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throwaway_7274
I was glued to the window while flying over southern China recently. There is so much infrastructure you can see from the air, even in fairly rural provinces. So many bridges. So many wind turbines. It is visibly a country on the move, a country that believes in itself and its ability to do things. The Chinese Century is increasingly palpable, for better or worse.
fusslo
I have two chinese-born coworkers (who spent 20-30 years here in the us) in the same room. When we talk about china's expansion, I am always jealous of the public projects, infrastructure, housing, etc. They always point out the huge unemployment of young people, declining birth rate, and other social ills.
They say they're worried when the building stops. Even more people will be out of jobs. And when the nation ages all they built will be used and maintained by fewer people
I've never been to china so it's interesting perspective from people with family there and go back 2-3 times a year
sureshv
I always take these views with a grain of salt, many immigrant's view of their home country is ossified at the time of emigration.
seanmcdirmid
But we’ve seen this already in Japan, and it kind of worked out for them? Yes, they didn’t become the richest country in the world like everyone predicted in the 80s, they have stagnated a bit, but life there is still pretty good.
I’ve been visiting China since 1999 (and lived there for around 10 years). Rapid progress, lots of investments, over investment (ghost districts and ghost cities) are inevitable, but after its all over they will still have an advanced economy with lots of opportunities.
Danox
Why is that a problem? Most of the people in China live in about 1/3 of the country. Imagine if everyone in the United States lived in just 1/3 of the United States even with 350 million people that would be crowded , but China has 1.3 billion people living in an area the size of the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi river imagine 1.3 billion people living just in that area.
Building infrastructure for a civilized society is never bad and when I say that nothing is perfect. There are downsides. I would rather have the infrastructure and I wished the United States still had that can-do attitude. The rail system across the country needs to be upgraded desperately.
The Chinese have even taken the lessons of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, they have built two Thorium reactors and refueled one without turning it off, and they appear to be right on schedule to have that larger second reactor online by 2030.
ErneX
Visit if you can, and take some bullet trains! We had a blast last year there.
cromka
China will likely become the go-to place for immigrants within couple decades. Just like any other developed economy had.
ChoosesBarbecue
I'm passively curious how the long-term maintenance of this all ends up. You don't just build a bridge, you have to keep it up when the natural strain of the world impacts upon it. Given provinces already have debt problems [0], how the hell will all of this infrastructure look in 50 years?
[0]: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3254680/c...
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devilsdata
Are these not the same things people are complaining about in the West, though?
aworks
I traveled to Wuhan twice a year for business for much of the last decade (until the pandemic).
China was a growing country that clearly knew how to build infrastructure. In Wuhan, they built an entire development intended to employ 100,000 engineers (Huawei + our US company's 50). They built a subway system in a decade that's bigger than New York City's. I took the high-speed rail to Beijing and it was superb. They replaced an old, shabby international airport terminal with a new one with the widest concourse I've ever seen. They subsidized regular flights between Wuhan and San Francisco on China Southern airlines. The Hyatt Regency there was one of my favorite hotels I've ever stayed in (cheap and high quality). In a big commerical district, they had the largest screen I've ever seen that had a Blue Screen of Death :-)
Dazzling yet I'm not bullish on China due to its demographics, among many other reasons.
twilo
What’s wrong with their demographics? Population decline?
thisisit
Whenever the topic of Chinese infrastructure comes up I am reminded of a 2016 Wired documentary about Shenzhen. It was positive portrayal of hacker culture in Shenzhen. But one thing really stood out to me. They had demarcation line separating the city and “urban village”. It looked like lots of poor people lived in the urban village. The guide mentioned that the urban village will be torn down completely in 3 months to expand the city and people had to move. It sounded like gentrification. The host was impressed by the efficiency.
But it made me question how many countries can actually be that “efficiency” because matters of uprooting large swath of population will take years not months and run into significant legal challenges as well.
To be clear use of eminent domain and gentrification happens even in US but I doubt it can be as “efficient” as a technocratic government. It’s not a knock on Chinese government, just something I always wonder.
esperent
Tearing down a slum is not gentrification.
