered to become far more scarce in 20 yrs than Crude Oil will be.
Our world has societal problems sure, environmental too, but like always its technology, better, more advanced, much preferred ones, that can fix it, not this obsession with trying to take things away from people.
The internet and being constantly glued to our phones, desks, letting activists indoctrinate people create echo chambers, is leading people to impulsively downvote everyone they disagree with, without any discussion. It has become a religious doctrine, with “sides” to pick, and the apolitical and the agnostic, treated as villains who “support the status quo”.
I hope we can come out of this, what you said about boats and living by the sea, I’ve thought of it too, individualism is a beautiful thing, a human right hard fought across generations, passed on in our societies by our loved ones, who won this for us. I hope our democratic societies can keep it, defend it.
No, the initial goal of this factory is to achieve dominance over the global automotive industry but the ultimate goal is to convert it into a machine that can spit out drones to invade Taiwain, South Korea, and Japan.
Source? Zhengzhou doesn’t seem like where you’d put a factory you want to protect from the combined forces of Japan, Korea and America.
You build the drones in advance of the conflict.
It's very questionable if America will play a role there. It's 50/50 that Xi will be able to do a personal favour to Trump or Musk that will keep America out of it.
When the times comes to defend Taiwan (or Japan/Korea) it will be life or death for the US to react and win. If they fail, the whole house of cards will collapse for the US. Trump as stupid as he is had gotten the ball rolling in the correct direction in his first term and I don't see how he will deviate this term.
Where do you think the Chinese will build the factories that spit out drones en masse to invade their neighbours?
> Where do you think the Chinese will build the factories that spit out drones en masse to invade their neighbours?
Where they're currently building drones.
In times of war factories will be retooled to best serve the needs of the military.
I anticipate that in a regional war China will need more aircraft than land vehicles, especially given that the regional adversaries they are facing are mostly island nations.
Why do you think the Chinese will invade their neighbors?
Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.
They abhor liberal democracies and seek to extend their domineering control over as many people as they can.
The CCP is an absolutely tyrannical organization that denies their own citizens the rights that you and I take for granted. Why would they ever desire their neighbours to have what they deny their own people?
Look no further than Hong Kong and North Korea to see what China wants for their neighbours.
South Korea only exists as it does today because Western forces repelled Chinese supported North Koreans from conquering it.
Japan only exists today because of American rebuilding after the destruction of Imperial Japan during World War 2.
Taiwan only exists as it is today because of American support.
China would have subjugated these entities and destroyed any chance of prosperity and independence that they had if not for the efforts of people who believe in individual autonomy and liberal democratic values.
China only has the power that they do to day because of authoritarians in the west who tricked the world into thinking that globalism means that we should engage in trade with undemocratic societies.
Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.
Did they invade Hong Kong? It's a very western viewpoint that invasion is the only way to affect change.
Hong Kong was leased from China. No invasion necessary.
They've squashed the democracy movement there, though.
I'm not saying they're not trying to expand their sphere of influence. I just think they're not quite as gung-ho about it as western powers. They work slower and less aggressively, invasions are a last resort.
Now do Tibet.
75 years ago? If that's the closest precedent you can find, that kinda speaks for itself, doesn't it?
Are you a Russian bot account?
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Spoken like a true out of touch professional managerial class person. Regardless of country, your kind just got totally rebuked this past year. If you didn't realize, auto manufacturing was the last major home grown profession where you could have some semblance of stable middle class life. Once that is gone, the hollowing out of the middle class will be complete and there will be no money to transition to your garbage solution that the population clearly does not even want.
Cars only survive as a viable means of transportation due to vast subsidies and a total reorganization of society around them, the most inefficient mode of transport you could imagine. They are not the future of transport, they shouldn't even be the present.
> the most inefficient mode of transport you could imagine
Rockets, helicopters, trebuchet-and-parachute?
> I for one cannot wait for the total destruction of European and American auto manufacturers
I am so confused, the only way that can happen is via cheap imports of cars from other countries including China. So why would that help "real transport solutions" ?
If anything cheap EVs would make them less likely since a lot of nasty pollution from legacy ICE cars would be gone.
Because even if ICE cars are entirely replaced by electric tomorrow in their entirety, they are still a blight choking up roads with traffic and noise, nevermind the destruction of the rural town or village. The incentive to preserve such an absurd status quo drops away when the loss of manufacturing jobs starts to be less of a question to contend with. They are gone either way, the only question will be if you want to continue having your population pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into foreign companies or not.
Thanks, I hate it.
Just wait till Trump hits 'em with tariffs. That'll fix 'em --- NOT!
China is rapidly de-carbonizing and leaving the West behind.
For reference, England consumed 1 billion tons of coal during it's peak coal consumption decade.
So please stop with the "China is decarbonizing" crap, because they are not. A more accurate statement is "China understands the importance of energy and is applying an as-much-of-everything-approach to achieve its industrial goals"
You are comparing a country that was probably less than 5% of China's current population during that peak. And not only is China 17.5% of the world's population, it is also the major manufacturing hub for the majority of the world. 10 times as much coal as the UK's peak is still a tiny number.
The reality is that China is emitting much less CO2 per capita than the US or Canada, and just a bit more than the more industrious EU countries like Germany. And this is territorial emissions: if you take into account what percentage of those emissions is going into goods produced in China but bought by those very countries, it's probably around the EU average if not lower.
Is China anywhere near a net 0 goal? No, not even close. But among industrial powers, it is one of the ones that went by far the most into green power.
Also please stop comparing absolute numbers between countries with more than an order of magnitude population difference.
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Relative numbers are what matters realistically when comparing countries. The comfort and buying power of 1.4 billion Chinese people counts as much as that of all of the citizens of the EU and USA together.
It is not in any way moral or acceptable to imagine that China or India should have lower total emissions than the EU or the USA, despite having many, many more citizens.
And this is not even discussing total historical emissions, which is what actually matters most for global warming, and where the first century of massive emissions was almost exclusively due to Europe and the USA.
I know it isn't fair. Life isn't fair and neither is climate change.
It's not about fairness. It's about the fact that countries which have huge emissions per capita can't rest on their laurels if they have relatively low total emissions. Instead, they need to take an active role in reducing emissions - both their own, and those of people in the developing world. If Germany or the UK or Norway or France (not to mention Canada or the USA) want to reduce emissions more but can't realistically reduce theirs as much, then they need to, for example, start donating green energy solutions for developing countries, to allow them to grow their economies and comfort while keeping their own CO2 emissions lower.
What these countries can't do is start pointing fingers at others and claim that people in India say, who emit 2T CO2 per capita, are the real problem compared to their 14-7.
look at the trend lines of co2 emissions per capita for countries. You might find it interesting.
heck, even just look at co2 emissions per capita NOW. we arent talking about a high and mighty high emissions population dictating down to countries with low emissions that they should reduce. We're talking about china with more emissions PER CAPITA than europe, and every individual country in europe. Many developing countries are worse than pretty much every european country. Libya, iran, malaysia, all worse than every country in europe.
Europes emissions are going down over time. Chinas are going up - in an exponential curve.
this is the point where people deflect and claim "oh, but those countries manufacture stuff the west uses, it's their fault"
It's really not. A big part of the reason they manufacture those things and the west doesnt is because the west actually bothers to hold up any kind of environmental laws at all, driving companies away
Yeah it's going to suck for Americans as the US has to lower their total emissions to match the country of Denmark.
Absolute numbers matter when considering the total CO2 budget for the Earth.
When considering how to divide that budget among the people of Earth absolute numbers for countries do not matter, because the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary lines humans draw on maps.
One easy way to see that per capita is the correct way to allocate the budget rather than per country is to consider what happens if countries split. Suppose we agree on a worldwide budget of 4 x 10^10 tons of CO2/year.
If we go by country each country's share is 2 x 10^8 tons/year. That would mean in a small country like Liechtenstein they could live a lifestyle that required 5000 tons/year/person.
Meanwhile, in the US we could only live a 0.6 ton/year/person lifestyle--about what Zimbabwe uses today. That's about 1/25th of the current US lifestyle.
That is not going to work. The US could hold a constitutional convention and dissolve with each of the current 50 states becoming an independent country, and at the same time make strong free trade and mutual defense treaties. They can call this the "American Union".
That raises the number of countries in the world, so each country now gets a smaller slice of that 4 x 10^10 tons/year global emission budget. Collectively the total emissions budget of the combined states in the American Union is around 8 x 10^10 tons/year. That allows the American Union to live a 24 ton/year/person lifestyle as a whole (which is 60% more than the current US lifestyle).
Of course China, which only gets a 0.16 ton/year/person lifestyle under the original country allocations could do the same thing. If they did the Chinese Union with the individual countries being what are now prefectures, that Chinese Union could have a 15 ton/year/person lifestyle (about the same as the current US CO2 emissions.
Each time a large country does this "split into a strong union of separate countries" thing the boost in how carbon intensive a lifestyle that union's residents can lives comes at the expense of a drop in what the rest of the world can have.
The limit of this is a world of thousands, or even millions, of micro-countries, each with about the same per capita CO2 allowance.
Hey, I personally produce less CO2 than the entire USA combined. I guess the USA better up its game!
Yes, China still uses a metric fuckton of a coal, but they are decarbonizing: every year, the % of energy generated by coal goes down 1%, and renewables go up 1%.
Just to underline, this is not notional capacity (which inflates solar/wind), but actual power generation. This is all the more impressive because China's total consumption is simultaneously increasing rapidly.
cool now compare the population difference.
In order to build renewable infrastructure, you do need to expend a lot of energy: mining, processing, transporting. China is using coal to build up that infrastructure and converting that dirty energy into clean.
So when GHG absorbs energy from the sun, it's on a per capita basis?
No, but when talking about whether a country is emitting more than its "fair" share of GHG for any reasonable definition of "fair" per capita is what matters, unless someone can make a convincing argument that some people have some kind of natural or divine right to contribute more to GHG emissions than others.
Why didn't you include England's total historical contributions to GHG emissions and technologies in your comparison then?
Its not just about population. The UK was the world's foremost manufacturing nation at the time, just as China is now. It was the centre of manufacturing of an empire so the relevant comparison is with the population of the empire. There were no real alternative sources of energy - no nuclear, no solar, no wind (in a form suitable for most industry).
The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.
And if you want to count the population consuming industrial goods as the population that "causes" those emissions, then China looks even better, because they are producing goods consumed by literally billions of people.
> The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.
Most of those did not use coal in most of the empire in the year of peak consumption: 1913.
It was providing a lot of raw materials.
The 100% tariffs are already in place under the Biden administration. Trump only needs to prevent a Mexico manufacturing loophole.
However, BYD still has the entire rest of the world to sell to. They will be fine.
Yes, BYD will be fine.
And they know this is --- hence they are doubling the size of their already massive factory.
Guess who won't be fine? US auto manufacturers. They won't be able to compete anywhere other than the USA. And China loves it.
The US government bailed out GM under Obama. Do you know what GM did this month? They spent billions on stock buybacks and millions on bonuses while firing a ton of people. F'em. They aren't a car company, they are a stock company that happens to make cars, a route most large American companies seem to be taking (see also Boeing, whose management cares so much about/is detached from their product that they relocated their management away from the business and to Washington DC).
China is a 30 million a year car market and up until 2 years ago,GM used to sell more cars in China than in the US .
It was an incredible cash cow .
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US auto makers have been on the ropes since the 1980s. My hypothesis is that their heyday was 50s and 60s “greaser” culture and they kinda got their heads stuck in that era. “Golden ages” are incredibly dangerous.
When people started wanting just practical small reliable affordable cars as the price of gas increased and cars became just an appliance they didn’t respond to that market and the Japanese did. It’s been either sideways or downhill since. The only thing keeping them alive now is unnecessarily large status symbol trucks and that is a limited market that will be trashed if oil spikes again. There’s got to be a limit somewhere to how much people will pay to show off or own the libs or whatever motivates one to buy an F-5000 Super Chungus.
They are still mostly missing the EV boat. First Tesla caught them asleep and now China. Culturally they still are not crazy about EVs because they do not go vroom vroom.
Trump might string them along a bit longer with protectionism and a pull back on EVs to push more vroom vroom but meanwhile BYD will eat the entire world.
Their downfall was earlier than that. Post WW2 everyone was looking to buy a new car (people kept their old one during the war because production was going to the war effort). The car companies had such demand they moved to a 'car salesman' sales structure to milk every customer as much as possible because demand was so much higher than production. They got hooked on the easy money and entrenched a lot of bad business practices/policies as a result.
