阿良

🇨🇳 Chinese EVs have been taking the world by storm, whether you like it or not When I look around here on the street in China I try recognize the car brands and I see so many brands I don't know One brand I see a lot is LI, but also BYD, Zeekr and XPeng Apparently there's now 129 (!) EV brands in China producing cars, which kinda shows the massive scale of the EV boom here There's a real historical parallel here with the US a hundred years ago, where there were about 2,000 new American car companies in America. Of course most failed, and only a few remained The same is predicted for China, where only 15 EV brands are predicted to survive in a decade, so a real battle is going down here now to see who will win One interesting thing is that there is one American brand that is remarkably present here, and that's Tesla, you see Teslas everywhere, the Tesla Y often holds the top spot for most cars sold in China, and you see Tesla superchargers here a lot What's also interesting is that where Elon Musk gets so much hatred in the West (not from me), in China he's revered as a hero. Elon is a high IQ engineer and successful entrepreneur. And it's a real artefact of the culture that Chinese respect that kind of person while in the West if you're rich, successful and smart you're seen as a bad person by at least half of society. I think that says a lot about our society and how we educate people in the West and we should really reconsider that. Engineering and entrepreneurship are the key stones of a functioning society. Engineering invents new things and entrepreneurs turn those inventions into businesses that bring them to people. Without both, you don't have jobs, money, and well, prosperity! Chinese culture seems to understand this well, which is why they like Elon Musk and still drive Teslas as one of the few Western cars here. Anyway to continue, in this video I visited the Huawei store and I have to add a correction, because due to new Chinese regulation that requires car brands to fully own their manufacturing, Huawei has "officially" separated their car business, but in fact they still fully design the car, sell the car, and get most of the profit from it. They just can't call it a Huawei car anymore Huawei is interesting because they produce everything, phones, tablets, watches, laptops, and, well indirectly, EV cars too A similar brand is Xiaomi, who actually do own the manufacturing of their EV, and their EV is one of the fastest growing in sales in China It's a real slap in the face for the West I feel that Apple, the creator of the iPhone, wasn't able to produce a car and cancelled their car project, when many of the Chinese phone companies are producing their own cars now with relative ease Of course the iPhone is produced in China, and manufacturing is in China, so being closer to the manufacturing physically, it must have been easier to design a car, than try to do it remotely from Apple's office in Cupertino But it does seem significant that we couldn't do this While I'm writing this the news comes in that Germany's car and greater manufacturing industry is tanking, their energy costs have gone up 2-3x due cutting off the Russian gas, and they've simply become too expensive overnight Germany's car industry, the historical center of car production in the world with BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi and Volkswagen, has started laying off 100,000+ employees and scaling down their production due to declining sales, which are a direct result of the competition from China offering cheaper, more advanced EVs with better software than the Germans And I mean you can feel it, I walk around in EV car stores here and the cars look great, the interior looks modern, the software is miles ahead of the clunky interfaces of German cars, most EVs here have a little cute robot on the dashboard that you talk to, so you never have to touch the screen anymore to do anything, like "switch on the wipers" or "route me to my hotel" etc. The EVs here honestly do not feel cheap, they're well built and comfortable Europe has tried to stop the rise of the Chinese EVs in the European market with a 45% tariff, but even with that tariffs, many Europeans still prefer to buy Chinese EVs over others, and they're still cheaper than the German cars! The US went further with a 100% tarrif, and that stopped them from being sold mostly in the US because it's not profitable anymore for the Chinese One thing I have to add which you probably know is that the Chinese government does heavily subsidize their EV industry (with about $230B+ in the last decade), it's not a secret and their subsidies do not compare to the ones the US and EU provide for their industries, which gives Chinese EV companies the (unfair) advantage to produce them at a discount and sell them abroad cheaper, which is exactly why the EU and US put tariffs on them Even with the subsidies, the engineering and production and software is impressive and feels very modern, I'm a Tesla fan, own a 2025 Tesla Y, but the Chinese EVs feel and look more modern to me. They usually have more screens, more features etc. There's real innovation happening here it feels like And that's kinda the conclusion you get being in China with every industry, they've already by far departed from being cheap clones of Western products, they're now at the next stage of adding their own features and ideas, which is what we always criticize Chinese on "they're not creative", well they are creative, they just start from the point where Western products are now, and then start innovating from there (instead of starting from scratch fully, I mean, why would they?) If you ask Grok how does the future of the Western car industry look like, especially the European/German ones, it's pessimistic. The only positive it can find is that maybe European brands can focus on premium and exclusivity. Like they do with Hermes hand bags, but then do the same with cars. BMW and Mercedes-Benz are of course luxury brands and they could survive by remaining premium and make money that way. But the regular middle and low end of car production in Europe (and America?) will most probably be wiped out and replaced by the Chinese I think That is if the Americans and Europeans will keep allowing them into their markets But even if they don't, the Chinese are happily going to the rest of the world like South America, the Middle East or the rest of Asia where you see BYDs literally everywhere As a European this does feel bittersweet, but then again we've all been shouting from the roof tops for years that this would happen if you didn't create a pro-business climate where startups would sprout, so now it's kinda "I told you so"