Sounds like the US needs to target it with tariffs quick. Surely it will be better for our economy to ensure the survival of a couple zombie automakers than it would be to bring accessible EVs to all.
replies(6):
It'd be a bold move after the lawsuits and data breeches Volkswagen has faced.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/customer-data...
https://carbuzz.com/news/automakers-spying-on-consumers-decl...
https://www.osborneclarke.com/insights/volkswagen-fined-eur-...
Does "ID" translate to something more interesting in German? Both names are atrocious.
https://apnews.com/article/china-volkswagen-executive-deport...
That said, the new car looks very much like an "electrified" Golf, which is one of the first cars I drove, and I have fond memories about it. The new car may succeed if they target the same audience, and remove all those fancy user-tracking "features".
When pronounced english ID pretty much has the same connotations in German as in English, but the phrase “Intelligent Design” isn’t connected to creationism in Germany (or rather, creationism wasn’t a culture war issue here in the first place).
When the letters are pronounced in German, it sounds like “Idee” (idea), but I’m not sure if they’re leaning into this, nor whether the average person will have that association.
AFAIK, EVERY1 (garyoldman.gif) is a working title and it’ll end up being called something different.
Meta has 3 billion daily users across products and brings in $165 billion. Their entire business is your data and they get about $55 a year off of selling yours. (I picked them because they have little revenue other than ads, though even then, not all of their ads have anything to do with your data, but I'm estimating in your favor and calling 100% of their revenue a result of collecting your data, because they're probably the closest to it at very large scale.)
So even if a car company was as good at collecting and monetizing your data as Meta, it couldn't meaningfully dent the price of a car. It couldn't even charge the batteries for a week. Data is cheap and highly scalable, cars are neither.
The specs are great for 2025. Let’s wait for 2027 when BYD has a better performing model for much less.
I am all vouching for VW’s electric efforts. I drove the ID Buzz which is great. I just wonder if they could sell competitively without tariffs in the EU.
The BYD Seagull retails here in Uruguay for less than that and we tax cars at about 100%. On China it seems to go for 10-12k.
It's a proper, basic city car. 4 to 6 air bags, ~300km range (more than what this article's car indicates), all basic security features and standard gadgets out of a modern car.
Our EV infrastructure is not viable if you don't have a charger at work/home and yet these have sold like hot cakes.
Legacy carmakers are making increasingly worse ICE cars for the most part (btw does GM sell a C-segment hatchback on any market, anymore?) and their EVs are simply uncompetitive. What's it going to take for them to wake up to the fact they're going to have to stop fleecing their customers with crappy products? Bankruptcy?
Before that there will be the ID.2 scheduled for 2026: https://www.whatcar.com/news/new-volkswagen-id-2-electric-ca...
A senior executive for Volkswagen in China has been deported for allegedly using cocaine and marijuana while on vacation in Thailand, according to Chinese authorities and German media reports.
Germany’s top-selling Bild newspaper [..] reported he tested positive for drug use after returning from a holiday in Thailand.
Drug use is an administrative offense in China punishable by a 10- to 15-day detention and a fine of up to 2,000 yuan ($280).
Thailand legalized marijuana in 2022 but Chinese authorities have warned that use of the drug overseas is equivalent to using it at home and subject to the same penalties.Our egg prices are also high because we block Mexican and Canadian imports. Trump continues a multi-decade trend of taxing consumers to subsidise business owners.
Not saying is bad, just saying.
There's no way we let that happen to cars. China's average auto worker pay is $4.20 an hour. America's is 6x that. What you call fleecing customers we call paying workers a living wage.
We'd rather pay $25k for a cheap EV and have a thriving auto industry than pay $10k and have none. We'd happily choose paying more for cars over Latin America-style wealth inequality, though lately it seems as if we're going to manage both at the same time.
If you have a Golf vs E-Golf, you will compare everything from range, weight,...
That is my personal opinion that is the result of a small sample set of observations.
With this not due to start production for two years, it does look like they're well behind the game and unlikely to be able to compete on price.
(edit - I realise this is at least in part because the Chinese government subsidise the industry, and here in Aus we have no tariffs on them because we have no car industry to protect)
So assumung 25% tariff then 8% sale on top, the $20,000 would wind up at $27,000 sale price for the USA (although like other people have pointed out, this isn't going to be sold in the USA)
[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/18771/passenger-car-trade-bet...
Its very much cheap and cheerful. but its a great little car, with all the issues it has I still would not hesitate to recommend it. Its perfect for our commute car, and I charge it by solar panels so drive it for free.
The VW model is likely to be about the $40-45k (AUD) which is nowhere near the "affordable" range they think they're trying to hit.
EVs are less constrained in terms of packaging. The battery and all the working parts are stashed down in the floor, so you can do whatever you like from the wheels up, without having to worry about where you're going to fit the engine or transmission or gas tank.
