Geely Electric Cars
 

https://ecomodder.com/forum/attachme...1&d=1555072811

I thought we had discussed this, but search did not turn up anything. It is supposed to have a 410 km range for $22,321 and a 500 km range for $25,298. That is 255 and 311 miles, respectively. They say they have received 27,000 orders and 18,000 are from overseas, but they mention European countries. They say it is a matter of time before it comes to the U.S., but there is not any mention of how much it would cost. People comment that the outside is bland, but the interior is pretty modern: https://jalopnik.com/while-all-of-yo...chi-1833985087

These - and other brands - had better come to north america, or there will be no affordable electric cars for when they pull the plug on gasoline car sales in 15+ years.

Even by 2030 doe projects only 10% of new car sales will be plug in capable. They think a large portion of those plug in cars will be plug in hybrids that can still burn gas.
We could speculate that maybe by 2030 the plug in market share could possibly double, but thats pretty wild speculation.

Hahaha. Pull the plug. Intended pun or happy coincidence?
JJ

Unintentional as I typed it, but enjoyed the irony right after. :p

Looks promising, but the front-end looks a bit odd.

The trouble with these things is that they double in price when they cross the ocean.

The Chinese cars “look” the role but the ones that have come over are horribly unreliable compared to even Dodge,
They just aren’t built for American travel beyond appearance.

Are they getting better?
Sure but still aren’t built to the spec Americans expect

Depends. If you're comparing them to the best of the Japanese, definitely.

Comparing them to American- or European-designed cars, they fare better (well, particularly since the Chinese pirate engineering talent primarily from Europe...)

We have already had about a half dozen Chinese cars come over the ocean all have been underwhelming with rather severe levels of major failures.
Wheego, BYD, Miles, Kandi, Greatland, and other Chinese companies have already tried selling their EVs here and all have ended up as projects in diyelectriccar forums because of their epic failure rates of basic components

Until they import cars in significant numbers and stay in business long enough to support them we won’t know if they can do better than their other recent offerings here

Are you knocking Chinese build quality?

http://i.imgur.com/A3kRa.jpg

https://images.khaleejtimes.com/stor...20190108114405

I don't know about the old blue bike, but the orange is reportedly made in China (for a German company).

My understanding is that with Chinese manufacturing, you get what you pay for. If you go with the lowest bid, you get Chinese cars like from those pictures. If you put quality over price, you get bikes like the orange one.

While we are sharing Imgur posts:
https://i.imgur.com/nrpN0zE.png

Now tell me to replace my head gasket!

[I have not worked on it in months!]

That is generally true with everything. Of course, I was making a joke.

Nearly everything is made in China, including things of very high quality.

As a tangent thought probably due to my ignorance of manufacturing, I always wonder why when given the option to make something of quality, or to make something as garbage, some choose garbage. Take bicycle components for example. Presumably the materials and part counts for a quality derailleur is similar to a poor derailleur. What is the extra cost to produce a quality derailleur compared to a poor one? Surely it's not 4x the cost given the basic design and materials are extremely similar.

How much do you want to pay to design, for materials, quality control, R&D, warranty, and labor? I am sure there are many other factors, but if each of those averages 26% more for high quality versus low, it now costs four times as much.

On the other hand, if you focus on price, you probably need to change your name periodically and have other complications.

No, if all the factors that go into a car increase 26% in cost, then the cost to make the car goes up 26%.

Good catch Charlie.

The designs can vary significantly, though--your typical department store bike has a derailleur that's not very similar to a Dura-Ace or SRAM Red. Also, when you get in to high-end bicycle components, people are willing to pay a lot more for components that are slightly lighter, so the market supports a lot of markup for higher-end components.

A few people on Slowtwitch have bought and built up knock-off carbon frames from Taiwan, where most high-end bike frames are made. Those are a crapshoot mostly because they aren't subject to the quality standards they have to meet to be marketed by the OEMs. So yes, you can get the "same" frame, but oftentimes it isn't finished correctly, there are alignment issues, , who knows how the carbon layup and material differs, etc. even though it came off the same assembly line and looks the same as the name-brand stuff.

If there's lots of markup on lightweight components, it begs the question of why there isn't more competition which would tend to drive the price down. I'd be willing to learn how to make high end widgets if the market is supporting a high markup, and price it a bit lower than the competition.

Branding. It's the biggest barrier to entry there is.

Acura, Lexus and Infiniti didn't hit our shores in the 70s because no one would have bought high end cars from those crappy Japanese brands back then, and no high end bike shop is going to carry your components because you're not a brand that drives customers to their store.

