Another one (US consumer EV startup) bites the dust

Bollinger bails on consumer EVs and switches to medium trucks:

It joins Nikola, Lordstown, Faraday Future, Fisker, and others who have expressly cancelled their own production plans for consumer EVs (in some cases in favor of announcing plans to have a third party manufacturer such as Magna or Foxconn handle the dirty work).

Meanwhile, Chinese EV makers are going all out:

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Sometimes I feel like that little boy wondering why no-one else notices that the Emperor has no clothes. When are we in the West going to wake up and realize that China’s manufacturers – much derided for sending us the cheap stuff which is all we can now afford to buy – are rapidly becoming the world leaders in high quality advanced manufacturing.

Think about the list of Chinese companies which each delivered at least 90,000 electric vehicles last year – SAIC, Tesla, BYD, Lynk, Great Wall Motor, XPeng, NIO, Li Auto. And that list excludes major Chinese auto manufacturers Baidu and Geely. For most of us, there is only one name on that list we would recognize. Just imagine what the future holds for Germany and Japan once China starts reving up its exports of highly competitive vehicles!

If we in the West don’t start to get serious soon, we will find ourselves reduced to hawking cheap handmade curios to rich Chinese tourists.

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Lynk &Co and Zeekr are Geely brands. And Baidu is supposedly partnering with Geely. Chinese tech titan Baidu and carmaking giant Geely to pour US$7.7 billion into making next-generation smart cars | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)

You may have been thinking of BAIC which is going to hit with Arcfox Arcfox - Wikipedia

Category:Electric vehicle manufacturers of China - Wikipedia

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Don’t miss the central point – China has a slew of competing manufacturers already making substantial numbers of electric vehicles in a wide range of factories. The West does not. There will be consequences.

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SAIC-Alibaba JV:

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https://www.thestreet.com/technology/tesla-rival-goes-bankrupt

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It’s a great strategy. In the meantime, that’s how young Chinese see it:

I sure do. Here in Shenzhen, young women of my age and background had two options. Sex work for the arrogant Hong Kong businessman who came over the border and treated Shenzhen like their own private brothel, or work on the factory line for a pittance making things for Americans to slap their labels on and resell for massive profits. We’d make a 1 dollar for every 10 they did off of what we made. No choice; we didn’t know how to design what the West wanted or market it to them if we did.

They knew things we did not, and we were told if we knew those things, and used that knowledge- well, that was stealing. They owned ideas and had pieces of paper we never agreed to saying no one but them was allowed to have those ideas.

But late at night, we took those things apart, we figured out how they worked, and how to make our own. We studied English and translated videos for each other, learned culture, learned what people wanted and would buy, and English just barely good enough we could sell it to them ourselves. A few of us even got good enough to improve on those things- to innovate.

I see little girls in Shenzhen now, and they’ve got all the options in the world, they’ve got their own ideas, and I see how enraged that makes some who think we should stay beneath them forever. I see your politicians desperately scramble to deny where we are and scramble to put us back where we were. To restore those “good old days” when everyone knew their place- before we got all uppity.

I know they’ll fail, and I smile for that little girl and all the ones like her because no one’s going back. Got some Little Pink overseas Chinese who clearly were nowhere near Shenzhen 20 years ago shrieking about what a worker’s paradise the whole place was for everyone. This article 11 years old, pretty much on the tail end of things, but it gives the general idea what the urban villages were like before they cleaned things up- https://archive.is/fUdrL

Restoring the US to some imagined former glory does not require by extension also restoring the geopolitical position that largely enabled that state- a position much of the planet deeply resents and is unwilling to return to!

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