Gentrification is when existing communities that used to have decent if basic living situations get gradually priced out of an area as richer people and their expensive amenities move in. Gradually, as house prices go up and food gets more expensive, people sell and move. It's a slow, mostly voluntary thing, or at least, driven by market forces rather than official mandates.
Tearing down a slum is a much more disruptive thing that instantly displaces a entire community. Although it's unclear what happened to that community in this case and I can't find anything clear about it online (lots of clearly biased articles for one side or the other though).
threethirtytwo
A Chinese person who was here in the US as a foreign student once commented to me that he was so surprised that the United States was like the country side. He didn’t realize how rural the country was.
This was at UCLA which is in LA which is the second biggest city in the US.
phainopepla2
West LA isn't like a Chinese city, but no one in their right mind would call UCLA rural
HerbManic
I get the same thing here is Australia. There is a lot of space with little going on.
I mean we have the Nullarbor plain. The name literally means 'No Trees', and it is very fitting.
If you ever end up there... I hope you don't.
klodolph
People are also surprised how rural much of China is.
testing22321
When friends visited NYC and we drove around a bit they said “it’s like everything is half finished”
leereeves
Presumably referring to population density? People like the low density in California.
badpun
I'd say it's a country that builds a ton of infrastructure, at the expense of living standards of common people. The money from infra has to come from anywhere, and an all-powerful central government can just redirect the stream from consumer spending into building out infrastructure. Whether Chinese are happy about it, you'd have to ask them.
tartoran
The US is not building infrastructure at the expense of living standard of common people. Ask Americans if they're happy about it.
10xDev
On the move to where? Massive unemployment amongst youth and population collapse is on its way.
You are projecting a fantasy.
baq
BYD has pretty amazing tech to be honest, but putting protectionism as an argument against the US and pro BYD in the same sentence is naive at best. The CCP allowed BYD to exist and the CCP can end BYD in a single weekend regardless of any human right concerns elsewhere.
roughly
And, more to the point, BYD exists because the CCP has been aggressively protectionist of its domestic companies and has been strongly involved in growing, supporting, and protecting its domestic industry to ensure it has one. BYD is not a cautionary tale about protectionism, it's a sales pitch for it.
margalabargala
Well, different kinds of protectionism.
The CCP's protectionism is because China is going for a cultural victory. It wants Chinese products to be available and inexpensive and purchased around the world. It puts resources to that end.
The US's protectionism is for the enrichment of the CEO, board members, stockholders, and Executive Branch's family members. It wants to protect the domestic market from sending money somewhere other than the relatives of the people in power.
While they're both "protectionism" they're not the same policies.
mrexcess
Hasn’t the US been equally so, including the auto company bailouts, government fleet purchases restricted to US-made vehicles, US national moves to secure supply chain inputs for the auto makers, etc.?
The main difference that I see isn’t protectionism, it’s that BYD took a direction the market wanted, whereas US auto makers have not produced vehicles that were appealing to consumers who had choices.
moi2388
No, it is not. From mass recalls to faking sales targets and finances, BYD is actually facing serious problems. As soon as their benefits stop they are going the way of Evergrande
dhosek
I may end up living outside the US next year (was going to be this year but it’s been postponed) and when I was investigating auto options, I’ve been severely tempted by the BYD Seal as a replacement for my Prius. All the reviews I’ve found have been positive and while I’m not a big fan of the compromises made in the display mount for the useless automatic rotation feature, it’s quite tempting. I’m torn between just getting a new Prius or spending an additional 8K for the Seal. I don’t know that I’ll drive enough for the difference in cost to add up (or, for that matter, to justify buying a car at all, but that’s a question for a different day), but I really like the idea of not contributing to the pollution in the urban area I’d be living. Option C would be the plugin hybrid version of the Seal which would be cheaper than the Prius.
soperj
Where outside the US? You might be fine with just a bike and transit.
lostlogin
> the CCP can end BYD in a single weekend
Seeing the way tech companies behave makes me think they fear Trump the same way. for example, Tim Apple certainly crawls up Trumps arse.
HerbManic
While not exactly the same, it does rhyme. More a case of suck up to Donny T and hope they give a tax break or something. Keep the shareholders happy.
