
Chinese cars are still cheap, but they're no longer ugly - jkuria
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-cars-are-still-cheap-but-theyre-no-longer-ugly-11548417621
======
lancewiggs
The main change that China is driving is the shift to electric vehicles -
buses, cars and bikes. They already make and buy about have of the car EVs
each year.

~~~
lazyjones
Don’t forget to mention that they are forcing foreign car manufacturers to
switch to EV in order to have a chance at keeping their market shares, by
imposing EV quotas. This will likely do a lot of damage to unprepared giants
like VW, who are selling 20-30% of their cars in China today.

~~~
jdietrich
China has a horrendous smog problem. Volkswagen cheated on emissions tests for
years. It's not a market they deserve to succeed in, at least not until they
credibly clean up their act.

China's commitment to climate change is lukewarm, but they're all-in on fixing
their air pollution problem. It's abundantly clear that internal combustion
has a very short future in China. Western manufacturers need to face up to the
electric future in a real hurry.

~~~
ShorsHammer
> China's commitment to climate change is lukewarm

They met their Paris targets early, the US pulled out last year amid being a
decade behind on meeting it's commitment and threatened the entire stability
of the agreement by doing so.

Most of the Western world isn't on target despite having lower goals than
China.

I'm interested in who exactly isn't "lukewarm"?

~~~
lazyjones
> _Most of the Western world isn 't on target despite having lower goals than
> China._

This isn’t really fair to say. The „Paris targets“ are just global temperature
goals, the actual emission targets were nationally (i.e. individually) chosen
afterwards and very different, as well as being defined as „emission
reductions per unit of GDP“ for developing countries while the US‘ was
absolute. As a result, China‘s emissions will peak somewhere around 2030 while
the US has to reduce emissions dramatically till then.

Here‘s a visualization: [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-
emissions-by-re...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-
region)

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xenihn
I would love to see Chinese cars drive the cost of vehicles down
significantly. I've been semi-looking for a new car for a year now (now rush
since I walk to work), and it's ridiculous how expensive everything is. After
taxes and fees, I haven't found anything that I'd be happy with for less than
$20k used or $25k new.

It would be amazing to reach a point where you could get a decent new car for
around $15,000.

~~~
tjoff
Why not buy a used car? I would never dream of buying a new car. It comes with
greater risk but a 3 year old car does not have significant risk attached to
it, but it is significantly cheaper.

~~~
pishpash
There is a reason why the prices are different, warranty being one. Are you
suggesting the market in cars is inefficient?

~~~
lottin
Let's say that the difference between a used car and a brand-new car is the
lack of warranty (and some amount of physical depreciation, which for the
purposes of this discussion we can ignore). Then for the prices to be equal it
means that the price of a used car must be equal to the price of a brand new
car minus the "value" of the warranty, which depends on the reliability of the
car and the repairing costs. It seems perfectly possible that consumers, say,
overestimate the probability of the car breaking down, which would lead to a
difference in prices. Whether we can call this a market inefficiency, I don't
know.