GM for all intents and purposes died (remember we funded a whole new GM, a completely new business entity, during the 2008 financial crisis timeframe) and yet new GM just 'invested' 6 billion dollars in stock buybacks, millions in management bonuses while conducting employee layoffs. But they will have no problem coming and asking the government for billions 'to remain competitive' soon. F'm.
I think there’s a little bit more to the golden age story.
The “malaise era” started in the early 70s as a perfect storm of fuel economy restrictions and more widespread US economic woes. This lead to decades of low quality cars being made.
US automakers not only lost out on consumers looking for simple appliances to drive, but ALSO the enthusiasts that liked driving and cars. The car guys that came of age in this era have two choices: chase after the same American muscle cars your dad liked, or switch over to imported hot hatches and the JDM tuner scene
> This lead to decades of low quality cars being made.
Really, it was only a bit over one decade. Taking GM as an example, their last great cars were produced for the 1973 model year, after which point the economy, emissions, and efficiency requirements resulted in drastic (bad) changes. It only took until the late 1980s for them to make some genuinely good vehicles though. For instance, the Buick Regal/Oldsmobile Cutlass/Pontiac Grand Prix from 1988 were well built, comfortable, handled (relatively) well, and were very reliable - especially from 1990 with the introduction of the 3.8L V6, what is likely GM’s most reliable engine ever built (second possibly only to the small block V8). The same was tru for their sports cars (while not making much power out of the displacement, the TPI V8 firebird and corvette were similarly efficient to European sports cars at the time). Many GM cars from that era (late 1980s until early 2000s) are some of the most reliable American cars ever built.
The same is true for Ford; for example, the 1988 Probe, while not the most popular vehicle, was very reliable, comfortable, efficient, and well-built, likely in part due to their partnership with Mazda. It could reasonably be argued that as early as 1980, Ford was making pretty good vehicles, with the Mercury Grand Marquis/LTD Crown Victoria being well-built and reliable, if very down on power with questionable efficiency.
Not worth talking about Chrysler because they didn’t know how to make good/reliable cars before the fuel crisis and they certainly didn’t figure out how to afterwards.
I know this isn’t your main point but it’s worth considering that the US did actually figure out how to build really good cars again, and it didn’t take them that long. Mid-90s to early-00s American cars were, in my opinion, at the perfect point of technological advancement: CAD and high-precision/low-tolerance manufacturing resulting in engines that last well over 300k miles without major servicing; enough computer advancement to have high precision per-cylinder fuel and spark control with accurate air metering leading to better power, efficiency, and reliability; and enough material advancement to have interior and exterior build quality that makes the car look like it wasn’t built in a shed. But most importantly, they hadn’t figured out how or where to cheap out on components, so you end up with the “unreliable” components (like the 4L60e and 4T60e transmissions) “only” lasting 200k miles before requiring a rebuild - which in today’s money is still less than $1000, let alone 20-30 years ago.
From the birth of the US auto industry until about 2010, the only period where there wasn’t a single American car worth buying brand new was probably 1974-1981. The “malaise era” itself was by the loosest definitions only about 13 years, from 1974-1987.
So in your opinion, what hat would be the standout 80s American cars for enthusiasts and collectors?
Off the top of my head, there’s:
- fox body mustang
- fiero
- gnx
- bronco
Anything else would be selected primarily for idiosyncratic nostalgia reasons (eg “this is the faux-wood station wagon I grew up with”)
> US auto makers have been on the ropes since the 1980s.
Without a doubt.
In about 2000 the US automakers sued the EPA because their proposed clean air regulations for about 2009 were "impossible".
They were actually more lax than what Japanese automakers were already selling cars for in the year 2000.
So the automakers sued the US government to admit that in 2009 they couldn't build cars that were as clean as cars Japan was already making in 2000. That says a lot.
The US consumer does not buy small new cars.
As has been pointed out, they sure did in the 70's when there was a huge financial incentive.
I expect that acting like all American's want are $60K+ luxury cars is what is going to take the US auto industry into the next massive downward spiral.
I.m.o. consumer weight on safety has dramatically increased since the 70s. Frugality has decreased. Of course it is an arms race with all the other giant cars already on the road. Consequently GM etc. are trying to appease US consumers with giant EVs.
I agree with you. I.m.o. consumer preference is the root cause of the issue.
The US is trying to do industrial policy (like now in China, and previously in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, and in Germany before that), but without the key aspect -- export discipline -- that makes industrial policy work. I'm thinking about Joe Studwell's How Asia Works. Everything I'm seeing in the US reminds me more of the failures in Indonesia and India than of the successes in Japan and Korea. With the exceptions of -- "say what you will about Elon, but" -- Tesla and SpaceX. Bidenonics will take time to bear fruit, though, and could yet yield some successes.
Point is, using tariffs to protect "infant industry" is the opposite of export discipline.
(As a side note, most of those countries also had major land reform, whereas property rights -- sorry, "rule of law" -- are pretty sacred in the US )
Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and many other countries turned sour on importing chinese EVs in favour of some kind of protectionism. Most developing countries dont have the infrastucture for EVs. Europe hit BYD with a 17 % tariff (10% being the standard)
When they're locally built, tariffs don't apply. Like Japanese, Korean and European car manufacturers, BYD will do the same in Mexico and eventually the US if necessary.
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I wonder if they built that factory to be resistant to bombing and how much air defense they plan to put around it when they take Taiwan.
I also wonder how fast it can be converted to spit out drones.
EVs on the battlefield are as of yet untested. That makes the BYD factory at best possible dual use. A bad target for Taiwan and its allies for a host of reasons.
In past wars factories making steel pots made helmets. I can definitely imagine an ev plant making drones.
Drones seem to be quite an important facet of the current war in Ukraine and Russia.
I wonder how fast this factory could be converted produce drones and how fast it could spit them out.
Imagine a circular loop of larger carrier aircraft that load up FPV drones from this factory and fly to their destination to drop them off only to fly back to do it again.
The FPV drones could have object recognition to target people, artillery, infrastructure so they could operate autonomously.
I wonder if they will put the landing pads on the factory roof or next to the factory.
DJI is already the worlds largest drone maker, better to let them continue then rebuild a car factory.
They won’t be able to take Taiwan. Taiwan has enough missiles to wipe out China’s navy 10x over before the US steps in with our navy
Look at a map of Taiwan. Or better, look at it in Google Earth. Taiwan is a narrow island with a mountain range running north-south down the middle. The developed areas are west of the mountains, facing China, in a strip 15 to 30km wide.
There's no defensive depth. And nowhere for all the people to go in an attack. It's not like Ukraine, where the current fighting is like battling over Iowa, one farm at a time. It's more like Gaza, with too many people crammed into too little land. But bigger.
China has a large number of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles. Bringing US Navy ships in the Taiwan strait means losing many of them. The PLAN has more ships than the US Navy, and is building more at a high rate.
Equally, China has enough missiles to blockade Taiwan permanently. There's no reason for them to attempt an amphibious landing or anything insane like that. It's unclear to me what the US response would be in a blockade situation, but Chinese hypersonic missiles do pose a threat to carriers.
This isn't Desert Storm we're talking about here, China is a real threat.
I still see memes about how the large government is preventing progress and causing de-industrialisation being pushed on Twitter, usually putting some European countries graphs next to USA graphs and showing how EU performed worse than USA after 2008(I guess that's the year the regulations kicked in), however they never compare China and the USA on these graphs.
Because then the libertarian propaganda turns into communist propaganda.
Can we get a vote on boycotting Twitter posts? I don't think it's right to support a platform that is now largely crazy right-wing nationalists, racists, transphobes and the like. Its owner regularly posts false information intended to stoke fears and manipulate people, and now this person is literally a government official. I don't want to see that platform advertised on HN.
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Factory square footage is the new crowd sizes. Tell your friends.
It's 2024, we can do better than blurry horribly blown out pictures these days. Check for example https://mapper.acme.com/?ll=34.39719,113.94792&z=15&t=SL&mar... for cleaner shot of the site (zoom in few notches for extra details). Google Maps annoyingly cuts half-way through the factory site.
edit: that ACME mapper image looks to be from mid-2023, in more recent imagery the construction on the east side has been completed.
When you zoom out far enough in ACME mapper, the factory disappears. (I'm guessing that's an older image.)
Yep, pretty common for different zoom levels to be different time points. ACME is using plane photography for its high zoom images. You could try zoom.earth for hourly/12hourly satellite imagery.
Although it is generally true that aerial photography is used to supplant satellite imagery in these sorts of public map services, I'm pretty confident that the image of BYD factory here is actual satellite imagery.
The way Chinese towns are organized is incredible. I'm impressed by this map.
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The number of construction vehicles doing something versus sitting around waiting for labor in that shot is impressive.
I'm 100% sure its a photo op. Think about the logistics of the trucks taking spoil away. How can there be one arriving and one leaving at each location at this time: the diggers near instantly fill their entire capacity?
And the narrow access road is way too congested for all those to actually leave or arrive at that rate. Moments after the shot, the trucks will clearly all have to stop and wait.
This being said, there is power in that many machines in the same place at one time. They would cetainly be able to get work done quickly. Just not quite as quickly as it appears in that shot. Waiting is part of the process, you cant have a system where every component works at 100% capacity
Yeah, I have never seen something like that in America in my life. Always plenty of machines sitting around, and every few weeks some guys will hop on them for the day, but other than that they just sit there. It almost looks AI generated how densely packed those are - though I assume that this is real footage.
With China's real estate sector stagnating (because they've built enough housing for future demand to an excess, broadly speaking), all of that capacity is moving towards clean energy manufacturing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
https://thediplomat.com/2024/04/how-china-became-the-worlds-...
The doubts about the size of the investment in that Wikipedia article are funny. It's a bit like "We cannot afford to invest in education", but the Chinese are saying "We cannot afford not to invest in education" (Famous quotes, it's more about R&D here). China's leadership is probably terrified of falling into the middle-income trap. It might be the biggest issue on their minds right now. At least I am watching from the sidelines, wondering "Are they gonna make it?".
Education has always been important in Chinese culture.
You could say it's central to their culture. Sort of goes for most Asian cultures, the education of children is something Asian parents will sacrifice greatly for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41664312
Me too! My guess is 2031, but it'll feel hollow
- Definition of this is 12,000 2011 USD, BLS says thats 17,600 2024 USD. Looking like 2024 closes at a little under 13,000 24 USD. If we calculate out the 6% CCP standard GDP growth rate, it'd take 5 years
- GDP is not very likely to grow at the formerly-real 6% per year moving forward. Population peaked, trade is now a tailwind instead of a headwind, GDP per capita at 13,000 is 0.5x Russia and 2.5x India, and we're in year 2 of a deflationary crisis that's barely being held off, if it is, and is characterized by an significant oversupply in housing stock that'll take years to run down. So I'll tack on 2 years, make it 7 years, 2031.
China scaling and efficiency is really something else. it seems they've latched on to something that works better than even democracy and capitalism
They’re certainly good at building.
Actually utilizing that capacity is something else entirely; there are factories less than ten years old shuttering due to overcapacity. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/business/china-auto-facto...
And the rush to subsidize more capacity is a big contributor to local government debt burdens in China, which is estimated to leave Chinese debt to GDP at 117%.
You are never going to get exactly the right amount of capacity, so the question is whether you want to err on the side of too much or too little. Too little might often be more efficient, but there are undeniable strategic benefits to having too much. The events of the last few years have taught us all some painful lessons about the hidden costs of JIT and lean. China might have got the balance wrong, but they aren't prima facie wrong.
They are prima facie wrong, their overcapacity is bad and actively harmful, this isn't a sign of it succeeding, its a sign of desperation from it failing.
There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago.
Dazzled by the spectacle, this misses that their economy is characterized by deflationary headwinds due to a massive, massive over-investment in property, and this just squeezes the toothpaste (debt taken on to goose GDP) to another side of the tube. (housing to batteries)
> There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago
Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?!
There's also a type of western mind that automatically dismisses the odds of a different country succeeding, based on nothing but the fact that they are using a different approach (on the surface). It's a kind if circular reasoning: our system is the best because we're the best, because of the system we have. To subvert the Simpsons - "the best so far"
Edit: I'm far from a Sinophile, but there's a certain willful blindness, concerning an almost religious belief that the west will prevail because it's the west, regardless of all the systemic weaknesses that show up again and again. It would suck for a dictator-for-life leading the biggest economy in the world, but healthy minds would introspect to see how we can do better, like we should, right? I have no doubt out leaders will pick the wrong lessons, like social credit scores and pervasive surveillance
You don’t have to apologize, man. I was on a Pullman train once but it wasn’t quite a bullet train. I also rode a Western train named Orient Express.
