Volkswagen seeks to counter rivals with budget EV model

That's way too expensive for an "affordable EV".

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?

It's too expensive for an affordable EV in half the world I am sure. The wealthier half of the world will never let Chinese auto makers in. China wants to do the same thing they've done with other manufacturing, use government subsidies, borderline slave labor, and artifically low currency to eat the market and kill everyone else's manufacturing capacity until they have the market entirely.

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.

Your figures are way out of date. The average Chinese auto worker now earns 21900 CNY/month, or about $36000/year. Even the low end is ~$15k.

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.