In the meantime, for 2022’s final Morning Dump, we have news about the Chinese auto industry’s rise in Europe; our allies in that continent being none too happy about our Inflation Reduction Act; and the e-bike boom we’ll see even more of in 2023. Let’s do this!
China’s European Boom
The car you see above is a 2023 MG EV4. Looks pretty slick, doesn’t it? It’s not a bad deal, either; for an entry-level price of 28,420 Euros in Germany, you get 217 miles of EV range on Europe’s WLTP cycle, 10 to 80 percent fast-charging in 35 minutes, and a package that competes with the Volkswagen ID.3. Also, a high-performance version with 443 horsepower is coming next year too for about 39,000 Euros. We equate MG with vintage roadsters in America, but these days the brand is owned by China’s SAIC and production happens there as well. Cars like this are why the Chinese automakers had a pretty successful year in Europe, according to Automotive News. EVs in particular are booming there:
Europe’s Mad Over The Inflation Reduction Act
Lately, we’ve been talking a lot about the revised new car (and used car, now) EV tax credits implemented under the Inflation Reduction Act. If you’re up to speed, you know the goal is to localize the EV supply chain so America doesn’t cede total battery and production dominance to China (see above!) But it also means that for cars to qualify for tax credits, they have to have “final assembly” done in North America. European countries such as Belgium and England were the biggest importers, taking up nearly 70 percent of the shipments. Exports of electric passenger vehicles accounted for more than half of the total car shipments for two months in a row, with November registering a record high of $6 billion in exports. Naturally, this is bad news for European automakers. (And Subaru, and Toyota, and Hyundai/Kia… you get the drift.) Earlier this month, French president Emmanuel Macron visited President Joe Biden and said, bro, we are straight-up not having a good time over this stuff. More or less. And in French, one assumes. You get the idea.
The Quiet E-Bike Revolution
The Flush
The other focus is on requirements that battery components be sourced from the US or its trade partners. While the EU does not have a trade deal with the US, Dombrovskis hopes that the geographical scope of this can be drawn sufficiently widely to include the bloc. “There are some openings, there is some work ongoing but we are not quite there yet,” said Dombrovskis. This trend is in large part due to the variety of options that have entered the market. Some are built specifically for certain jobs such as food delivery, others are designed to fold up or built with extra seats for kids. Now, they’re being used as a convenient micro-mobility transportation option for those who don’t want the inconveniences and costs that come with a car. White said safety and security are the top concerns for prospective e-bike buyers. Aside from alerts to danger on the road, features like navigation to avoid dangerous roads and asset tracking to deter thieves and enable recovery of stolen bikes will help to spur greater adoption. Google Maps has decent bike navigation in dense areas, directing me onto quieter streets whenever it can. However, it’s not perfect. For trips to my favorite local Target, Google advised cutting through a graveyard. Great (if spooky), but there was a bridge that I needed to cross that was out. I had no way to report this to Google, so every time I try to go to that Target I get directed the wrong way. I don’t know how Apple Maps or other services are handling bikes, I’m sure someone out there has done a comparison. This way, they’re not competing as much with the domestics, and can really ramp up & go after them when their cheap cars turn out to be surprisingly good. The stereotype is that the Chinese plan long-term, not only for next quarter’s profits, and this strategy would work well for them. In my opinion-pretty much uninformed though it be. People can’t afford used cars anymore, stuck buying used. Toyota knew that when people called out their political donations. Their sales aren’t hurt, because people want Toyota reliability. Ford knew that the reports of quality issues wouldn’t stop people from wanting the Bronco. Chinese companies know that bringing over crossovers and SUVs at a reasonable price will make sales. As long as the compete with Nissan and not Subaru, they will get market share fairly quickly. Especially if they buy the rights to recognizable brands. MG and Polestar don’t seem Chinese to people who do minimal research. The Chinese makers have been buying up old European brand trademarks to ease the current push into Europe. They already have succeeded there. Many of those brands are useful in Africa, Asia and South America as well as the US, Canada and Mexico. I expect at least two Chinese automakers to have a permanent place in the US market within 6 years, first on the west coast, then the east coast, and nationwide within 8 years. I would have guessed less than half that before the IRA was enacted. Given the IRA law, expect Chinese makers to take longer in Europe and maybe even focus on the rest of the world first. e.g. Walmart. Although I must say, for what it was, the Yugo is not at all a bad