> There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago.
The thing is, overcapacity combined with the 996 week and labor exploitation can be used to outcompete any Western company - especially the old ones, who are spread around the country. Look at the supply chain of the established (i.e. everyone but Tesla) companies... dozens of manufacturing plants, thousands of suppliers, almost zero vertical integration because "manufacturing batteries, ECUs or windshield wipers is not our core competency, let Bosch do that".
The only car manufacturer in the Western world not following that is Tesla. They have only very few, but very large factories that vertically integrate as much as possible on site, which not only gives them the advantage of cutting out the middlemen and their profit margin but also allows for much, much faster iteration cycles when everything is done in-house with no bureaucratic bullshit associated with change requests.
Typically, a car model, its design and parts are fixed for around 2-5 years after the prototype manufacturing run, no changes are possible at all outside of maybe the software, unless the design change is necessary to meet regulatory compliance or if it's something horribly defective. Then the model gets a "rebrush" integrating a few changes, which lives on for another 2-3 years, and then a fully new iteration crops up. Tesla (and SpaceX) in contrast, they do iteration times of weeks.
The disadvantage of that model is of course spare parts logistics and repair training, because holding stock for hundreds of subvariants and iterations is all but impossible, and that shows in every statistic for Tesla's average body shop waiting time.
And to come back to China's automotive sector - they're copying that model of iterative speed just as well. We've seen them come from piles of junk barely roadworthy (or not road-legal in Europe at all) a few years ago to be able to fight heads-on with the European car giants.
China’s debt load fluctuates if you consider just the central government, local governments, and SOEs owned by either the central or local governments. Then you have private sector debt. SOEs are where a lot of china’s shadow debt comes from (localities ask SOEs they control to fund public projects of their own books), this is what pushes China’s debt load over 100%.
There’s that and the LGFVs financed by land sales which are all off official balance sheets.
In the US this model is called venture capital - build lots of things knowing lots will fail.
It's a model that creates big winners and lots of losers.
Ironically of course the other alternative is central planning which is a hallmark of communist economic systems.
> estimated to leave Chinese debt to GDP at 117%
Japan is 264%, Singapore 168%, the US 129%, France 112%, Canada is 107%, UK 97%, Germany 66%, Australia 22%, Afghanistan 7.4%, Kuwait 2.1%.
A debt ratio isn't particularly useful to know on it's own.
Efficient yes, generates good quality of life for the average citizen? Not as much. Plenty the west can learn from China on how to do large public works though.
Authoritarian governments have always been better at ordering top to underlings to get shit done, because if you don't get shit done your shit is getting undone. Which is to say erased from history and replaced by someone who will.
Basically, Chinese government wants a bigass factory and they will get a bigass factory because literally fuck you.
This is in contrast to liberal governments where governments can incentivize, plead and beg, and in certain extraordinary cases force the matter at court-point, but ultimately is at the mercy and pleasure of the people governed.
The flipside, of course, is that when authoritarian governments get it wrong they really get it wrong sometimes well past the point of recovery. Liberal governments getting it wrong have a lot more margin for error.
This factory is being built by BYD, not the government, and not a state-owned enterprise.
It's being built because BYD anticipates massive growth in demand for electric vehicles, not because of some arbitrary mandate.
BYD is known for its ruthless price-cutting and drive for efficiency, so they're a very bad example to illustrate government bloat.
There is a mandate, several interconnected mandates actually.
They're not arbitrary though, and many nations have them. China just seems to be translating that into action better.
https://www.globalpolicywatch.com/2021/06/chinas-14th-five-y...
There's a mandate for the government to support the development of the EV industry, and there are targets, but this factory is being built because BYD decided it makes economic sense for them, based on anticipated demand.
The Chinese government is doing many things that increase demand, make it easy to scale up production, etc. For example, many Chinese cities are making it difficult to register new internal-combustion-engine vehicles. I'm also sure the local government has rolled out the red carpet for BYD in terms of permits, tax incentives, and so on.
That's different from the government issuing a command, "Build us the largest EV factory in the world, regardless of economic viability!" That's how the previous comment came across.
No, it's when an authoritarian government wants something they'll get it. And by get it I mean "they'll take your house, ignore any local environment concerns and possibly just demolish entire villages and generational livelihoods".
Everyone seems to have some "oh how great it is they just get things done" as though they haven't diligently turned up to complain about some development application of the local council.
Yeah, sunshine and rainbows I suppose provided you're thousands of miles away.
From my visits to China, lI've come to conclude that Chinese people have more property rights than Westerners .
I saw roads built around houses because villagers refused to sell.
Eminent domain doesn't seem to exist there
Yes, actually. You repeated my argument only a bit more verbosely.
>Basically, Chinese government wants a bigass factory and they will get a bigass factory because literally fuck you.
> Basically, Chinese government wants a bigass factory and they will get a bigass factory because literally fuck you.
And what's the difference from the US government when it wants a bigass factory?
Isn't the difference that the US also wanted China to build bigass factories? They got too good at that.
>And what's the difference from the US government when it wants a bigass factory?
A normal business transaction, with all the good and bad parts thereof. The government can't force the issue unless they do it themselves which is usually not the case.
not just that, but the fact that the US gov't does hold elections means that what they do generally is in line with the people.
At this moment, what the chinese gov't is doing is _also_ (presumably) in line with their people's wishes - after all, factories and exports means jobs and economic growth. It remains to be seen if this continues to be in the face of a potential war, tariffs, or some other external shock.
> it seems they've latched on to something that works better than even democracy and capitalism
Wouldn’t this just be plain old fashioned authoritarianism? America can latch on to this too, and we might based on how the Trump admin turns out.
No. One required component is plain old fashioned oversupply of labor. America doesn't have that because all employable people are too rich. China also has an oversupply of skilled labor like engineers, in part because the threat of poverty is a strong motivator to get rich. America also lacks that which you can see in capable young people doing arts degrees with no thought to their future income because it doesn't matter - they'll still live comfortably even on minimum wage.
It's not that life on minimal wage is comfortable, it's that we have been told for a generation now that 'just get a college degree and it will be fine'. Happily amplified by for-profit education investing a lot of money lying to young people (ads).
Ask your local waiter with a college degree if they would have studied something else if they got the chance. My experience is that many would.
> Ask your local waiter with a college degree if they would have studied something else if they got the chance. My experience is that many would.
The problem of bad choices is orthogonal to the problem you are describing.
It's relative. Relative to the rest of the world (and China), you can still live comfortably on minimum wage.
You can still live comfortably on US minimum wage if your cost of living is like in China?
What question is this? With a US minimum wage with China CoL you are rich.
That’s an easy enough problem to solve if we had the appetite to solve it, why couldn’t we legitimize the roles illegal immigrants currently do right now with a Singapore style migrant worker program?
Probably because the average Chinese is far more skilled than your average illegal immigrant.
It's not just raw labor force. It's capable engineers, designers, architects, etc. How is illegal immigration going to solve this?
The amount of skilled people wanting to migrate to the US is almost infinite (unfortunately). If the US decided to open 20million green card spots, they would be filled.
To be clear, I think that there is an existing, legal migrant worker programme. They do most of the non-automated farm work in Central Valley California. Also, the Singapore system is a bit ugly if you look closely. I hope the US can do better.
There is an estimation of 11-30 million undocumented immigrants in the US. The biggest difference is that in the US they are working on fast food jobs, house cleaning, babysitting. Different priorities.
If the Trump administration (or the Biden administration) tried to enact an industrial policy like China, I think they would fail. It's not easy, and plenty of authoritarian governments fail at it.
And what blows my mind is that if I want to rent a tractor with a front loader for some landscaping work it’s hundreds a day. Yet even larger commercial earth moving equipment sits around unused for weeks.
Some of that may be due to the owner transporting it from job to job instead of storing it in their own yard.
Nonetheless, there's a lot of idle people/equipment in construction because things have to be done in the right order and sometimes it's more economical to over-provision than risk delaying the whole project because something wasn't available when it was needed.
Those hundreds per day will partly pay for all the sitting around unused in the hiring company's yard! You can see this in the pricing which is usually a lower rate if you hire it for a longer period.
They're building a large carwash facility near me and have taken over a year to get to the point of putting the roofs onto some steel framed sheds. I constantly think of the time when we were able to build the Empire State Building in 13 months.
The other really impressive part is that they also treated the workers really well during the construction. Cautionary Tales did an episode on this: https://timharford.com/2024/09/cautionary-tales-steel-and-ki...
They paid good wages but also kept a high bar on quality and performance. The workers in turn were incentivized to do a good job and gave feedback like ideas on how to improve efficiency, e.g. build an internal railroad to carry bricks up as they got higher and higher in height.
I have, happens around 6 AM. They get all the generators started up, power tools and full power. All the heavy machinery at full throttle. A cacaphonous 6AM salute to the internal combustion engine. Old Zeke fills his truckbed full of rusty nails and drives aggressively around the neighborhood dropping this way and that. Well, not old Zeke nowadays, more like Senor Ramirez Carloz Gonzalez.
Question is, if it's 6 AM at a construction site, and nobody is around to hear it, do they make any noise?
It does seem to have an AI look to it. The resolution is pretty poor.
It's amazing what happens when you don't have union inefficiencies holding back progress.
10% of workers are unionized today, vs. 30+% 1940-1960. Surely this isn’t the reason.
I'm sure that's the one and only reason
They don't have time to waste, they have to get as much cheap stuff out as possible before further tariffs.
Viewable link: https://nitter.poast.org/taylorogan/status/18591462425191672...
The scale is just insane .. hard to comprehend a 3km/2mi wide factory.
To my knowledge the largest factory in the world is BASF Ludwigshafen (Germany) with 10 km². Here is an aerial photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:LudwigshafenBASF2017-0... Followed by Volkswagen Wolfsburg (also Germany) with 6.5 km². Seems the BYD factory is competing with it for rank #2.
I guess it depends on what qualifies as a factory. Azovstal in Mariupol is around 11 km^2 and certainly isn’t the largest in the world.
It will be 50 sq. km by the time the extension is finished [1].
[1] https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1859149340897628545
The wording is confusing, but I believe the Zhengzhou International Land Port is 50sqkm, not the factory. That also fits the numbers they're giving [1]: "Zhengzhou International Land Port Project announced ——total area of around 50 square kilometers", and that includes a lot of "open-air warehouse" (parking lot). It's still massive, but not quite as crazy.
1: https://www.zzhkgq.gov.cn/2024/01-28/2944537.html
Agreed, the factories clearly aren't the same size as Manhattan.
I don't think BASF really counts, it's more of a factorio district and not one single insanely large building.
I was refering to the size of the factory premises = land + buildings.
It seems we need diffrent categories for a ranking: premises vs. base area of the buildings vs. floor area of the buildings vs. largest building per base area vs. largest building per floor area, etc. And then we would need to clarify what counts in each case ...
Anyway, I live about 20 km from BASF and it is quite an impressive sight, especially at night. Here is a photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Fackelschein_des_Steam... However, the red lights are probably an artefact of the camera; typically the lights looks rather bluesh in reality. And the photo was shot with a 400 mm lens: the television tower in the foreground is more than 4 km away from the factory, the house at the left about 3 km.
I've studied in the area and, as a bit of a night person, often drove past at night when driving to or from parents. A very cool sight, though the smell is often less pleasant :D - presumably nothing toxic, that would be illegal, but it does smell bad. Kind of like burning plastic, but without the harshest components of that smell.
Anyway, cool that Germany still has the biggest of something ~heavy industry.
I hope you appreciate how nice it is that you can reasonably assume that whatever you're smelling isn't particularly toxic.
I would be curious to know what chemical compounds that you are smelling. Germany has incredibly strict environmental protection laws. As an aside, the waterfront of Kawasaki, Japan is pretty similar, but not one single company. It looks straight from Factorio.
Like an image ripped from Blade Runner.
Nah, Blade Runner looks better.
So much roof space, so little PV. I guess in China they don't do rooftop PV as much because the regulations allow for cheaper installations somewhere on a meadow?
BYD 900k employees vs Tesla 122k
https://cnevpost.com/2024/09/13/byd-workforce-exceeds-900000...
