>I wonder how developing electric motors compares to combustion engines. My hunch says that it’s the main reason the Chinese high-tech electronics industry was able to develop and iterate leading electric vehicles so fast.

The talent had very little impact to be honest. The primary factor was a government looking 50 years down the road seeing that:

1. ICE engines have little to no long-term future in transportation.

2. global warming is a thing whether the right wing in the US likes it or not.

3. They were never going to overtake the West in ICE engines and had to attack from a different angle.

The US' lack of breakthroughs in EVs has little to do with technology or expertise and everything to do with an administration that is openly hostile towards EVs and renewable energy in general. For the rest of the planet, EVs becoming the primary form of transportation is just an obvious and logical conclusion, even if it takes us another 25-50 years to get there.

China saw it and decided to heavily incentivize and subsidize the rapid expansion of EVs both to fix the air quality issues in China and corner the market.

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tredre3 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The US' lack of breakthroughs in EVs has little to do with technology or expertise and everything to do with an administration that is openly hostile towards EVs and renewable energy in general.

It has nothing to do with the current administration either. For one thing, China's dominance predates it. For another, the EU and Japan have failed equally hard at capturing any meaningful EV marketshare.

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SoftTalker 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

1. There is still no good answer for air transport, trans-oceanic shipping, long-haul trucking, and long-distance rail. ICE will be used there for a good while longer.

	▲	govg 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think air transport and oceanic shipping will probably still take time owing to energy density concerns, but there are electric trucks already (with trials of roadside charging rails that can actively charge during driving), and for a large part of the world, electrified trains are the norm. It's a uniquely US problem that rail isn't electrified, even other major OECD countries are above 50% if not more, while in places like India it is almost 100% electrified railway (one of the largest networks in the world).

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pstuart 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The current admin is actively hostile to EVs, but I think the real problem was the chicken and egg issue of charging stations: they wouldn't be built because there wasn't enough demand for them and EVs would be limited in sales because they wouldn't have chargers to use on the road.

This is where Tesla made a huge difference with Supercharger stations. I am no fan of Elon, but that work was fundamental in making EVs viable in America.