New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) in China

gelgoog said:

With regards to Lithium the problem isn't its scarcity. It is more about the cost of extraction. In South America it is in brine salt deposits and it is much easier to extract. In a lot of other deposits the lithium is in hard rock, which needs to be broken, transported, processed, etc. Making the lithium from those mines way more expensive.

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gelgoog said:

It is pretty simple. As Japan lost the consumer electronics maker market they also lost the economies of scale of mass manufacture of the products that are required to make them.

For example Sony used to sell a lot of cameras with lithium ion battery cells. What about now?

What is the latest Panasonic appliance that you have seen let alone bought? Panasonic i.e. Matsushita used to be like the world's #1 consumer electronics maker. And Sony used to be #2.

Sony were the first to market an OLED TV. But then Samsung managed to mass manufacture it and make it in the many millions. Sony never got past the trial stage. It was a niche product and highly expensive.

BYD started out making components for smartphones and laptops. They used to make batteries for mobile devices. They only got into making cars afterwards.

It is all about scale. Mass production can make a product an order of magnitude cheaper. And by selling more units with larger profit per unit you can then pile those profits into R&D to stay ahead.

I would also say that corporate culture also plays a part. In Japan you don't knock on someone else's business. For example, why couldn't have Sony or Panasonic just made an electric car themselves? Because of Japanese corporate culture. They are electronics makers and that would be intruding on someone else's market. In China this is much less of an issue. BYD also had an advantage in that there was no car company in Shenzhen so they had a lot of local government support.

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tphuang said:

BYD Sea Lion 07 to be the first ocean series model w/ L2+ ADAS

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1748304637092921497

U8's various smart car functionalities compiled into 1 video

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1748306385509425192

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supersnoop said:

What's interesting is that most of the companies you named like Sony and Matsushita/Panasonic were producing the Lithium batteries in-house for their gear. Sony's battery production capacity was large enough to also supply outside companies like the famous flaming Apple Powerbook 5300c, the first mass market Lithium powered laptop.

The question still remains, even as their influence in consumer electronics waned, how come they were not able to take advantage of American outsourcing? It was this outsourcing that gave rise to the BYDs and CATLs.

Was it just a missed opportunity, much like how Toyota was the leader in Hybrids and just kind of quit making any more serious progress? I mean, they didn't even invest into PHEVs until a few years ago. Even if they didn't really believe in full EVs, PHEVs are very popular, so it is 100% just a bad business decision.

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FairAndUnbiased said:

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Japan is extremely xenophobic and conservative. If it doesn't look broken it will not be fixed. They will only change when forced to change, and then will not change further, until forced to do so again. They do not feel forced to right now, since they look down on the source of change, China. Thus they will continue falling further and further behind.

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