> What's the median income in Africa, and how much is the cost of a new Chinese EV that is supposed to be sold in Africa? I'm not sure, do you happen to know?

Africans are poor but Chinese EVs are cheap. What’s more, they can earn more with better tools, like Chinese EVs and Chinese investments in green energy. If you’ve been to a bunch of poor countries you know how it works by now. Yes, $10k is a lot of money in those places, but it isn’t a horrible amount of money and is realistic for lots of non-rich people.

> Chinese automakers were/are subsidized by the CCP (including "investment" deals via Belt and Road), it's a response to that. Even today China requires joint ventures for western automakers to operate in China (to my knowledge). China already turtled up via protectionism.

Yes, thats definitely fair. But they didn’t turtle up, they innovated and developed new tech instead. The difference is that China used protectionism to catch up, the USA is using protectionism to…be lazy and dumb. Which one do you think will pay off?

> When you say western automakers aren't aiming to compete on their products what do you mean? The quality of the vehicles? Capabilities? Cost? All of the above?

Yes. Germany has the best bet of catching up, the American auto corps have been dying for a couple of decades now and are probably beyond help. Japan (not western, but usually included) made dumb bets on hydrogen that it still isn’t walking back.