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The size of BYD's factory

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Re: The size of BYD's factory

#471

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

saturn8601 wrote: post #52
ChumpGPT wrote: post #19

US/German manufacturers just do assembly, they don't manufacture parts, so they only need assembly plants. BYD is a vertically integrated manufacturer. They make everything in-house which helps drive down costs. This huge footprint results in having all those different manufacturing lines under one roof. They depend on no one for finished parts, the only supply chain is raw materials.

People are waking up, and to be fair, Tesla really led the way in the US for the last few years because they had no choice(no one would take them seriously). The question is can the West turn the ship around before its too late?

IMO the US really needs to do some house cleaning before anything real gets done. You can't expect the hand to cut itself out. I'm not sure if Trump could do that, TBH. He didn't have a lot of support in Military-Intelligence.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#472

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

thewanderer1983 wrote: post #145
bdangubic wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

west can compete. unlike byd’s, which get bricked all the time without infrastructure to maintain and repair them, west (and japan even more so) build cars that last. this is china we are talking about, the last thing I want is a car made by them… :)

As someone from Australia, which hasn't shut its self off from the China EV market. I drive a BYD Dolphin. You should be worried. They are cheaper, and more full-featured than European equivalent. They aren't junk. Also, they aren't the only big player from China. Australia is soon getting GAC/Aion, Geely, Jaecoo, Leapmotor, Deepal, Xpeng. Here is an article if interested. https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/which-…

Does Australia ask manufacturers to setup factories locally? I always think it's a good idea for employment and perhaps technology transfer. I don't know why Canada is not doing that. Getting a couple of big car factories could be huge for the locals. That's thousands and thousands of employment.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#473

Post by bombcar »

bee_rider wrote: post #459
mike_hearn wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't according to his biographer, and it definitely wasn't staged. The bafflement of his hosts is well recorded, as were his questions and his expressions as he explored the shop, see the photo on this page: https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day Soviet supermarkets were drastically more impoverished at that time. No comparison. Censorship is a problem because it affects everyone, especially the…

> The bafflement of his hosts is well recorded, as were his questions and his expressions as he explored the shop, This isn’t really evidence that it wasn’t staged by him though. That is, he doesn’t need to tell the host that he’s going to react strongly. He was a political operator, I’m sure he’d be happy to dupe some supermarket owner. > Soviet supermarkets were drastically more impoverished at that time. No compar…

Even if the information about our wealth was available; it was likely discounted and ignored; even North Korea can make charade supermarkets as necessary.

There's a difference between hearing something and seeing it everywhere.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#474

Post by ReptileMan »

foobarian wrote: post #389
jpgvm wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say it's central to their culture. Sort of goes for most Asian cultures, the education of children is something Asian parents will sacrifice greatly for.

Curious that education is valued so much, but then there are cycles of uprisings where educated people are targeted (Cambodia, Chairman Mao, ..)

As always the revolution starts from the competing elites. The culture revolution happened because CCP couldn't allow any form of alternative power centers.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#475

Post by bombcar »

SoftTalker wrote: post #178
edot wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I have never seen something like that in America in my life. Always plenty of machines sitting around, and every few weeks some guys will hop on them for the day, but other than that they just sit there. It almost looks AI generated how densely packed those are - though I assume that this is real footage.

And what blows my mind is that if I want to rent a tractor with a front loader for some landscaping work it’s hundreds a day. Yet even larger commercial earth moving equipment sits around unused for weeks.

It's about usable time and cost of capital - if it's cheaper to rent the unit, they'll rent one, if it's cheaper to buy one and let it sit idle most of the time, they'll do that.

The rent/buy calculus can be incredibly shunted towards "buy" once you're using it even somewhat. It's even more so when you realize that labor costs is the main issue, and not having a skilled worker waiting around for an item to be delivered (by another slightly less skilled worker, perhaps) is a huge savings in its own part. Five guys on a site might have 15 machines total; even though they obviously can't use all 15 at the same time.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#476

Post by tame3902 »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #339
tame3902 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Volkswagen's main factory is also pretty large: "Spanning more than 6.5 km², the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg is now the largest automotive plant in Europe, employing more than 60,000 people."[0] [0]: https://www.volkswagen.de/de/marke-und-erlebnis/volkswagen-e...

