Hey, always remember, Biden doesn’t do all the things, don’t forget to vote for your LOCAL politicians, best we can do. Always remember it’s all the government not just one guy.
I’ve never actually seen any Chinese EV cars in the States unless you count like, Volvo. (BYDs and MGs are getting quite popular in Australia though), so this tariff looks to be more political posturing than anything else.
BYD electric busses are made right outside Los Angeles, so they wouldn’t be subjected to the tariff at all, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
I don’t understand why there are some people down voting you. The US auto industry products are relics from the 20th century and protecting it will make it worse. They’ll still lose the global auto market.
Rather than fixing the economy issues at home, we create more barriers to entry for affordable EV’s domestically. Fucking dinosaurs rich off dinosaur remains ruining the planet for our children.
To be honest, buying a new EV to replace a working gas car is almost as bad as just continuing to use it. Plus most US electricity is generated with fossil fuels. 22% of global emissions are from motor vehicles, but more than half that is commercial and would hardly be affected by consumer EVs.
I believe a far greater priority is to invest in rail structure, curbing both commercial and industrial use of road vehicles, which are both extremely inefficient methods of transport.
Plus most US electricity is generated with fossil fuels.
Most meaning how much? Also it depends on where you are. Some places (including California IIRC but don't quote me on it) already generate enough renewable energy to meet 100% of their consumption and are using fossil fuels as backups. Also EVs are a lot more efficient than ICEs, so they still help even if the power source is fossil fuels.
most US electricity is generated with fossil fuels
This is incorrect. Over the whole country on average about 60% comes from fossil fuels, but it varies massively by location and even what time of day you are charging. Note that in that list on Wikipedia you can sort by CO2 / TWh, which is the most helpful way of looking at it since they have a narrow definition of “renewables”. There are other such lists of course…
So blanket statements like “well it’s mostly coming from fossil fuels anyway” are simply not helpful. If you live in Vermont, Washington, Oregon, New Hampshire, Idaho and quite a few others, you are not charging your EV with much in the way of fossil fuels, and probably then only at certain times of day.
A really good way to calculate this is to find CO2 emissions per Megawatt hour in your location by time of day. Not all generators provide this, but in California for example, there is a helpful dashboard: www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/emissions.aspx
There are also efforts like watttime.org which can cycle usage based on emissions. They actually provide APIs for this data.
If Chinese made EVs are forced through multiple levels of proper QA, they aren’t going to be as affordable as you think. Cheap shit from China is horrendously bad and good quality Chinese goods are just as expensive as domestic products.
Do you really want to sit on top of a few hundred pounds of lithium that wasn’t inspected properly?
The US can and does set quality standards for products sold on its markets. This doesn’t improve the quality of the cars sold in the US, it just makes them more expensive. It may even have the indirect effect of reducing the quality of vehicles sold in the US because increasing price instead of setting and enforcing quality and testing standards means lowering quality to maintain or increase profits is still an option.
Made in America. I can’t understand that way of thinking. I buy the best option for myself, I don’t care if it’s made at home or on the other side of the world.
I mean, I’m already subscribed to several only fans accounts that shove lead tainted bad dragons into all of their orifices while drinking from a Stanley cup that’s full of other toxins.
Sometimes you got to be a little less risk-averse to really live life.
It’s really impressive the lack of knowledge in the US about china’s products. I can definitely say you have never been inside a BYD or GWM EV. The US car brands have no chance of durvival, the government wants to give them time to die a slow death so employees and shareholders have time to relocate to other industries. The only problem I’d that the ones paying the price will be, as always, the US customers. Just to give you a point of reference, the price for a Tesla 3 equivalent in china is 20,000 USD, let that sink.
The thing is, cheap or expensive everything is made in china. You can buy a BYD and have state of the art technology in a car or a Chirey and pay peanuts for a car that does the job. Just like you can buy an iphone, made in china, or a Xiaomi for 50 bucks.
Cheap shit from China is horrendously bad and good quality Chinese goods are just as expensive as domestic products.
And here we are. Full circle.
The original Ender3 is a good example of a cheap 3D printer that went through almost zero QA. By some miracle, most printers worked and still do. However, it doesn’t take much to dig and find all the ones that were shipped with fake XTC connectors and were a fire hazard. There are plenty more examples I could dig up from personal experience. (We won’t even get into all the tools I have fixed where the chassis is referenced to mains or high voltage components had no, or insufficient, grounding.)