They make batteries, regular cars and hybrids and the cost of labor is lower
If you search Zhengzhou many of the results from mainstream media were about ghost cities
The rest are about Foxconn's factory.
This BYD factory were build further down south of downtown.
Twitter links no longer load at all on my iPhone. Can someone post an archive link or something?
You can replace all twitter.com (or x.com) links with xcancel.com:
https://xcancel.com/taylorogan/status/1859146242519167249
Wild, fascinating, frightening.
It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change.
It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale, and nations that suffered similar disparities in industrial capacity (not to mention energy production) haven't done well in the past.
> It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale
The sad thing is, we still can if we want to. When Russia throttled down the natural gas pipelines into the EU, it took them mere weeks until the first new floating natural gas terminal was put into operation. And they've collectively dumped an astonishing number of new terminals into the North Sea since then, all at the same time. Germany alone spent $6B in infrastructure investments before that first winter without Russian gas.
We could if we wanted to. But by and large, we don't want to.
Of course we can motivate ourselves. But they're acting like we did in the 1800s through the mid 1900s. They just build anywhere no matter what. They have no interest in dealing with environmental concerns. The officially released pollution levels in China are mind-boggling and they still do not represent how bad it really is.
You think US manufacturers wouldn't be delighted to just buy a few hundred acres land and start building stuff? They'd do it in a heartbeat. For better and for worse, it is not a level playing field. Conforming to government regulations over here is stifling for a 100-house development in Arkansas, but it's almost impossible in California, Illinois, or New York. Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years.
> Conforming to government regulations over here is stifling for a 100-house development in Arkansas, but it's almost impossible in California, Illinois, or New York. Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years
Reading this (and I completely agree, it's even worse in Europe), sounds like Chinese "management" implemented Agile on a whole new scale.
The upside of a planned economy is that it can work like the internals of a private company, with one drive, "do what needs to be done". The downside is that it can work like the internals of a private company where you bite the bullet or look for another employer. This is much harder with countries, especially because planned economies are more likely to have taller fences around them.
The air quality in China is lot better now than a decade ago. The smog was so bad in 2012 and I remembered the AQI hitting 999 (the max it would go) on more than one occasions during Beijing winter.
Went back again in early 2024 and it was so much better, pollution still noticeable on more days than not but at least half the time I spent had AQI below 100.
I was in Shenzhen in 2017 and again recently. The difference is huge. The air quality walking around the street is very good and you never smell gasoline.
I’d argue that vested interests in oil and coal have done more to damage the US’s ability to invest like this than any regulatory red tape.
Huge parts of America hate EVs. There is endless debate about nuclear vs clean energy vs coal, which prevents any change from happening.
Counterpoint: See the speed with which Colossus has been (is being) assembled in Memphis Tennessee. Yes, on an existing industrial site but this is still one damn impressive accomplishment.
https://www.servethehome.com/inside-100000-nvidia-gpu-xai-co...
A data center is much easier than building an industrial factory
They had to build themselves because third parties gave longer timelines.
This seems like an apples to oranges comparison. They are completely different. Can you provide some specific examples?
Is it your thought that is typical for large-scale development?
This is why Trump has pushed for mass deregulating, America (let alone the west) can't compete against China when our politicians demand that we straight up don't.
The bread and butter of progress is competition and I think a lot of American companies “won” like Boeing or Intel in the 90s and no one else could compete.
Unfortunately winning is disastrous because it makes you complacent.
Perhaps the most flagrant and dumbest example is Internet Explorer 6.
I do not approve of raising tariffs on foreign vehicles because it will dull our edge in the long term. Protectionism is a short term bandaid.
Tariffs are a good way to ensure you still have a domestic capability. If Germany/korea/japan/China outcompete all US auto makers and they die, along with it goes a ton of jobs, manufacturing knowledge & capacity, cultural influence, an ability to keep capital flowing domestically, downstream suppliers, and ability to change factories from autos to military equipment in wartime. If China just keeps taking industry, then all we have left is an outpouring of all capital and a bunch of “content creators” left. Not a good prospect.
US auto companies already try to compete globally in situations with/without tariffs. That provides plenty of competition too.
I completely agree with you, but it’s still funny how we were ok with the companies moving the jobs out of NA (so, we lost all the things you’ve listed) to save themselves money. But when it comes to saving money for the consumers, suddenly we’re not allowed to do the same thing, because it doesn’t help the bottom line.
Intel was famously not complacent. Perhaps a long lapse starting a decade ago. But even then “complacence” was not the problem. Ditto for Boeing. Managerial focus on just milking the cow has been the fundamental problem: and they milked frantically—not complacently.
I can't tell if I'm missing sarcasm here but ...
Intel was paying customers Billions a year not to use their competitors products in the early 2000s. So not complacent about breaking the law to stifle competition but also complacent about actually building competitive chips that could win in the market.
One could perhaps say that short-termism is complacency about the future.
Well even with 100% tariffs BYDs new sub 10k vehicles will be far cheapet than anything else the US market has to offer
> our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change
The US and EU are long off-peak carbon emissions (emissions even decreased during the Trump administration I, even using a trendline ignoring COVID). The biggest emitter right now is China, and it's emissions are growing not shrinking, and a considerable amount of that (including 90% of the worlds new coal plants) goes to projects like this.
China is building more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. At this point there is no “let’s just reduce our emissions by 30% or so and hope things work out” plan that’s compatible with stopping worst-case outcomes, there is only a “let’s replace every single energy and fuel source with non-emitting ones on a ridiculously short timescale” plan. Insofar as we have a chance of doing that, it’s because of what China is doing right now.
To the extent that they’re using fossil fuels to build the infrastructure for this renewable tech, I’m completely fine with that. That’s much better than using it to build iPhones or consumer nonsense. Insofar as they’re building a renewable grid backed by modern dispatchable coal and they’re also building out massive storage manufacturing capability and their emissions are on track to decline, I’m also fine with that.
ETA: China’s emissions appear to be peaking and entering a structural decline. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2453703-clean-energy-ro...
Kinda, but we’re not really in a position to blame them right? To some extend, sure, but that’s easy to say when you’ve already got yours.
What does blame have to do with anything? Emissions are emissions.
The tone of the message feels kinda like ‘China bad, look at all those emissions’
It’s possible that was not the intent.
Western country populations seem to be willfully falling for obvious fossil fuel propaganda over and over again. Future generations will rightfully curse our names. (Including today's children.)
Sadly it comes down to "Show me the money."
I vote for change, but I don't have the money to buy electric. Even running costs don't make the difference when it comes to multiple tens of thousands of dollars in purchase price.
I'd love to "care for our environment by buying an electric car". I can't afford to.
Affordable EVs are a solved problem. China has solved it. The world responded by putting up tariffs.
I already own a car. An affordable EV is a thing I'll buy in like 15 more years when my already 20 year old Toyota finally dies maybe.
If I bought it sooner, then my car would just go into the second hand market and do the same thing.
"Affordable" isn't changing anything: I don't need another car, and I'm not going to prematurely crush mine into a cube.
Frightening?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...
We Americans have more to fear from economic and technological dominance than we do from military invasion.
As a budding superpower ready to unseat the US from it's throan. All China has to do is wait for progress and time to run it's coarse and emerge the victor. If anything, the US is the tigger happy country as we watch the inevitable, looking for any excuse to use to stop them.
Remember, why the hell does China give two shits about war if China can surpass the US simply through economic progress. They don't care, in fact they want to avoid war.
why does they have to be a winner and loser. everyone can thrive? except the United States is being buoyed by two main elements.
1) the ability of the internet to extract value overseas while untaxed in the client country 2) The H1B visa which funnels the best talent from struggling countries 3) strong institutions and financial and education centers and 4) military industrial complex that thrives on basically manufacturing conflicts with other countries
#4 is what is scary. not the dominance of any other country itself
> why does they have to be a winner and loser. everyone can thrive? except the United States is being buoyed by two main elements.
Why can’t there be a winner and a loser and both the winner and the loser cooperate and thrive with loser having the humility to admit he’s a loser? Isn’t this the same peaceful consequence? Just say China is better and admit inferiority for the everlasting peace. Why can’t you do it?
Because competition and cooperation are intrinsic parts of natural selection and therefore evolutionary biology and therefore human nature. Don’t pretend to be above your own nature.
Or do pretend. We can all act according to our ideals and deny our basest instincts, but don’t expect the mob to act the same way in aggregate.
I don’t think anyone disputes that China can out-manufacture us. Does that make them “better”, they the winner and the West the loser? Obviously not; things don’t end, history continues and things can go in different directions in the future. Not to mention that there are other dimensions that matter besides manufacturing prowess, namely quality of life, individual freedom, etc.
In the dimension of quality of life, technological prowess and economic GDP, China is likely going to match the US in western cities. Think about it. Manufacturing lies at the heart of everything. Do you think there's some universe where the US is good at designing things and then submits the design to China to manufacture and then suddenly China remains in the dark on how to design things?
Don't be deluded on the whole individual freedom or quality of life thing. 99% of Americans don't even exercise the right to protest. China doesn't let you protest and this fact doesn't really affect anyones life.
So that I can afford cheap shit from poorer countries, if they stay poor they contribute less to climate change, less competition for finite rare resources
frightening! depends on your perspective of who you are ;)
Is there a list of the world's largest factories, in a liberal sense of the word? The ones I'm aware of only consider individual structures [0], which excludes industrial plants that span multiple buildings, like this one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings
One of the old classics in this genre of largest factories, BASF, https://www.basf.com/jp/en/who-we-are/organization/locations...
Volkswagen's main factory is also pretty large: "Spanning more than 6.5 km², the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg is now the largest automotive plant in Europe, employing more than 60,000 people."[0]
[0]: https://www.volkswagen.de/de/marke-und-erlebnis/volkswagen-e...
It becomes tricky because what does 'factory' mean? Especially once it's scaled to the size of a small town, you start to see town-like buildings popping up. There's some stuff which is arguably necessary for the factory itself, such as the train station and logistics facilities, a test track, and things which are necessary for the employees directly such as employee car parks and restaurants, but then there are other things like a visitor centres, shops, gardens, monuments, museums, a Ritz-Carlton hotel. Also, are power and water facilities part of the factory? Even if that means that we're counting a reservoir as 'part of the factory'[0]?
How would you come up with an exhaustive list of which buildings contribute to the size of the factory, and which should be excluded?
Otherwise, you're just looking at the land owned or leased by the company, which is obviously a valid measure somehow, but it's hard to say whether it would lead to fair comparisons. I don't have the answers, just throwing it out for debate.
[0]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/wYLiYdHFioyR9Y8b6
Which if this BYD site is 2x2 miles for ~5sq km, BASF is twice as large at 10sq km! Wow
> ~5sq km
I get over 6 km^2.
Point still taken.
2x2 miles is over 10km^2. Barely.
US/German manufacturers just do assembly, they don't manufacture parts, so they only need assembly plants. BYD is a vertically integrated manufacturer. They make everything in-house which helps drive down costs. This huge footprint results in having all those different manufacturing lines under one roof. They depend on no one for finished parts, the only supply chain is raw materials.
I believe outsourcing can be a symptom of not innovating anymore.
Imagine having to contract out every prototype to a metal working shop — it slows down your ability to iterate because you can’t just go downstairs and try it.
But once you have a design set in stone, outsourcing is cheaper than doing it in-house. These companies specialize in producing parts with economies of scale.
But if you do it for too long, you kind of lose the ability to quickly iterate. Striking a balance is hard.
> But once you have a design set in stone, outsourcing is cheaper than doing it in-house. These companies specialize in producing parts with economies of scale.
Except you need to ship the parts to your factory and still employ QA people who must check whether you got what you paid for.. If the supplier has a bad defect ratio, you must order more parts. It's not as cut-and-dry as you think.
Every time your assembly-line halts, you're paying people for twiddling their thumbs. The more external suppliers you have, the higher the risk.
People are waking up, and to be fair, Tesla really led the way in the US for the last few years because they had no choice(no one would take them seriously). The question is can the West turn the ship around before its too late?
Depends if we keep the CHIPS act and the IRA. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-ira-...
too late for what??
too late relative to what?
too late to dominate in the industry of electric vehicles and thus, control/own large % of the wealth generated.
When Trump ups everything from China by 100% I guess US would be able to make something with profit?
I doubt it. It's much easier to either launder or manufacture the goods in a third country, that benefits from most of the same incentives that made Chinese manufacturing go through the roof.
