BYD builds fastest car

Dec 2026

Or you could buy Nissan leaf, renault Zoe and other cars.

> Apple taxis service? Apple family self driving vans?

Taxis and buses are pretty old tech at this point. (Not just from an Uber/Lyft perspective either; taxis and coaches predate cars themselves, because the ideas/"tech" worked just fine with actual horse power.)

As for self-driving cars, so much of the efforts today remind me of that old Ford quote to the tune of "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse". It doesn't feel like an innovative step change in transportation, it feels like a slightly better car (when it works). It doesn't fix any of the current big problems of cars and over-relying on cars as our primary transportation form factor.

Less of that seems to me to be a problem with over-regulation than a problem with current financing games and not competing with each other as much on price, because the average car buyer is expected to buy a car a third of the cost of their house mortgage for a third of the term because that it is what banks want and what banks give a generous cut back to dealerships and sometimes to manufacturers to help entrench it as the way to sell cars.

GM alone has spent most of its history waffling between whether it wants to be a large bank itself or not. (The "GMAC" division has threads back to 1911, was spun out in the '00s as "Ally Bank", has been mostly repurchased with others to reform a larger "GM Financial" starting in the 2010s.)

The other part of it is that marginal costs are weird in the modern software-defined world. Motorized windows are cheaper today than the plastics and mechanical parts of roll up windows. Similar for the mechanics of manual mirrors. An electric motor tuned precisely for that mirror is fewer parts than a manual mirror. A camera system is sometimes even cheaper than mirrors today, which is wild.

> China's EV subsidies are basically identical to US and EU subsidies.

Not really, not much similarities between China and EU subsidies past 15 years. China's NEV subsidies are illegal because they are either conditioned on illegal tech transfer, local content requirement, or restrict market access. To give a high level view of the problems:

1) forced technology transfer/IP theft -- all foreign automakers/EV battery producers forced to give up IP to access China's market (and subsidies). This was litigated before the WTO by the EU in 2018 (see WT/DS549):

  Hybrid in a Trade Squeeze, Keith Bradsher, Sept 5, 2011, NYT

  ... The Chinese government is refusing to let the Volt qualify for subsidies totaling up to $19,300 a car unless G.M. agrees to transfer the engineering secrets for one of the Volt’s three main technologies to a joint venture in China with a Chinese automaker, G.M. officials said.

2) Once foreign battery producers made IPR/IP concessions to access China's growing EV market and significant investment in battery production in China, they were effectively banned. All domestic, foreign automakers were likewise forced to switch to local champions, namely CATL/BYD, promoted by the gov't under MIIT's 2015 Regulation on Power Standard:

  Power Play, Trefor Moss, May 17, 2018, WSJ

  ... China requires auto makers to use batteries from one of its approved suppliers if they want to be cleared to mass-produce electric cars and plug-in hybrids and to qualify for subsidies. These suppliers are all Chinese, so such global leaders as South Korea’s LG Chem Ltd and Japan’s Panasonic Corp. are excluded.
  ... Foreign batteries aren’t officially banned in China, but auto executives say that since 2016 they have been warned by government officials that they must use Chinese batteries in their China-built cars, or face repercussions. That has forced them to spend millions of dollars to redesign cars to work with inferior Chinese batteries, they say.
  ... “We want to comply, and we have to comply,” said one executive with a foreign car maker. “There’s no other option.”

3) China also made sure no Chinese consumers had access to EVs with batteries from foreign EV battery producers effectively creating a captive market of buyers for CATL/BYD.

  Why a Chinese Company Dominates Electric Car Batteries. Keith Bradsher and Michael Forsythe, Dec 22, 2021, NYT

  The government soon said electric car buyers could get subsidies only if the battery was made by a Chinese company. G.M., which had not been notified of the rule, started shipping Buick Velite electric cars in 2016 with batteries made in China by LG, a South Korean company.
  Angry consumers and dealers complained that local officials were denying them subsidies, people familiar with the episode said. G.M. switched heavily to CATL for the huge Chinese market.

4) another fairly recent example of China's arbitrary regulatory barriers to keep out foreign competition, which was later dropped after the gov't found out their local "champion," CATL, couldn't pass the EV battery safety test:

  Why a Chinese Company Dominates Electric Car Batteries.
  ... A rival had released a video suggesting that a technology used by the company, CATL, and other manufacturers could cause car fires. Imitating a Chinese government safety test, the rival had driven a nail through a battery cell, one of many in a typical electric car battery. The cell exploded in a fireball.
  Chinese officials took swift action — by dropping the nail test, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. The new regulation, released two months later, listed who had drafted it: First on the list, ahead of the government’s own vehicle testing agency, was CATL.

So these are very deliberately orchestrated mercantile policies to gain advantages with forced tech transfer, limited foreign competition, and subsidized overcapacity and export subsidies. It's just too bad that the existing global trade/subsidies regulation regime, aka, the WTO, doesn't have much effective enforcement tool to discourage/punish such behavior. EU's shortcoming IMO is their blind faith in the market and their belief that the market would autocorrect.

As of this week, EU has over 100+ countervailing measures (anti-dumping/anti-subsidy) in force against Chinese imports, ranging from ceramic tiles (AD560), to decor paper (AD712), to polyester yarn (AD690); in addition to few more dozens of on-going investigations from candles (AD726) to hardwood plywood (AD717).