What a coincidence! I work for a 3D printer farm with about 2000 printers. We have had all the different kinds, and we finally settled for the ender V3
The V3 is relatively new. I am referring to the originals that made Creality and I know those printers inside and out. While they were a good starter printer, they had dozens of flaws. You name an issue, I saw it.
I was using that as an example of bad QA for consumers. Anyone who can rebuild printers can identify and fix those issues, but it shouldn’t be that way.
If you like a good mass production story, just look back on YouTube on the Linux Tech Tips channel about the Chinese company that decided to cost cut when he was finalizing his screwdriver for production.
There are quality products from companies like DJI or Bambu Lab, or, domestically designed products where companies have to babysit production. Hell, even PCB fab companies are generally OK, but even they have randomly cropped parts of my PCBs for no reason.
As long as you are a smart buyer and understand what you need Chinese companies will provide it. If you are looking for the lowest price then you’ll get it, if you are looking for high standards, like the iphone smartphones, you’ll get it as well. Same with EV cars. If you want a top quality EV you buy a BYD, if you want a piece of metal with a battery to take you places you can go as low as you want. But don’t get me wrong, I really like that the US is blocking the EV cars from China because their market is very big and it would make the prices go up and the stocks would dry from everywhere else to supply the US market.
tl;dr: There is much more to this than just having “smart consumers” and there are some very real reasons why Chinese products can be cheaper to make and sell. Cost cuts always come from somewhere.
If you want a top quality EV you buy a BYD
That’s a bold statement. I’ll be more comfortable when I see more third-party teardowns of the vehicles that are conducted outside of mainland China. There have been a few that seem independent, but not enough to my liking. (In fairness, I have no love for Tesla at all. If anything, I have a stronger bias against Tesla.)
Battery fire data, that I can find, has been heavily obfuscated by both Tesla and BYD with floods of soft propaganda on that subject. Reports of battery fires seem to be more common with BYD, but even that is unreliable. For example, BYD fires have some reports between 2x and 10x more than that of Tesla, while other reports have them a 2x lower. (Uncertainty is a pure propaganda win, I suppose.)
As long as you are a smart buyer and understand what you need Chinese companies will provide
if you are looking for high standards, like the iphone smartphones, you’ll get it as well.
That’s my point. A person basically needs an EE degree to understand what they are getting unless a Chinese company puts a massive emphasis on QA themselves, which is rare. Otherwise, US companies have to implement strict guidelines for Chinese manufacturing and testing themselves.
We also need to go deeper into component counterfeits. While there are numerous clones of standard ICs on the market, there are just as many fake and mislabeled ICs that make it into brand products that were sourced from China as well. Component swaps are extremely common unless major component distributors implement their own QA processes. Mouser and DigiKey have to charge a premium for this, where LKR or LCSC seem to specialize in clones and can cut costs that way.
The most well known issue I can think of is the electrolytic capacitor scandal that happened between 1999 and 2007. (That comes to mind first as I just replaced several dozen caps in a legacy CD player and MIDI keyboard.)
Here is some more interesting stuff. It goes beyond criticism and into the bizarre and quirky: Fake OPamps that have been discovered recently: youtu.be/NSgqYLLPUSs?si=C8Nca5zJZXcyf0Hi
if you want a piece of metal with a battery to take you places you can go as low as you want.
That is where I have a bit more faith in the structure of the US legal system, for once. Buying a faulty LED dimmer is one thing but buying a car is another. If BYD (or Tesla) cars start killing other people that haven’t bought an EV, I would expect that any ensuing lawsuits would get the FTC and the US DOT sufficiently motivated to clamp down harder on shoddy construction. (Strict regulation has its own disadvantages, of course.)
The US automotive industry already isn’t competitive abroad. This is only going to make it worse. Meanwhile the investors reap monopoly profits while the consumers pay the price. (And yes I know it’s technically an oligopoly.)