Some manufacturers are making EVs that look just like their gasoline-powered equivalents, but there's a real possibility that they're headed down a blind alley. I think that manufacturers who fully embrace the design freedoms of EVs and find new ways of creating distinctive experiences will stand a much better chance of surviving the next decade. Weird doesn't mean good, but bland is just a concession of defeat.
https://www.salaryexplorer.com/average-salary-wage-compariso...
Also, Chinese manufacturers will do the same as Japanese and Korean manufacturers before them: work around tariffs by building assembly plants in the US and Europe.
for whatever reason GM ended Bolt, and now the cheapest/smallest seems to be Equinox EV SUV with starting MSRP 33600 (before tax credits if any, etc). While it is on smallish side SUV-wise for US market, for the European and similar markets i guess it would be pretty large.
With Tesla being the leader in EV the second officially is Ford with 6% followed closely by GM, yet the Hyundai + Kia together have 10%, and anecdotally i see around SF Bay Area a lot of Kia/Hyundai EVs (sedans or SUV-ish sedans).
I’m happy for you that you can afford to plop $25K down for a car.
There's a multi-billion dollar a year industry around the buying and selling of it. Every single company you've ever interacted with in any way is going out of their way to collect and store every scrap of your data they can get their hands on and you can bet that it isn't because it isn't worth much. It's worth a lot.
The data collection isn't even about ads. Ads are what they want you think it's for because nobody cares about which ads they see. They'll sometimes sell your data to advertisers, they will even use it for advertising themselves, but the data being collected about you is being used for all kinds of things. It's increasingly used to set the prices you pay, the policies companies hold you to, even how long they leave you on hold when you call them.
Car companies in particular want to sell your data to insurance companies who will jack up your rates depending on where, when, and how you drive. Your location data is highly valuable for all kinds of reasons and where you drive to, when, how often, and how long you stay there can tell them a lot. Car companies are selling our location data to police departments and federal agencies. Some cars are even collecting video and audio of everything that happens in and around the cars.
A car is a one time purchase. Until recently they got your money once and had to wait until you got another car to make money off of you. By collecting your data and using it against you, or selling that data (often as a subscription service) for others to use against you, it means that you never really stop paying for the car. You'll pay again and again for as long as you have the car.
These new Chinese cars are literally flooding the market with the usual way we are used nowadays to think: buy cheap, change again in 2 years. (Which we didn't do before this cheap manufacturing existed.)
In this context it makes totally sense.
Cars, though, at least how we're used to think, are made to last. A car is not just a bunch of features, it's also a lot about the quality of the components, and there are videos showing how poor BYD quality is. If you're happy with that, that's OK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Motor_Vehicle_Safety_S...
These cars are garbage, people are happy because they are cheap, shiny and have all multimedia and can do 400KM... why not.
The majority of costs are just the price of raw materials and manufacturing anything, whether in the US or abroad. What Chinese OEMs are doing isn't anything secret, it's just optimizing the other things to hit those price targets. Cutting out dealerships, better value engineering, lower executive/corporate salaries and benefits, cheaper electronics, limited features, vertical integration, and most importantly being willing to sell lower margin vehicles.
The rest of the car is fine I suppose but the infotainment unit in my brother's ID.4 is most certainly crappy.
The touch is horrible, the unit is slow AF both in latency and update rate, and the menus kinda suck.
Sure it's a small part of the car, but it's pretty integral to the operation of the car given they removed most knobs and buttons.
great transit is not cheap. It needs $200/month per family. This is less than the family is spending on one car (of 2-3), but still a lot of money (more than any transit agency in the world gets). You can't start smal either because until you have everything right driving is strictly better so nobody will try it. Even if you build it, expect several years for people to try it.
If it's not salaries in your P&L, then it's salaries in your supplier's P&L, or salaries your supplier's supplier's P&L.
It should have been the first piece of the puzzle. I've owned three VWs, I wanted to keep buying them, but VW has made so many bad choices in the last fifteen years it's hard to support them.
https://realitypod.com/story/volkswagen-launches-600-car-the...
For 600 all it takes is a silly mood to buy one. Then you sell it again 2 months later for 300 when you come to your senses and realize you have a wife, 3 Kids and a dog. No regrets and someone else can have their silly mood. Some will keep it because 258 miles/gallon is a sound way to save money.
Back looked like this
It would be great if everyone could be wealthy enough to buy all their necessities and never worry about money, but that's a pipe dream.
That said, I have less sympathy for Jochen Sengpiehl here, he's reportedly the chief marketing bigwig responsible for
Volkswagen has apologized for posting a racist video promoting its new Golf 8 [ ..that..] showed an outsized white hand pushing a black man away from a parked VW Golf, before flicking him into a restaurant called Petit Colon, which translates from French as the Little Colonist or Little Settler.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/21/business/volkswagen-racis...
