> I think this is a serious problem in existing car companies. They attach too much prestige and career to being "petrolheads", or simply working in the engine division; after all, that's the most expensive to develop and least easy to substitute part of the car. The EV transition threatens to sweep that all away. Probably most of the EU manufacturers won't really get on board until those people retire.

You speak as-if they didn't create EVs. It's just that most of the European EV platforms were resounding failures, be it CLAR, CLAR II (BMW), MEA1 & MEA2, (Mercedes), J1 (Porsche), e-tron (Audi), MEB (VW), of these MEB is pretty much the only one that turned around to generate some kind of volume, but that took many years. Sales numbers for all of these are way below predictions, we're not talking about a 50% miss here. I don't know how much a car architecture costs to develop, but I'd wager it is not a cheap endeavor. Between that and the comparatively large number of battery-related EV recalls these projects probably represent double-digit billions of losses for the European car industry. This seems realistic given the widely publicized $20bn Ford EV write-down. So given these enormous sunk costs and yet they're still somewhat investing in EVs doesn't read to me like they're not trying to compete on EVs. If that were the case, they'd just cut their losses, or done so years ago.

That's where all those European battery factories that were announced a couple years ago went: Consumers do not buy EVs anywhere near the expected volume and therefore there is no demand to finance such factories. The handful of batteries needed for the low volumes of EV production are easily sourced from existing factories and the rest is imported from China.

Stellantis/PSA doesn't appear in this story because they never went beyond compliance car EVs (i.e. their "let's stuff a 50 kWh gross battery and the cheapest electric drive we can buy from a supplier into an ICE chassis" approach).

> They attach too much prestige and career to being "petrolheads", or simply working in the engine division; after all, that's the most expensive to develop and least easy to substitute part of the car. The EV transition threatens to sweep that all away. Probably most of the EU manufacturers won't really get on board until those people retire.

“Those damn pesky artists still painting by hand. We need to wait for them to die out to let the stable diffusion guys take over and then we will be number one!”

I know what I said. Engines are an art.

> Jack Welch's "destroy your business dot com"

What is this?

> Set the tariffs to offset any government subsidies or environmental regulatory costs.

The problem is this is really hard to objectively measure.

> Complete protectionism doesn't work because it makes your own manufacturers non-competitive on the global stage.

Yes - and this is a problem Detroit has been struggling with since Japan got decent at cars. The recent wave of protectionism is backing them into the dead end.

> How come this hasn't happened with solar panels, inverters, telecom equipment, batteries etc.

It actually began a few months ago regarding solar panels and batteries [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...

Solar panels, inverters and batteries are not critical infrastructure and I'd wager the jobs impacted are considerably lower than the automotive industry.

I guess it's a bit like the nuclear deterrent. The threat of them raising prices or refusing to sell to other countries might be enough.

For telecom, at least, governments have legislated against Huawei equipment, Nokia is going strong from a European side

Really this is conspiracy level thinking. It's not like there's no car industry in the EU, it's just that it's grown in the low-COL areas like Slovakia and not in high-COL areas like Germany.

Chinese imports and local manufacture should be able to compete in the "free market". It's just that that term has been heavily debased by idiots misusing it, like everything else.

It has. There's an enormous amounts of solar panel manufacturers in china that had to close down, due to the governments ordered over capacity, to try and take over the world. This has led to enormous waste of resources in china.

Now the government has ordered massive development of electric cars, to push down prices to loss making levels. In a few years, a lot of chinese elctric car manufacturers will close down, just like what happened with solar.

The trick here for the west, is to copy china, and once the internal bubble bursts, launch its own companies in solar and e-cars based on copied chinese technology.

The hunter has truly become the hunted!

    > Tesla ... are (from what I gathered) still building sub-standard cars.

Oh yes, the hands off capitalism that involves the CIA forcing multiple regime changes in other countries to beenfit American corporations.

According to ChatGPT the labor cost per vehicle is more than twice as high in the US versus China. $1,341/vehicle vs $585/vehicle

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a292f0205ec819182b54e48ce9702a3

Mitsubishi? I disagree. There were founded two years after the Meiji Restoration (~1870) to build cargo ships and (later) mine coal. However, during World War II, they were a huge part of the Japanese war machine.

> Do you honestly think they had 'communist' backdoors to key infrastructure they were selling into the West, to be scrutinised by armies of security engineers? They are not stupid.

The UK used to have a special BT+Huawei+MI6 joint office where the kit was subject to inspection. I never heard of anything confirmed coming out of there, and the thing seems to have vanished from the internet. So I suspect the order to phase out Huawei was similarly politically motivated.

> internally, China is hyper competitive, with no rent-seeking class

The party elites and their families are all billionaires!

This type of concern could be ameliorated through the proper application of consumer protection laws concerning privacy and the right to modify and repair the things we own. The US doesn't want China to be able to spy on drivers because the US wants to be able to spy on drivers, which is why the proposed "solution" to your concerns is to simply ban Chinese cars. It's not about privacy or protecting consumers, it's about deciding which wolf gets to eat the sheep.

> This essentially means the manufacturer controls them

The thing is, this problem exists regardless of who the manufacturer is, and using nationalism to make it about China disguises the real problem. Tiktok didn't magically become safe or unsafe when it was divested.

No, but at the same time, the established car manufacturers are very protective of their own stuff so they are disincentivised from e.g. building a car that works offline. John Deere is infamous for this, locking down their machines to the point that they would become scrap if the company ever went under (for example).

But it's all capitalist forces, because while in theory new companies could start that make basic / offline / affordable / maintainable / reliable cars (and tractors, and everything else), there is simply not enough demand making them non-starters.

It's like people (on here) asking for open phone platforms or phones with smaller screens; they're a minority. Most people do not care.

China is definitely a manufacturing powerhouse. But if you think it’s morally superior to the USA I strongly recommend doing some reading. China is an authoritarian nation with extreme censorship as can be seen with the GFW. Criticism of the government is not taken well, LGBTQ content is forbidden, poor treatment of unsupported religions, poor acts of espionage, they have mongered plenty of wars and territory disputes themselves, and have been extremely poor stuwards of their corner of the internet onto the rest of the world.

China has no legs to stand on in a mortality debate. I’m not exactly of fan of things in the US recently either for the record

Edit: forgot to mention Taiwan as well as the Hong Kong protests. Recently individuals and an Artist were arrested in China for trying to remember those passed.

You know China is busy genociding its Uyghurs population, right?

Their cars are probably better than US ones, but they are not free of the taint of genocide.

Edit: and that's not counting their aggressive territorial expansion in the South China Sea and their threats against Taiwan.

I cannot speak for the the complete BYD cars, but I can say their battery tech is outstanding. As well, they are rolling out the world's first 1MW superchargers, than can charge an EV in less than 10 mins. (I saw a YouTube demo. It is pretty wild.)