1. Buy an American brand with a decent reputation.
2. Build electric cars under the American brand that are more reliable than the ICE ones were.
3. How does the rest of this go? :)

Building a more-reliable car than the American brands sounds easy.

Just not for the Chinese.

Are any well-funded Japanese startups reading this? :)

What are the tariffs on imported Chinese vehicles? It's more likely that they can't compete when tariffs are imposed than they simply are incapable of making a quality EV. After all, EVs are simpler to make into a quality product than conventional ICE vehicles.

BTW- I'm not saying US tariffs are necessarily wrong, as long as they are in response to similar Chinese tariffs. Tariffs in principle are bad for everyone, but they are effective bargaining tools if other countries impose tariffs.

Tariffs to keep us competitive will only make things worse. Tariffs because they do not pay what is considered a fair wage in the U.S. are ridiculous, but tariffs on sweatshops make sense to me.

I guess that responding to tariffs with tariffs makes sense.

I don't know what tariffs on sweatshops means. A tariff is a tax levied on a type of product or products from a particular country.

The term sweatshop itself is a subjective term. Are construction workers sweatshop workers since they have difficult labor and get paid relatively poorly?

The only thing I know is that nobody and no government has the right to impose restrictions on the wage I voluntarily agree to. No minimum wage, no maximum wage, and nothing in between. It's all arbitrary and evil. It doesn't even make any sense at all. I can give my labor away for free, but I cannot sell it at the price I want?

It's unenforceable anyhow because someone could simply "volunteer" their time for me, and I could give them "Redpoint tokens" to "appreciate" them. Then I could have a kiosk that purchases Redpoint tokens with USD. Bunch of corrupt nonsense these laws are. Doesn't matter if they were well intentioned when they cause harm and impose restrictions on freedom.

So called sweatshops have done more to lift people out of absolute poverty than anything else implemented in so called developing economies. After all, a little money is better than no money at all.

"In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn't the bottom."
"Yet sweatshops usually go not to the poorest nations but to better-off countries with more reliable electricity and ports."

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/o...15kristof.html

Look, I'm all for people having more comfortable and safer work environments, and prospering for their labor. That said, it isn't up to me to dictate the price that people sell their labor for. It isn't mine to sell.

The whole point of opening factories abroad is to make things at a competitive price. If we expect the same working conditions and wages abroad as we do here, then there's no point in opening factories abroad, and those places will suffer.

Capitalism, while far from perfect, has by far been the best way to facilitate trade and prosper all people.

Besides all that, if we really cared about people abroad, particularly in sweatshops, we are free to give our own money to them. Anyone making noise about "unfair" wages that isn't giving their own money to those people is either a corrupt political hack, or extraordinary naive. You don't get to say that something is very important to you, while offering no evidence whatsoever that it is.

People tend to be more generous with other people's money than their own. People like to tell me to buy things (that I do not feel that I need), but when I ask if they will pay for it, they act like I am out of my mind.

You know how Warren Buffet kept saying he should pay more taxes? You can always pay extra--or you can pay what the IRS says you owe, instead of having your attorneys fight it.

If Warren Buffett says he needs to pay more taxes, how come he never does?

Because he's not volunteering to give his own money to a government that's run by people who don't care about doing math properly. That would be horribly inefficient and would reward bad behavior. What he's doing is criticizing a system that lets Warren Buffett pay a lower tax rate than his secretary does: that's a horribly inefficient system that punishes (by charging a higher effective tax rate) working stiffs.

Apparently the authors of our tax code think Warren Buffett is pretty hard done by and shouldn't be taxed as highly as his secretary, his janitor, or the guy who cooked the Big Mac he had for lunch. Warren Buffett thinks pointing out that this is wrong is a much better way to improve matters than simply giving more of his money to the IRS.

See, aside from BYD, which is a major manufacturer, the rest of those sound like rebadged crap bought lowest bidder with tacked on American hardware (I literally laughed out loud when I first saw the price of the Zap Xebra, knowing how utterly terrible the "glider" it was based on is, and how much cheaper the Chinese electric version was).

And here, you've got BYD, which just a model generation or two ago was building knock-off fifteen year old Corollas and pirated Lexii... but which is now building the most successful hybrid-electric SUVs in China.

The pace of improvement is very, very fast. China has, in the past decade, started rapidly bringing itself up to global NCAP compliance. Some companies are targeting million mile durability for their engines, and the torture tests and teardowns are approaching what you'd see for the Japanese.

I've been driving Chinese cars since they could kill you if you looked at them funny (which, to be fair, was only fifteen years or so ago), and I've been impressed by what I've seen. The latest models I've driven were within the upper third in terms of quality compared to mainstream brands. All that remains to be seen is long-term durability.