China's goals for pushing electric vehicles very hard are multi-faceted and strongly aligned with their long-term national strategies:
* Reducing their dependence on oil, one of few strategic resources which they do not possess in sufficient quantity and is subject, in large part, to the inclinations of foreign entities. Advanced electronics is another such resource on which they are also investing heavily to address the dependence.
* Building up technical expertise by accumulating experience in designing and scaling up production of affordable electric vehicles for the masses. (Unlike ICE vehicles, this is an area where no one has a huge lead.) It is clear that EVs are the future. The size of global automative industry is in the trillions and can provide jobs for a huge number of people.
* Improving urban air quality especially in tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai to address the concern of talent who they try to attract (and attract back) from abroad as well as to address people’s demand and to reduce long-term public healthcare expenses.
* Helping with global warming which may affect cities like Shanghai in the future. But this is possibly not a primary goal. As another commenter mentions, other approaches like carbon tax could be more effective.
Governments in several developed nations should at least be concerned that, if they invest insufficiently in EVs, the issue of unemployment and underemployment in traditional manufacturing hubs could become more severe than it is now.
Yup, it's too bad that politicians in the US open purse strings when you say "national security depends on producing a leading fighter plane", vs "national security depends on an infrastructure for energy independence and ecological stability". China is basically investing in the second which yields nice secondary and tertiary economic benefits while the US builds a next-gen fighter with much weaker secondary economic benefits.
How much did the $2 trillions invested in the Irak War paid back ? I mean beside the obvious benefit of parasiting the invaded country and suck all you can out of it ?
Because $2 trillions (more than 60 millions of man year at minimum US wage) invested in schools, research and clean energy would certainly have yielded some interesting results.
It also has the small benefit of killing less civilians, not destroying the UN trust and avoiding a few PTSD.
I agree with you generally, but I don't think you can say that the US was parasitic in Iraq. I've never heard from any credible source that the US looted the country and in fact Trump has often complained about that ("We should have taken the oil!"). That said, companies hired to develop infrastructure in Iraq, it seems, were highly parasitic toward US-supplied development and defense funds.
Because of a downvote, I'll supply a few links simply from Google's first few results for the search "kkr iraq wasted money". Btw I was thinking of companies such a KKR and Halliburton.
For the record, I was opposed to the war in Iraq, and am also in opposition to Trump. I wouldn't usually mention political leanings on HN, but it seems relevant here.
> The investment is no longer substantial in public R&D.
The US is spending over half a trillion dollars per year on R&D total, and the Federal Government is spending $113 billion - every year - on R&D. How is that not substantial exactly? A trillion plus dollars every ten years is a lot of R&D.
The US total spending on R&D as a share of GDP is about 40% higher than the EU and is about 30% higher than China's current ratio.
China's total R&D spend, between public and private sectors, is around $260b to $300b. So the US Federal Government all by itself is spending ~37%-43% of what all of China combined is on R&D. That's substantial.
Currently on an inflation adjusted basis, Federal spending on R&D is as high as it was in the late 1990s. There's a fair argument to be made that it should be perhaps $50 billion higher. Federal spending on R&D nearly doubled during the Bush Administration, and then flat-lined under Obama before declining in the last few years of his Presidency. If you continue the spending expansion of the Bush years, it would add up to around $50-$60 billion more.
The problem? The US has an inbound trillion dollar budget deficit, 2/3 of which consists of entitlement costs ballooning ever higher. Business spending on R&D has massively expanded in the last 30 years, going from $60 billion up to $360+ billion or so. To an extent I'm ok with that arrangement, the government can focus on more important things like entitlements. The $113 billion per year in Federal R&D is plenty to put toward long-term projects that the private sector isn't funding.
The ability to recognize key areas to build up capability is not discernible in absolute R&D numbers (it looks like FY2018 there is about $140B planned in total R&D). The other thing about your numbers is that we need to know if there has been a purchasing power adjustment to make them comparable.
With respect to the US Gov't R&D, you don't mention that about 50% of that R&D is for defense. Personally I would argue that a bigger split to non-defense uses would yield pragmatically better "defense" of the US. Of the non-defense funding, much of it goes to "FFRDCs" Federally Funded R&D Centers. There is this game that the US plays with liberal (in the economic theory sense) firewalls where we have increasingly bought into this ideological stance that the gov't should never compete with private interests. In contrast, I would guess that China's R&D went much more directly towards creating new industries. I think China is being much more pragmatic about it's R&D expenditures than the US.
