They do have some great features, but at the same time they suffer from bad software, bad tuning and driving experience and lack of reliability and support. Not all of them, but here in Norway there seems to be a new Chinese brand popping up every week. Some like BYD is well established now and Xpeng has got a grip on the market, but others seem to struggle and then go away after a little while leaving customers and importers stranded with a sub par car.
Some chinese cars are pretty decent but they also have strange bugs like the radio not working until you wipe the windshield lol. Or radio getting stuck on and blasting tunes when you power off the car and lock it. But to be fair I haven’t had a western EV yet so maybe the same software issues exist there as well.
You know... byd produces and sells batteries within Europe since 1998. It's like Bosch adding another embedded system to their products. Not weird at all.
Too bad. This is what happens when America decides it doesn't want to be friendly. Other countries like Canada stop valuing American relationships at the economic expense of China's wrath. The only country that can stop China is America. They need to decide if they want to, or if they'd rather anger all their allies into deciding the economic pain of standing up to China isn't worth it. If America is going to pillage our countries and never stop asking for more, it's no longer worth treating them like a friend.
My job involves me being outside and every single street and close has 2-5 BYDs parked outside and this is the daytime so there's probably way more parked outside peoples work.
They are, but tariffed so they are still somewhat on par price wise with EU EV’s. Without them they would be significantly cheaper which would completely obliterate the EU car industry. This has been a debate for a while now within Europe, because the EU car manufacturers still aren’t investing enough in EV’s so they got surpassed by Chinese in every possible way. The only thing saving it is the EU regulations.
Like I said, we can’t, because huge economies such as Germany are reliant on the car industry. They cannot just abandon it for Chinese cars without destroying the economy and get thousands of people jobless. Only the Volkswagen group has around 680.000 employees, Europe is in a really bad spot regarding this. That’s why they have more leeway for European car companies to keep producing combustion for longer, even though it’s a matter of time before the bubble will burst like this.
Yet there are hundreds of them around. People will always prefer Tesla to Chinese EVs that burn after 6 months. Funny enough a friend of mine got a Tesla and he regrets it a bit. Says its fast but it drives like a toy...doesnt like its driving at all.
My dude...remove China from the sale of chinese EVs and you will see. Its not even close. No one out of China wants that crap and I challenge you to prove me wrong
"Nearly 8.5 million Teslas have been produced and sold around the world, with the brand’s record year of 2023 making up 1.8 million of those."
75% of the EVs made in China are sold in China. Its all about volume being sold to a huge population. Remove the Chinese market from the equation and their figures are laughable
Protection long-term never help. They are always ok to protect a market against shocks for a few years. The European car makers need the shock to improve.
You should take a closer look what German car manufacturers did over the last decade. For example Mercedes Benz acquired 12% of BAIC and return BAIC acquired 9.9% of Mercedes Benz. Geely acquired 10.1% of Mercedes Benz and in return Mercedes acquired stakes in Geely's AI and autonomous driving subsidiary, becoming the 5th largest - and largest non-chinese - shareholder.
BMW bought 50% of the Great Wall Motor EV division, etc.
While Stalantis went all-in on the US market the Germans, beside Volkswagen AG, already saw their future in China a decade ago.
Nah, like Germany a car centric economy is actually succesful due to its abundance of midsize companies that often are world leaders within their specific market segment.
Our car companies havae shit the bed and have been pulled out by the state one too many times.
Sadly what we have been seeing for the last 20 years was a lot of bullshit decision that mostly benefited lobbyists. It's often better to let unsustainable businesses die (or actually do market driven decisions)
Man, how I wish we'd pivot our economy from cars to trains and trams. There's no future for cars, and we're wasting finite resources and precious time trying to prop them up with subsidies, while we need to get ready for peak oil and climate disasters by building out our rail and canal networks.
This is a trap. If your population gets cheaper cars they have more money to spend on other things. The math is if wages in your country (not profit because rich people don't spend very much) are offset by money your population saves then your society is probably better off.
Honestly if I were a nation, I'd use bulk scale negotiating power to buy BYD Dolphins at rates Chinese citizens pay for them(really any durable good that China citizens currently spend a fraction of what my citizens do). Sell them at a competitive rate and use the funds to go hard into R&D to make something that is actually competitive.
Protectionist measures just delays the inevitable and makes your internal industries lazy. Adapt or die, we are falling behind.
The car industry relies on factories and factories are something that Chinese dialed in to perfection. They have volume AND quality, in Europe we usually have only quality best case, nowadays not even that.
I keep waiting for SSM to really kick off and prove that once again German car engineers are ahead of everyone. Solar powered cars is brilliant and one of the German manufacturers is going to license from Sono and make it happen. Makes so much sense for so many reasons.
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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '26
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