~~~
pishpash
Re: warranty, I think you're leaving out the value of loss of economic
productivity of using the car in the case of an out-of-warranty breakdown. If
this warranty is priced incorrectly, then you should be able to buy a used car
along with a bumper to bumper insurance add on for less than the price of a
new car. The only exploit I see is that this is probably priced under
near-100% utilization scenarios a la rental cars fleets, and your personal
economic value on the car is lower, i.e. you have other means of transport, or
you drive occasionally. My point is, uninformed individuals may misprice this,
but transport industry purchasers won't, and I don't see them doing what I'm
suggesting. Instead, they buy new cars and offload at three years.

~~~
tjoff
You assume that the transport industry pays the same price. Also need to
factor in the extreme inconvenience of buying a massive amount of used cars,
which everyone will attempt to exploit.

Through leasing, rental etc. is how a lot of cars are delivered to the market.
It is beneficial for a manufacturer to have the opportunity to sell a new car
and know that there will be lots of pretty-new in great condition cars on the
second hand market after a while. Which will help drive brand perception.

------
MichailP
I think it is done. There is no way China doesn't become number 1 in every way
that is possible. The stupidity and shortsightedness of western companies that
partly enabled this is really staggering. I guess that initial thinking was
let's do the clever part of making a product: design, IP, etc. but use cheap
labor from China. But obviously the know-how was also unintentionally
transferred. And now you have a behemoth with know-how, educated people, mega-
cities etc. There is just no way to compete. I guess you can impose sanctions,
ban sales, sabotage deals etc. but it is done anyway.

On the other hand, I don't think that China rising is a bad thing, and it will
make a world a better place, since USA and its allies can't compete with China
with wars (though there are some pathetic attempts) but you probably must put
all that war budget money and effort into research and infrastructure.

Possibly this is a huge win-win for the whole world. Or we end up in flames if
there is enough stupidity and solving things by war and force.

~~~
musiciangames
It's true that the West appears to have exported a large part (maybe too much)
of its industry to China. However,

>>There is just no way to compete.

We used to think the same about Japan. Japan reigned supreme in consumer
electronics, motor cycles, cars ,and was taking large chunks of the mainframe
market. It was 'obvious' then that Japan would take over the computer
industry, in particularly with its statist

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer)

Just because we can't see now who will compete with China, doesn't mean nobody
will.

~~~
oblio
Japan: 126 million people.

China: 1.3 billion people.

Japan: 377k sqkm.

China: 9.56 million sqkm.

China is following exactly the same path as South Korea or Japan, but it's a
huge country, not a medium sized one.

Somehow I doubt China will stop at regional power level, considering all its
resources pretty much guarantee it being #1 in the world, by far, if they're
managed by a half-decent government.

And nota bene, China has such a huge scale that it doesn't need to be fully
democratic and fully developed to still be #1 by far. If the average Chinese
citizen will produce half or one third of what the average US citizen does,
the Chinese economy will still dwarf the US one, due to sheer population
sizes.

~~~
tinco
To reinforce, China is already expanding its influence around the world,
picking up low hanging fruit in countries the west has neglected in Africa and
probably elsewhere. I don't think Japan ever had those opportunities.

On the other side, China is also raising its first generations of people born
in middle class, who are starting to expect social government. From health
care to the environment, to safe and comfortable jobs. We will have to see if
those things will burden China as they burden Japan, the EU and the US.

------
guidedlight
Hyundai hired some Audi designers in the mid-2000’s to give their vehicles a
more European look. It worked!

~~~
jtokoph
Hyundai isn’t Chinese though. It’s Korean.

~~~
ggm
What happened in Korea can happen in China and India

------
speedplane
China will eventually be able to build safe and inexpensive vehicles that can
compete in the global market. However, unless they open up their society,
allow civil liberties like freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and
unimpeded markets, they will always be playing catchup.

The U.S. should not be afraid of China emulating our technological prowess, we
should be afraid when they start challenging our values.

~~~
closeparen
What are the major social problems in the US right now?

\- Freedom of speech gives corporate and foreign agents unlimited influence
over the democratic process.

\- Freedom of movement is devastating communities in both the sources and
sinks of mass internal migration.

\- The free market is delivering greater and greater returns to a smaller and
smaller group of people.

Those freedoms aren’t, like, self-evidently good for outcomes. If we are to
stay committed to the principles, we’re going to have to acknowledge and
accept thier costs, because those costs are going to be the top political
issues for the foreseeable future.

------
tlb
That one in the picture is still ugly. The stretched-out-of-proportion chrome
grill reminds me of the dentist's daughter in Finding Nemo.