It becomes tricky because what does 'factory' mean? Especially once it's scaled to the size of a small town, you start to see town-like buildings popping up. There's some stuff which is arguably necessary for the factory itself, such as the train station and logistics facilities, a test track, and things which are necessary for the employees directly such as employee car parks and restaurants, but then there are othe…

Of course, it becomes tricky to decide what belongs to a factory or not if you look closely enough. And comparing factory sizes is something inherently silly. But I think that in a capitalistic society the land area owned by the company is a good first order approximation. If they wouldn't need it, it would be better for them to sell it.

But in the case of the Volkswagen factory the points you mention lead to something interesting: The city of Wolfsburg was created just before WW2 to house the workers of the factory created at the same time to produce the precursor of the VW beetle. Even today the city is dominated by the factory: it has a population of 120,000 and 60,000 work in the factory. So under a loose enough definition of "factory", the whole city of Wolfsburg is part of it.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#477

Post by ebruchez »

digitalsurgeonz wrote: post #411
t0bia_s wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your natural resources shrinking, you need to expand if your entire economy depending on that sources. China will soon be more aggressive as any other empires.

>China will soon be more aggressive as any other empires. in its entire history it has never invaded outside its traditional borders, and it achieved all this without invading or enslaving people. It will continue this way in future too :)

> it has never invaded outside its traditional borders

Your notion of "traditional borders" is where this becomes nonsense. With a little bit of revisionist history you can justify all sorts of invasions, such as the 1959 invasion of Tibet, or the desire to retake Taiwan. In reality, China is an empire, with several of its regions very unhappy to part of it (Tibet, Xinjiang, and probably more if you could only ask its people).

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#478

Post by ElevenLathe »

mike_hearn wrote: post #444
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead. Railways were already becoming uncompetitive by the 1920s and now live on mostly in parts of the world where they already exist, where land is at a premium. The fact that railways were becoming uncompetitive in the mid-1900s is why high-speed rail was developed. The Japanese pioneered high-speed rail in the 1960s, dramat…

People take HSR sometimes because it's heavily subsidized, especially in China. Without government intervention rail can't compete against airports and roads. China's railway is in a staggering amount of debt due to mass overbuilding of the sort that would have bankrupted any normal company in a market economy long ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/vt7jrz/a_whopping_90... > China is not at all like the USS…

Air travel is also heavily subsidized, and road travel even more so. One of the real reasons for the interstate highway system (not the purported reason -- defense -- that got the bill through Congress) was to break the back of the rail monopolists (and, importantly, the rail unions). The American state chose to literally invent a whole new kind of socialized transport (marketed as a form of consumer individualism) than just nationalize and upgrade the railroads like every other civilized country.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#479

Post by xtracto »

afh1 wrote: post #423
wingerlang wrote: post #396

I don't know about elsewhere in the world, but the amount of BYD's I see on the streets of Bangkoks today compared to say two years ago must be an 1000% increase. They are absolutely everywhere.

Same here in Brazil. Even in the countryside.

I'm curious: Do Chinese cars have the stigma of being crap quality in other countries?

Here in Mexico most anecdotes of people buying Chinese cars are that after less than a year something broke and they had to take it to the repair shop, where it stayed for a very long time due to a lack of pieces even by the manufacturer.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#480

Post by JackFr »

sangnoir wrote: post #307
refulgentis wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are prima facie wrong, their overcapacity is bad and actively harmful, this isn't a sign of it succeeding, its a sign of desperation from it failing. There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago. Dazzled by the spectacle, this misses that their economy is characterized by deflationary headwinds due to a massive, massive over-investment in…

> There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?! There's also a type of western mind that automatically dismisses the odds of a different country succeeding, based on nothing but the fact that they are using a different approach (on the surface)…

For those old enough to remember, we heard it all before in the 1980's about Japan so experience has made us circumspect.

But even more so, markets enforce discipline on capital that state directed firms don't have. Everyone decries executives who "only look as far as next quarter's profits", and while admittedly at the margins that can have perverse incentives, in the large it demands that management put capital to work at profitable enterprises selling goods and services the public actually want.

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