B-b-but capitalism
I want to see China develop the first legit self-driving car to see how fast the narrative on intellectual property does a 180
when the US actually steals intellectual property from China, you won't/don't even hear about it.
Any nation that has built a border wall was just copying China's and owes them a massive sum for infringement. Mr Bidenchov, tear down that wall
I'm someone who's a skeptic that Lvl 5 autonomy will ever really exist and work, but if anyone even gets to a solid, reliable, far reaching Lvl4 it'll absolutely be China. In part because it's going to require newly designed, built, and maintained infrastructure and city design that's fit for purpose. America will start a nuclear war before agreeing any substantial investment in it's own infrastructure.
B-b-but capitalism
I mean the article does point out that BYD was founded by a Chinese billionaire, is backed by Warren Buffet and the government involvement is roughly equivalent to what Tesla itself received. Good example of how Elon Musk is personally a negative asset to a company but doesn't say anything broader about economic systems or countries.
Tesla's always been dogshit at actually building cars. Meanwhile, BYD got a bunch of venture capital from Warren Buffet over a decade ago and has just been chugging along Tortoise-style to Elon's Hare.
BYD is also low-key becoming a major supplier of electric buses to western countries, which is why they now have a factory in California. They even advertise it as being unionized on their website, which seems good.
I remember seeing a BYD ripoff of a toyota corolla in Beijing 2010 and thinking they would always just be a small player, but turns out anyone can make electric cars better than tesla since traction motors and batteries are a lot easier than internal combustion engines and unlike tesla everyone else knows how to make cars without 5cm panel gaps.
NIO is about to offer a much better looking, better built, Tesla Model 3 competitor with a 600 mile range (!) for about $40k.
GAC are supposedly a year or two out from the same for around $30k (!!)
Geely owns Volvo and their sub brand Polestar is already making a far better Tesla Model 3 with the Polestar 2.
At the high end of the market better run and more talented (often with influential Tesla people who learned from those mistakes and left) luxury EV brands with better products like Rivian and Lucid are about to eat Tesla's lunch.
The American OEMs are now putting out more reliable, livable, and better made EVs than Tesla but the software and charging infrastructure is shite.
European & Japanese OEMs are sort of cobbling together a slowly improving but much more reliable and better built EV car market.
The Chinese are already dominating this market and they're only just about to start offering their product more internationally. Beyond its (diminishingly important and advanced) charging network Tesla is already lagging way behind.