I suspect you will see the same out of John Apple later this year.
phainopepla2
I don't mean to downplay Trump's strongarming of industry or the obsequiousness shown by tech leaders, but let's be real, it's not remotely the same level of control.
threethirtytwo
The US has thousands of atrocities under its belt. For this aspect, the US and China tie in terms of the leaderboard.
vkou
The US can end any of its trillion dollar companies overnight. Ask anthropic how much they were looking forward to being on the receiving end of the orange gibbon's ire.
lenerdenator
That's pretty much everywhere, especially China.
If you have ambitions that are contrary to that of the Party, well, they're going to get what they want, one way or another. It doesn't matter if you don't want to deal your AI to the military or if you'd rather not sell your home so that a highway can be built over the lot.
mghackerlady
Running a business isn't a human right. Also, I hate the conflation people have that the ability for the CCP to do something means it would. Furthermore, the party in socialist states is basically just the government. It being called a party and being explicitly ideological in function isn't, in practice, very different from the US having something called the federal government that has a constitutional ideology
holmesworcester
Doing anything you want to do that does not harm anyone else, and helps some, is most certainly a human right.
To arbitrarily repress this most basic impulse, the one to go after a dream to make better ways to do things, is severely anti-human.
Most businesses are in this category.
PessimalDecimal
In what world is China less "protectionist" than the US?
plaidthunder
The world before all of the big beautiful tariffs.
It's depressing that we can't buy BYD in the USA. It's feeling more and more like being stuck with a Lada in the 1980s.
leereeves
Are BYD cars specifically banned or do they just not comply with all the US regulations?
weirdmantis69
Ya I heard that from some chinese facebook users... oh wait...
IncreasePosts
A BYD seal is basically comparable to a model 3, except it has a more classic car aesthetic as opposed to a giant screen. What are we missing out on?
Pfhortune
I believe they're specifically referring to energy policy. As they said:
> massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects
The protectees in this case are fossil fuel interests.
everdrive
The modern discourse is quite rough -- people have been making these equivalencies for quite some time -- but as the US behavior becomes worse and worse, these equivalencies become more and more true. And as they become truer, the people who have always been pushing them only feel vindicated.
It's quite unfortunate, but I can't say I blame them. From their perspective the tiger is finally showing its stripes.
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dangus
There are two types of protectionism:
1. Protecting your interests by building a dynamic strategy. You protect your interests by enhancing your strengths and building on them.
2. Protecting your interests by playing “defense” against your decline.
We all know which country chose which path.
Chinese party leadership is stacked with literal engineers. They’ve prioritized development of industries crucial to their success. For example, they know they’re never going to be a big oil producer and that fighting wars over oil is expensive and futile, so they have developed their path to energy independence with their solar and wind industry along with electrified transit of all types.
Meanwhile, in America, our leadership is stacked with grifters who only have experience in shifting money around. We are all stuck with oil and car dependence that nobody’s willing to address with long-term infrastructure development reforms.
We are trapped fighting wars over oil because $6-7/gallon gasoline in middle America would trigger a major recession. Our government actively incentivizes wasting oil via automotive regulations written by industry lobbyists. That big F-150 parked at the Old Navy that doesn’t need to follow CAFE regulations is totally a “work truck.”
We don’t strive to build the most competitive industries, instead we use sanctions and tariffs to prevent foreign competition from reaching our shores.
And before you talk about China disallowing foreign competition, I’ll note that Chinese citizens can go to the mall in China and buy a Tesla, an iPhone, an Audi, Levi’s jeans, Coach bags, do a web search on Bing, deploy applications on AWS servers in Beijing, etc.
strictnein
> 1. Protecting your interests by building a dynamic strategy.
"Dynamic" is doing a hell of a lot of work there. I guess what you mean is steal technology from the west, undercut pricing on foreign goods and dump products in their markets to destroy the competition, end up being the last one standing, because you freely violate trade agreements (as a member of the WTO) and other treaties.
> " so they have developed their path to energy independence with their solar and wind industry along with electrified transit of all type"
They have more coal power than the rest of the world combined, and are building more. Their "path to energy independence with their solar and wind" is purely propaganda.
