5 ms·
Cars and transportation more broadly is under heavy regulation and political control. Part of it for obviously good reason. The rest of it for not so good reaso
by throwaway4good 2y ago
Cars and transportation more broadly is under heavy regulation and political control. Part of it for obviously good reason. The rest of it for not so good reason.
There should be innovation in vehicle form and size now that electric batteries and motors have become cheap and abundant; cars such as the depicted would already be whizzing around town if we were free to buy them but of course we are not.
Perhaps innovation will happen outside the west where the politics of this is less locked down by special interests and overall conservatism.
- yorwba 2y agoThere's plenty of special interests invested in Zhidou. As the article mentions, Zhidou went bankrupt in 2019 and was only resurrected recently. What they don't mention is that Zhidou went bankrupt after its vehicles at the time no longer qualified for central government subsidies. This article https://k.sina.cn/article_6011862187_16655bcab0200129v2.html?from=auto&subch=oauto&ab=qiche&_rewriteTime=1715507014620 https://k.sina.cn/article_6011862187_16655bcab0200129v2.html... tags a bunch of Lanzhou city and Gansu province officials at a Zhidou promotional event. Most likely they agreed to subsidize the company with local government money in order to give them a leg up in the competition against other provinces. It's unclear to me how they expect to avoid bankruptcy this time around.