Slashdot Mirror
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.
Pretty much every incumbent car manufacturer plans on building their car plants in China. BMW is more prominently in the news for that but others are too. They'd be silly not to. That's where the incentives and the batteries are. And increasingly, that's where the knowledge is.
> The Chinese will soon be *better* at making bicycles than the west, simply because they do it. Same with robots, there will soon be far more in China than in the USA, and thus far more expertise.
Experience is one thing. Another parameter is that US culture is very unusual in a particular way, or really two related things. Co-workers from other countries have told me it's a bit hard to get used to working in the US because of this cultural difference.
In most cultures, including China, when someone shows up to work the company does things a certain way, and it's very often the Chinese way, the way other companies do it. The employee does their part, according to company procedures. That's good for manufacturing a million identical copies. The US is weird in that we tend, much more than other countries, to do things our own way. The employer wants certain results, of course, but each employee may do things a little differently, perhaps using different tools. Rather than doing everything the traditional way, Americans are looking for that "one weird trick" that makes it better, faster, or cheaper. The employee who comes up with a nifty trick to do it better is called clever, inventive, and praised for their ingenuity. In most cultures that behavior would be odd, inconsistent, and potentially dangerous.
My own workplace is an example - everyone on my team chooses different tools. Even where we have to share a common standard, Git, some of my co-workers use various diff GUIs to work with Git, while I use the command line. The codebase is a mix of programming languages and styles. Heck, some co-workers shine their shoes, some don't wear shoes. An office in China would look, and be, much more consistent, everyone working together, doing it the same way.
China is very good at making a million identical widgets, America invents like no culture before. They compliment each other - the Americans try all kinds of wacky new ideas and when they get a good one, they contract with the Chinese to make a million of them, precisely to specification.
Obviously each culture is different in many ways, with different attitudes and norms having different benefits and drawbacks.
IF we remember where our strength is, the US can continue to be a major and very important part of that synergy. If we lose our individualistic and inventive spirit, well then our workers will be like workers everywhere else, and be competing on wages - and in wages worldwide, only the top 1% make over $25,000 / year or so.