>they know they’re never going to be a big oil producer
They're literally the sixth largest, just behind Iraq and ahead of Iran. I'm pretty sure people consider Iraq a "big oil producer", right? They also have the 13th most proven untapped oil reserves, and likely more than that since they're not in the business of oversharing.
FireBeyond
> We are trapped fighting wars over oil because $6-7/gallon gasoline in middle America would trigger a major recession.
Our gasoline risks hitting $6-7/gallon because of a war we needlessly started to distract from our leader's seemingly rapidly progressing dementia, his approval numbers that are the lowest since I think LBJ, oh, and him being named repeatedly in the files of a notorious pedophile and child sex trafficker.
EA-3167
In the world of Chinese media I suppose? To me this all looks like the same hand-wringing angst we went through in the 1980’s with the industrialization of Japan bearing massive fruit.
Right down to the shaky real estate markets.
landryraccoon
China has surpassed the US in total energy generation, and the gap is growing in their favor every year.
Japan never surpassed the US in power or industrial output. China is different. They’ve clearly surpassed the US in some key areas.
raxxorraxor
BYD is successful because they are cheap. For most people cars are simple utilities.
But countries either need to be protectionist or you need to lower production costs to a Chinese level. That means workers only earn the same as a Chinese worker.
You could also collect import taxes, but I think people simply cannot or don't want to afford a car that is much more expensive.
Some decry Chinese government subsidies for cars, but the truth is that these exist in western nations as well. They are sometimes indirect, but the end result is the same. The secret to cheap prices is simple labor costs.
Commonly refereed to as race to the bottom and not a new topic/problem. Car makers in countries with high labor costs could maybe pivot to luxury cars... otherwise the result of the competition is already determined.
In 50 years China will have the same problem with other countries that produce even cheaper. That is already happening and for quite a few years already.
Taxes would probably be the best solution, but they have become politicised and weaponised.
Bombthecat
BYD has to me become an icon of German decline vs Chinese expansion.
My view.
I was looking at a new car. Went into several car shops, VW, Skoda, Toyota and BYD.
And all of them were basically empty and BYD was FULL! Like really really full.
And the sales guy confirmed it, they are selling cars like crazy.
electriclove
Which country was this in?
Bombthecat
Well.. Germany :)
titanomachy
Must be EU somewhere, never seen a Skoda anywhere else.
Yizahi
Oh, don't worry. I'm sure Mr. Stable Orange will follow the tradition and institute a Capybara tax soon, forbidding import of any foreign EV smaller than 2 meters wide and 7 meters long and having a fully enclosed body. That will show those libruls :) .
sfjailbird
> This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights
The U.S. record on human rights is horrific, if you see it from a global perspective (which you should). China is a saint in comparison.
stephc_int13
Many predicted it for a long time, the US will always be a great power, for structural and geographical reasons, but it won't keep the position it had for almost a century.
The good thing about China is that apart from Taiwan they have little territoral ambitions, I don't foresee huge conflicts incoming, but I am a not entirely sure the US will manage to lost its position as gracefully as the British Empire.
It could be bad news for US citizens if their currency precipitiously lose its power, and they'll look for people to blame.
the_gastropod
> The good thing about China is that apart from Taiwan they have little territoral ambitions
One of the reasons China wants Taiwan is because it would enable further territorial expansions into The Philippines and Japan. China considers any neighboring Democratic nation a threat. Taiwan is just their first / easiest prospective target.
If you have access to PBS, there's a very good documentary that touches on this a bit called Invisible Nation.
Pfhortune
Would be great if we could buy/drive these in the US. Funny how we have a "free market" only when it is convenient for certain interests...
stetrain
They're all over the place in Mexico City. It'll be interesting as these EVs start to show up along the northern and southern borders traveling within the US.
corndoge
WSJ had a piece on just this recently.
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/chinese-cars-byd-geely-u-...
mekdoonggi
The sad reality is how politically influential it will be for Americans to take a Chinese EV from the airport to a hotel in Cancun and say, "Why don't we have this in the US?"
cpursley
Saw some in southern Arizona, had to do a double-take.
dieselgate
That was me with Polestar like 4 years ago but really don't see many of them anymore in the PNW
TulliusCicero
I agree that that would be great as a consumer, but given how protectionist China is, you can hardly blame countries for responding in kind. Trade should be a two way street.
sampton
Doesn't Tesla have a factory in China?