Economists are inclined to frown on
the strategy of dumping giant piles
of government money onto budding
technologies that are in need of
scaling up. They prefer market
mechanisms, tech-neutral incentives,
and nudges that maximize the free
choices of market participants. In
any economic model, such policies
will perform better.
And that’s well and good. But
sometimes problems are big and
urgent, you need scaled-up solutions
quickly, and you just don’t have
time to mess around.
I think the author is fighting a strawman here and not giving those
economists enough credit. What China's with solar panels and electric
buses has been narrow and centrally planned, they wanted to solve
those problems in particular.
Whereas the argument on the other side is that you should be equally
aggressive with something like a carbon or pollution tax, because then
you start solving the same problem in parallel across the entire
economy instead of just in some specific sectors.
What China's been doing right is having the political will do actually
spend money on the problem, as opposed to most of the west. But that
doesn't mean their method of doing so is optimal, if we were similarly
willing to turn the screws on via carbon or pollution tax I think we
could make more gains than they're making.
Government sponsored R&D can yield great results. The US sponsored an actual 'moonshot' last century, with well known results. That spawned a lot of industrial activity.
What China is doing here is both smart and strategic and they have been doing it for decades. Their solar activities can be traced back to the 1980s. They are creating new export industries and stimulating economic growth by investing in disruptive things where they believe they can succeed. Meanwhile the US is pretending coal is fine, and the EU is pretending Diesel is fine or that shifting from either to the euphemistically called natural gas is an actual solution. Change is slow there because politicians are not acting to provide the necessary incentive for industries to do what is needed. As a consequence, there are several major industrial players at risk of disappearing or being marginalized. This will hurt, a lot. Politicians are afraid to do what is necessary. This creates the opportunity for China to take over; they spotted that years ago; and they are now succeeding.
The reason that there is an incentive for natural gas is because the same people who own the mineral rights to oil own the mineral rights to natural gas.
Or, you know, nat-gas is cheaper, pollutes far less, is cheap, and provides much better operational capabilities for mass transit than electric, etc etc.
Or you can hand wave that all away and shout conspiracy theories.
It's not a conspiracy theory. That's what happens when you purchase mineral rights for drilling.
And it is cheaper, but there are also significant questions about what will happen to that cost if consumption significantly increases via mass transit.
I'm all for lower emissions, but let's not pretend there isn't a vested interest behind it.
Especially when there are also other options that don't get nearly the attention.
Sources? I'd love to read about the analyses done on this topic. Most of the papers I've read have suggested the opposite conclusion that you're claiming.
Economists are inclined to frown on
the strategy of dumping giant piles
of government money onto budding
technologies that are in need of
scaling up. They prefer market
mechanisms, tech-neutral incentives,
and nudges that maximize the free
choices of market participants. In
any economic model, such policies
will perform better.
And that’s well and good. But
sometimes problems are big and
urgent, you need scaled-up solutions
quickly, and you just don’t have
time to mess around.
If China invests in industry and US invests in taxes the result will be that US companies/individuals will import Chinese industry products. Then some orange-haired US president will have to add tariffs to counter the trade imbalance thus isolating the US from global trade.
while market mechanisms like a carbon tax can definitely spur parallel innovation and direct economies toward desirable solutions, it's less clear that it's an obvious efficiency win (it's not even clear that optimal efficiency is the most desirable feature of a solution, since it trades away resiliency).
what is often missing in the market efficiency argument is that the efficiency-killing waste is concentrated for government projects and distributed for markets. that makes it eaiser to "see" the government waste (especially if the government has transparency rules that don't apply to corporations), and makes the waste of market-based solutions less obvious (because it needs someone to aggregate it properly).
in market-based economies, many companies will try and fail for a given opportunity (e.g., the thousands of instagram & facebooks that didn't make it), and that's "wasted" economic activity. and sometimes, it takes a market economy a few tries and many years to get something right (internet search as another example), which also lowers overall efficiency.
markets work well in many cases, but they aren't a cut-and-dried answer to every economic challenge. when the risks are low, central planning can potentially "beat" a market-based approach. in any case, it's not an either-or choice--countries are continually experimenting to find the best blend of the two.
(for the record, i'm all for pricing in externalities with mechanisms like a carbon tax)
In a perfect world they may be right, but externalities, government subsidies of incumbent tech (directly or indirectly), and network effects completely destroy and hope of a real free market. And if global warming is really as bad as they say it is then those externalities are basically uncalculable, skewing the equation far far more.
Because you’ll lose when your neighboring country doesn’t apply that tax, and then you’re forced to impose a tariff on their products so it doesn’t ruin your economy, but then you realize that you’re effectively taxing your citizens with that tariff while you’re incurring all the costs of your neighbours pollution.
