
Wan Gang pushed China to leapfrog the West in electric vehicles - jseliger
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-26/world-s-electric-car-visionary-isn-t-musk-it-s-china-s-wan-gang
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cauldron
[https://twitter.com/GeorgStieler/status/1075195222953349120](https://twitter.com/GeorgStieler/status/1075195222953349120)

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Tsubasachan
Well the US is out: climate change is a hoax and the EPA is being silently
murdered. No sense of urgency there.

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ziont
yeah, I'll believe it when I see it on the road. People forget that making a
car suddenly doesn't get easier because you no longer use a combustion engine,
there are dozens of established car manufacturers that are moving in.

It took the Koreans over 40 years to finally achieve competitiveness and
quality. The road for China will be even tougher.

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puranjay
I think the more important point from the article is that China backed EVs big
time and it is beginning to pay off. Not a lot of other governments made such
forward thinking bets 20 years ago.

It's now a matter of 'when', not 'if' in China's case.

Here in India, we get random murmurs about EVs from the government, but no
concrete action. There is just a single crappy EV model on the market, no
charging network, and no infrastructure investment

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reacharavindh
The article is very light on actual useful technical information, and just
tries to sing blind praises to that one guy who politically helped China think
about electric vehicles.

It is good for the world that growing china uses new electric vehicles instead
of gas guzzlers. But, the article fails to corroborate how the Chinese would
be able to even compete in the global market. True, the Chinese already has
the Chinese market. Considering the way their government works, that's a easy
act.

Comparing indigenously built electric vehicles from China with globally
acclaimed engineering prowess of Tesla is just silly at this point.

Are the Chinese cars superior to a Tesla in any way? (No details)

Are they better quality than Tesla in any way? (personally, I would be very
skeptical)

Are they safer? Teslas keep scoring the best in crash tests. I can't find any
data on Chinese cars..

When they start competing genuinely on technology, perhaps they may warrant a
serious comparison. Not now. They don't deserve it.

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bjelkeman-again
We used to laugh at “Made in Japan.” Then they became really good at consumer
hardware (cameras, music, cars, TVs). China manufactures some of the most
sophisticated hardware in the world (smartphones, tablets etc). They do learn
and iterate fast.

The one thing that makes me wonder if they can make really good electric cars
is the software side. Japan fell from the throne in consumer entertainment
hardware as they didn’t do software well. They still don’t. I think electric
cars is a lot about software and batteries. Can China do really reliable,
trustworthy, user friendly software? Without it I predict their cars will
struggle.

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logicchains
>Can China do really reliable, trustworthy, user friendly software?

You should try WeChat, the most popular Chinese chat application. Apart from
the legally-mandated spying, it's super user-friendly, and quite lightweight
compared to the likes of MSN Messenger, Skype, Facebook messenger and Slack
(uses only 10s of MBs of ram).

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hackerman12345
You're comparing it to old junk. Whatsapp is far superior to FB Messenger.
Discord is far superior to Skype, etc.

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logicchains
Does Whatsapp even have a desktop client? It didn't last time I checked. And
Slack isn't "old" junk.