SpicyLemonZest
They do. The Chinese government gave them a special exemption, presumably because they wanted to build EV manufacturing expertise. Other foreign auto companies are not allowed to open their own factories in China; they have to do a joint venture with a local manufacturer.
NickC25
They do. Because Elon is proving himself to be quite an idiot.
China was more than happy to welcome him in, and have him teach them how to build an EV. They simply copied what they could and improved on it.
"The communists will happily sell the capitalists the rope the capitalists hang themselves with"
sarmasamosarma
[dead]
jmyeet
For anyone that doesn't know, then president Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law in 1988 that banned all car imports into the US unless the car is at least 25 yaers old.
Why? Because US Mercedez-Benz dealers were selling their cars at too high a price and a lot of Americans were importing them directly from Germany. So the dealers associations lobbied Congress for a ban.
Country of free markets, by the way.
altcognito
This is entirely misleading and misinformation -- only those not meeting all applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS).
high_na_euv
Free market does not exist
ASalazarMX
Or rather, it exists briefly until it is naturally captured by the biggest players.
high_na_euv
There is always some industry thats favored by gov due to good reasons.
Military, food, energy, etc.
cmxch
Just buy a Textron golf cart and you have 90% of the Chinese EV experience.
Mashimo
Are you saying all cars that are manufactured in China are rubbish? Because that is just plain wrong.
b40d-48b2-979e
It's the same propaganda that was used against Japan and Korean cars. Asia = bad, America = good.
dorianmariecom
is there even a screen?
arjie
Traveling in Asia and South America, the primary impression I got was not that this is a war of manufacturing that we're losing but that the game is already up. Chile was full of Chinese makes and they were all surprisingly good. Riding in a Chinese MG in Taiwan or Hong Kong you suddenly realize that this isn't a future competitor. The people talking about the war of car manufacturers here seem like those Japanese holdouts who were still fighting in 1956.
devilsdata
Come to Australia. About two years ago there was so many Teslas. In the space of two years, I've seen twice as many BYDs. I can only imagine this will continue.
cameronh90
It's not "surprisingly" unless you haven't bought much in the last 20 years.
China-owned brands are now often better and more premium than their Western counterparts across the entire spectrum. Give me Anker over Belkin any day. There are a few areas where the West still leads - Chinese software tends to be buggier and less polished, luxury apparel isn't at the same standard - but that lead is diminishing rapidly. Customer service could still do with some improvement: it's usually much slower and less professional, but the trade-off is it's not uncommon to end up talking to an actual engineer who can investigate and solve the problem rather than just follow a script, even at a huge company.
The worst products are now formerly high quality Western brands with PE overlords that forced them to outsource manufacturing to the lowest bidder.
AceJohnny2
> The worst products are now formerly high quality Western brands with PE overlords that forced them to outsource manufacturing to the lowest bidder.
Stanley Black&Decker?
gamblor956
Anker was founded and is owned by an American...
etblg
I'm not sure where you're getting that from, from wikipedia:
> Anker was founded in 2011 by Steven Yang in Shenzhen, Guangdong, but the company moved its headquarters to Changsha, Hunan.
And its listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange as a public company.
mekdoonggi
Yeah the game is already lost. The question is how long the US can keep dumb laws that don't acknowledge reality. Unfortunately that timespan is 249 years and counting apparently.
dzonga
Tesla has no moat.
BYD makes better EVs & is leading in battery tech.
FSD has been promised forever & not delivered. Now Musky says - for cars to have real FSD they need to be newer hardware tech.
Robotaxis - Waymo is better.
xiphias2
It has nothing to be about moat. It's about its older car brands and oil so much that it doesn't stay competitive.
Jensen Huang says that the same thing can happen to NVIDIA. Tinygrad is stopping exporting Blackwell based cards to most countries except the 10 Tier 1 countries, as all others need a few months of paperwork. Huawei GPUs don't have these export restrictions.
dieselgate
> BYD ... is leading in battery tech.
Dang, it seemed not that long ago - 5 to 10 years - when Tesla had far superior battery tech. I know that isn't a short scale by tech standards but has BYD, and others, really leap-frogged that much?