Carbon taxes have to be astronomical to actually affect market behavior. Better to take direct control and titrate down carbon fuels while ramping other methods.
The market can't do it except by perhaps a happy accident, an accident that would be resisted by the established players. Look for the big oil companies to buy up green startups and kneecap them to keep the oil money flowing. Consumables are much more profitable than capital purchases like solar panels, ask the printer makers about their ink.
Then carbon taxes should be astronomical, they need to offset the currently huge free externality of releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Surgical interventions like subsidizing solar only address part of the problem, and do nothing about e.g. pricing in the real cost of livestock carbon release.
The parent was not suggesting subsidies, they were suggesting nationalising the entire energy industry and managing it to address the problem directly.
A carbon tax might work in theory, but the political reality is that as long as fossil fuels are a profitable business, any such tax will be fought tooth and nail at every step of the way.
It is now far too late to expect the market to turn itself around. If we want to fix the problem, we need to take away the power that maintains it.
I wish they would make self attaching electric/battery trolley busses. The main lines on the streets in Vancouver aren't bad but the intersections are such a mess with the trolley lines. You could min-max a system that combined trolley lines with batteries and use much less of both. Put the starts above bus stops so they don't have to attach at speed and you get to cover the initial expensive acceleration too. Back of the envelop guess from supercharger times is you would only need 10-20% of the routes actually covered in lines to maintain battery charge.
It'd also be nice if more of the self driving companies would go after busses first. Fixed routes seems like a significantly easier problem and you can amortise all your sensor/electronic cost over a more expensive vehicle.
Both combined would pretty radically alter the environmental and economic cost of public transportation.
Partially or fully caternary-free trams that utilise supercapacitors are already deployed in some cities like Guangzhou, China and Zaragoza, Spain. It is probably not too much of a stretch to extend this concept to trolleybuses. Like the trams, they can use charge points at stops either overhead or embedded in the roadway.
You just reminded me how much I hated the trolleys when I grew up in Vancouver.
I don't want them to come back. One of the key advantages of buses is that they're flexible and could react to shock loads. Moving people in bulk should be done with grade-independent rail, like the Skytrain.
I wasn't a huge fan of them growing up in Seattle either, but the new ones are so much better. They have lithium batteries, a few miles of off-wire range, and auto-detach/reattach for the poles. Basically solved all the problems.
They are planning to do something similar in Tempe, AZ I believe. From what I understand, it's going to disconnect when it turns onto Mill Ave (which is the big bar/restaurant/shop street) and then reconnect afterwards.
The self driving companies won't go after buses first because they haven't already gone after buses first. Google's been using the mid-large size vehicle for years now. It is much smaller, more manueverable, better acceleration, lower costs to procure, and yet another benefit is you're not limiting yourself to wherever the buses happen to have to go. Buses have to stop/start on the whims of the driver, so is Google going to make a self-driving bus but still have a driver there to make it start/stop? Where is the efficiency gain? Where is the helping of the handicapped or uncapable that they achieve with personal vehicles? I think all the companies in the space have it right, personal vehicles first, as well as freight vehicles, and then trains/planes/buses later since they already have skilled drivers that we'll have to retain anyway.
> Buses have to stop/start on the whims of the driver, so is Google going to make a self-driving bus but still have a driver there to make it start/stop?
Buses have to start/stop based on passengers desiring to exit, passengers waiting, and passengers completing loading. Drivers detect and react to those conditions, but it's not about whim.
Trolley buses are kind of on the way out with battery operated buses. I doubt they would use the trolley lines for supercharging, that would require way too much infrastructure when the super chargers could easily be centralized at a few stops.
Are trolleys more efficient than buses, pound for pound? Especially after you factor in the capital expenditure needed to build out the trolley lines? I find it hard to believe that a niche technology (trolleys) would be more efficient overall (impact * quantity) than buses, which are everywhere.
Buses are probably an 'easier' problem, but it's much easier to pitch selling self-driving cars to individual consumers rather than to government procurement budgets. Also, I suspect the bus problem space introduces additional issues such as <what to do when some asshole is parked in the bus bay>.
You seem to be thinking of trams, while nimos is talking about trolleybuses, which are buses that draw their power from overhead wires [0]. Specifically they're suggesting that a hybrid option with batteries would reduce the need for wires everywhere (just run on battery power), but would still allow the buses to charge while connected to the overhead wire.
> So it decided to make electric buses a thing. How? By dumping a giant pile of money on the problem, subsidizing the purchase of more than 350,000 BEBs in the following four years.