car. When I spoke with Jason in St. Louis, he confirmed his Yugo was the fastest car in his fleet, and among the most reliable. I compared it to the Trabant, but he corrected me that the Yugo was improved greatly over its contemporary Soviet-era crapcans by feedback/parts/engineering from Fiat. That brief conversation on the subject makes me WANT a Yugo at some point in the future, and a Trabant to go with it. I’d love to paint them up all red with a yellow hammer and sickle on the hood, then pervert them into really fast electric drag machines to bait those all-American Corvettes, Vipers, Hellcats, and Demons at the strip with. Communist crapcans FTW! With today’s EV technology, it is possible to make a modern equivalent to the Yugo as an EV, that is maintenance free, mechanically bulletproof, and cheap. I’m thinking a $6-8k runabout with 0-60 mph in under 8 seconds, a top speed of 80+ mph, and a real-world 60-80 mile range at 70 mph, can be done, if you can get the production volume high enough. Using LiFePO4 batteries, battery life could be well over 250,000 miles, and if kept small enough, battery replacement cost could be $2-3k, since you’d only need a 12 kWh battery. Such a vehicle would be a subcompact hatchback with fold-down rear seats, sized similarly to a Mitsubishi iMIEV or Scion IQ, but much more slippery with a Cd value in the upper 0.1X range(think 2005 Mercedes Bionic for what its shape might look like). Oh, I can believe it. Of the ten cars I’ve driven so far in the 24 Hours of Lemons over the years, a Yugo GV has been the quickest, nimblest, and most confidence-inspiring of them all. Admittedly it’s hard to say how much of this is a positive reflection on the Yugo and how much of this is a perhaps less than fully positive reflection on, respectively, my automotive choices and Jason’s. Then again, maybe it’s not that hard to say. There were a huge number scrapped in the ’80s and ’90s after suffering catastrophic engine failures around 40,000 miles, because the timing belt had a 40,000 mile replacement interval and people just didn’t do it. You can forget the Trabant; that’s never going to happen, unless you can find a pretty good Maisto Diecast model. NHTSA and the EPA have banned all Trabants from US roadways and ordered them destroyed on sight. I remember Car and Driver being ordered to get rid of the Trabant 601 wagon they imported for testing in 1990. You’re better off buying an OKA. It’s a tiny Russian subcompact sold here from 2003. the importer is in Las Vegas, and you can buy it in either EV or kit. the kit can use the engine from the Suzuki Swift/Chevy-Geo Metro/Pontiac Firefly. http://okaauto.com/ Personally, I’m looking forward to buying a Chinese-made Duesenberg EV micro-car. https://www.volocars.com/vehicles/13074/duesenberg-ii-estate-car My personal opinion is that the quality downside won’t be worth it, and the risk of surveillance or user data being shared with the CCP is high enough that I’d never have any interest no matter how cheap the cars are. I think there definitely will be a subset of consumers who shop on price alone who will say damn the consequences and give the Chinese companies a foothold here. If the ICE bans really do come to pass in the near future, I fear the only saving grace for lower income consumers may be cheap garbage from China, which would be quite sad indeed. All the more reason that I will be owning 20th century automobiles from now on. I’m not against technology per se, I’m against technology being used to control, extract money/time from, or manipulate people. I’m all for EVs, for instance, but I’m against proprietary, sealed-off systems that can’t be serviced without special proprietary OEM tools. If you mix them up you have to make a bunch more extremely awkward calls. The main thing holding back China from the US is that they haven’t finished clearing out the low hanging fruit elsewhere. If you’re already at or near capacity, why deal with tariffs and US regulations for less profit than what you can get selling that product in Europe? As they scale up, they’ll be here. OK, Patrick, I’m gonna be “that guy”: “Warren Buffett’s been pairing his stake back a bit in recent months,” “Pairing back”? Really? Is there an editor in the house? :-/ Stuff happens when you’re a one-man band. Thanks for catching this though! I’m betting it wasn’t food poisoning. Probably more like 26 Oz Flu. I’d recommend finding a used full-suspension mountain bike for sale on craigslist or offerup that was built with quality components and 1st-world labor. Then I’d source some quality components, mainly motor and controller, new, and look for a decent used battery pack with a built-in BMS. Sites like endless-sphere.com and ebikes.ca can offer you a lot of good info to get started. All in, you could get a decent ebike built to street legal spec with a 30-50 mile range when ridden hard for well under $1,000, including the cost of the bike, if you’re careful what you buy. You will also not come out with something “better,” except for maybe better for your specific use case if you have a weird one. If you were to convert something you’d want abig-tubed mtb frame to deal with the torque and a 250w (or “250 wink wink” watt) middrive. You don’t have to worry about chains and such too much @ only 250w unless you are putting down some legit power. https://i.imgur.com/1KvhZN8.jpg https://i.imgur.com/j75uGn7.jpg https://i.imgur.com/tzO209r.