Auto execs in the US, Europe, and Japan never thought Chinese EVs were a threat. Now they’re coming to wipe the floor with their Western counterparts.
“You won’t believe what’s coming,” warned the title of a January 2023 video from the Inside China Auto YouTube channel. “Europe’s premium car makers aren’t ready for this,” warned another video from the same channel, uploaded in July.
Produced by Shanghai-based automotive journalist Mark Rainford, a former communications executive for Mercedes-Benz, the channel is one of several by China-based Western commentators agog at what they are seeing—and driving.
American, Japanese, and European car manufacturers had decades head start in this area and they blew it chasing higher profit margins on large trucks and SUVs with lax EPA gas mileage restrictions at a time when climate change has become a major crisis.
Invested in lobbying instead of products
Who Killed the Electric Car is an excellent look at early EV business in North America
I still get angry thinking of what happened
Petrol cars go brrrrrr
And BS green washing with dead end hydrogen demo cars.
Yeah they’re so weirdly fucking attached to hydrogen cars even though there has never been anything even remotely approaching a solution to their problems.
The execs could make extra money double dipping from oil companies, they are taking marketing funds from oil companies pushing hydrogen too.
Utility companies are often public and even otherwise evs don’t really have the same margins for electricity.
I’m curious if the “climate change is a hoax” stuff is as prominent in China as the US. I’ve run into so many people who hate EVs solely because they think climate change is a hoax and EVs are just another way to scam them out of money for a lower quality vehicle… despite any evidence of EVs being better quality
American gasoline cars suck and are more embarrassing than other country’s gasoline cars, but Chinese EVs are not at all a viable competitor in the market yet and so far have consistently failed to even gain a foothold for 15 years straight.
If you have any counterargument to that, I’d like to see it.
I guess it depends on which market and what you mean by a foothold, but they’ve had some success. The second best selling electric car in the UK is from the Chinese-owned MG, for example.
And Schmidt released a report a while back with the headline claiming that every fifth new pure electric vehicle in Western Europe this year has been made in China.
China isn’t dominating the market by any means, but it seems like maybe they do have a foothold now, IMO.
Fair point, i was very vague in my initial comments. I was talking more from a reputational, manufacturing and corporate perspective more than the cars existing in the market at all, which I totally concede is the common usage. I talked about this in other comments, but the scorn of my initial comment is aimed at the absurd, valueless, propagandizing article itself, rather than the ev market in China the article is irresponsibly promoting the hopes and dreams of.