~~~
rasz
one in the first picture is a direct Lexus RX 200t ripoff :)

------
kalleboo
But what about safety? My lasting impression of Chinese car manufacturers are
those YouTube videos of crash tests in Australia where the passenger
compartment is the crumple zone. That's the department where they need to
convince me.

~~~
kimjongman
Not bad [https://www.haval.com.au/ancap-high-five-for-
haval/](https://www.haval.com.au/ancap-high-five-for-haval/)

~~~
taneq
I'm sure they _can_ produce crash-worthy cars. The question is whether they'll
continue to do so once they're past the crash testing stage. I seem to recall
reading quite a few cases in a range of industries where Chinese manufacturers
substituted cheaper, lower-grade materials when the thought they could get
away with it.

~~~
latch
Personally, I would feel bad making such a negative characterization based on
something I seem to recall. I'd look it up. If I was right, I'd provide the
source, if I was wrong I'd be silently embarrassed.

~~~
SyneRyder
It's a fairly well known phenomenon. There is a book called "Poorly Made In
China" about it, and the term for it is "Quality Fade".

The concept is that after winning the contract (sometimes at a price below
their own costs, in order to beat competing manufacturers), the Chinese
manufacturer increases their profit margin by "optimizing" the product design
- using cheaper components or omitting parts without the knowledge of the
buyer, until the products are rejected.

Here's an article I found from a random search on "Quality Fade" [1]. For a
counter-viewpoint, the China Law Blog [2] argues it isn't Quality Fade if
customers still buy the products. It was written in response to a recall of
23,000 Chinese-made cars in Australia after they were found to have asbestos
in their engine gaskets. Great Wall Motor had argued that "their own in-house
testing [had] concluded that the asbestos was not a danger to human bodies"
[3].

[1] [https://sourcingjournal.com/topics/sourcing/apparel-
producti...](https://sourcingjournal.com/topics/sourcing/apparel-production-
quality-fade-124208/)

[2] [https://www.chinalawblog.com/2014/03/chinas-quality-fade-
is-...](https://www.chinalawblog.com/2014/03/chinas-quality-fade-is-there-
really-such-a-thing-and-so-what-if-there-is.html)

[3] [https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/08/17/chinese-
asbes...](https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/08/17/chinese-asbestos-in-
australia-blame-quality-fade/)

~~~
taneq
Thanks for posting this! I was on mobile and didn't have the time to dig up
sources, but the asbestos-in-vehicles incident is one of the specific examples
I was thinking of.

The baby formula example that a sibling poster mentioned is another. Where I
live the supermarkets have had to limit customers to 1-2 tins of formula each
because people were buying trolleys full of it to ship to China, where middle-
class Chinese buy it because they can't trust locally sold formula to be safe
for their babies.

The argument in [2] that if customers still buy products then everything is
fine, when in fact both the immediate client and the end customer are being
defrauded, just underscores the mindset behind the problem. Any company (local
or foreign) doing serious fabrication in a country like China needs their own
comprehensive QC system in place to oversee the entire build process.

------
miguelmota
Improved cosmetically? sure. "no longer ugly"? Define ugly

------
known
Evidence suggests Toyota produces superior cars
[https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-
expe...](https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-expensive-
cars-to-maintain-by-maddy-martin)

But its share in Global car sales is just 9.2%

------
gd2
GAC currently has a nice display booth at the NADA show, National Automobile
Dealers at Moscone Center in San Francisco, showing about 6 cars. Which is
probably some sort of a confirmation of what the article says about them
coming to US dealers soon.

------
The_suffocated
I always wonder why India couldn't catch up. Although I don't know about its
engineering sectors, I have the impression that the country is at least not
that bad in scientific research. And it has cheap labour too.

------
justtopost
You guys have a different value of ugly. Also a LOT of astroturfing in here.

------
rapsey
But are they still death traps?

~~~
ggm
There are a fair few "great wall" utes in Australia. Somebody might have
differential on fatal accident rates but I'm not hearing tales as bad as the
GMC/Chevy petrol tank problem (if we're talking death traps)