Americans will be buying Chinese goods with "made in Vietnam" or "made in Mexico" stamped on it. The American profit will be in setting up those laundering schemes
If the Trump tariffs are based on country of final assembly, then yes, final assembly will just occur somewhere else, but it will take a couple of years to setup, and the inflation shock by that time will have done a lot of damage to the economy (recession likely, depression possible). It makes sense that it took Trump forever to find a treasury secretary willing to go along with this.
You can bribe officials in Vietnam/Mexico. So they'll be your country of "final assembly".
I doubt the Americans will let them do that so easily.
They already are. Just one tiny well-explained example, although it's utterly rampant:
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/23/1197961495/the-trade-fraud-de...
No bribery required though, at least in most cases.
They tried stockpiling aluminum in Mexico during the Trump ban and that was shutdown quickly. I guess they just have to be more convoluted about it. I wonder if Trump will do something like “tariff China and any country that doesn’t tariff China itself (transitive)”, but it feels like it might be futile to do that.
The Trump tariffs will turn the entire world to China. America may no longer be interested in free trade and go full isolationism but many smaller countries can not. A painful truth is that for Europe the millions of containers with goods from Asia are a lifeline.
Couple of years for a western enterprise maybe, but in the east, things move fast. Really fast.
It depends if Trump tariffs just China or everyone. He promised high tariffs for China, but tariffs on all imports besides.
Vietnam and Mexico will massively profit.
That is not remotely how tariffs work.
Doesn't a tariff drive up prices? (or at least intended for that)
Tariffs are a surcharge on imports added and demanded by the government, paid by the people or entities importing.
As an example, if an American buys a Chinese coffee maker priced at $100 and there is a 50% tariff, there is a $50 tariff that is paid by the importing American to the American government.
The total cost to the importing American is $150. Now, if this price is equal to or higher than an American coffee maker then the importing American is incentivized to purchase the American coffee maker instead.
As another example, if Tesla sells Model 3s for $50,000 and BYD comes in with a similar spec car priced at $25,000, then putting a 100% tariff on it will drive BYD's effective price up to $50,000 allowing Tesla to compete without undercutting or outright selling at a loss.
Essentially, tariffs are a way to ensure that the pricing floor of the domestic market is not driven down unreasonably by international markets at the cost of the importers.
EDIT: Fixed some math. :V
Right, the coffee maker company in China has some options:
The middle options are the most likely: avoiding the tariff somehow. Companies do the middle two all the time to varying degrees to get around/avoid tariffs, import fees, etc, even US companies.Also the other issue: the first thing the American company does is ensure it sells coffee-makers for $149 and not a penny less.
In fact depending on your tarriff regime, this can incentivize a bunch industries to actually raise prices if the new import cost is higher then they would currently sell at.
The incentive to raise prices is pressured down by customers' desire to not spend more money than they have to. If businesses can get away with raising prices that means the price was too low to begin with, tariffs or no tariffs.
Not entirely correct. Boeing, despite all the bad press, actually reversed course on this recently. 787's wing was made by a supplier, but 777X's wing is actually built in-house, right next to the main factory, starting from carbon fiber fabric.
How much can Boeing do this though? My understanding is in the past they used moving some of their production to a country as leverage to win contracts. They are a company that moved their headquarters to DC because management treats the product as secondary as if they make widgets. Until they reverse that they aren't moving in the right direction.
Wasn’t always that way. Ford’s River Rouge plant took iron ore in one end, and rolled automobiles out the other end.
Don't forget USA auto companies also outsource their design work, CAD, etc. My understanding is that TATA used to have a whole floor at Chrysler.
So the factory accepts iron ore, crude oil, coal, lithium ore, bauxite, monazite, copper ores, rubber, and soy beans at one end and spits out finished cars at the other?
They don't even outsource their nylon zip ties?
the only supply chain is raw materials
Citation needed, this seems exaggerated. Eg. I'm sure they use IC's and I'd be very surprised if the facility includes a fab.
They, BYD, have their own semiconductor R&D and manufacturing subsidiary called BYD semiconductor.
EDIT: Seems like it is a division, so not a spin-off.
Just like Ford used to do.
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Can the west compete?
The problem with the west is that it’s already developed. Everything in the west is a bit like the European automobile industry, it’s highly refined for what it is and we expect to milk it for some time to come.
Same thing happened with the financial institutions and internet infrastructure - those who had the early versions of it established early ended up lagging behind once the technology was superseded.
The poorest countries in Europe had the best internet for a while because the richest countries wanted to milk the copper wires they invested on.
The US for long had much worse payments systems than Europe and Africa because they were at advanced stage on adopting the early technology.
strongly disagree. the West has almost no manufacturing capability or labor force (at an affordable rate) at the moment. it's almost unsustainable even for a small business to be paying $20 an hour in some cities let alone run large factories
Is it maybe because centering divs was much better career choice than dealing with machines and chemicals for more than a decade now? If that’s changing and manufacturing becomes a need, it should correct by itself.
The west, especially the USA invested gargantuan money into high margin high scale businesses and the Chinese worked their way up in dealing with atoms with help of the west. Now they too can do many of the high margin stuff and the west will have to re-learn how to deal with atoms. It happened because the west’s rich were simply shittier than Chinese bureaucrats and invested badly by choosing wrong KPI or ideas. Wonder what happens if the AI thing doesn’t pan out after pouring enormous money on it(instead of on something strategically important but not as potentially lucrative).
IMHO things are reversible, especially for the USA. Europe is in a worse place as its demographics and energy situation is less favorable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_assembly_pl...
This is a ridiculous statement. The west has absolutely staggering manufacturing capacity.
China has more. And the trends are in the wrong direction, to be sure. But Germany and the US, among many others, have tremendous capacity.
Define "the west". There was an interesting article here in HN the other day [0] "Almost 10% of South Korea's Workforce Is Now a Robot". China now surpasses all the west-aligned nations in terms of total industrial robots [1], however the west still has the upper-hand in terms of robot to population density ratio.
I think it is a matter of strategy and it seems China's strategy is innovation, science and productivity. We on the west seem to like consumption before everything else and IMHO we are doing it wrong.
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42225091
1 - https://www.statista.com/chart/31337/new-installations-of-in...
I think another axis is an underlying cultural difference: balance of collectivism vs individualism. China can say “there will be a factory here” because it’s overall good to have one, even if a few noses are out of joint. In California it’s decades of fights to get a train. The trick to competing is to find the right balance for the next decades. China used to be all-central-planning, which was sluggish and not agile. Now it’s guided by central planning (great for overall alignment) over many years rather than jerky 4 year stints, combined with massively distributed efforts to generate high levels of competition and agility. What is the optimal balance for your country or state?
Isn't robot density per 10,000 workers the standard metric used by the International Federation of Robotics?
https://x.com/orikron/status/1859657159338025418?t=9J4ASQP_M...
> however the west still has the upper-hand in terms of robot to population density ratio.
Considering that latest data shows that China industrial robot density is only lower than SG and SK (surpassing Japan and German recently), then the west doesn't have the upper hand anymore.
Depends if the Chinese need a market to export to.
The main issue with china is a reliance on exports and a declining population...
All work and productivity is ultimately an enabler of consumption.
> China's strategy is innovation, science and productivity. We on the west seem to like consumption before everything else and IMHO we are doing it wrong.
What is this even supposed to mean? You can't have productivity without consumption - who are you producing things for? Well, consumers - duh.
China is the beneficiary of having relatively low marginal costs, but it's worth noting that's been changing and production has been moving out of China and into other cheaper regions - i.e. Vietnam.
Any big grouping can compete if there’s enough will. Look at how eg Russia has rejigged much of its war machine during the Ukraine war. Look at how Ukraine has turned themselves inside out to compete. At some level of pressure, countries transform. How much will it take? Is simple economic pressure enough? Can eg Europe gather enough of its massive educated population to transform?
In economic competition, as with poker, if you don’t know who the sucker is…you’re it. China has been making suckers of many countries and they are slowly waking up.
There is a sense in which China has made a sucker of itself, too. China has some serious internal economic structure issues and it remains to be seen how long those issues and the downstream problems it creates are sustainable.
For an example, remember the amazing speed of construct demonstrated by the Chinese government building covid quarantine facilities? Hundreds of square miles of em across every province. They're all gone now.
I always hear this as a criticism of China but then I watch some footage of the actual place and it looks like it lives in the future (to be fair, it's uneven, but let me tell you I've traveled to the US enough times to be shocked at how uneven it can get). Sure, there's real problems I'm sure, where isn't there, but here in Canada by the time we've built a kilometer of an LRT line massively over budget, China has added a new high speed rail line.
I don't believe so anymore - at least not in California.
https://www.hoover.org/research/californias-businesses-stop-...
"Between January 2022 and June 2024, employment in US private businesses increased by about 7.32 million jobs. Of these 7.32 million jobs, about 5,400 were jobs created in California businesses—representing about .07 percent of the US figure. Put differently, if California private-sector jobs grew at the same rate as in the rest of the country, they would have increased by over 970,000 during that period, about 180 times greater than the actual increase."
Didn't California shut down surfboard blank production? You can't even make traditional surfboards in California anymore. They don't want jobs that produce environmental waste. Not all states are like that.
Not with NEPA (and CEQA and friends). The current environmental movements will have to be dismantled since they are extractive rent-seekers on production. Fortunately, a new administration will soon be power so there is an opportunity to remove the roadblocks to America’s future success.
A world with a Chinese hegemony is not going to be pretty, as online DoorDash hammer and sickle communists are about to discover.
No. Nixon et al handed us to CCP whole. But hey, cheap TVs, clothes and what not.
west can compete. unlike byd’s, which get bricked all the time without infrastructure to maintain and repair them, west (and japan even more so) build cars that last. this is china we are talking about, the last thing I want is a car made by them… :)
As someone from Australia, which hasn't shut its self off from the China EV market. I drive a BYD Dolphin. You should be worried. They are cheaper, and more full-featured than European equivalent. They aren't junk.
Also, they aren't the only big player from China. Australia is soon getting GAC/Aion, Geely, Jaecoo, Leapmotor, Deepal, Xpeng.
Here is an article if interested. https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/which-chinese-car-bran...
People used to say the same things about things made in Taiwan, then Japan, and then China, for things like electronics and white goods. It was true - until suddenly it wasn't.
In engineering you ultimately have to build stuff. Over, and over, and over again. You'll mess it up a lot at first, and then one day you'll realize that you haven't.
China is not stuck in 1965 trying to make an EV out of a saucepan and a backyard forge. They learn, and they keep trying. They have a domestic market that their government allows to be used as a test bed for everything they are doing, which sounds more coercive than it really is, especially given the fierce Sino-centric patriotism they have.
If Xi can last another 20 years without a palace coup, or manage a smooth transition of power that does not whipsaw policy, the West is in serious trouble.
Yeah but Japan has long had a cultural obsession with delivering high quality products. I don't know if China ever did, but if it did, much of it was wiped out during cultural revolution and replaced with succeed at all costs.
And there is a difference between success and excellence.
For example there have been zero bullet train fatalities in its entire history, and several Chinese HSR fatal accidents already. For political reasons the quality of the HSR wheels in China took a sharp downturn so expect more accidents in the coming two years.
Japanese-American here. This is revisionism. Japan was absolutely known for low quality products in the past. Probably the best "pop-culture" reference to this is "Back to the Future" when Marty travels back in time to 1955 and shows Doc a Made in Japan product (camera, I think?) Doc says its junk because its Made in Japan, but Marty sees it as high quality because its from the 80s.
Thats correct but it's hard to argue that it isn't a postwar blip in Japanese history as many companies of renown have lineages spanning both sides of the war, producing high quality product, anyways it feels like more than your median country.
Obviously quite literally survivorship bias, but since that's literal, it counts.
Japanese cameras became popular with pros during the Korean War precisely because they used high-quality materials and had great quality control. A good Leica was still better at the time, but you were much more likely to get a good Nikon.
There were many terrible electric cars out of China for years. Every province had its own little EV manufacturers. China's car industry is less concentrated than the US, but the big players are winning.
BYD is only the 9th largest carmaker in China. SAIC, Changan, and Geeley are the top 3. SAIC and Changan are state-owned, but Geeley is private, as is BYD. SAIC makes about 5 million vehicles a year. General Motors, over 6 million. BYD, around 3 million. Tesla, a little less than BYD.
Reviews of newer BYD cars are quite favorable. It's not like five years ago, when China's electric cars were not very good.