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Jrz8rYc.jpg You’ll need to go to a recumbent streamliner or a trike to do this sort of aerodynamic work, which will be a greatly more challenging platform to find on a limited budget and could many times over offset the cost of quality ebike parts/more battery. It would cost just a bit over $3k to replicate mine for everything, if you do all the work yourself. Mine also has a rear hub motor, and I absolutely love it. I don’t have to worry about it eating chains, I don’t need to regularly grease any bearings, I don’t have to worry about spacers to make sure the chainline and sprockets are aligned, I don’t have to wipe an expensive ebike-suitable chain down every day(because I can use the cheapest basic $15 7-speed KMC chains instead), and it’s dirt simple to keep operational. Plus this motor has thin laminations and according to ebike builders I’ve spoken with can soak up 10 kW peak for minutes at a time without overheating if you add some ferrofluid and a hubsink, albeit so far the most I’ve run mine at is 3 kW. China is already a huge supplier of automotive components to major established manufacturers globally. They also have all those joint ventures with these manufacturers in China. I’m surprised they haven’t started much like some of the Japanese and Korean companies by supplying rebadged captive import versions of their cars to the big western manufacturers looking to jump in the game quicker than their own R&D can get it done. For instance Stiletto already has more brands that cars. Probably even more than the volume of cars the sell. They are not really at the head of the pack with EVs. It would make sense for them to rebadge a Chinese car as say a Colt to get their toe in the water. They have the sales channel and brand recognition and whatever Chinese partner they work with can get to market without having to build all of that on day one, and they will get experience with the expectations of the market for when the time comes to do it themselves. Back when GAC would always show up to the Detroit auto show, the fit and finish of everything they brought was very much less than good. However it was still good enough to where I bet they’d sell to people who really want a new car and don’t really care what it is as long as it’s brand new. But the cars were as you said, utter shite If you mix them up you have to make a bunch more extremely awkward calls. The main thing holding back China from the US is that they haven’t finished clearing out the low hanging fruit elsewhere. If you’re already at or near capacity, why deal with tariffs and US regulations for less profit than what you can get selling that product in Europe? As they scale up, they’ll be here. I’d just ignored it when it happened in the past, but don’t think they ever were moderated. Given the choice of a Chinese car vs. any other option including a rust bucket ’92 Festiva, you’ll find me pedaling the rusty hooptie. And yes I’m well aware that my cell phone or toaster was probably made there; that’s become unavoidable. I can avoid gifting $40,000 to a Communist company, there’s an ocean of alternatives. I didn’t research your list, though I found Spotify’s inclusion suspicious. They’re not Chinese owned: https://fourweekmba.com/who-owns-spotify/ The problem is that ultimately, ebikes remain a ‘luxury’ item as we careen headlong into a recession caused by corporate profiteering. (It’s not fucking inflation!) And what’s the first thing people cut spending on? Luxury items. When you have 1 in 5 Americans reliant on government aid to eat or to have any sort of heating in the good years and that number is skyrocketing as companies – you guessed it – demand we make them more profitable. The costs of natural gas production and delivery have not changed, period. Their employees are not making more money. Yet somehow they are shattering 2008 levels and keep climbing. Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil posts record quarter after record quarter – $20B in profit. “How, and when, do you think Chinese brands will catch on in America? Would you buy one? People certainly don’t think of Polestar that way and those cars have been remarkably well-received so far.” This right here is one of the prime reasons I am going to hammer every writer and every editor with a literal hammer until it gets through: cars have always been political and always will be. You cannot divorce cars from politics. And that goes triple here. Go drive by an auto manufacturing plant, observe the ‘(manufacturer) PARKING ONLY, violators towed’ lot signs and how the ‘IMPORT PARKING’ lot is a mile away. Recall – if you’re old enough to – the ‘rah-rah only buy AMERICAN or you’re a dirty commie for buying a Honda’ style campaigns. The only reason Polestar is ‘okay’ is because it’s Volvo and Volvo is European. 