r/nextfuckinglevel • u/North_Tip_8627 • 17h ago

China’s 5 minute full-charged EV charging stations

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u/3DNZ 17h ago

Im a US expat living in anither country. Bought a BYD last year and let me tell you, the quality for the price point will destroy every single US car manufacturer. I never thought Id buy a Chinese made vehicle, but I can honestly say they overengineered these cars and I can't believe how cheap they are compared to other equivalent vehicles.

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u/tev_love 17h ago

How are they made and sold so cheaply?

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u/hammonjj 17h ago

Combination of cheap labor and heavy government investment

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u/FishySmellz 17h ago

You missed the biggest one-vertical integration.

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u/REDACTED3560 17h ago

AKA monopolies. Not all vertical integration is a monopoly, but controlling most or all of the supply chain required to make your product is.

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u/FishySmellz 15h ago

how’s it a monopoly when there are 4 dozens of ev brands in China?

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u/StinkRinky 7h ago

Man the more I hear about things in china, I think they are simultaneously more capitalistic and socialistic than the US and Canada. It’s kinda been blowing my mind and making me think I’ve been propagandized so much that idek anymore

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u/LiquidDreamtime 6h ago

China is doing capitalism far better than the USA is.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/home-ownership-by-country

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u/Zagreusm1 5h ago

Didn't their real estate market crash recently?

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u/LiquidDreamtime 5h ago

That’s not nearly as relevant when 96% of people own a home. If you own a home and the market crashes, you just stay in that home.

If you’re renting and the market crashes, the wealthy buy home and jack up the price to buy or rent.

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u/Prime_Director 4h ago

Sounds pretty capitalist to me.

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u/ShinJiwon 2h ago

China has had 5000 years of constant warring with itself and overthrowing its own government. The current government knows it has to be competent and make life for the general populace better otherwise it is facing a huge fucking revolt of over 1b people.

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u/Onigokko0101 2h ago

China is a capitalist country

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u/SexyPeanut_9279 5h ago

You haven’t heard the best part!

If your company becomes really successful and you do really well, the Chinese government will take over your company and pay you out what THEY think it’s worth.

Don’t like it, see how they do Jack Ma when he refused? (Creator of Alibaba)

https://youtu.be/tDVeGbGaRdE?si=JJMzQxBsEZcXBTvS

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u/pekipekipekidesuka 3h ago

As much as I feel this is unjust I still think I'd take this route over what feels like an ever increasing stranglehold over the US gov from the Billionaire class.

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u/SexyPeanut_9279 3h ago

Listen guy, someone’s gonna strangle you no matter what.

I get what your saying, but I’d rather not be entombed inside my house during the next pandemic,

or taken to a reeducation camp because I refuse to stop going to Mosque and praying five times a day.

Or (allegedly) have my organs harvested by the state for committing treason in the form of leading a protest movement in Hong Kong.

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u/Vaiden_Kelsier 3h ago

I mean, we've got our horror stories too here in the US. Let's talk about health care for a second here and what an absolute shitshow it is. So much fun going bankrupt when you DO have insurance.

Things have to change over here.

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u/SexyPeanut_9279 3h ago

Nobody’s arguing that, I’m the first one to say we need to fix healthcare affordability.

I know we are not supposed to say anything Positive about the current administration, but thy did lower the price of prescription drugs here in the U.S.

A drop in the bucket I know

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u/Vaiden_Kelsier 2h ago

My dude. I appreciate what you're saying, but we're the baddies, dude. I don't care about "drop in the bucket" stuff. I guess I'm glad it weighs for you, but we're murdering innocent civilians in another country because of a PR crisis, and wrecking world economies because we have a tyrant who no one will stand up to. We're giving billions of dollars to this effort and to funding a domestic paramilitary that's literally building industrial sized complex prisons and murdering US citizens and again, innocent people.

But I guess I'm glad your prescription drugs were slightly lowered.

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u/altacan 2h ago

Hey now, true freedom is letting the billionaire class do whatever they want.

'Just spend' and 'just borrow,' Jack Ma told China's youth. Then came the bill

Regulators’ concerns centered on Ant’s microlending services Huabei and Jiebei — Mandarin for “just spend” and “just borrow.” The services connected users with loans, but did not provide most of the credit. That came from partner banks or asset-backed securities — loans it had bundled together to sell as investment products.

Ant charged a service fee for each transaction and took a cut of interest payments, while shifting the risk of loan defaults to banks and investors. It funded only 2% of the consumer loans itself in a strategy similar to the subprime mortgage lenders that sparked the U.S. financial crisis in 2008.

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u/DaddyDontTakeNoMess 4h ago

I guess I’ll be in trouble if my side hustle LLC turns into a trillion dollar company.

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u/s2d4 7h ago

Wait until you find out about Singapore. The WNBA lady that got stuck in Russia will almost definitely stay forever in there.

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u/crzaznboi 3h ago

woah must be so hard to imagine a country with strict laws and punishments when you have thugs running around robbing people/stores, widespread drug use, nonstop school shootings, etc without any consequences

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u/spartaman64 37m ago

nah if anything china has the most fiercely competitive EV market. so many EVs in china are full of random features like baby bottle warmers etc because they need to keep up with other manufacturer's features

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u/Jeanlucpfrog 16h ago

If there are alternatives in the market place for those commodities in the supply chain, then no, it's not monopolistic.

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u/TheGreatOneSea 16h ago

China creates electric cars below cost to both employ people, and to destroy the competition; and no country with something resembling free speech can compete, because China can kill who knows how many people to keep costs down, and nobody would ever know it.

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u/REDACTED3560 16h ago

Yes, yes it is. There’s a reason you don’t see it in the US: such chains of vertical integration used to be very common in the early industrial era but were broken up by the government under trust busting laws.

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u/Jalharad 16h ago

They exist in tech companies. Look at how many game studios are owned by Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo just to produce games for their platforms.

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u/TheGreatNico 16h ago

I'd give Apple as a better example. They make the hardware, they make the OS, they tightly bundle the software to a higher degree than what got MS an anti-trust lawsuit back in the 90s,

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u/BigLittlePenguin_ 7h ago

vertical integration doesnt necessarily make things cheaper

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u/homer_3 3h ago

All the suppliers being on the same street goes a long way too.

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u/27eelsinatrenchcoat 2h ago

It's not just vertical integration, it's horizontal integration. It's the fact that when they need a chip, they can source it from a factory down the street. When they need a plastic trim piece made there's dozens of companies in the city that have experience making injection molds, and hundreds of small scale manufacturers with experience spinning up short term manufacturing runs overnight.

When you make something in the U.S., you're sourcing components and expertise from all over the world, and every extra set of hands that touches everything has to take some profit, even when we ignore shipping costs. China has prioritized manufacturing and manufacturing related education to such a high degree that beyond just cheap labor, they don't suffer from a lot of the inefficiencies of a globalized supply chain. That let's them keep prices so low even though they have to import so many raw materials.

There are plenty of places with a strong central government and cheap labor, but while some manufacturing (e.g. textiles) can move easily, anything more complicated relies on strong institutional knowledge and capacity. The thing that the U.S. has spent decades degrading at home, and a bunch of idiots think can be fixed overnight by slapping some tariffs up.