BYD has a simplified design for electric cars. The main component is the "e-axle", with motor, axle, differential, and wheels in one unit. There's a power electronics box which controls battery, motor, and charging. And, of course, the battery, made of BYD lithium-iron-phosphate prismatic cells. Talks CANbus to the dashboard and driver controls. BYD offers this setup in a range of sizes, up to box truck scale.
BYD and CATL are spending huge amounts of money to get to solid state batteries. The consensus seems to be that they work fine but are very hard to make. The manufacturing problems will probably get solved.
(Somebody should buy Jeep from Stellantis and put Jeep bodies on BYD E-axles. Stellantis is pushing a terrible "mild hybrid" power train with 21 miles of electric range, and an insanely overpriced all-electric power train. Stellantis prices went through the roof under the previous (fired) CEO, and sales went through the floor. Jeep sales are way down, despite customers who want them.)
Chinese cars used to have lots of quality problems because they didn’t embrace automation, afraid that would take away jobs (Toyotas made in China 12-15 years ago were notoriously bad compared to ones made in Japan/usa). But in the last ten years, they’ve gone full speed ahead on it, as aggressive as the Japanese, and the quality increases are really noticeable. It’s not just a tech upgrade, they’ve really changed the way they are thinking about manufacturing (not just a jobs program).
> BYD is only the 9th largest carmaker in China. SAIC, Changan, and Geeley are the top 3
Protip: when you calc Chinese numbers, be sure to lookup the latest data. 1 year or 2 means landslide difference.
SAIC sales dropped > 11% and profit down by 27% in the first two quaters 2024. Think about that for a second.
it will take years before they can prove that their cars are made to last. I won’t be lining up to buy them but in 5-10 years perhaps
Kia/hyundai went through that phase already, and just got through it with absurd 10 year warranties when they first came out. China could do the same in the states, although I think they will have enough traction in SEA/Africa/Russia//Australia by then that they won’t have to.
Mine comes with a 5 year warranty, and a 7 year battery replacement warranty. I'm fine with not waiting.
This can't be a serious take, right? Chinese consumers don't expect much less when it comes to maintenance and repair. And given their 3M+/year vehicle production output, they're not a small player.
reach out to countries that sell these cars, find people on social media and/or if you have them in real life or travel… these cars are absolute garbage
I had the pleasure of seeing one in Mexico recently. If this car is garbage, sign me up! But alas, it's impossible because we decided that since we can't compete we'll just make them essentially illegal.
not sure what your perspective is based on. gi your persistence, it seems it's likely not rooted in actually talking to these people, but perhaps some slight unconscious bias?
most of the things you use in your kitchen and also your device. you're typing this on were manufactured in China
Do you have any data about that? I have only heard the opposite from owners and it sounds a lot like the things Americans used to say about Japanese cars prior to getting stomped by them in the 80s.
two friends in russia, traveled to mexico twice this year, boss from australia… story after story after story always the same, amazeballs for X number of days and then get bricked, interior issues, steering …
I have a chinese EV (GMW, not BYD.) I am a very happy owner; huge features for the price. I am not sure i can see buying of a "mainstream" manafacturer again. (My country has no tarrifs/no domestic car building.)
your iPhone is manufactured in China :). your view is very outdated, or maybe even willfully. I'm sure they're plenty capable
This feels very paperclip maximization
Most of this is land being dug up, we don't know what it will be used for. Could just be holding area for stock, which is not a good thing. Premature to comment on the scale of BYD's factory.
The power of centralized planning.
All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average) and maintain/develop car dependency infrastructures.
This is the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy and reducing massively our climate and biodiversity impact.
I want those kind of factories to produce trains, bicycles... everything that can move people in a more efficient way than those "cars".
There is a clear reason why such factories are being built in China and if you are a USA or German citizen, you wouldn't like it.
In a BBC article from a couple of days ago [0], they hinted that China intends to take the lead into transitioning developing countries from fossil fuels to green tech. They produce batteries, EVs and solar panels. Just this year alone Pakistan of all the countries, imported 13 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels. For context - the UK has 17GW of installed solar in total.
China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.
0 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rx2drd8x8o
Pakistan has better geography for solar.
>China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.
it is classic case of new dominant players emergence when paradigm shift happens. PC vs. mainframe, GPU vs. CPU, clean energy economy vs. fossil fuel based.
How is the power being generated for all this manufacturing capacity?
60% coal, some baseload nuclear (5%), renewables (30%). They have massive dams (14% of electricity IIRC).
Coal share is shrinking, a lot.
Today, capacity factor of coal plants is below 50% (that's why you always see China builds coal plants... that stand idle) and their coal consumption has been more or less flat for a decade. The plan is to use coal plans when wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine. Natural gas is a national security risk due to imports, but they do have a lot of coal.
Out west coal drops a lot and green energy is more available. They are still limited by grid in getting green energy from west to east. They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.
> They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.
There are also other reasons. The name of western province is Xinjiang. They did have a plan to turn it into manufacturing hub, and it's one of the reasons why you see stuff you see.
I actually went to changji before, and visited my friend’s brother furniture factory, so they have manufacturing in Xinjiang. They have more potential for it than any other western province if we go by culture since Uighurs are just as industrious and educated as Han (economic competition is where a lot of the conflict stems from, if they could fix that the autonomous region would boom).
BYD make busses. They have something like a 20% market share in the EU and the number of EV busses in China is mind boggling and was an esrly sign that China was going to win the EV market:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231206-climate-change-h...
BYD also have some kind of monorail product!
World's response to the climate crisis is already dangerously delayed, and we're at a point where we need anything ASAP. We've ran out of time to massively overhaul infrastructure everywhere.
The US and UK apparently can't even build a single high speed rail line any more.
Car dependency sucks, but we won't be able to fix that in the short term, but at least we can fix its oil dependence.
Cleaner grid will also need a lot of battery storage, and EV demand helps scale that up.
I don't think it's a particularly different timescale to swap from ICE to EV than to drastically reduce car dependence. What makes you think there's a big difference to where swapping to electric cars is easier than avoiding cars?
> the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy
The worst except the others. Like sure, retooling our metropolises might be nice. But it’s also not only expensive but incredibly carbon intensive, to say nothing of not wanted by most of the world.
It's not that expensive to put down a bike lane.
The problem with car-dependent cities is that they are very spread out. Why does public transit suck and why don't many people use the bike lanes? Because everything is far away.
We've built our cities this way. Our tax system encourages it (by not taxing land value directly and exempting development from taxation), and our zoning requires it (my city is almost entirely zoned exclusively for single-family detached housing). Bike lanes are nice, but they don't make a 25-km ride through endless suburbia any shorter.
You can't just copy the superficial traits of bikeable European cities and hope to get the same results. We need to fundamentally rethink the way our cities are allowed and encouraged to grow.
I don't use the bike lanes because most of the places I go don't have secure bike parking. I'm worried my bike will be stolen, and the local police don't take bike theft seriously. Some of the local dedicated bike trails have been essentially taken over as homeless camps, which are ironically full of stolen bike parts.
It is outrageously expensive.
"Building 101km of cycleways across Christchurch to cost $301m", population 405000, So that is $750 per person, which is about 1% of median earnings for a year. That is paid for mostly by car owners (via petrol tax and car tax) and a bit by home owners.
And the new infrastructure is visibly under-utilised - at best a few % of traffic. You could force people to bike using laws and economics I guess... I would be interested to see a per-trip cost analysis for cyclists.
There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere - bikes are great for some trips and some demographics.
Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...
301 million dollars for 101km of infrastructure is cheap compared to building highways [0]. The price of the usual infrastructure is a burden on everyone as well, not just car owners.
You shouldn't have to force anyone to choose any particular mode of transport. I think people choose what is most convenient and that happens to be cycling in urban areas where there is safe infrastructure for it.
Your question reads pretty weird to me; building cycling infrastructure makes a city more ideal for cyclists, that's exactly the point. I didn't read it yet, but I found a paper that seems interesting and in the direction of your question. [1]
[0]https://www.worldhighways.com/news/european-highway-construc... [1]https://economics.acadiau.ca/tl_files/sites/economics/resour...
> is cheap compared to building highways
How about cycleways are cheap compared to building airports?
Cycle lanes are not substitutes for highways nor airports.
Nor the other way round, though.
> It is outrageously expensive.
Quite the opposite.
> Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...
https://www.benelux.int/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Report_Cy...
The paper suggests biking only 118 days per year. The car ownership costs are not "saved" - the projected savings are wrong. Ownership car costs are 0.167/km and savings by riding a bicycle are 0.349/km.
Two ignored real costs of bicycling are lack of optionality (planning ahead for weather changes, locked into transport mode) and carrying capacity (groceries, children, sports equipment, etcetera). And I'd like to see other costs of cycling (wet weather gear, helmets, locks) included.
About the quality I expected.
Bike lane construction tends to be lumped in with regular road maintenance, which makes it look expensive, but the really expensive part is doing repairs on the existing roads. "Building bike lanes" for 300M is more palatable than "fixing potholes and repainting" for 300M
Depends on where you live I guess. "Fixing potholes" would be far more palatable than "bike lanes" over here.
This seems to be the source of that quote: https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/124611551/building-10...
Note that this is NZ dollars, and that spend is over ~16 years. I.e. ~NZ$46/year/person ≈ US$27/year/person at current rates. The article compares the costs to road and motorway costs in Christchurch.
> not that expensive to put down a bike lane
Scale-wise insufficient. We aren’t going to get to net zero with bike lanes.
Who said net zero? Perfect is the enemy of good.
> Who said net zero?
OP is expressing dismay at EVs and suggesting building bike lanes instead. (Not in addition to.) The latter doesn’t solve the problem the former is being built to address. More bikes is nice. More EVs are necessary.
Suggesting more bikes as an alternative to EVs isn’t perfect versus good, it’s fielding rubber ducks against battleships.
Comments like these need to be included in almost any discussion about transport or in fact any discussion about any change. Most people (or both sides) dismiss ideas because they are not 100% perfect. And ignore the fact that nothing can be perfect
If we only do a little bit, we'll only accomplish a little bit.
Yes, we'd better not do a little bit. Surely then, we'll accomplish a lot.
Bike lanes and bikes aren't alternatives to most of what motorized transport is providing.
30% of the US can’t drive, whether because of disability, age, financial hardship, immigration status, or any number of other reasons. Why don't you hold the current system of "motorized transport" to the same impossible standard of solving all transportation needs as you expect of bikes?
Because your groceries are delivered by truck. Your houses are built with materials delivered by truck. In fact your entire lifestyle and the existence of the services which support those people, is provisioned and delivered by local road transport.
At least 80% of urban car trips could be replaced since the invention of the e-cargo bike. That doesn’t mean it works everywhere, of course, but there are millions and millions of people driving a single digit number of miles, usually at slower than bicycle doors-to-door speeds, and are never carrying 3+ kids and hundreds of pounds of cargo.
Think roads, not cars.
I am. Most of our road costs are for suburban car commuters and for subsidized car storage. If it was business usage and transit we’d need far fewer lanes, especially since businesses would use rail transportation more if the roads weren’t so heavily subsidized.
Most car trips are very short, and commuting to a CBD is easily served by transit.
That still doesn't solve last mile supply of stores and offices, nor does it solve construction, policing, emergency services, etc.
Each of those likely has possible alternatives to motorized transport, but they're all different alternatives. Meanwhile, today, they all share the same road network with regular civilian commute, sharing costs and mutually improving efficiency.
Put differently: instead of imagining all passenger cars replaced by bikes, imagine all roads replaced by bike lanes, then extrapolate from that.
Most middle-class people, especially parents of small children, aren't going straight back and forth between home and work. They're making other stops for day care, school, shopping, after-school activities, gym, etc. Often there are tight time constraints which make public transit unusable. Like it would be impossible to use transit to pick my daughter up from school and get her to practice on time. It's a constant juggle and the childless young urbanites who dominate HN seem to be ignorant of how regular people live.
I find it so weird that people constantly speak as though public transport is this hypothetical maybe like a moon base or something. I use exclusively public transport, bikes, and walking. My whole family (with children) does. It's just not a problem.
Children walk or cycle to and from school. By themselves. When they're very young their parents did go and pick them up sure, but then its a small school within walking distance.
We rented a car and a trailer for a couple hours recently to move a double bed. It posed no problem, and was dramatically cheaper than owning a car for a month would be even if the car itself was free.
I got a nice cabinet for my friend recently. We are going to take the drawers out and move it to his place on a bus. I don't think it would fit in your car.
