The recent surge in fuel prices due to the war in Iran has spurred demand for electric vehicles around the world, and Chinese car makers are making the most of the opportunity.
Trump is training the world in how to live without us. Congrats!
Yes. But as an American I want to thrive with byd here!
They’re just better electric cars than what we can get…
We can’t even get those small Japanese trucks
The whole world is starting to find out that they can thrive without the usa, now that they have to (unless they kiss the ring). Fuck, it’s just like Stephen King’s novel “The Stand”.
Losing the US market would have hurt if they were on it in the first place. The only things they made and sold iirc were electric buses and maybe some short distance electric trucks meant for use in ports or other such use cases.
Canadian here who wouldn’t mind trying a BYD.
You guys either already have them or will very soon. I haven’t checked the progress lately, but it’s certainly moving forward.
Interesting, because I heard recent reports of huge amounts of inventory and large upfront manufacturing costs painting a picture of a company with extremely large amounts of debt to service. Some likening it to the Evergrande property company.
I doubt it’s on that scale, but I could easily believe BYD is another hyper accelerated company with shaky fundamentals.
As can we all.
Pretty sure they’ve been doing fine without the US market for years.
(It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when BYD sets up dealerships just north of the border, since Canada has given them the okay to import a certain number of vehicles per year.)
(It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when BYD sets up dealerships just north of the border, since Canada has given them the okay to import a certain number of vehicles per year.)
Better to look at Australia. Low tariffs only apply to 50,000 cars made in China, which include Volvo and Teslerrr. This means the cars they import will be expensive.
But Canada tried an experiment with BYD buses, they set up an assembly plant near Toronto in 2019 and the buses were so bad, no one ordered them because they broke in testing. Toronto ordered 25 and sued to get their money back, and by 2023, BYD Bus Canada was shut down after building a whopping 10 buses.
Buying a new model from established car makers is a bad idea. The reality is there is no long term data on these Chinese EVs.
London (UK) has been successfully running BYD EV buses for years with no major issues. They’re cheaper than the diesels to run and quieter. Not sure why Canada had so much trouble.
I was curious about that so tried googling ….
Canadian buses were
- earlier models - I see years like 2018
- at least some were built in a new plant in Canada
- part of the blame was lack of spare parts
- part of the blame was limited range, especially in winter
London buses
- newer. I see years like 2024
- no real winter
- I see articles about a new larger battery to fix range issues
- appeared to have similar problems, including a major recall for fire risk
Maybe London benefitted from newer models and doesn’t get as cold as canada
Seems a fair conclusion, certainly it is warmer in London UK than London Ontario !
Wasn’t just Canada, US cities all had problems in testing.
Tesla had pioneer advantage
The Chinese will make better vehicles more efficiently and cheaper
That should make everyone happy
I’m certainly very happy with my Huawei watch. Obviously a totally different product by a different manufacturer, but China can clearly make quality stuff that’s affordable.
A huge domestic market is a strong advantage for Chinese manufacturers.
Even if every single country stops buying Chinese cars, they’ll still have a base of 1.5 billion potential customers.
With more countries actively partnering with China, this number goes up considerably.
This is the reality of the situation. They are an absolute juggernaut with a tremendous amount of inertia. It seems like it would be a good long term strategy to partner with them, or emulate them at least.
They did do quite a bit of damage to Mercedes, Porsche and BMW in Germany over the last 2 or 3 years.
Competition: the final boss of capitalism.
Tho, maybe it’s because the Chinese don’t deal with these huge margins they have on cars now. A new car now costs tenfold what a new car would cost a few decades ago
A new car now costs tenfold what a new car would cost a few decades ago
Average car price 20 years ago in Canada, $32,700. That $52,000 corrected to inflation.
Average price of new car in Canada 2026 is $63000, but average is a stupid measure, the median is much lower.
I can’t find the actual median price but it is estimated by one site at $45K.
The big difference between today and a few decades ago is people leasing cars they cannot afford, which drives up prices.
Not entirely disagreeing with you. The way you worded it was always going to be the case if all you do is compare window sticker prices from across the decades though. Inflation cuts your money in half roughly every 20 years. A 20K car in 2006 is a ~40k car today even if everything else stayed equal. The average price for cars after inflation is going up though. The US’s trend towards SUVs and trucks is certainly pulling prices up but other things do as well like the government mandated features(small relatively but not nothing).
Some examples(these are when they became mandatory, not available)
- front airbags - 1998
- tire pressure monitoring (tpms) - 2007
- ABS - 2011
- stability control - 2012
- backup cameras - 2018
Are you sure on the TPMS date? I’ve got a vehicle that’s much newer than 2007 that doesn’t have it
For the US it’s September 2007, for the EU it started November 2012 but seems like a phased rollout until 2014. Don’t really follow EU regs.
Canada, and still not mandatory here apparently. Which is weird because a lot of our automotive requirements do tend to follow the US due to common production lines and other such factors
They sell a lot of EVs because of laws. China did not make EVs voluntary in large cities.
Indeed, environmental regulations have played a pivotal role in the development of Chinese EV market, no doubt here.
