New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) in China
- Thread starter supercat
- Start date
US is not capitalism at all. State governors will go to great lengths to attract auto plants as they are seen as prestigious manufacturing and good vote-getters. They will go far to keep them with incentives and public opposition to labour unions, so actually it's national socialism.
Problem with the JVs is that they simply either have inferior or no cars at all to build with the preference of PHEVs and EVs
Honda: 0 EV, 0 PHEV
GM: EVs: Lyriq, Optiq, Equinox, Blazer, Hummer, Silverado, Escalade IQ. 0 PHEV
Toyota: bZ4x, bZ3 (BYD based car), Prius Prime PHEV, RAV4 (Wildlander) Prime PHEV
Nissan: Ariya EV, Sakura EV, Slyphy EREV
VWAG: ID-series, Q4, Q6/Macan, Taycan/e-Tron GT
*Not all of the above are available in China, just giving an idea of what could be built
For GM, only the smaller cars are relevant, but the Lyriq which has been on sale for quite some time has clearly not shown enough to management to believe that their pipeline is strong enough since they are already talking about strategic retreat.
Honda has nothing at all. Further cooperation with GM has been scrapped, however no models have been shown except for the Honda-Sony Afeela which is not a production ready concept (despite claims of being ready for 2025)
Nissan is in disarray due to the crumbling partnership with Renault. Perhaps the new Geely venture will help.
Toyota has great brand loyalty, but the pipeline is bare. Complicating this is that now they also have to develop China competitive smart features. They are trying (Huawei/Momenta partnership, BYD joint venture), but at the moment they don't have anything close. However, those moves are indicative of a company that still sees the value in the market relative to ROI.
China is the only market with such cutthroat EV competition. In other markets, Tesla is the clear leader in EVs for better or worse. Driving an EV from a conventional automaker, the dynamics are fine, quality is good, but there is no intelligence whatsoever. Some people have better experiences, but I don't personally feel its there.
Western PHEVs do not have a different drive train, just note the below
Hybrid Drive train - electric motor and gas motor can both drive the car
Extended range EV (aka not a true hybrid) - only the electric motor drives the car, gas motor only provides electric power
EREVs are not generally available outside of China
A few other points
Toyota hybrids are "true hybrids" in the engineering sense, but with respect to everyday use, it is just a fuel efficiency boost when they lack the plug in part (they only have two PHEVs as noted above). PHEV should be able to run in full EV mode (no gas being used).
EREV is much simpler/cheaper to build, but the biggest disadvantage is terrible fuel efficiency if you need that aspect. European countries have those mandates for EVs in 2030, so there is no point to develop those. Might as well put in more batteries.
BYD has the economy of scale and production efficiency to deliver true PHEV at a price competitive or lower than ICE cars which is how they are tearing up these sales charts.
tesla is not even premium brand.
supercat
Major
Another day, another couple of articles talk about how China's auto industry turned the tables.
BYD's battery EV Song Plus was launched with a starting price of $21,000.
BYD's battery EV Song Plus was launched with a starting price of $21,000.
Song with DMi 5.0 would be a killer model in the US car market. My family bought a RAV4 XLE, which cost more than a loaded Song. But I would take a loaded Song with DMi 5.0 over RAV4 on any given day.......
......
it is a killer model anywhere at the price it's selling at right now.
Song Pro will probably be under 100k at some point.
How about the quality of construction of the car? Are they using top materials when building?
Over time, Chinese car quality will surely be getting better and better as more and more domestic brands adopting super smart auto manufacturing plants like Huawei collaborated with Ceres and JAC, for the simple factor in quality control that less human touches mean better manufacturing quality. The old myth of superior Japanese manufacturing quality has already been shattered. Huawei has a few super smart manufacturing projects under construction with 5.5G and industrial LLM backend. AITO M9 and Beijing S9 are the 2 prime examples. If you follow their quality trajectory, you would get a real sense of what is going on inside MIC 2025.
orders report, here is the one for BYD
They are on pace for 400k new orders in China just for mass market brands
Traditional auto vendors suck at writing software. This is why companies like GM or the Japanese majors simply cannot cope.
In Japan I think Sony or Panasonic would have had a better chance of making an EV than Toyota or Honda. The problem is Japan's compartmentalization of society and economy. The industry and the government won't allow you to enter someone else's turf i.e. making cars. Want to buy some auto parts from existing vendors? The parts manufacturers are part of the zaibatsu of the auto manufacturers and won't sell any to outside challengers.
As for why Toyota resisted to much at making the Prius a full blown plug-in hybrid it was because adding charging severely reduced the lifetime of the NiMH battery.
In Japan I think Sony or Panasonic would have had a better chance of making an EV than Toyota or Honda. The problem is Japan's compartmentalization of society and economy. The industry and the government won't allow you to enter someone else's turf i.e. making cars. Want to buy some auto parts from existing vendors? The parts manufacturers are part of the zaibatsu of the auto manufacturers and won't sell any to outside challengers.
As for why Toyota resisted to much at making the Prius a full blown plug-in hybrid it was because adding charging severely reduced the lifetime of the NiMH battery.
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