When the CCP pushes Chinese people to use EVs, they do so. This is not a story of the success of EVs. It a story of the power of totalitarian government. This is the kind of power that makes America’s environuts envious.
The biggest problem is China’s shift from traditional gasoline-powered cars in recent years to electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids, which now make up a majority of its market. The country had introduced policies and incentives that pushed buyers towards EVs, where they found better cars and better values in the Chinese brands.
“Ten years ago, President Xi Jinping and the Chinese automakers decided: ‘We have been chasing global automakers in internal combustion engine vehicles, and we’re not catching up. We’re going whole hog into electric,’” said Dunne.
Western automakers tried to stay the course with gasoline-powered cars, and for the most part, so did their JV partners. Now those companies — other than Tesla, which has a factory in Shanghai — are trailing far behind in an effort to keep up with lower priced EVs and hybrids from Chinese automakers, such as BYD.
It was a massive miscalculation by Western automakers, said Bill Russo, head of Shanghai-based investment advisory firm Automobility and head of Chrysler’s Northeast Asia operations from 2004 to 2008.
It’s tough to feel the least bit sorry for automakers or any other industry that invested heavily in the Chinese joint venture scams. It has been nothing more than a thinly veiled investment in Chinese communism that was NEVER going to end well for anyone other than the ChiComs. Western corporations VOLUNTEERED to be mugged for their most valuable corporate assets hoping the ChiComs would eventually grant them fair access to the domestic Chinese markets. Never going to happen.
Musk must still think he can leverage his space-tech to somehow benefit Tesla, but that window is closing too.