In some cities, ICE cars are borderline unusable since you can’t even drive them at will any day you want - assuming you can even get a license plate in the first place.
What I meant was that international pressure on the demand side is not as scary for Chinese companies as it is for many other places.
It’s so pink. I want it!
Most Americans would not buy a Chinese car anyway.
I love that Americans pretend to be the most important and competitive market. The combined population of Europe is twice that of the US. South East Asia is 700 million. And the choices in EV’s is triple that off the US.
These are the markets Chinese manufacturers are after. These markets accept Chinese cars based on the price, quality and innovation.
They also said that about Tesla, “no new car company can be successful…”
Have you seen Tesla sales since 2025? They are getting out of the car business.
Yeah, even before its ceo came out of the closet as Nazi- after growing to a successful car business they got distracted by new and shiny
But I still think their cars are better technology than anything else in the us, and now cheaper than most. They still have their big upcoming push into semis. They still have most superchargers. They still have a rapidly growing storage business. The cybertruck flop really hurt them and I don’t see how they can afford another.
But ai doesn’t really have a profitably business model yet and humanoid robots are a much bigger gamble with no market yet. This is where a more typical business owner would create new corporate entities so Tesla could become a successful car company while the ceo could try other gambles
They used to say that about Japanese cars in America too.
And the first Toyotas and Hyundais were awful, they rusted out in minutes.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. If BYD were allowed to import their entire fleet to the US they would be at the top of my interest list on price alone even if the US prices were double what Ive seen in new articles.
I’m personally in need of a new vehicle and everything, both the pickups I need and the passenger cars, are too expensive and has too much shit I don’t need installed by default. I’m literally holding my car together with ducktape and bailing wire waiting for the Slate Truck to come out.
I think that if Slate Auto actually pulls off a inexpensive light duty EV pickup, and it proves reliable, it may completely change the landscape of the American auto market. I’m pretty sure that Ford and maybe Jeep will survive, but I’m not sure the others will unless they can start kicking out lower priced vehicles quickly.
Most Americans would jump at the opportunity of the price is right. They might tell you to your face they won’t but they will.
Most of our bs is made in China anyway
No one cares about population. It’s about gdp.
American media pretends. Americans are just stupid.
Id buy a Chinese car before an American one (as an American).
There are around 290m cars in the us for the 330m people
There are around 420m cars in Europe for the 730m people
So while the actual amount of cars in all of Europe is more than the US the percent car ownership in a single country is insane
Than why don’t they buy foreign EV’s? There were options but now both Hyundai and Kia have stopped selling EV models last year solely in the US. In my opinion that makes the choice for BYD logical as these US established brands can’t even sell their EV’s.
Hyundai has pulled the ioniq 6 but the ioniq 5 and soon to be ioniq3 are sold in the USA still. Unless there was some news I missed. For Kia, Im not sure what their status is.
My own opinion, they were too expensive and the EV charging network wasn’t built up enough to prevent people from feeling like the available range options weren’t large enough.
Still, the absolute number is what matters, still bigger market.
If you are making an ad campaign, all of the US speaks the same language, generally has the same safety regulations, and a much larger percent of the people are your target ad personnel
The EU is a cohesive unit for regulations but speak many different language and once you branch out of the EU to all of Europe you can see why there are huge advantages to advertising in the US.
So no it’s not the absolute number that matters
California is famous for having different safety regulations.
I don’t see how the percentage should matter, absolute numbers matter. You get money for every sale, if you sell to 1% or to 99% is irrelevant.
Imagine you owned a store, what seems better, having 40 customers come in and all of them buy or having 80 people come in and all use up time with a salesman and then only 45 people purchase. You would end up spending a much more significant amount of the sales revenue on the larger showroom and more staff. This isn’t my opinion this is why the American market has been prioritized, that and the fact that Americans spend more on cars per year
California has different emissions requirements (not safety) but since they are a strict upgrade to the rest of the US (and comparable to other int markets) as long as you follow their requirements all cars in the US can be sold without any contradictory requirements
A very common kpi used is to examine the success of a campaign in a per target demographic so having the much lower response rate is worse
The 80 people with 45 sells, hands down. You don’t need more showroom, showroom depends on the product. You don’t need more staff, they work on commission, and again are proportional to the inventory.
Let alone that the comparison is pointless, in Europe people who don’t want a car don’t go car shopping and don’t consume any imaginary resources. You are in a town of 80 people and 45 visit your store to buy a car instead of a town of 40 where all 40 buy.
The question is can they survive when their cars catch on fire at an alarming rate? https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/hundreds-cars-burn-byd-fire-130025851.html
And they say batteries aren’t to blame, because you know car seats, electric motors, and body panels are known for just randomly catching fire. It obviously wasn’t the batteries /s
But I truly want them here. I work in the automotive industry and yeah, they’re scared shitless. However, from my point of view it seems like a greed thing. It would drive competition hard and that would mean short to medium term r&d cost increases.
We are so fucking far behind it’s not even funny. Shutting out the competition is just putting our head in the sand. It is time to get into gear.
Once again, this news makes the man happy.
Ah, I see that the 50-cent army has fucking arrived, too.
