Volkswagen seeks to counter rivals with budget EV model

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?

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Fun choice of words for the company that famously got caught cheating at the benchmarks

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.

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.

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)

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.

I have never bought a new car.

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...

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.

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.