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China's Ambitions To Power the World's Electric Cars Took a Huge Leap Forward This Week (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Future Mobility Corporation (FMC), the Chinese parent company behind electric car start-up Byton, has placed an order for a paint shop capable of handling 150,000 cars per year, German supplier Duerr said on Wednesday. China's Byton, a newcomer headed by the former head of BMW's i8 program, has already released plans for a premium electric SUV vehicle, the latest in a series of China-backed electric autonomous prototypes. Byton has financial backing from Chinese state-owned carmaker FAW Group and the country's dominant battery producer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. (CATL) This is just one of the stories this week relating to China and the electric car industry. MIT Technology Review adds: In a public offering on June 11 in Shenzhen, battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. (CATL) raised nearly $1 billion to fund ambitious expansion plans, and its stock has been shooting up every day since. Thanks largely to the company's new plants, China will be making 70 percent of the world's electric-vehicle batteries by 2021, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).
Just seven years later, CATL has built up the biggest lithium-ion manufacturing facilities in the world, according to BNEF. The company can crank out around 17 gigawatt-hours of lithium-ion cells annually, placing it just ahead of Korea's LG Chem, the Tesla and Panasonic partnership, and China's electric-vehicle giant BYD. Flush with capital from its offering, CATL plans to build two new plants and expand existing facilities, pushing its capacity to nearly 90 gigawatt-hours by 2020. [...] Notably, it's the only Chinese battery company so far to line up deals to supply foreign automakers, including BMW, Honda, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen.
Just seven years later, CATL has built up the biggest lithium-ion manufacturing facilities in the world, according to BNEF. The company can crank out around 17 gigawatt-hours of lithium-ion cells annually, placing it just ahead of Korea's LG Chem, the Tesla and Panasonic partnership, and China's electric-vehicle giant BYD. Flush with capital from its offering, CATL plans to build two new plants and expand existing facilities, pushing its capacity to nearly 90 gigawatt-hours by 2020. [...] Notably, it's the only Chinese battery company so far to line up deals to supply foreign automakers, including BMW, Honda, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen.
China's Ambitions To Power the World's Electric Cars Took a Huge Leap Forward This Week
Not to be confused with the Great Leap Forward:
It is widely regarded by historians that The Great Leap resulted in tens of millions of deaths. A lower-end estimate is 18 million, while extensive research by Yu Xiguang suggests the death toll from the movement is closer to 55.6 million. Historian Frank Dikötter asserts that "coercion, terror, and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward" and it "motivated one of the most deadly mass killings of human history".
Odd that an editor would put "leap forward" in the title of an article about China. Was he trying to be funny?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
The more people working on electric cars, the better. I want a 15,000 dollar electric car with a range of 400 miles. That will happen eventually, but the more people researching it, the sooner it will happen.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
About the time I was born, Schwinn was THE brand of bicycles in the US. Every kid wanted a Schwinn. Part of that was marketing, part of it was their production expertise. Schwinn had a lot of "tricks of the trade" to make great bikes.
To cut costs, Schwinn made a deal with a company I Taiwan to actually manufacture the bikes. They sent their experts to Taiwan to teach the workers there how to do it. After the Taiwanese company started using those techniques to build and sell non-Schwinn bikes, Schwinn switched to a new, small company in China. Again their entire their experts to Asia to teach the workers there all the tricks and techniques.
The little Chinese company is now the world's largest manufacturer of bikes. Schwinn declared bankruptcy in 1992, and by the time I was 7 years old the bike to have was Diamondback - one of several brands produced and sold by the company in Taiwan.
Schwinn had taught the Asian manufacturers how to put Schwinn out of business.
American companies are still doing that. Apple has been very, very good to Foxconn, for example. Foxconn no longer needs Apple, or soon won't. They are now selling direct, using everything they learned from building Apple's products, and can cut Apple off any time they decide it's advantageous to do so.
Same way that all of the "domestic" brands like IBM and HP became supplanted by Lenovo and Acer/...
As a capitalist, modern capitalism not only sucks, it's stupid.
While I don't disagree with your analysis, let me differ...
Fundamentally, there is a nexus between design, engineering and production. A three-legged stool, if you will.
I would submit that a national economy cannot long subsist on one (or even two) legs of that stool, and we have arbitraged at least 2 of of those legs to an economy that - while efficient - is, at heart, a Communist Dictatorship and we in the west ignore what we have wrought to our peril.