> Why didn’t the Europeans come out on top?

Fewer new entrants? America has Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, et cetera in the EV native camp, and Waymo in the autonomous-native camp.

If we limit ourselves to export variants, Europe has Polestar. (And by this metric, China has dozens of new entrants in both fields.)

Europe doesn’t need new entrants. They got legacy automakers that are no worse at making EVs than Chinese and American startups.

The problem is: they can’t make them cheap enough to compete with China in developing countries. I’m not sure if they even want to do that at this point, the margins there are so low. It’s easier to just rebadge a Chinese car as your own (Renault and GM already do that in SA).

Polestar is owned by Geely, a Chinese company