> All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average)
Actually, if you pay attention to scales and sizes, it's so very little to achieve so much. What you're seeing is tremendous efficiencies concentrated on a small piece of land, affecting transportation on a vast scale.
Believe it or not, but the buses and trains are also being manufactured in China. if you'd visit, you'd see that they have excellent public infrastructure, with multiple redundancies
I’m a bike commuter, all on board for transit, etc. but too much of the world – especially North America – is built around cars exclusively and that’s not changing any time soon because doing so would require things like massive rezoning to avoid people needing to travel such long distances just to function.
If we are going to have cars, I’d prefer they be smaller, safer EVs contributing ⅓ the carbon footprint of the status quo. Every bit of savings buys years to make further changes, and it directly saves lives and improves quality of life for a billion people. Even if climate change was not happening, it’d be worth doing for the improvements in cardiovascular health, disruption of sleep patterns and other consequences of engine noise, local water and soil pollution, etc.
I agree that cars are at least double the mass they need to be. The size of cars needed for a school run or to drive to work are generally quite small, but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.
> but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.
This is the reality in United States, but not in most of the world.
Sadly though, other countries are trending the same way.
Unfortunately the only places in the world that I know of building new cities are UAE, Saudi, Egypt, China. I don’t think any of those are building for car-less.
Saudi Arabia's "The Line" is car-free.
For the 1000th time here, even extremely well developed public transport by US standards and various financial punishments for owning cars is simply not enough for people to drop them, the convenience is simply too high.
Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year.
Maybe some AI driven community (or even private fleet) of shared cars to be hailed in Uber style on demand would work, reducing number of cars overall and the need to own personal one(s). Not there yet.
I don't think anyone envisions having no cars; public transportation make it so we don't need cars, and other nudges make it so we have fewer cars than we would otherwise have.
Next weigh up your house, get ashamed, tear it down and live in a tent.
You might as well wish that the factories produced teleporters. You're putting the cart before the horse. You have to fix the demand side first. I know there's an online demand for public transportation and bikes and if you are in that bubble it can feel like the whole world is with you, but in the real world, most people (obvs not everyone) prefers to have their own car.
I think there's hope since the only thing people like more than their cars is being glued to their phones, and public transport enables you to do that during your commute.
Why can’t both be done? Bicycles are already cheap, and an electric bike can be purchased under $1000. Not everyone is capable of limiting their commute to the ~10 mile radius an e-bike easily permits. Some of us still need cars, unfortunately. Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move.
Is there some technology that enables high-speed travel and weighs less than a human, which seems to be an important criteria to you?
In Japan electric bikes were relatively cheap as you say but in Canada, a bike to carry my family costs more than 5-6k, closer to 10k.
I can't even import those electric mama charis because of unwarranted concern about batteries.
Hard to support bike infrastructure when safetyism means bike routes are only for singles and the rich.
A bicycle is not suitable for the 100km trip to see my parents, and the only country that can operate trains at a satisfactory level is Japan (and maybe China, but I don't trust their data).
So no, its either this or a gas car. Both are real solutions that work, today. Changing society from the bottom up is not.
or a bus.
But then again it's amazing how we ignore the infrastructure costs of building and maintaining the roads to run the cars everywhere.
Sounds swell. But people like cars. Not realistic.
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Based on your comment, you've based your identity around something that requires packing the rest of us into traffic like cattle. Many people have died unnecessarily to support this lifestyle. Many more have their time utterly wasted as well. It continues to have drastic negative effects for all life on this planet.
I agree that development shouldn't be chosen based on political beliefs; however, your argument is not without that. I'd ask for you to look into your own biases here.
Do you truly have no individualism without owning a large metal structure and without forcing everyone else to as well? I find that difficult to understand. My individuality is so much more powerful than that.
You might get downvoted a lot, but I feel the exact same way as you do. Trying to destroy cars is starting to become a political/religious belief.
A lot of people think that people stopped being religious, they dont go to the church. But 24/7 Internet, TikTok, Youtube Shorts, etc, I think brought the Church to our homes in front of our eyes 24/7, the religion is different and there are many factions, but the obsession with trying to control every part of other people’s lives is starting to comeback.
The people who strongly try to take away other’s freedom to drive cars, eat meat, or so, often like hypocrites support almond milk that is made by mass murder of pollinating bees in california, gazillions worth of water just to grow oats for oatmilk, especially in a world, where in a lot of places, water is considered to become far more scarce in 20 yrs than Crude Oil will be.
Our world has societal problems sure, environmental too, but like always its technology, better, more advanced, much preferred ones, that can fix it, not this obsession with trying to take things away from people.
The internet and being constantly glued to our phones, desks, letting activists indoctrinate people create echo chambers, is leading people to impulsively downvote everyone they disagree with, without any discussion. It has become a religious doctrine, with “sides” to pick, and the apolitical and the agnostic, treated as villains who “support the status quo”.
I hope we can come out of this, what you said about boats and living by the sea, I’ve thought of it too, individualism is a beautiful thing, a human right hard fought across generations, passed on in our societies by our loved ones, who won this for us. I hope our democratic societies can keep it, defend it.
No, the initial goal of this factory is to achieve dominance over the global automotive industry but the ultimate goal is to convert it into a machine that can spit out drones to invade Taiwain, South Korea, and Japan.
Source? Zhengzhou doesn’t seem like where you’d put a factory you want to protect from the combined forces of Japan, Korea and America.
You build the drones in advance of the conflict.
It's very questionable if America will play a role there. It's 50/50 that Xi will be able to do a personal favour to Trump or Musk that will keep America out of it.
When the times comes to defend Taiwan (or Japan/Korea) it will be life or death for the US to react and win. If they fail, the whole house of cards will collapse for the US. Trump as stupid as he is had gotten the ball rolling in the correct direction in his first term and I don't see how he will deviate this term.
Where do you think the Chinese will build the factories that spit out drones en masse to invade their neighbours?
> Where do you think the Chinese will build the factories that spit out drones en masse to invade their neighbours?
Where they're currently building drones.
In times of war factories will be retooled to best serve the needs of the military.
I anticipate that in a regional war China will need more aircraft than land vehicles, especially given that the regional adversaries they are facing are mostly island nations.
Why do you think the Chinese will invade their neighbors?
Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.
They abhor liberal democracies and seek to extend their domineering control over as many people as they can.
The CCP is an absolutely tyrannical organization that denies their own citizens the rights that you and I take for granted. Why would they ever desire their neighbours to have what they deny their own people?
Look no further than Hong Kong and North Korea to see what China wants for their neighbours.
South Korea only exists as it does today because Western forces repelled Chinese supported North Koreans from conquering it.
Japan only exists today because of American rebuilding after the destruction of Imperial Japan during World War 2.
Taiwan only exists as it is today because of American support.
China would have subjugated these entities and destroyed any chance of prosperity and independence that they had if not for the efforts of people who believe in individual autonomy and liberal democratic values.
China only has the power that they do to day because of authoritarians in the west who tricked the world into thinking that globalism means that we should engage in trade with undemocratic societies.
Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.
Did they invade Hong Kong? It's a very western viewpoint that invasion is the only way to affect change.
Hong Kong was leased from China. No invasion necessary.
They've squashed the democracy movement there, though.
I'm not saying they're not trying to expand their sphere of influence. I just think they're not quite as gung-ho about it as western powers. They work slower and less aggressively, invasions are a last resort.
Now do Tibet.
75 years ago? If that's the closest precedent you can find, that kinda speaks for itself, doesn't it?
Are you a Russian bot account?
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Spoken like a true out of touch professional managerial class person. Regardless of country, your kind just got totally rebuked this past year. If you didn't realize, auto manufacturing was the last major home grown profession where you could have some semblance of stable middle class life. Once that is gone, the hollowing out of the middle class will be complete and there will be no money to transition to your garbage solution that the population clearly does not even want.
Cars only survive as a viable means of transportation due to vast subsidies and a total reorganization of society around them, the most inefficient mode of transport you could imagine. They are not the future of transport, they shouldn't even be the present.
> the most inefficient mode of transport you could imagine
Rockets, helicopters, trebuchet-and-parachute?
> I for one cannot wait for the total destruction of European and American auto manufacturers
I am so confused, the only way that can happen is via cheap imports of cars from other countries including China. So why would that help "real transport solutions" ?
If anything cheap EVs would make them less likely since a lot of nasty pollution from legacy ICE cars would be gone.
Because even if ICE cars are entirely replaced by electric tomorrow in their entirety, they are still a blight choking up roads with traffic and noise, nevermind the destruction of the rural town or village. The incentive to preserve such an absurd status quo drops away when the loss of manufacturing jobs starts to be less of a question to contend with. They are gone either way, the only question will be if you want to continue having your population pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into foreign companies or not.
Thanks, I hate it.
Just wait till Trump hits 'em with tariffs. That'll fix 'em --- NOT!
China is rapidly de-carbonizing and leaving the West behind.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...
For reference, England consumed 1 billion tons of coal during it's peak coal consumption decade.
So please stop with the "China is decarbonizing" crap, because they are not. A more accurate statement is "China understands the importance of energy and is applying an as-much-of-everything-approach to achieve its industrial goals"
You are comparing a country that was probably less than 5% of China's current population during that peak. And not only is China 17.5% of the world's population, it is also the major manufacturing hub for the majority of the world. 10 times as much coal as the UK's peak is still a tiny number.
The reality is that China is emitting much less CO2 per capita than the US or Canada, and just a bit more than the more industrious EU countries like Germany. And this is territorial emissions: if you take into account what percentage of those emissions is going into goods produced in China but bought by those very countries, it's probably around the EU average if not lower.
Is China anywhere near a net 0 goal? No, not even close. But among industrial powers, it is one of the ones that went by far the most into green power.
Also please stop comparing absolute numbers between countries with more than an order of magnitude population difference.
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Relative numbers are what matters realistically when comparing countries. The comfort and buying power of 1.4 billion Chinese people counts as much as that of all of the citizens of the EU and USA together.
It is not in any way moral or acceptable to imagine that China or India should have lower total emissions than the EU or the USA, despite having many, many more citizens.
And this is not even discussing total historical emissions, which is what actually matters most for global warming, and where the first century of massive emissions was almost exclusively due to Europe and the USA.
I know it isn't fair. Life isn't fair and neither is climate change.
It's not about fairness. It's about the fact that countries which have huge emissions per capita can't rest on their laurels if they have relatively low total emissions. Instead, they need to take an active role in reducing emissions - both their own, and those of people in the developing world. If Germany or the UK or Norway or France (not to mention Canada or the USA) want to reduce emissions more but can't realistically reduce theirs as much, then they need to, for example, start donating green energy solutions for developing countries, to allow them to grow their economies and comfort while keeping their own CO2 emissions lower.
What these countries can't do is start pointing fingers at others and claim that people in India say, who emit 2T CO2 per capita, are the real problem compared to their 14-7.
look at the trend lines of co2 emissions per capita for countries. You might find it interesting.
heck, even just look at co2 emissions per capita NOW. we arent talking about a high and mighty high emissions population dictating down to countries with low emissions that they should reduce. We're talking about china with more emissions PER CAPITA than europe, and every individual country in europe. Many developing countries are worse than pretty much every european country. Libya, iran, malaysia, all worse than every country in europe.
Europes emissions are going down over time. Chinas are going up - in an exponential curve.
this is the point where people deflect and claim "oh, but those countries manufacture stuff the west uses, it's their fault"
It's really not. A big part of the reason they manufacture those things and the west doesnt is because the west actually bothers to hold up any kind of environmental laws at all, driving companies away
Yeah it's going to suck for Americans as the US has to lower their total emissions to match the country of Denmark.
Absolute numbers matter when considering the total CO2 budget for the Earth.
When considering how to divide that budget among the people of Earth absolute numbers for countries do not matter, because the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary lines humans draw on maps.
One easy way to see that per capita is the correct way to allocate the budget rather than per country is to consider what happens if countries split. Suppose we agree on a worldwide budget of 4 x 10^10 tons of CO2/year.
If we go by country each country's share is 2 x 10^8 tons/year. That would mean in a small country like Liechtenstein they could live a lifestyle that required 5000 tons/year/person.
Meanwhile, in the US we could only live a 0.6 ton/year/person lifestyle--about what Zimbabwe uses today. That's about 1/25th of the current US lifestyle.
That is not going to work. The US could hold a constitutional convention and dissolve with each of the current 50 states becoming an independent country, and at the same time make strong free trade and mutual defense treaties. They can call this the "American Union".