So, it's a typical state-financed infrastructure project.
Good thing if it pans out. If not — :shrug.jpg:
The problem with big governmental actions (especially of an authoritarian government) is that when they are good, they are mighty good; when they are bad, they are mighty bad. The same government that mass-buys electric buses also continues to build the Great Firewall and total surveillance. To my mind, they do both things for the same reason: for the good of the country, as they perceive it, and because they can.
The fact that China's government moves so decisively in areas of technological advancement may have to do with the fact that many of their government officials have degrees in engineering, science, math, etc.
With so many of the Chinese officials having technical degrees, I can't help but wonder if the United States government could benefit from technocrats in Washington.
Technocrats lack the skill set to win elections where everyone lies outrageously.
If they had such skills, they would be common American politicians. One if the few benefits of China's collectivism is all the politicians have to share the same reality, even adjusted by party propaganda. It allows technocrats to operate effectively since they do not need to compete with outrageous liars.
Is it about lying outrageously? I grant that occurs in high-profile and memorable cases, but is the average race for the house or a local seat corrupted by outrageous lies? It just seems sensible and historically continuous that those who study the law (lawyers) end up being the ones who most frequently write the law. I am 100% for more STEM and humanities-oriented law-makers, however I'm arguing technocrats lack specific knowledge of laws, not of lying.
Do you genuinely believe that when many laws are written by interest groups and past with little modification?
And yes, the average race us corrupted by outrageous lies. I have literally never seen an election at any level that lacked outrageous lies by at least one of the candidates.
Meanwhile in Europe we're still in the prototyping phase. I feel like the electric car market will belong to China and established European car companies will become irrelevant over the coming decade. Right now they seemingly spend more effort lobbying against change than keeping up with innovation.
And Mercedes took a peek at their van by pretending to be a different company and taking 1 for a test drive, but got caught because since it's German Post, when the worker entered the address of this fake company, the system warned them that it's an unknown company, could it be a shell corporation?
Prototyping? Companies such as Linkker in Finland have been producing BEV buses for years: http://www.linkkerbus.com/
We've had a couple of them running normal bus lines in Copenhagen for some years, to assess the feasibility and TCO compared to diesel, CNG and hybrid buses. So far they seem to be doing rather well. They're quiet and comfortable (no vibration) -- as a passenger, I really like them.
They tend to throw shit at the wall, and see what sticks, reliability and safety are secondary at best. Or someone dictated that it should be done, not matter what.
Diesel cars are what German car makers want to sell. I doubt they can go all electric. It would make 2/3 current staff obsolete since electric car does not need complex internal combustion engine. What to do with these people? Basic income isn’t there yet.
Edit: I wanted to buy BMW i3, because it has about right range I need for my travels. Guess what: there is no way to charge it! No single charger closer than half mile. Electric cars are useless without infrastructure.
This is great. Countries and governments have the power to make the future they want happen. Often we see that power used to stifel innovation and subsidize failing incumbents to protect jobs.
Investing in technology research that'll be better for the planet (and China's smog problem) in a way that actually brings prices down long term and not just subsidize purchasing the technology in the short term is a good thing. I hope this continues.
Once again China is owning the future while the US twitters.
Hopefully, in that future, we can talk them into selling us a few of those busses (with a BIG tariff piled on, of course). Which we -might- be able to use, if we can afford to -charge- them.
It isn't all roses however, Los Angeles has had serious issues with their BYD fleet [1].
I have posted many times the best place to put EVs is in the nations school bus fleet. they have fixed routes, obvious and accessible places to charge at, would introduce new generations to EV travel, and insulate school systems from fuel prices. The negatives are higher cost of entry, poor cold weather performance, and sheer number of buses to replace.
Maybe in addition to making cheap electric buses, they could make EBs that don't break down every 20 miles?
Several transit agencies in SoCal purchased Chinese-made EBs on a trial basis. None of them plans to continue to the trials due to the abysmal downtime record and maintenance costs. Instead, they're looking at the more expensive, but far more reliable American and Japanese EBs coming to market in the next year or two.
There's the LA Times article about BYD already linked. The other big agency that's pulling back on Chinese EBs is the Foothill Transit Agency, where I have friends who are part of the team evaluating the EB trial.
There are a few smaller transit agencies that cancelled their plans to acquire BYDs after the LA Metro's failed experiment. If they're not mentioned in the article you'll have to deep dive into the Metro archives to find the reference.
They've only recently begun actual sales of production vehicles. Up until a few months ago, all vehicles sold were test vehicles sold to transit agencies as proof of concept and for benchmarking cost efficiencies.
