Nothing grinds one’s nonexistent EV gears quite like the suggestion that China is leaps and bounds ahead of Western EV technology and that this is somehow concerning. It’s not, and there’s little reason to expect Sino technological supremacy anytime soon.
Nevertheless, a recent piece from InsideEVs does its best to convince the reader that Ford, Toyota, and Volkswagen had best pack it up.
From InsideEVs:
I spent a week in China for the Beijing Auto Show, the country’s biggest car industry event. As a guest of the Geely Group along with a few other international journalists, I drove more than a dozen vehicles, sat in many more, and had a lot of important conversations. The real story is far more nuanced than a simplistic “Us vs. Them”; a story of a China that has fraudulently over-invested in electric cars and is desperately seeking a space to dump their inferior products.
That narrative is false. Western automakers are cooked. And a lot of this is probably their damn fault.
The whole piece is worth reading here. While the narrator is untrustworthy both for his boosterism regarding EVs (“Western automakers are cooked”) as well as because his sponsor for the trip is Geely, a Chinese EV manufacturer struggling to land foreign investment, his observations about Chinese purchasing behavior and automotive nationalism are worth considering.
But as for the electric vehicles themselves, it’s a bit rich to say the Chinese are lightyears beyond American EVs when Chinese businesses are in court for stealing Tesla’s battery technology. Furthermore, the material evidence offered for Chinese design dominance boils down to giant screens that replace buttons and toggles being “incredibly responsive, matching inputs with as little latency as a high-end smartphone.” I’m sorry, but no one asked for a 48-inch smartphone strapped to the dashboard. Volume, HVAC, and shifting belong assigned to physical levers and knobs, where tactile, sightless operation is the inviolable rule.
But the best part is the admission that rather than make better batteries and improve range (R&D intensive and better left to Western companies from which the tech can then be lifted), the Chinese companies are training customers to be happy with an underwhelming powerplant.
See here:
There are reasons for that, but namely, Chinese EVs are so good now — as is much of its urban infrastructure — that concerns about range or charging just aren’t as pertinent to the average consumer as they once were.
Zeekr representatives said that now, the brand must figure out ways to attract consumers that don’t involve range or charging speed. Hell, the whole Chinese car industry has the same conundrum. Thus, all of its domestic brands (and some foreign ones) have ingratiated themselves with Chinese tech companies, and the two have moved in lockstep to figure out just what that means.
“Yes, comrade, you see, the People’s infrastructure is so good that you will never complain about charging times and range. Right?” EVs are popular in China because the government is pushing EVs while punishing non-EV transportation. It’s not complicated, and it’s certainly not the market deciding the outcome.
But the real kicker about the claim that China is eating the West’s lunch with its EVs is the fact that the West is giving up on fully electric cars. Ford and GM are retooling for hybrid production, a sector that Toyota has already planted its flag in as the best of battery tech and internal combustion. That China is leading in bad technology is the equivalent of bragging that one is the world’s best LaserDisc manufacturer . . . erm, congrats?
John Pearley Huffman over at Road & Track has the most informed and evenhanded explainer of EV limitations to date.
Batteries – still – don’t have the energy density of petroleum-based fuels like gasoline or diesel. Since 1800 when Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery, scientists, technologists, and yahoos with spare time on their hands, have all been striving to quickly shove more amperage into a smaller space and discharge that stored electricity efficiently. And there’s been progress. And there’s still a ways to go.
It’s a game of trade-offs. Increase battery size to increase range and that adds mass to the vehicle which, in turn, means more energy is needed to move it.
If China is to dominate transportation, it will dominate its domestic scene through anti-competitive practices and brute force. American EV exclusivists will pine for similarly auto-ritarian policies here — may their dreams never come true. Americans have no need of a state-mandated electric Lada with tablet-operated windshield wipers.