( according to https://www.campaignasia.com/article/volkswagen-china-cmo-de...)
A few years ago this was true, but quality has improved massively since then. Was in China recently, got to ride in a bunch of Chinese EVs including several BYDs. Really impressed with them, and came away wishing I could buy one myself, but that seems unlikely to be an option for now in the US unfortunately.
In the 70s your argument was made against emerging Japanese makers. Unknowns like Toyota, Datsun (now Nissan), Honda etc.
Then in the 90s it was Koreans entering the market. Daihatsu, Hyundai, Kia etc.
Now it's the Chinese brands arriving as well. The incumbents will talk about "quality" all day long, but in truth European quality was always a bit of a myth (British Leyland anyone?) And the heyday of BMW or Mercedes quality is long gone.
The gold standard for quality today? Probably Toyota or Honda.
So yeah, laugh off the Chinese options as low-quality.
Easily possible if we fix zoning laws, encourage building more homes, and reduce regulatory capture that prevents competition in industry.
I thought car manufacturers had realised that touch-screen interfaces are simply terrible for drivers, and I thought customers were largely agreed in their hatred for them.
I would like to know how many accidents are caused by modern cars' usage of screens in the interior.
For an ICE car, this issue doesn't exist - you can put in a 900cc 80hp engine into a tiny car with basic trim and the end result would still be a car that can take you everywhere.
This influx of cash from VW is the only reason Rivian is still in business.
Farming mfg out, puts those people out of a job, those out of a job can get lower pay or go on the dole -that comes out of all those "poorer people's" taxes. And, while we're at it, why not outsource poor people's labor overseas or even import cheap unskilled labor to undermine them?
No, you want to maintain a diversified, robust and self-sustaining economy that perpetuates wealth rather then siphon it overseas.
VW and Stellantis need to go bankrupt and their technical workers need help to transition to being part of industries that will strive in a low-carbon economy: public transports, bicycles, two-wheels EVs, etc. [0] As for the management of these companies, they can all bloody starve, frankly.
[0] https://ilnousfautunplan.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Indus..., Claude's summary in English: https://claude.ai/share/695d7c05-25e5-4295-aa09-2bdc8717f8ca
Someone would need to do a study to test if this were true. My guess is many of the safety feature are a net positive. It would be interesting to see the tradeoffs though.
And having been to China and sitting in plenty of BYDs... they're on par. Decent.
The cars can be obviously cheaper, and yet aren't. Chinese market may be subsidized, but international? Not really. Coming back to VW, ID3 in China was half the price compared to the one in Europe, so there were even people trying to import them back and sell for less than official distribution - that effort was shut down thanks to VW's lobby.
In my Renault Megane e-Tech, if my windshield suddenly fogs up I can hit a physical button[1] to max the heater and blower. In the ID.4 it goes via the touch screen.
So, you press the "button" on the screen, nothing happens, so you press it again, except it turns out the system registered the first time it was just slow and so now you've turned it back off again. Or, you press it and nothing happens and you press another 5x times and still nothing because your finger is too dry...
I see the 2024 variant[2] kept the all-touch approach, but I haven't tried it so perhaps it works better in practice.
[1]: https://www.megautos.com/nuevo-renault-megane-e-tech-electri... (row below the center console screen)
[1]: https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/volkswagen-id-buzz-cargo-te...
It’s just much more scarce so the people who own the mines can charge more for it.
Gold is a very easy metal to work with. While iron into steel especially on a large scale isn’t trivial.
I doubt the cost of labor has a meaningful impact on the price of gold.
History shows that pretty much no one who set out to make a reliable design the got it right the first time, things tend to fail in unexpected ways.
From the teardowns, BYDs seem to be pretty much unrepairable - batteries are glued together, and the motor/inverter/charger/heatpump/etc seems to be put together into one sealed unit - something they're pretty proud of, but let's hope nothing fails in there.
From what I hear from the Chinese, they aren't big on the second hand market, so that's another worrying aspect.
For example, I'd love to get a car which doubles as a mobile work pod, where I could drive to a foresty car park, set up a hotspot, run the A/C, plug in my computer and do my days work from there.
But despite all the bells and whistles, interior layout is still very conservative.
By contrast a tonne of steel requires about 2 tonnes of iron ore and 0.8 tonnes of coal and 0.1 tonnes of limestone, all bulk minerals dug out of the ground. Total world steel production was 1.9 billion tonnes in 2023.
This was many years ago so I don't know how it is today..
I reserved the cheapest standard transmission car for rent at the Frankfurt airport. When I got there they downgraded me to an automatic car. I held firm and said I reserved a standard car so that's what I must have. I had to wait over an hour but finally they found me a standard car, a much upgraded model too compared to the cheapest one I reserved.