That raises the number of countries in the world, so each country now gets a smaller slice of that 4 x 10^10 tons/year global emission budget. Collectively the total emissions budget of the combined states in the American Union is around 8 x 10^10 tons/year. That allows the American Union to live a 24 ton/year/person lifestyle as a whole (which is 60% more than the current US lifestyle).
Of course China, which only gets a 0.16 ton/year/person lifestyle under the original country allocations could do the same thing. If they did the Chinese Union with the individual countries being what are now prefectures, that Chinese Union could have a 15 ton/year/person lifestyle (about the same as the current US CO2 emissions.
Each time a large country does this "split into a strong union of separate countries" thing the boost in how carbon intensive a lifestyle that union's residents can lives comes at the expense of a drop in what the rest of the world can have.
The limit of this is a world of thousands, or even millions, of micro-countries, each with about the same per capita CO2 allowance.
Hey, I personally produce less CO2 than the entire USA combined. I guess the USA better up its game!
Yes, China still uses a metric fuckton of a coal, but they are decarbonizing: every year, the % of energy generated by coal goes down 1%, and renewables go up 1%.
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
Just to underline, this is not notional capacity (which inflates solar/wind), but actual power generation. This is all the more impressive because China's total consumption is simultaneously increasing rapidly.
cool now compare the population difference.
In order to build renewable infrastructure, you do need to expend a lot of energy: mining, processing, transporting. China is using coal to build up that infrastructure and converting that dirty energy into clean.
So when GHG absorbs energy from the sun, it's on a per capita basis?
No, but when talking about whether a country is emitting more than its "fair" share of GHG for any reasonable definition of "fair" per capita is what matters, unless someone can make a convincing argument that some people have some kind of natural or divine right to contribute more to GHG emissions than others.
More details are in this comment [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42229636
Why didn't you include England's total historical contributions to GHG emissions and technologies in your comparison then?
Its not just about population. The UK was the world's foremost manufacturing nation at the time, just as China is now. It was the centre of manufacturing of an empire so the relevant comparison is with the population of the empire. There were no real alternative sources of energy - no nuclear, no solar, no wind (in a form suitable for most industry).
The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.
And if you want to count the population consuming industrial goods as the population that "causes" those emissions, then China looks even better, because they are producing goods consumed by literally billions of people.
> The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.
Most of those did not use coal in most of the empire in the year of peak consumption: 1913.
It was providing a lot of raw materials.
The 100% tariffs are already in place under the Biden administration. Trump only needs to prevent a Mexico manufacturing loophole.
However, BYD still has the entire rest of the world to sell to. They will be fine.
Yes, BYD will be fine.
And they know this is --- hence they are doubling the size of their already massive factory.
Guess who won't be fine? US auto manufacturers. They won't be able to compete anywhere other than the USA. And China loves it.
The US government bailed out GM under Obama. Do you know what GM did this month? They spent billions on stock buybacks and millions on bonuses while firing a ton of people. F'em. They aren't a car company, they are a stock company that happens to make cars, a route most large American companies seem to be taking (see also Boeing, whose management cares so much about/is detached from their product that they relocated their management away from the business and to Washington DC).
China is a 30 million a year car market and up until 2 years ago,GM used to sell more cars in China than in the US . It was an incredible cash cow .
US auto makers have been on the ropes since the 1980s. My hypothesis is that their heyday was 50s and 60s “greaser” culture and they kinda got their heads stuck in that era. “Golden ages” are incredibly dangerous.
When people started wanting just practical small reliable affordable cars as the price of gas increased and cars became just an appliance they didn’t respond to that market and the Japanese did. It’s been either sideways or downhill since. The only thing keeping them alive now is unnecessarily large status symbol trucks and that is a limited market that will be trashed if oil spikes again. There’s got to be a limit somewhere to how much people will pay to show off or own the libs or whatever motivates one to buy an F-5000 Super Chungus.
They are still mostly missing the EV boat. First Tesla caught them asleep and now China. Culturally they still are not crazy about EVs because they do not go vroom vroom.
Trump might string them along a bit longer with protectionism and a pull back on EVs to push more vroom vroom but meanwhile BYD will eat the entire world.
Their downfall was earlier than that. Post WW2 everyone was looking to buy a new car (people kept their old one during the war because production was going to the war effort). The car companies had such demand they moved to a 'car salesman' sales structure to milk every customer as much as possible because demand was so much higher than production. They got hooked on the easy money and entrenched a lot of bad business practices/policies as a result.
GM for all intents and purposes died (remember we funded a whole new GM, a completely new business entity, during the 2008 financial crisis timeframe) and yet new GM just 'invested' 6 billion dollars in stock buybacks, millions in management bonuses while conducting employee layoffs. But they will have no problem coming and asking the government for billions 'to remain competitive' soon. F'm.
I think there’s a little bit more to the golden age story.
The “malaise era” started in the early 70s as a perfect storm of fuel economy restrictions and more widespread US economic woes. This lead to decades of low quality cars being made.
US automakers not only lost out on consumers looking for simple appliances to drive, but ALSO the enthusiasts that liked driving and cars. The car guys that came of age in this era have two choices: chase after the same American muscle cars your dad liked, or switch over to imported hot hatches and the JDM tuner scene
> This lead to decades of low quality cars being made.
Really, it was only a bit over one decade. Taking GM as an example, their last great cars were produced for the 1973 model year, after which point the economy, emissions, and efficiency requirements resulted in drastic (bad) changes. It only took until the late 1980s for them to make some genuinely good vehicles though. For instance, the Buick Regal/Oldsmobile Cutlass/Pontiac Grand Prix from 1988 were well built, comfortable, handled (relatively) well, and were very reliable - especially from 1990 with the introduction of the 3.8L V6, what is likely GM’s most reliable engine ever built (second possibly only to the small block V8). The same was tru for their sports cars (while not making much power out of the displacement, the TPI V8 firebird and corvette were similarly efficient to European sports cars at the time). Many GM cars from that era (late 1980s until early 2000s) are some of the most reliable American cars ever built.
The same is true for Ford; for example, the 1988 Probe, while not the most popular vehicle, was very reliable, comfortable, efficient, and well-built, likely in part due to their partnership with Mazda. It could reasonably be argued that as early as 1980, Ford was making pretty good vehicles, with the Mercury Grand Marquis/LTD Crown Victoria being well-built and reliable, if very down on power with questionable efficiency.
Not worth talking about Chrysler because they didn’t know how to make good/reliable cars before the fuel crisis and they certainly didn’t figure out how to afterwards.
I know this isn’t your main point but it’s worth considering that the US did actually figure out how to build really good cars again, and it didn’t take them that long. Mid-90s to early-00s American cars were, in my opinion, at the perfect point of technological advancement: CAD and high-precision/low-tolerance manufacturing resulting in engines that last well over 300k miles without major servicing; enough computer advancement to have high precision per-cylinder fuel and spark control with accurate air metering leading to better power, efficiency, and reliability; and enough material advancement to have interior and exterior build quality that makes the car look like it wasn’t built in a shed. But most importantly, they hadn’t figured out how or where to cheap out on components, so you end up with the “unreliable” components (like the 4L60e and 4T60e transmissions) “only” lasting 200k miles before requiring a rebuild - which in today’s money is still less than $1000, let alone 20-30 years ago.
From the birth of the US auto industry until about 2010, the only period where there wasn’t a single American car worth buying brand new was probably 1974-1981. The “malaise era” itself was by the loosest definitions only about 13 years, from 1974-1987.
So in your opinion, what hat would be the standout 80s American cars for enthusiasts and collectors?
Off the top of my head, there’s:
- fox body mustang
- fiero
- gnx
- bronco
Anything else would be selected primarily for idiosyncratic nostalgia reasons (eg “this is the faux-wood station wagon I grew up with”)
> US auto makers have been on the ropes since the 1980s.
Without a doubt.
In about 2000 the US automakers sued the EPA because their proposed clean air regulations for about 2009 were "impossible".
They were actually more lax than what Japanese automakers were already selling cars for in the year 2000.
So the automakers sued the US government to admit that in 2009 they couldn't build cars that were as clean as cars Japan was already making in 2000. That says a lot.
The US consumer does not buy small new cars.
As has been pointed out, they sure did in the 70's when there was a huge financial incentive.
I expect that acting like all American's want are $60K+ luxury cars is what is going to take the US auto industry into the next massive downward spiral.
I.m.o. consumer weight on safety has dramatically increased since the 70s. Frugality has decreased. Of course it is an arms race with all the other giant cars already on the road. Consequently GM etc. are trying to appease US consumers with giant EVs.
I agree with you. I.m.o. consumer preference is the root cause of the issue.
The 2008 bailout had some strings attached to modernize. I believe the Chevrolet Spark was one of these strings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Spark#Third_generati.... It was eventually discontinued.
> Guess who won't be fine? US auto manufacturers.
The US is trying to do industrial policy (like now in China, and previously in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, and in Germany before that), but without the key aspect -- export discipline -- that makes industrial policy work. I'm thinking about Joe Studwell's How Asia Works. Everything I'm seeing in the US reminds me more of the failures in Indonesia and India than of the successes in Japan and Korea. With the exceptions of -- "say what you will about Elon, but" -- Tesla and SpaceX. Bidenonics will take time to bear fruit, though, and could yet yield some successes.
Point is, using tariffs to protect "infant industry" is the opposite of export discipline.
(As a side note, most of those countries also had major land reform, whereas property rights -- sorry, "rule of law" -- are pretty sacred in the US )
Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and many other countries turned sour on importing chinese EVs in favour of some kind of protectionism. Most developing countries dont have the infrastucture for EVs. Europe hit BYD with a 17 % tariff (10% being the standard)
BYD has factories in Brazil: https://valorinternational.globo.com/business/news/2024/09/0... https://en.byd.com/news/byd-company-announces-first-factory-...
why does that matter?! :)
When they're locally built, tariffs don't apply. Like Japanese, Korean and European car manufacturers, BYD will do the same in Mexico and eventually the US if necessary.
I wonder if they built that factory to be resistant to bombing and how much air defense they plan to put around it when they take Taiwan.
I also wonder how fast it can be converted to spit out drones.
EVs on the battlefield are as of yet untested. That makes the BYD factory at best possible dual use. A bad target for Taiwan and its allies for a host of reasons.
In past wars factories making steel pots made helmets. I can definitely imagine an ev plant making drones.
Drones seem to be quite an important facet of the current war in Ukraine and Russia.
I wonder how fast this factory could be converted produce drones and how fast it could spit them out.
Imagine a circular loop of larger carrier aircraft that load up FPV drones from this factory and fly to their destination to drop them off only to fly back to do it again.
The FPV drones could have object recognition to target people, artillery, infrastructure so they could operate autonomously.
I wonder if they will put the landing pads on the factory roof or next to the factory.
DJI is already the worlds largest drone maker, better to let them continue then rebuild a car factory.
They won’t be able to take Taiwan. Taiwan has enough missiles to wipe out China’s navy 10x over before the US steps in with our navy
Look at a map of Taiwan. Or better, look at it in Google Earth. Taiwan is a narrow island with a mountain range running north-south down the middle. The developed areas are west of the mountains, facing China, in a strip 15 to 30km wide.
There's no defensive depth. And nowhere for all the people to go in an attack. It's not like Ukraine, where the current fighting is like battling over Iowa, one farm at a time. It's more like Gaza, with too many people crammed into too little land. But bigger.
China has a large number of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles. Bringing US Navy ships in the Taiwan strait means losing many of them. The PLAN has more ships than the US Navy, and is building more at a high rate.
Equally, China has enough missiles to blockade Taiwan permanently. There's no reason for them to attempt an amphibious landing or anything insane like that. It's unclear to me what the US response would be in a blockade situation, but Chinese hypersonic missiles do pose a threat to carriers.
This isn't Desert Storm we're talking about here, China is a real threat.
I still see memes about how the large government is preventing progress and causing de-industrialisation being pushed on Twitter, usually putting some European countries graphs next to USA graphs and showing how EU performed worse than USA after 2008(I guess that's the year the regulations kicked in), however they never compare China and the USA on these graphs.
Because then the libertarian propaganda turns into communist propaganda.
Can we get a vote on boycotting Twitter posts? I don't think it's right to support a platform that is now largely crazy right-wing nationalists, racists, transphobes and the like. Its owner regularly posts false information intended to stoke fears and manipulate people, and now this person is literally a government official. I don't want to see that platform advertised on HN.
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Factory square footage is the new crowd sizes. Tell your friends.