I'm not in that space myself and do not keep up with EV benchmarks but am curious what advances or other changes were made. I recall reading Ford battery technology was also very good but interpreted that to be due to general advances in EV battery technology across the board rather than any one specific make/manufacturer.
decimalenough
BYD is one of Tesla's battery suppliers.
https://thedriven.io/2023/05/22/teslas-switch-to-byd-batteri...
dieselgate
Interesting I had no idea, thanks.
mort96
> Dang, it seemed not that long ago - 5 to 10 years - when Tesla had far superior battery tech.
It seems logical that if someone was going to surpass Tesla in battery tech, it'd be a battery company. BYD has, after all, been making batteries since its founding under the name "Shenzhen BYD Battery Company" 30 years ago.
decimalenough
BYD has its own "God's Eye" self-driving tech, and unlike Musk's pigheaded insistence on cameras only, BYD is incorporating LIDAR into their cars across the range:
https://thedriven.io/2026/01/11/byds-cheapest-electric-cars-...
dzhiurgis
> LIDAR
You still believe that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLgCJUeBuI
Mawr
Cool collection of self driving edge cases, thanks. How are any of them related to Waymo using or not using a particular sensor, LIDAR or otherwise?
IshKebab
There are plenty of FSD failure examples on YouTube too. I don't think you can draw conclusions from that. Especially because FSD isn't actually driverless yet, unlike Waymos.
dzhiurgis
LOL, have you driven one?
Other than nice alcantara interior the drive is just a mush and software is awful (BYD Sealion 7). Older ones (i.e. Atto 3) were obsolete from the factory.
I got to sit in Zeekr 7x yesterday (top 3 in NZ by sales in April), hopefully I can get a test drive soon. It actually has every feature Tesla has (and more). Will be interesting to see how they actually execute.
gnfargbl
Is BYD beating Kia here in the UK? It's hard to tell from the SMMT figures [1] but it looks to me as if Kia sold just under twice as many vehicles as BYD. Given that so much of Kia's lineup is now BEV, I'm not sure who is winning.
Tesla is doing poorly here. That's almost entirely down to Musk's public image, not because BYD make better cars.
physicsguy
I see a lot more Kia’s but I think it’s shifting because dealerships are shifting. The Toyota dealership near me now sells Jaecoo, Cherry, etc. and I am seeing tons of the Jaecoo SUV cars around. The Pentagon Vauxhall dealership I bought my car from keeps emailing me about BYDs.
spacedcowboy
I see plenty of BYD around, but I see more Kia cars. Maybe I'm biased with my EV6 GT Line S, but I wouldn't swap it for a damn thing.
TitaRusell
Why should Australians or Dutch people have loyalty to foreign car industry? Who killed Holden or DAF? It wasn't BYD lol.
bluGill
You should be loyal only to the extent that the loyalty helps some interests of yours. That is if the car industry ensures military equipment should you need it. (or alternatively you are going to war and don't want them to have the expertise that a car industry has).
For those not paying attention to geopolitics, Taiwan is the real concern here. China wants to control them, and is building a strong military. How the future will play out I don't know, but this should be your concern.
floxy
Isn't the concern with over the air updates and back-doors? As in, if the citizens in county A buy country B's cars, and now there is a tiff between the two countries, country B could potentially brick all of those vehicles in country A.
bluGill
That is just another variation of geopolitical worry. Nobody will do this unless there is a geopolitical situation happening. If you are going to war then bricking the enemies cars is useful. Otherwise it is harmful (even if you do it accidentally you lose trust and so nobody will buy from you again - which is why so often rollouts are done slowly - if it doesn't work you only have a few customers affects and can spend more than a car's value on techs to fix them thus ensuring you don't lost reputation)
kazen44
also, DAF was large in a very specific time in a very specific place. Let's not forget that the dutch car industry has always being dependant on german car industry.
somelamer567
The point of China's mercantilist and imperialist games with electric cars, is to attack and kill Western industry, and deprive us of the ability to defend ourselves.
IshKebab
I'm no fan of China but is it totally unimaginable to you that a country might just want to be successful?