Edit: well I’m kind of wrong: https://www.gold.org/goldhub/gold-focus/2024/05/higher-gold-...
Profit margins seem to be about 50-70% currently but historically it was closer to 30% (of course that’s still many times higher than for steel production)
.VW is already building hundreds of thousands of full BEVs every year with 383.100 sold (and delivered) in 2024 [1]
What can be reasonably questioned is the final price of the car once it enters production.
[1] https://www.volkswagen-group.com/en/articles/volkswagen-deli...
All of the products they are making actually have two lines, one for the oversea, one for the nation. The oversea line would be high quality at first. But once they eat up all the market share, the story would start to change. The oversea buyer would happily to see they are been treated the same as Chinese.
Just think about the product from TEMU.
You may be right. But at the moment this is just speculation. Just like happened from Japan and Korea, the quality ramped up quickly. And yes, companies age, and as they do so quality drops off. And another rises in it's place. That's literally the issue you're seeing now with US and European goods.
>> Just think about the product from TEMU.
Interestingly the quality there is climbing too.
It’s also important to note that car prices aren’t directly comparable across different global markets. China heavily subsidizes its local car manufacturers. An EV for €8,900? That doesn’t even cover the material costs.
Right now, VW offers the ID.3 for around €30,000, so the price gap is significant. When the BYD Seagull launches in Europe, it likely won’t be priced at €10,000 either—various factors will probably drive up its cost.
And while I don’t want to rely on the outdated "Made-in-Germany" argument, we should wait and see how the ID. EVER1 actually performs before comparing cars based on price alone. I know that the BYD Seagull is of a decent quality. So let's see, what VW will offer.
Teslas are now old enough to be subject to mandatory yearly inspection in EU. They are dead last in the German and Swedish rankings based on the number of issues found during the yearly inspection.
German TÜV EV+ICE ranking:
1. Honda Jazz
2. VW Golf
...
110. Ford Mondeo
111. Tesla model 3
1. Polestar
2. Lync
...
X-1. Dacia
X. Tesla
https://www.carscoops.com/2024/11/tesla-model-3-comes-bottom...
https://www.tjanstebilsfakta.se/teslas-besiktningsresultat-a...
Your location data is already being sold by your phone provider and various apps you use. They’ve got way more than your car ever will. Facebook knows more about your location than your car ever could if you use their apps, and again, they get on the order of a few tens of dollars a year from it. And they own their own ad network.
Cars start at over $25k, your data isn’t worth a meaningful percent of that. It’s simple numeracy.
That's literally the stated purpose of Trump's tariffs, though.
It's not about hurting the Chinese. That's a bonus in some cases, sure, but the stated purpose is to encourage US economic growth in the industrial sector.
If BYD starts building factories in the US to hire American workers and sell to American consumers, Trump would be bringing it up every time he saw a microphone.
All humans are hypocrites. We want manufacturing here, both for jobs and National security/economic resilience. But we also have our own budgets.
Australia and the UK have modest barriers to entry - especially in Australia a large part of the market is Chinese.
In the EU they are allowing Chinese imports because otherwise the Chinese would restrict the sale of German cars in China. So they are coming in though still a small percentage of the market in the EU/UK.
I used to have a Chinese made imitation Yamaha and the quality was awful as you'd expect from a counterfeit knock off manufacturer but I imagine the BYD stuff is pretty good.
But it feels like we're reaching a point where we're trying to catch a falling knife, where every safety improvement is _obviously_ worth it, even as the easy gains have gone away. We've also (almost) completely ignored the safety of everyone outside of the vehicle in our arms race to protect occupants.
Canada and Mexico don't produce enough eggs to have any effect on the egg shortage in america. Which, to note, has been an issue since 2024. It is not related to any kind of trade war that Trump is starting
The data doesn't bear that out. Look at the best selling cars in the US, not many cheap cars on that list. Now compare it to the best selling cars in Europe, almost only cheap cars.
Top 3 car in the US are Ford F-series, Chevy Silverado and Toyota RAV. Top 3 cars in Europe are Dacia Sandero, Renault Clio and VW Golf.
At least slightly weird-looking electric cars seems to be what the market _wants_.
Apparently a great uncle of mine found gold on his family farm in Scotland, but it was never profitable to exploit so saw no benefit from it!
China's subsidized their EV market with tens of billions directly. On top of that, they subsidize critical components and materials. They also keep their currency artifically devalued.
An American comnpany could do everything BYD does and still not come remotely close on price.
https://soymotor.com/sites/default/files/usuarios/redaccion/...
This results in longer vehicles, with lesser proportion of useful space, the packaging being worse than some ICE vans (and much worse than the original VW Bus).
This is to save engineering and manufacturing costs, which is kinda a bad thing to do when your vehicle retails for this much.
