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I read new truck sales in China are about 30% electric and climbing. Apparently it does make sense for them

• ddlsmurf 1mo ago
  What China does hardly indicates economic sense, and you can be sure you won't hear about the down sides or failures. They already very agressively hide car lithium fires but they're very frequent. Economics over there are mostly investment driven with a large dose of ideology and vanity, not demand driven. You can see it everywhere including the massive amounts of empty housings for example
  • dmichulke 1mo ago
    This ignores the fact that there are also things that China does better or equal than Western companies. Like robots, solar panels, electric cars (?), AI models, electronics. They must be good at something, otherwise China wouldn't be where it is. So flat out dismissing anything from China is not enough of an argument. Mind you, I'm not saying you're generally wrong, just your "generally" is wrong. ;-)
    • ddlsmurf 1mo ago
      I'd dispute they do any of those better, they stole the IP, then used public funds to make cheaper versions in the hope of leading the markets, including by being artificially more affordable while there is any competition. Besides electric cars and solar, it's very debatable wether those will actually be ecological in the end. For ex. they are still opening massive amounts of fossil based electric plants, so the truck that is half battery is actually running on coal anyway. It would take an incredible re-work of the electric grids to accomodate actually transitioning away from thermal cars, including some solution for seasonal storage. If you're impressed by their robots, I don't know what you're looking at, they seem to be ridiculous, not even at the tech level that boston dynamics had decades ago. Finally keep in mind that electric cars are fantastic spying devices, for collecting data, and if you're nefarious, imagine hacking into them. That's why teslas are banned near anything governmental in China. So there is a huge strategic advantage to cornering that market, but not really to save the planet. The AIs are all distilled, USA still leads by far there, and they too are strategic weapons
      • ragebol 1mo ago
        > used public funds to make cheaper versions in the hope of leading the markets, including by being artificially more affordable while there is any competition If you replace 'public' with 'VC', isn't that the exact same as the US does in Silicon Valley?
        • ddlsmurf 1mo ago
          if VCs didn't care about making their money back, but instead had very different interests, then somewhat
          • ragebol 29d ago
            You don't think China (as a whole and as the government) is making it's money back? If not now, then in a few years
            • ddlsmurf 28d ago
              They're really not, the tiniest bits have shown with evergreen for ex, all the ghost cities. We don't really see the people who's savings, which with kids is the only "pension", have been demolished, on an individual level Chinese tend to save way more than others, this is gone. There's the demographic issue on top, the famines, that they import 70% of their food, depend on trade which the americans are withdrawing for protecting the routes of, and other unadressed issues because the priority is this investment, the missing population, the utter lack of statistics, even internally. Most likely the biggest factor will be wether they try something in Taiwan next year as they warned.
      • cpt_sobel 1mo ago
        > they stole the IP, then used public funds to make cheaper versions in the hope of leading the markets If you steal my IP and you make a better - or at least comparative but cheaper - product, that's on me for not innovating further.
        • 1mo ago
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  • D_Alex 1mo ago
    >They already very agressively hide car lithium fires But you found out... how?
    • ddlsmurf 1mo ago
      They regularly pop up on the usual guanxi, douyin/weibo etc. They stay up for a few hours usually.
      • mbesto 1mo ago
        > but they're very frequent. Yet you state their frequency as some sort of statistical fact. Your anecdotal experience doesn't make it any more or less true.
        • ddlsmurf 29d ago
          and you are refuting with even less justification. I told you how to check for yourself if you actually cared about veracity. Best of luck trying to get funding to publish something academic anti-CCP though, but I'd love it if you did. Also this is just a conversation, not an academic debate
          • mbesto 29d ago
            > I told you how to check for yourself if you actually cared about veracity. Which means nothing. You still dont get my point. > Also this is just a conversation, not an academic debate It can be both.
  • ragebol 1mo ago
    Being dependent on (cheap) oil can make economic sense as well. Unless you get cut off all of a sudden. Depending on local energy might make more sense in the long term. also for factor other than the economy.
• ncruces 1mo ago
  Due to Iran, they're cutting oil/fuel imports 30% YoY, and consumption by the transportation sector by 5~10%.
  • ddlsmurf 1mo ago
    And opened about 80GW of coal last year alone. That's the only advantage to electric trucks, they can run on coal too, even though you can only carry half the capacity whilst moving the same total weight, it still can make sense, just not economic and certainly not ecological. They sure love people writing articles about it though, and how green and solar they are.
    • ZeroGravitas 1mo ago
      Running trucks on a 50% coal grid like in China makes both economic and environmental sense. It makes more of both as the Chinese grid gets cleaner.
      • ddlsmurf 1mo ago
        neither of those are true, if they were, remember when tesla wanted to sell trucks like 10 years ago ? if you use electric trucks, half the mass you pay to move around is useless. Also the grid isn't "half coal", the truck doesn't wait for the sun to come out to charge. Which is another cost to transporters: the hours of downtime to recharge. They only make very limited sense in very last mile scenarios in dense cities. Also coal is way worse to burn than petrol, and in China's case, it's mostly bituminous, one of the worst coals in terms of pollution.
        • ZeroGravitas 1mo ago
          Solar is only about 13% of China's power. They have hydro, wind, nuclear and gas too as well as coal. Their off peak prices have generally been overnight, ideal for truck charging, though they have started having them around noon too like many other nations with growing solar share. Great for a mid shift top-up. Coal is worse to burn than gasoline, but a car engine throws 80 percent of that away so you have to burn more compared with an efficient EV. This has all been debated to death for over a decade, MIT has interactive tools to calculate figures, there's really no excuse for not knowing this about a subject you are so passionate about.