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Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
There's certainly some dirty tactics after the pandemic, but the reason they're losing now is they make worse cars that cost more. Full stop.
And yes Fuzz, done of that is lax environmental standards and poor working conditions. But not all of it.
A good chunk though is the Chinese EV companies are miles ahead in R&D, and China has been building factories at a crazy pace since we offshored everything to them. They own the world's best infrastructure building know how. They went from breaking ground in Shanghai in January 2019, to production in October. It took 3 years in Germany just to begin production and still haven't gotten close to peak capacity. China can build a battery factory in the blink of an eye because that's what they do .
And on the R&D front, BYD has 110,000 engineers and scientists working on pushing the limits of their vehicles. They've spent more than their profits on R&D in 13 of the last 14 years. Toyota spent just 2.8% of their revenue on R&D, and most of that on gas and hydrogen. That ain't it
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Because they have access to lots of cheap labour they can treat poorly, don't need environmental assessments, government approvals etc. I don't want to live in a country that functions like that, which means I'll accept that we have to pay more for things we make here.
It's not magic, these are tradeoffs. Magic would be doing it without tradeoffs, which everyone seem to think is how it happens.
Do they also have rapidly improving knowledge based workers? Yes, because they have the resources to funnel money into it. Resources we gave them by offshoring production to the cheapest places possible, and now they are using them to beat us at all of our own games, because they don't play by the same rules, and will steal IP from anyone they need to to win. I mean, it's almost like a lesson should have been learned by us on this one, but apparently not, 'cause y'all keep finding ways to justify continuing it.