Anecdotally, many of their customers are requesting additional buses, but I've been asked by my source not to say how I know that.
In my state (Kerala, India), the government run bus company is currently trialing Chinese electric buses. I think some of the metro trains are also Chinese made.
Meanwhile in the USA we subsidize big oil and gas and bail out failing car manufacturers all while claiming market mechanisms and capitalism is the only way to go.
We also have a lot more electric buses on the road in the USA than before, at least here in the Seattle area (well, we’ve always had them due to hills and cheap hydro, but now they have batteries).
From what I've read, 99% of the world's municipal electric busses are currently in Chinese cities. And I also believe Los Angeles has a bigger electric bus fleet than Seattle?
I find that difficult to believe. For example, Shenzhen just achieved a milestone of 100% electric buses, and it alone has way more buses on the road than Seattle. Your point on 3rd-tier cities stands, but I think it's misleading to say that there are more electric buses on the road in the USA. Other Chinese cities won't be far behind Shenzhen.
Sorry if it wasn’t clear in my comment, I meant “a lot more” as in “more and more”, not “more than China”. I wasn’t trying to claim that he USA had more electric buses than China (that should have been obvious isn’t the second sentence, but I edited my comment to make it clearer), only that parts of the USA are undergoing an electric bus revolution at the moment also (to counteract parent that said we are just obsessed with oil).
The article isn't just about having some elecric busses in some cities. We also had some solar panels in USA but we weren't investing in them in the same way to increase their usage and ramp up their production.
It's about the Chinese government investing in electric vehicles to make them cheaper long term and increase their viability and usage.
Yes, I know. But it isn’t like electric buses aren’t getting traction here in the states at all. Where public transportation is really a thing, this is happening.
China has public transportation everywhere of course, though you’ll see these buses in shanghai and Beijing but not yet in tier 3’s (at least last time I checked a couple of years ago, it will change eventually).
I happen to live near both of the routes (downtown Bellevue) that have already been electrified, so it already seems like a huge thing here, even though they are just getting started.
(Incidentally, the same thing was true in Beijing when I lived on their first battery electric route 7 years ago)
Because I never made that claim in the first place. I only meant more than before, not more than China, that should have been obvious from context but I edited my comment to make that more clear.
Don't forget too-big-to-fail banks. They got bailed out and now they are even bigger than they were after gobbling up a bunch of mid-level banks the past few years.
> “It’s a pain in the ass,” he continued. “That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great.
This just sounds incredibly entitled and out of touch. People are grateful for public transportation despite it's inperfections because it's much better than not having it at all.
I also don't understand the American idea that "only people who have no other option take public transit."
I could easily afford a car – I had a pretty nice car that I ended up selling because I never used it – but I enjoy taking public transit, because I hate traffic, finding parking, etc. If I can currently get along fine without a car in Los Angeles, then maybe, with some more investment around the country, other people would willingly ditch their cars, too.
Me too. Most issues people have with public transit aren't with the concept of buses and trains but the lack of investment in making the system as good as it could be. We don't need a new way of doing it we just need to invest in it.
A little googling says that there are a lot of guideway systems called "light rail". Are guideways somehow immature compared to actual rail systems? I've ridden on a ton of each in airports, they seemed to work the same from an end-user perspective.
There is no way individual transportation will ever be as efficient as public transportation in an urban setting. If their math says that autonomous vehicles will be cheaper than buses then it must be ignoring that autonomous buses will also be cheaper and more efficient than they are now.
Yes but there will still likely be a market willing to pay the near-2018-public-transit price for a private ride in 2028 -- even if that represents a premium over 2028 public transit rates.
* Reducing their dependence on oil, one of few strategic resources which they do not possess in sufficient quantity and is subject, in large part, to the inclinations of foreign entities. Advanced electronics is another such resource on which they are also investing heavily to address the dependence.
* Building up technical expertise by accumulating experience in designing and scaling up production of affordable electric vehicles for the masses. (Unlike ICE vehicles, this is an area where no one has a huge lead.) It is clear that EVs are the future. The size of global automative industry is in the trillions and can provide jobs for a huge number of people.
* Improving urban air quality especially in tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai to address the concern of talent who they try to attract (and attract back) from abroad as well as to address people’s demand and to reduce long-term public healthcare expenses.
* Helping with global warming which may affect cities like Shanghai in the future. But this is possibly not a primary goal. As another commenter mentions, other approaches like carbon tax could be more effective.
Governments in several developed nations should at least be concerned that, if they invest insufficiently in EVs, the issue of unemployment and underemployment in traditional manufacturing hubs could become more severe than it is now.