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.
Do not equate to huge leap forward.
Also - it might not be wise to use huge leap forward when talking about China. Just sayin'
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.
I have the EGO series of home yard tools...I think they are superior to whatever is here in the West. They are just not so boastful about it.
I wonder how FMC feels about a Chinese company using its name.
The Federal Maritime Commission is furious.
dna.js
That kind of reductionism is rather inane. Henry Ford didn't flip a switch one day and churn out the ~1 billion vehicles that the world is currently using that are creating a good deal of all of this pollution we're now dealing with. Could you honestly look back and say that what he and others like him did has had no impact on the world today just because what they did at the time was rather small in comparison?
On October 16, 1919 a silly little man gave his first speech to a little over 100 other people at a restaurant in Munich, Germany. No meaningful impact would come about from that. The major political parties like the SPD or Zentrum would be the ones to lead Germany. Not any tiny fringe political operation.
Beggar-your-neighbor economic policies never benefit trade in the long run.
When my wife bought her Tesla, we received about $7k in subsidies.
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.
Nope, Henry Ford incorporated in 1903 and made a profit in 1903. Tesla has been around for 15 years and still making no profit.
Ford in 15 years was making 436,000 cars a year and making a profit. At 20 years making 1.8 million cars a year and making a profit.
damn, Musk is a punter in comparison.
Your obsession becomes obvious when you rant about Musk when neither the article nor the comment about about Tesla or Musk.
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."
no obsession, my point is that electric cars will be made for the masses and profitably so by the big auto manufacturers. Not by little chinese companies and not by musk
Amazon turned its first profitable quarter in less than 7 years. Two years later it had profit for each of 8 years, 2003-2011. try again
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.
Nope, Henry Ford incorporated in 1903 and made a profit in 1903. Tesla has been around for 15 years and still making no profit.
Surely you know you are lying by telling only half the truth, right? I mean, if you knew he started in 1899 and nearly went bankrupt with a low-quality, over-priced car, and then re-incoroprated in 1903, you also know that he didn't start shipping the Model-T until 1908. Before that he was selling a custom, low-volume, high-end roadster, the model 999. You might have heard, Tesla also started out selling a low-volume, high-end roadster.
But one way Musk is not like Ford - Ford didn't have to compete with an already entrenched global industry. So, that might have slowed Ford down just a little bit. But I will give you this, Musk is a thin-skinned narcissistic ayn-randian asshole, but at least he's not a god damn nazi.
It is worse than that.
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. If you want to found a startup building smarter robots, you want to be where the robots are.
Eventually, the Chinese will send their experts to the USA to teach manufacturing.
The rational economists miss this bit.
> 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.
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.
150000 != 0, dipshit.
I don't respond to AC's.
Manufacturing a bike doesn't require much more than building it. The design of bikes doesn't change that much anymore.
Manufacturing an iPhone, however...
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.
It seems to me the numbers/ranking could be off, the tesla gigafactory targets 35 Gwh annually, but I can't find current production numbers. https://electrek.co/2018/01/03...
better is not part of chinese education. they cant do it.
For a German the situation is really frightening.
Foxconn has been trying to break into retail sales since at least 2010. I'm not sure Apple is quaking in its boots about this threat just yet. There may be a little more to the business model than knowing how to assemble components.
You should short their stock then, you will be rich.
"Beggar-your-neighbor economic policies never benefit trade in the long run."
You're kidding, right? Those strategies work fine. Always have, always will. There's only a problem when countries cut off supplies of essential goods to their neighbors as an element of their economic war. That's not what would be the issue here.
The question is whether the Chinese (or anyone else) can build cheap, ubiquitous, personal electric transport. I don't think a "premium electric SUV vehicle" is likely to be the Model T, Toyota Corolla, or Volkswagen Beetle of the glorious electric transport age envisioned by Slashdot editors. China may well come up with a electric or hybrid vehicle that is cheap, durable, not too unsafe, and is eventually parked in every third parking place worldwide. But I don't think we've seen it yet.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
'My point is that electric cars will be made for the masses"
Surely that's correct. At least that's the way it worked in the past.
"... and profitably so by the big auto manufacturers. Not by little chinese companies"
By that logic, the Volkswagen Beetle (21,000,000 produced) and the Toyota Corolla (40,000,000 produced) could not have succeeded. In the past the "big manufacturers" have either shied away from low end vehicles or produced lousy ones. But maybe things are different this time.
"... and not by musk"
Who the hell knows? I'm skeptical that Elon Musk can ever produce a world dominating basic transport vehicle in the US. But for all we know, he's cobbling together a production plan for a plant complex in China, Vietnam, or someplace even cheaper -- Somalia or Burkina Faso.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
150,000 vehicles a year is 500 vehicles a day, right? That's serious production, but not all that dramatic. Elon Musk is shooting for 600+ per day. BMW produces 1000 per day.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Nope, Henry Ford incorporated in 1903 and made a profit in 1903.
Which is utterly false. The first company Henry Ford founded went under. And later on, Ford had numerous financial setbacks and nearly ended up losing control of his company. He also dropped the ball again when he tried to drag out Model T production too long. Honda nearly went bankrupt in its early history, so this isn't strictly an American story, nor is it unique to the auto industry. John D Rockefeller borrowed so much money to finance his takeover of the Cleveland refinery industry that the local banks ran out of money to loan him.
My point is: your state is a lie.
ShanghaiBill, are you in Shenzhen now?
no, world was different place 100 years ago when entire countries had market need. In the here and now, big companies will do it, and little car makers don't stand a chance
Foxconn has been trying to break into retail sales since at least 2010. I'm not sure Apple is quaking in its boots about this threat just yet. There may be a little more to the business model than knowing how to assemble components.
I won't even buy a Foxconn PC motherboard because they're poop, even though Foxconn makes plenty of other brands' motherboards. They are literally generations away from being a threat to Apple, and I don't mean generations of PC hardware.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
electric cars will be made for the masses and profitably so by the big auto manufacturers. Not by little chinese companies
The second, third, and fourth-largest corporations on the planet are Chinese. You may not have noticed, but they've got a lot of people in their country. They currently have a whole bunch of different automotive brands because that's the phase their auto industry has been in. Now you're going to see consolidation. People have been making noise about the Chinese coming to America to sell cars for literally decades, but it looks like it's actually going to happen with EVs.
Lots of people would take a low-range EV if it were seriously cheap, so I think China's got a good chance to sell a whole lot of cars here once they work out crash safety.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Did you even read my post before replying to it? Where did I say anything about protectionist tariffs? How exactly did I frame it as a bad thing? When I said the cultures "complement one another", when I mentioned the "synergy".
Your rabid advocacy seems to be detrimental to your literacy.
As far as what's ideal, you wouldn't want doctors building cabinets while carpenters diagnose disease. Each should do what they are good at. It's the same with countries. Ideally, each country should do the things that they do better than other countries.
As I mentioned, over the last century (or two), the US has been good at inventing new things and engineering new things. Because we're good at that, we should do a lot of that.
Um, good luck waiting for that to happen.
The Chinese are building plenty of vehicles which are good enough to pass US crash tests. Granted, most or all of them are for foreign marques and built under license, but they'll figure it out sooner or later.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
150,000 a year is still around 1% of Toyota's output. It's not nothing, but it's not a game changer either when viewed in the context of the world auto market.