Chinese Economics Thread

[Petrolicious88]

Hydrogen was never a serious option lmao what are you even talking about. Only Japan hedged on hydrogen, no Chinese company did. When was a hydrogen vehicle made? BYD started profitably shipping plug in hybrids in 2008 and full electric buses in 2010. Before that, BYD was a successful auto parts/electronics company. All it had to do was assemble its own auto parts and electronics that it used to sell to others into a self branded package.

Lol hydrogen has huge applications, esp in buses and trucks. Chinese government was betting on both. Grove Hydrogen Automative, which is a State Backed entity was looking into Fuel Cells vehicles (FCV) as early as 2015, just a year after the start of NIO/Xpeng. Wan Gang was actively lobbying for FCV as late as 2018, prob even earlier. So lets be FairAndUbiased, it wasn't just the Japanese government that was betting on hydrogen.

The rise of Tesla literally forced a reset among global automakers . That had a huge impact on China as well in the early days. Why do you think they bend over backwards for Tesla Shanghai Giga

 

[Petrolicious88]

Because Tesla had made a name for itself in the West, part of the thinking was that China might as well be the main production and export hub for Tesla. After all, this applies to most other industries in the world.



And BYD has been working on electric vehicles for over 15 years now, building out a completely Chinese supply chain.


No. The central government in China focused on electric vehicles some 10? years ago. You can read about this in Rifkind's New York Times bestseller "The Third Industrial Revolution". Rifkind also mentions Angela Merkel, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang as big fans of the book, which outlines an electric future.

Electric vehicles were obviously better than hydrogen given:

1. The predicted declines in battery costs
2. All the promising new battery technologies in speculative development whereas hydrogen is a mature mechanical process with little room for breakthrough improvement
3. The predicted declines in solar and wind costs, with electricity significantly cheaper than coal. And how every building will end up with solar panels and how every electric car would be connected up as a grid storage battery.

It wasn't Tesla that settled the Hydrogen versus electricity debate.

Remember that electric bicycles, electric scooters, electric motorcycles, electric buses, electric taxis and small electric delivery vans all kicked off in China before Tesla's arrival. You could see that playing out in Chinese cities 5 years ago.

For example, by 2017, Shenzhen had already decided to completely switch to electric buses and taxis. And taxis are just electric cars that are driven a lot.

But you wouldn't realise this if you only consumed Western media output about electric vehicles, which only covered Tesla.

I don’t doubt BYD, never have. But It’s hard to compare the global EV impact between it and Tesla, at least In the early days. BYD produced around 50k electric buses from 2008ish to 2019, and thats worldwide. There are more than 700k buses and trolleys in urban China.

Let’s not compare electric scooters, bicycles, etc.. to making an actual EV car with range. Electric bicycles and scooters have been around China since the 1990s.

Im hoping for the day Chinese EV brands take the world by storm. That hasn’t happened yet. Most of BYDs sales are still at home.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

Lol hydrogen has huge applications, esp in buses and trucks. Chinese government was betting on both. Grove Hydrogen Automative, which is a State Backed entity was looking into Fuel Cells vehicles (FCV) as early as 2015, just a year after the start of NIO/Xpeng. Wan Gang was actively lobbying for FCV as late as 2018, prob even earlier. So lets be FairAndUbiased, it wasn't just the Japanese government that was betting on hydrogen.

The rise of Tesla literally forced a reset among global automakers . That had a huge impact on China as well in the early days. Why do you think they bend over backwards for Tesla Shanghai Giga

Theres lots of corruption and complacency in Shanghai. The incompetent lockdown there showed it. So I'm not surprised that Tesla was allowed to set up a plant there.

Grove hydrogen automobile is still around, they are still selling cars. They're also academic backed by a local Wuhan university, not government backed the way Tesla is.

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Tesla is mostly hype. Chinese government, especially local government, can easily be swindled by hype because they're not technical SMEs. That's why you have shit like energy vault being allowed. But with bare minimum competence, at least you don't havr garbage like Las Vegas loop or Indian Hyperloop.

 

[Fedupwithlies]

Stumble across this video. Anyone have ideas what happened? And bonus Jai part right after Ubermensch part.

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Looks like a patent dispute in Germany by Nokia

 

[Philister]

Panasonic supply the battery cells, but Tesla does the modules.

Also Tesla are using gigacastings now, which means they can replace hundreds of components with a single casting. Presumably the legacy automakers would be buying all these components in.

Plus Tesla are amongst the first to use commodity processors / domain controllers and software to replace hundreds (thousands?) of MCU units.

So overall, I judge Tesla far more vertically integrated than any other automaker apart from BYD.

It’s more complicated than that, for now,casting is good for manufacturing relatively small numbers , it does reduce the cost ,but it actually takes more time compared with traditional process.

 

[mossen]

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[AndrewS]

It’s more complicated than that, for now,casting is good for manufacturing relatively small numbers , it does reduce the cost ,but it actually takes more time compared with traditional process.

That's not accurate. A gigapress is listed as producing 1000 castings per day. That is 365K per year, which is not a small number

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

That's not accurate. A gigapress is listed as producing 1000 castings per day. That is 365K per year, which is not a small number

365k per year is peanuts compared to Toyota numbers. You think that casting, a literal bronze age technology, is something too complicated for companies like Toyota to think of?

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that processes like stamping or extrusion aren't.

 

[AndrewS]

365k per year is peanuts compared to Toyota numbers. You think that casting, a literal bronze age technology, is something too complicated for companies like Toyota to think of?

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that processes like stamping or extrusion aren't.

The point is that this output is from a single machine which removes the need for hundreds of (external) suppliers.

Note that Toyota hasn't ordered any Gigapresses, whilst there are numerous Chinese companies that have.
And note how Toyota still isn't developing electric vehicles seriously. So Toyota is a really bad example to use.

 

[Petrolicious88]

BTW, one of the suppliers of Tesla Gigapresses is LK Technology - another Chinese company you never heard of but it’s critical part of global supply chain. LK build it to Tesla's exact specification. Took a year of collaboration.

Gigapress saves up to 40% in production costs and will help Tesla meet its production goal of 20 million EVs per year.

And it’s inspiring other Chinese EV makers to do the same. LK is scheduled to supply gigapresses to at least 6 other Chinese car makers. So the Tesla catfish effect is still happening.