HarHarVeryFunny
I'm sure BYD and other Chinese EVs would dominate here too if it wasn't for tariffs.
BYD UK import tariff is 10%
BYD US import tariff is 100%
werdnapk
Canada reduced theirs to 6.1% from 100% about a month ago.
HarHarVeryFunny
I wonder what happens if someone from the US buys one in Canada and just drives it home? At what point and how do they get charged an import tariff? When they register it?
mort96
AFAIU, import duties aren't really something you're necessarily "charged" as much as it's something you have a legal obligation to pay. Sure, maybe you could buy a car in Canada and bring it in to the US without paying the tariffs... we call that smuggling.
ainiriand
Here in Spain you see a lot of BYD, considerable amount for Europe. But when I was in Uruguay that was a shock, almost all cabs, all electric cars, and some buses are BYD.
forinti
The thing that surprised me the last time I was in Uruguay (2022) was riding an ICE BYD. I had only ever seen electric BYDs.
Wikipedia informs me that they stopped making ICE vehicles in 2022.
unclejuan
There is a significant amount of BYD buses here in Spain, I don't live in Madrid but I go every now and then and I noticed a fair amount of electric BYD.
Also this is anecdotal, but I live in a small province capital (<100k citizens) and the urban planning councilor told me most likely most of the new buses we're getting next year will be electric and they'll probably be either BYD or eCitaros.
prism56
Ive seen soo many BYD cars in the UK in the last year.
I'm not in the market for a new car, but anyone who has looked recently what is the draw to BYD? Is it strictly value/price?
standeven
Value, performance, quality, and not being associated with Elon.
Barbing
BY*D
*except Elon’s
BoingBoomTschak
Quality? I'm really interested into hard and extensive data about mechanical (drivetrain, suspension, brakes, etc...) engineering and quality control that would make me put them on the same level as the Japanese.
Lacking that, I must hold the preemptive view that they cut corners at least as much as the average make/
throwa356262
Yes, they are (were) significantly cheaper than similar western cars.
Have their share of problems thought. IIRC climate control is often subpar.
2dvisio
Value price for us. The Sealion 7 for us had the combination of features, dimensions, range, 800v platform, for a price that was simply unbeatable (leasing).
Out of question that Volvo ex90, Kia ev9, Hyundai Ioniq 9 or even the BMW ix3 would have come on top if it wasn’t for the price.
dzhiurgis
> 800v platform
Ones in NZ are 400v and tops at 150KW charging.
Mashimo
> With over 7% market share, BYD is now the top-selling EV brand in the UK so far in 2026
But worldwide it has been for a while, no? I think total EV cars sold in 2025 BYD was top, if I remember correctly.
testing22321
I think Tesla just beat them on pure EV because BYD sell a lot of hybrids too.
unpopularopp
My SO bought an Ioniq 6 mostly because of the buttons and the seperate control surface for AC and such but they test drived a BYD as well which was the same as a Tesla, just one huge tablet and endless menus
ecshafer
Musk was saying at the start that Tesla was going to be $80k then scale up so they would have a $10k/20k car. It looks like BYD beat them to it. I guess putting manufacturing in China, giving them all of the tricks of the trade, letting them build consolidated supply chains, letting them iterate on every aspect of manufacturing, and automate it all was a mistake in the long run. pikachu_face.jpg
melonpan7
Tesla severely lacks competition in the North American market. They lost all their first mover advantage by sitting back and spending significant R&D into FSD. Chinese manufacturers have some incredible innovations such as Nio’s battery swapping.
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BYD has to me become an icon of US decline vs Chinese expansion. It’s just one example among many of China charting the way forward and innovating while the US recedes further into backward-looking, protectionist policy. See: US politicians on both sides trying to ban BYD imports rather than incentivizing stiffer competition from US automakers.
Another example: massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects. You occasionally see a heartwarming post: “California adds solar panels over a canal” and it just looks cute and kind of sad compared to the massive, ambitious, and technologically superior build out of Chinese renewables.
This is to say nothing of the CCP and their record on human rights and free expression. But anyone paying attention can quite clearly see that China is winning and the US is sacrificing their global superiority at the altar of fear, ignorance, and religious nationalism.