99% of Americans have no damn clue it’s owned by Geely. Chinese companies have gone out of their way to hide themselves when selling to Americans, and American companies have done their damndest to not mention to consumers that their CUV was built in China. Because those things would be an instant death-knell for sales. Especially with anti-China and anti-Asian sentiment at record highs by every measure. If they weren’t so fucking stupid that they can’t even understand basic business structures, the qultists would be screaming from the rooftops that Volvos upload your brainwaves to the CCP to infect you with the woke mind virus and are full of bioengineered diseases. Openly stating the manufacturer is Chinese? Neoliberals would be at best extremely hesitant, dealerships would need 24×7 armed security and bulletproof glass, and congress would be “debating” banning all Chinese cars from the roads. Doesn’t matter if the car’s good, bad, or middling. All that matters is that it’s Chinese, and China is bad. Decades ago, there were lots of politics afoot whose purpose was in keeping EVs unavailable to the general public from the auto industry, oil industry, and government, and were well documented in the film “Who Killed the Electric Car” as well as books like “Taken for a Ride” by Jack Doyle. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the OEM automakers attempted to suppress information on battery technology, made misleading and dishonest statements about the existing and future market for EVs along with refusing to lease or sell them to customers, spent millions of dollars lobbying politicians in an effort to press their agenda, their lobbyists printed ads in opposition to EVs, and after eventual success in lobbying to repeal California’s ZEV mandate the auto industry confiscated and crushed perfectly functioning vehicles, rejecting any offers by consumers to buy them no matter how much money the prospective buyer offered even after being willing to sign a liability waiver. In that same time period, the oil industry made blatantly false advertisements and statements about EVs and their technology, spent millions lobbying politicians in an effort to press their agenda, began setting up organizations intended to stall or prevent the adoption of battery electric vehicles in California and elsewhere, conspired to prevent utility companies from setting up EV charging infrastructure, and have even bought out battery patents in an effort to keep them from being used in motor vehicles(the NiMH battery being a key example, as this happened before lithium chemistries took off). The federal government catered to the auto industry when the U.S. Department of Justice filed an amicus brief supporting GM, DaimlerChrysler and others in their federal lawsuit against California’s ZEV mandate, infringing upon the state’s rights guaranteed within the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Further, the Bush Administration also was in support of the auto industry’s lawsuit, with Chief of Staff and former chief General Motors lobbyist Andrew Card acting as a plaintiff in the case. It is no coincidence that this occurred, considering that George W. Bush received over $1.3 million from the Auto Industry in campaign funds for the 2000 election. Dick Cheney made his intentions for energy policy quite clear when he stated, “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” The production EVs that were available in Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s, such as the Pugeot 101 Electric, or Citreon Saxo Electric or the Renault electric pickup, were kept out of the U.S. 20+ years later, now EVs are virtually mandated. Government is funny like that… I’m definitely not a fan. That said, I’m very much against banning of ICE cars. I’m all for people having a choice in what they want to drive, without government intervention. Regulations surrounding automobile production have been to the point of absurdity long before I was born, and have gotten much worse since. It’s nigh impossible today to tell apart the auto industry from government because they are so intertwined. It is largely for this reason that we have a dearth of affordable niche vehicles, and you can have anything you want, as long as it’s an over-stylized, over-sized, over-priced, tech-laden, complicated, unrepairable, cybaroque monstrosity of a mall-crawler in whatever shade of grey, white, or black you like, just sign on the dotted line and make payments for the next 84 months, and be ready to replace it when something fails just outside of warrantee that costs more to fix at the dealership than the car is worth. May 31: Henry Ford cuts a deal with the USSR, and changes world history, on this date in 1929 https://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/may-31-henry-ford-cuts-deal-ussr-changes-125237773.html My custom build ebike/microcar, once it is upgraded to top out around 110 mph, at top speed will have the same embodied kinetic energy as a new Hummer EV travelling 20 mph. Yet when operating in many states, I will be forced to limit the electric assist to 28 mph for supposed “public safety” reasons, even though I will be well capable of turning the motor off and reaching over 40 mph simply pedaling it. Funny how that is. If you want an unrestricted bike, get a proper electric motorcycle. If the brand isn’t “Wuling” or “Changan” or “Great Wall Motor”, most folks probably won’t notice. Heck GM doesn’t even realize Tesla is American. https://www.youtube.com/@TheLateBrakeShow/videos
