So its interesting to think what will happen when they turn their gaze outwards. How long will it take Chinese brands to be a force to be reckoned with?
Yes they might be sniffed at to start with, but that's only the same as Japanese cars in the 60s, Skoda in the 90s and most recently Kia, but other manufacturers won't be able to get away with calling them cheap tat for long (assuming they aren't).
I assume there are more barriers to entry compared to other industries. I know Europe slaps duties on imported cars but Japan worked around that.
We're all looking at Tesla to bring electric cars to the masses. Should we be looking at China instead?
Not long at all, I think. The US (and European) car and truck industries have been doing too much navel gazing, and far too little forward thinking and investment. While they have been selling things like gas guzzling light trucks and marketing them as a desirable replacement for regular cars, only made economical by low fuel tax and fracking, the Chinese have heavily invested in the next big thing. While the US companies focused on the short term profit, they are going to lose really heavily when the rest of the global economy has moved over to electric, and they have nothing to offer. Meanwhile, China will have several generations of experience in electric vehicle production of all types by that point.
Maybe not too late, if they pull out all the stops and seriously invest in both production and infrastructure to match, but it will take a lot to beat China at its own game at this point. Needs investment at national scale not only in the US, but the UK and the rest as well.
Regarding Tesla. They have been a pioneer in some respects, but I have doubts that they will be the ones to bring electric to the masses. That will I think be done by the established companies (local and Chinese) after they switch over to mass production. Tesla won't be able to compete on volume or price in my opinion.
>We're all looking at Tesla to bring electric cars to the masses. Should we be looking at China instead?
Right now, Tesla consumes more than 60% of the word EV batteries and their shares is still increasing. I'm sure most of the world's EVs will be Chinese but the most high-end ones will probably be Teslas (made in Shanghai if need be). One can draw a parallel with the smartphones market :)
The smartphone parallel is what I was thinking of. More particularly the transition from dumb phone, to smart phone, Tha basically destroyed most of the incumbents.
I take it you're saying Tesla is Apple.
Perhaps, you don't have the network effects and lock in with cars, that you do with phones, and Tesla don't seem to make 'the best' hardware like Apple do, but I don't have a crystal ball either, so I won't argue.
Agree but to be fair it was Tesla who actually made electric cars popular and desirable and built all the charging stations for their cars so it does not make sense for them to give services to other electric cars unless some law forces them to do so.
A top level commenter mentioned Geely-owned London Taxi Company is building electrified black cabs. Geely also happens to own Volvo: I think an electric Volvo will do very well in the high-end against Tesla.
Also, if China decides it needs extra EV battery capacity, expect the total number to significantly increase, and Tesla's slice will shrink (in relative terms).
Volvo's ex-performance brand, polestar, is being spun off into a hybrid and electric only manufacturer. They are starting off with the Polestar 1, a hybrid sports coupe, but after that, the polestar 2 and polestar 3 are planned to be electric (sedan and suv, respectively). Polestar 1 will be out of reach for most ($150k), as well as being in a coupe form factor. its competitors will likely be honda NSX, and maybe DB11 or R8. But it will be interesting to see how Polestars future products do.
Car technology always filters down from high-end models to daily drivers over time - today the tech will be in Polestar, in 5 years, it will be in Volvo's generic platform covering several models. Even Tesla kicked things off with the expensive roadster and the tech filtered to cheaper cars, and this follows a long tradition (power steering, airbags, traction control, cruise control were all premium models features at some point but are now standard)
> Right now, Tesla consumes more than 60% of the world EV batteries
Not sure where you heard that but that is completely false. BYD alone shipped over 100,000 electric cars (not including buses) in the third quarter (compared to Tesla's 83,000). Other Chinese car companies BAIC, Rowe, and Geel all ship over 20k+ plug-ins per quarter.
I think that's referring to total energy capacity and not the number of battery packs.
Tesla's luxury vehicles ship with 75/90/100kWh packs while BYD's model seem to have 63kWh (not accounting for busses which seems to have about 325kWh). No definite information available for Model 3, afaik, but I heard that the long range version has a 75kWh pack (50kWh for the "normal range" model?).
> It’s official: Tesla Gigafactory is now the largest annual producer of battery power in the automotive world
Official according to who? I suspect that, like much of the less critical reporting on Tesla, it's just reprinting a press release. In any case, that doesn't match the headline; it's just claiming it's the single biggest factory. There's no substantiation of the headline at all, and looking at the numbers it cannot be true.
Side note, but I don't get the part about Škoda. They have been building cars literally since the onset of the 20th century and have been a well established producer for a long time before the 90s.
Or was there some kind of consumer boom for Škoda vehicles in the US/Canada/Australia/the UK, or wherever you are from, that I never heard of before?
Skoda were the subject of many terrible jokes in the 80s and 90s, thanks to poor reputation and reliability of earlier decades. They were so cheap, but far more basic, compared to the better known makes.
They started to get OK reliability in the 80s which meant they started to become popular as value for money motoring. They got pretty common on UK roads. Popular and reliable enough to become a common choice for private hire use. Which as many at the time noted, meant Skoda had the last laugh.
The price advantage faded after the VW takeover, but they remained popular as private hire cars.
See also my reply to the sibling, but in the country I come from they were well known maybe from some time between the 20s or 30s, and they were generally always regarded as a good quality brand. Usually not as prominent as others, but still decent nonetheless.
I didn't know that until the last decade or so they were seen as poor vehicles elsewhere, to the extent as to become the target of jokes. Thanks for the context – it definitely helps me understand better how this fits into OP's point.
Not sure how much of the joking was simply down to price as they were a lot cheaper than others, or how much was build quality vs reliability.
The context of the era helps too, no 70s and 80s mass market cars were without a weak point or six, and jokes on the back of those.
Eastern Bloc makes had poor consistency, technology, and sometimes reliability compared to others. Applied to Lada, Skoda, MZ motorcycles etc. Simple tech also meant simple to fix of course.
Italian makes were beautiful but rusty before even getting to the showroom, with just as poor a rep for reliability and build.
Japanese makes didn't rust, but they couldn't weld and used bolts made of soft cheese pretending to be steel.
British and French? No one knew, they were on strike. ;)
Outside the eastern block countries, Skoda was the punchline of jokes and generally considered one of the worst cars you could buy up until the mid-late 90's when they became the Volkswagen budget brand. It's really only since the early 2000's that Skoda became a brand people wouldn't be embarrassed on being seen in.
This explains it. I come from a former Eastern Bloc country and Škoda was well established here well before the former regime overtook power after a short occupation by the Red army. Also, they were definitely not unknown in (parts of) Germany from very early on, although I guess not as prominent as in countries who didn't build their own cars, for obvious reasons.
I never knew that until very recently they had such a bad reputation in other Western countries. Thanks for clearing this up for me!
Actually that's mostly the Lada that were the subject of many jokes, such as "how do you double the value of a Lada in 5 minutes? By filling up". "What's a Lada on the top of a hill? a miracle. several Lada on a hill? a weird place for a Lada factory. lots of Ladas on a hill? A landfill" etc.
Yes they might be sniffed at to start with, but that's only the same as Japanese cars in the 60s, Skoda in the 90s and most recently Kia, but other manufacturers won't be able to get away with calling them cheap tat for long (assuming they aren't).
I assume there are more barriers to entry compared to other industries. I know Europe slaps duties on imported cars but Japan worked around that.
We're all looking at Tesla to bring electric cars to the masses. Should we be looking at China instead?