How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

China, being a superpower, has a vested interest in bringing other superpowers down a peg as well as increasing other countries' dependence on China.

Their state has a serious incentive to ship out cheap cars to destroy the automotive industry in the US and the EU for example. When that happens they can double the price on all their vehicles and you can't restart your car factories to compete with them again until years down the line.

With Huawei its about telecom equipment which is essential in today's age, with TikTok it's about controlling the narrative, also essential.

Yes, US and EU manufacturers need to innovate and be less greedy but the cost to make things will always be higher than in China so even though protectionism sounds bad, you'll always have some of that around to even the playing field.

I don't want to come across as the China pisser because most big countries do scumbag things of have done them (cough colonialism). But some more of China's vices that are out of sight:

- Keep the war going in Myanmar with terrible results for the population of one of the biggest and most populous countries in the world. You just don't hear about it because no journalist goes there. - Keeping North Korea in the saddle whereas they could have gently pushed for improvements. - Keeping the war in Ukraine going. If Chinese leadership has any moral ambition, they could stop the war quickly. But they don't. Their own agenda comes first, as is the case with any superpower.

But yes man I would buy a BYD immediatey and it pisses me off to no end that hey are 5x more expensive in Europe than in China. I guess the whole morality of free trade was only 'good' as long as it benefited us.

How come this price hike hasn't happened with solar panels, inverters, telecom equipment, batteries etc. It's been a while that such industries in europe have become obsolete

Ultimately China and US (and anyone else in the world for that matter) are doing the same thing - helping their domestic industry compete domestically and internationally, because they want prosperity for their country. They do it via different means - China via massive subsidies and US via bans and tariffs, but the end is the same.

If someone tries to tell you that these are somehow morally different, and one of them is the good guy and the other is the bad guy, they are pushing propaganda, knowingly or unknowingly.

How is that different from what the US and (to a lesser degree) the EU tried to do? Both are examples of capitalism.

Actually I know why it's different, I was just doing an online knee jerk response the difference is that western capitalism has a hands-off (but regulated) approach, letting the companies do their own thing. China and their companies are much more involved. I'm sure the US was a lot more directly involved in setting the directions of its industry in decades past, but since then the industry and stock market took over the reins.

Another factor may be that in the west, workers have more rights, unionized, and set their own boundaries. But they were also constrained - what would've happened if someone at Ford 10, 15 years ago said "I want to develop an EV?". In the US, it took a new company (Tesla with a heap of investor money) to make strides in that area. But because Tesla didn't have any actual experience in making cars, they reinvented the wheel and are (from what I gathered) still building sub-standard cars.

If an experienced company like Ford or VAG set aside money and resources to reinvent the car every once in a while they would've been able to keep up. As it stands, all the existing car companies bolted a battery and engine to their existing models, turning their cars into some weird frankenstein of 20+ year old car electronics, electric drives, and entertainment systems because they didn't have what it takes to design a car from scratch.

They also tried to min/max and moved a lot of production to China; short-term that was a benefit, especially VAG was the biggest car manufacturer / seller over there, until they caught up and overtook them in very short order.