In terms of market share, the Volkswagen Group remains the market leader in the EU in December. The company from Lower Saxony secured 24.9 percent of the pie with all its brands. The Stellantis Group accounts for 16.7 percent with its brands. The Renault Group is in third place with 12.1 percent. The strongest individual brand in December 2022 was VW with a market share of 11.2 percent. Renault secured second place with 6.8%, just ahead of Mercedes (6.6%). Toyota (6.0%), BMW (5.8%), Audi (5.4%), Dacia (5.2%), Peugeot (4.8%), Skoda (4.4%), Hyundai (3.8%) and Ford (3.6%). Opel is on a par with its sister company Fiat with a market share of 3.3%, while Kia is just ahead of Seat (3.1%) with 3.2%. Volvo is ahead of Citroën with 2.7 percent.
To be fair, China is massively subsidizing those manufacturers. Sky high tariffs are a pretty standard response to anti-competitive practices.
The barrier to domestic EVs is that dealers and manufacturers don’t like them because of the lower maintenance. We need to tighten efficiency standards to provide better motivation.
This has nothing to do with the economy as a whole which is doing great by all the standard metrics. It’s not great for those at the bottom, but they aren’t the market for new vehicles.
China has spent $57 billion over 7 years on EV subsidies. The US subsidies are buyer incentives which, until recently, were available for foreign vehicles as well. A Tesla sold in China does not get subsidized. Chinese subsidies have included large direct subsidies on the manufacturing.
I personally see direct subsidies to corporations as a last resort since corporations seem to use them for nothing but stock buy-backs.
Certainly, but that doesn’t mean the US can be dependent on China for it’s transition. As stated further up, I am very much in favor of government intervention to force auto makers to sell a lot more electrics. The current regulations are terrible.
Current evs are terrible. They lose some mileage every year until the battery completely fails when it’s 10 to 20 years old. At that point, if you had an EV with an actual usable range as a total replacement vehicle, you’re looking at $15,000 to replace a battery. The entire half of the US that needs to buy older used vehicles is going to be screwed, while the other half are paying much more for their new vehicles. The average American can’t afford the average new car.
I buy used and our vehicles are a 2013 Nissan Leaf and a 2017 Chevy Volt. We had to replace the battery on the leaf last year and it was $9k. It’s still the most economical vehicle we’ve ever owned. It’s not taking us on any cross country trips, but it’s got the range we need as our primary vehicle.
You are not wrong, but for a whole lot of Americans there are vehicles that fit their needs. Forcing auto makers to sell more would also force them to lower prices or increase quality.
Dude. You had to spend $9,000 on a 6 year old battery in a short range car. I have a 2008 Prius with 249,000 miles on it, I change the oil myself, and I’ve spent a total of $3,800 on it, not counting fluid changes that I do at home. You spent more on a battery than I buy vehicles for.
It’s not a contest. The point was that there are affordable ways to go electric, so you’re just supporting my argument. Congrats on deushing your own oil, but where did you buy 5000+ gallons of gas for less than $3,800?
I’m a really bad person to ask that. I’ve never bought a car (and I’m kind of old) newer than 10 years old and with one exception, I’ve never spent over $500 in a year on any maintenance or repairs. About 6 of those vehicles were sports cars. Most cars I buy I’ll keep a few years and then sale for 0 loss. I’m fully aware I’m the exception to the rule, but not enough to offset the EV cost. Older used EVs will be worth so much less than other cars. People will quickly learn that buying an old EV means they’ll have to tack on an extra $15k for a battery.
Good for you that you are recycling old cars. I do the same - our 2nd car is a 1993 Corolla with 275k on it. Drives fine. For you an EV doesn’t make sense and that’s just fine. But:
People will quickly learn that buying an old EV means they’ll have to tack on an extra $15k for a battery.
This is the sort of crap people spew when they can’t be bothered to research stuff and just use “facts” they “heard”. They generalize and round way up and now these are the new “facts”. I have to imagine you can do better.
Not all batteries are $15k - far from it. Many are $6-7k Given that maintenance and TCO at that point are extremely low, that’s not bad over the lifetime of a car. Ever had to replace an engine? Easily in the same range for some cars.
It’s not a given that an “old” EV needs a new battery. Lifespans are easily 10 years or more and lose range at about 1-2% per year or 10% every 200,000 miles.
Battery costs have plummeted and continue to fall.
Most are not six or $7k. In fact very few are. Just in this thread is a person who had to spend $9k to replace the battery on their 2017 Leaf. A subcompact with a meager 100 mile range, if it isn’t too cold outside.
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