Ummm EV… exhaust system…?

Surprisingly I have seen imported BYD Atto at 100% tariffs or so and Olectra buses which are actually BYD buses , probably CKU imported into India. Auto sector employment in India is seriously important as is the need for capturing a fair value even of EVs locally while on the other hand Oil & Gas imports have always been the biggest import bill and Forex drain so there are good incentives to move. It is just they do it slowly and in their own ways and the handful of capital intensive companies who tried getting LFP manufacturing into India failed as China scale cannot be replicated in India due to differing political systems and cultures, even today

Brazil also has a huge automobile sector, even though it's not Brazilian-owned

BYD had to open factories here

How do Chinese owned industrial factories in Brazil differ, apart from being more efficient and able to pivot to new markets better? Which seems like useful properties in a war footing?

Do you want your war munition manufacturers to say "we'd have better short term bonuses if we didn't manufacture what you need but instead just kept manufacturing our old stuff with no regard for the nations future"?

What you linked to is of construction contractors building the plant, not assembly line workers. It's a blurry line and certainly affiliated with BYD, but car assembly itself is moving toward 'dark' factories, populated by robots that are indeed kept in slave-like conditions, unpaid and worked beyond humane shifts.

As a side note, counterintuitively BYD has a lot more workers per car vs a lot of their competitors, but that's because of their extreme vertical integration where most are assembling upstream parts.

Cheaper but not cheap. US can pay literally 0 and still be substantially more expensive than PRC, labour simply rounding error ($500-$1000) per chassis.

BYD cars are cheaper because China just has the most expertise at building things at scale and because they're making many formerly discrete car parts entire modules, which are cheaper to manufacture.

There's also been plenty of reporting of 'slave like conditions' at Tesla, GM etc.

BYD in China shows off their factory towns for how wonderful the workers live. Its a modern day Hershey. It might be more of a Brazil issue than a BYD issue.

BYD is cheaper because BYD engineers are smarter, have higher IQ and able to vertically integrate components to cut overheads.

in the US auto OEMs are mainly putting parts together, made by different suppliers like ZF, Bosch, Lemforder etc etc. Its assembly work and it split across hundreds of legacy car component suppliers

Have you ever seen warehouses in the US or construction projects with only Mexicans. Not so much different to what you describe.

No they won’t as they have auto unions to protect

USA bans the onboard Chinese automotive software for national security reasons, effectively banning Chinese cars. This isn't a partisan political thing, Biden was the one that signed the Secure Equipment Act and Connected Vehicle Restrictions.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fact-sheet-safegua...

For all the talk about data and technology sovereignty in Europe, you would think they would take that more seriously too. Instead Europe is flooded with underpriced Chinese cars that they have no control over.

Dated take. China and BYD are doing a lot of things right that make this possible. A recent article showing how they're consolidating parts that passes the buck to consumers is a great example as to why they can sell 20% cheaper and still have higher margins.

Yes, but we're not talking about GM right now

Yeah we can see that with Anthropic and OpenAI.

No it's what happens when smart state intelligently subsidizes to bring down structural costs, while retarded state foolishly subsidizes to keep pork barrel jobs program going as legacy processes fall into uncompetitiveness. We had 30 years of PRC shock evidence now - everything PRC made cheap, remains cheap long after subsidies, because they structurally lower price floor vs western competition (generally) haven't.

subsidies is a very lazy argument, US subsidizes and protects even more and bails out car OEMs.

the real argument is efficiency, US cannot match efficiency and scale. Thats the root cause.

Is that why the US bans exports of EUV machines and Nvidia chips to China?

"They subsidize their industries. We protect local jobs." Totally different things.

Thought you were talking about the US.

It’s unavoidable, every country does it.

Sounds like an excuse to protect weak and unprepared American carmakers.

That link says the ban comes into effect for model year 2027. And it applies to cars with software and hardware from China. The cars themselves are fine.

which is a bit convenient, isn’t it?

could have banned the practice, demanded literal hardwire controls around it, etc. ensured that the customer cannot be pressured into enabling it all (so the vendor can't just disable unrelated functionality).

heaven forbid, demand selling infotainment-less configurations, or agreeing on a communication standard for real tablets and smartphones to communicate through.

instead, no, it's the chinese cars that should go.

Without pressure, local companies do not compete.

We need to let them in at a limited capacity and our domestic companies need to feel the heat.

The geopolitical risks are real. Stronger foreign companies can kill local ones if there's no stopgap or means for local companies to catch up. The cars are microphones for politically exposed persons (which most of you are not). If there was ever a hot war, these cars can turn into remote bombs and take out key infrastructure.

But in the here and now, we need Ford and friends to grow up and face real evolutionary pressures.

American consumers like big SUVs. But they also want cheap and modern, and once they see what else the market has to offer, they'll use choice to force the hands of American auto.

> How are they being received generally in Brazil?

Very well. Not only BYD but also other brands like GWM and Geely.

> What kind of vehicles are people replacing with BYDs?

Combustion cars with the same price, they are not replacing other electrical vehicles because the Chinese brands are way cheaper yet they are good cars.

> I always assumed Brazilians drove mostly "legacy" VW or Nissans

Nowadays we have many models from different brands.

In the past the fleet was basically VW, Ford, Chevrolet and Fiat. In the late 90s and early 2000s the Japanesne (Honda, Toyota and Nissan) and French (Renault, Citroën, Peugeot) became popular, and then Hyundai also became a success here. Recently, the Chinese brands are becoming more popular, especially Chery and the ones that I mentioned before.

> including the ID.4

But I never saw it here, even though VW is a very popular brand here.

Not OP but also a brazilian with friends that bought BYDs, the ones I talked to about it really like it.

I'd say around 60% of the Ubers I get are BYDs and I'm glad when it's one because that means it's a newer car and it's very comfortable.

A lot of Uber Black cars in São Paulo are BYD ones, so I think it is creating a brand of “good quality” cars around here

Which doesn't mean most people can afford them - I live in Europe and I've yet to see an ID.4 myself.

For reference, the new BYD Dahan RWD model has a listed range of 626 miles and claims 'flash' charging of 10% to 97% in 9 minutes.

There are also a lot of inconveniences about petrol cars, like the volatility of oil prices, uncertain future emission regulations, higher mechanical complexity and hence maintenance costs, lower performance and more noise.

German and American cars who aren't getting subsidized by the government, in fact they actually have to pay taxes. In addition to the fact that China is letting companies destroy it's environment.

> EU decides that they’ve had enough of poor people driving their own cars

This about PRC localization, EU can't do shit. Think about insinuation if they tried? EU incumbent carmakers from economic giants, Germany, France, wants to prevent rest of EU from access to cheap cars to protect their industry and maintain economic hierarchy. What happens once PRC plants opens up in Spain, Hungary for whom DE, FR auto dying is now opportunity? Reality is EU is not so unified that smaller countries want to live in shadow of DE and FR forever. Once localized PRC plants take root, they become daggers vs incumbent EU producers instead of shields vs EU protectionism - they will be supported locally and the geopolitics of banning would break EU.

A car sells your data to your Insurance company. You had to rapidly stop to prevent an accident? Well, data looks exactly like reckless driving. Enjoy your higher rates, dear customer!