China on autos: Consider yourselves warned

[erickmendes]

"Much of the growth to date globally has stemmed from government support, policies which are tapering off everywhere."

As if the combustion engine based companies and petrol industry doesn't have support from gov...


"There are also plenty of legitimate questions around how environmentally friendly EVs are. We have seen studies which show that an EV driven in China on electric power generated by coal-fired plants are actually more carbon contributory than hyper optimized gasoline engines driven in most developed economies."

Energy production matrix transformation... Every big country is developing ways to change the way it's produce energy, not because they are good samaritans, but because they need new energy production strategies to accomodate domestic energy needs.

 

[toooooot]

Instead, the pattern seems to be sponsor a large number of companies, then let Darwinian commercial forces play out across the sector, ultimately winnowing the number down to a handful of battle-hardened champions, who are then ready to compete on the global stage with tested supply chains and supplier ecosystems

While this is a wise application, it fails to sort these out to prevent all from being located in a single country, so should China come out on top it would be dangerous to rely solely upon them because of their aggressive political approach and attempts at domination of other countries.

They are clearly showing they dont want to be what they were just fifty years ago, they want to be the or one of the top powers on this planet.
The world does not need another dictatorship having major powers and abilities to shape the world.
That is not just bad for their own people, that is bad for all.

 

[Hotlynx16]

I don't own a car, I live in London and I am using the tube... and my bicycle. But I could assume that we might have 3 billion cars in the world.. maybe 2 billion? Even if they run with holy water ... there will be an impact. If we really want to talk about the most environmental way to transport people around ...it is public transport.

Only in larger cities in the US have enough public transport and now people are scared to use them because of the gangs. One 70 year old man got pushed down the steps of a bus because he told a black woman "she was rude, he died from the fall!

 

[Hodor]

Don't buy a battery powered electric car unless it has a solid-state electrolyte. Ordinary lithium-ion batteries can easily ignite when punctured. Or when compressed. Or out of sheer boredom. And then it's very hard to put the fire out. Most of fire departments aren't equipped or trained to fight the class 4 fires.

It's funny, isn't it? Who would have thought that after 120 years of driving gasoline/diesel cars, where you're basically strapped to a tank full of combustible liquid, the new technology would be even more combustible and harder to extinguish !?!

Here's my suggestion: If cars with ICE engines have to pay the CO2 tax (which is ridiculous, since CO2 increases the number of plants on Earth) then electric cars should pay a special tax to fire department. The money would be routed directly to fire departments, so they can hire more people and new equipment for putting out class 4 fires.

As opposed to CO2 tax, where the money is routed to banks, where it disappears in unknown direction.

 

[waclark]

And Japan was an allied, friendly country.

Not quite as friendly as you think. You may recall Japan doing nasty little things like dumping products at below cost to run US companies out of those markets.

 

[waclark]

Snip

Here's my suggestion: If cars with ICE engines have to pay the CO2 tax (which is ridiculous, since CO2 increases the number of plants on Earth) then electric cars should pay a special tax to fire department.
Snip

Well, yes, CO2 can be good, but too much CO2 is not good. That's the whole problem. We have natural "sinks" to absorb CO2 but when production of CO2 overwhelms those sinks we get too much in the atmosphere and that causes that earth to heat up. Sometimes to a point where plant life begins to die off due to excessive heat.

 

[GeforcerFX]

My first smartphone was a LG windows mobile phone that came out a little more than 15 years ago in 2007. back then if you tell me that in 12 years nokia, htc, lg and sony will all be irrelevant and replaced by bunch of chinese phones I would think you're trippin. and yet here we are today.

do not underestimate chinese cars. they might be crappy now, but who knows what they'll come up with in a few years. and who knows if you'll buy one in the next 10 years.

All of those phones were still chinese phones, they all still got made in china. They let other companies pay them to make the things, took the designs tweaked them a bit and sell them under there own brands.

 

[zulu53]

To be fair the quality of Tesla's cars is pretty questionable, almost every week an engineering problem appears and needs to be repaired X, Y, Z... This is terrible for a company with such high profit margins and so many subsidies.

To be fair: making a quality motor vehicle is a difficult task; taking many many years to get right - look at the JDPowers review over the years to see how long it took Toyota. Tesla leads the field in the EV reliability/quality field by a large margin even thought it is not up to IC engine quality as you say. China is in the middle ages in this respect. The Japanese and Toyota had to use the IP of Demming (which they paid for) to get better than the US. Whose IP are the Chinese going to steal, since they, on principle. refuse to pay for IP? Stealing IP and trying to copy it is not the same as hiring the owner of the IP to teach you the IP and how to implement it. Now that they are seeing the balloning labour cost that Westernisation gives them; its had for me to see them competing on an international level for a long;long time; way after the present Chinease leaders are dead and gone.

 

[Hodor]

Well, yes, CO2 can be good, but too much CO2 is not good. That's the whole problem. We have natural "sinks" to absorb CO2 but when production of CO2 overwhelms those sinks we get too much in the atmosphere and that causes that earth to heat up. Sometimes to a point where plant life begins to die off due to excessive heat.

Actually, we're not producing too much CO2. The nature has a way of reducing it to reasonable levels simply by..... growing more plants. And in the last 50 years, as NASA satellite imagery shows, Earth has become greener. Current CO2 levels are actually much closer to critical low, than to critical high. If CO2 starts dropping, plants may start disappearing.

Something you probably never saw in mainstream media is that greenhouses are filled with extra CO2 to make plants grow faster. They actually use CO2 generators to increase the levels of CO2.

Supplemental carbon dioxide in greenhouses

Learn about benefits, timing and sources of carbon dioxide for supplementation on plant growth and production within the greenhouse environment. ISSN 1198-712X, Published December 2002

www.ontario.ca

Because CO2 is the main source of dry matter in a plant. When you look at a big tree, if you don't count water, most of the mass in that tree came from what? Dirt? Nope. Most of the dry mass of a tree came from CO2. Entire body of a plant, branches and leafs are mostly made of carbon. And this carbon came from CO2. Not from the ground. From air.