Seeing a fair number of comments about “Chinese cars aren’t just junk now”.
Which is…not a shock? Japanese cars used to be jokes. And certainly, within my living memory, South Korean cars were regarded as abysmal little shitboxes—hence Kia’s 10-year warranty plan. But now those countries and corporate cultures produce fantastic cars, and compete at the highest levels. (Check out Genesis reviews, world-beating luxury cars from Hyundai.)
But I’m not sure if Chinese cars will make a significant dent in the US market. The US, both by regulatory standards and consumer expectations, puts a lot of demands on the content of cars. Very strong safety standards on the regulatory end, and expectations on mileage and features and lots and lots of cupholders in pseudo-SUVs that never ever go anywhere near offroad on the consumer end of things. By the time you get all the laws covered, and by the time you design and manufacture a car that meets customer demand, you have a vehicle that’s pricey to make, and then has to compete in a saturated market.
My personal take is that the Chinese car makers have somewhat missed their opportunity to introduce their own brands to the US market. Due to the pandemic and China's own policies, the tide is now against them. But Chinese companies do own a number of western brands (Volvo, MG, etc.) and those can continue to be viable or even grow and expand.
> The US, both by regulatory standards and consumer expectations, puts a lot of demands on the content of cars.
When Buick began selling a lot of cars in China, they had to improve the quality of their interiors in order to live up to the standards of the Chinese car buyers! It actually led to them also improving the interior quality of the cars they sold in the US. But it was too little, too late for them here, so the Buick brand now only exists in the Chinese market. They recently announced a 100K+ USD luxury minivan in China that would be ridiculous overkill in the US:
The mid/high end Chinese market is just as demanding as the rest of the world, and maybe more so in some respects. So many Chinese carmakers already know how to make cars that are up to US/EU standards.
I mean, my Volvo XC60 was made in Chengdou, China, and it's the most well made car I have ever owned(especially compared to my last Mercedes Benz which was actually assembled in Germany yet had the build quality of a wooden horse carriage)
Your car was designed at a component level in Gothenburg, Sweden. Components were designed and built around the world. It has then been assembled in Chengdou, China. This has been a goal of the Geely/PRC ownership.
It's a bit like with the iPhone being designed in California; made in China.
Well yes - my point is just to say that cars made in China can be very high quality(even though it's not strictly "Chinese car"(although Volvo is owned by Geely so......)
In mid-2020, I was interested in an S90 here in Switzerland, and I was told it's _only_ manufactured in China, so with CoVID going on, delivery would be 9-12 months. (Instead bought a Mercedes and had it delivered in 3-4 months.)
I understand why some long wheelbase versions are Chinese-only, but I found it odd that Volvo's entire flagship sedan series is all-China.
> I understand why some long wheelbase versions are Chinese-only, but I found it odd that Volvo's entire flagship sedan series is all-China.
I think the reason is that the S90 isn't high volume enough to warrant more than one factory, and China is a substantial enough market for them that it makes sense to build them there vs US/Europe.
Yeah mine is the T8 and apparently all plug-in hybrids for the right hand drive market are assembled in China. The order to delivery time was 9 months(ordered in 2019 June, delivered in March 2020).
Kia and Hyundai don't have good reputations because of the build quality of their engines. Their poor quality piston rings means the engine eats itself. They've had to recall basically every engine they've produced in the past decade.
Yeah I was like wasn't there some issue with some of their engines.
I think they have still come a long way since the early 90's. My mother owner one. Brand new off the show room in 1991 and the thing broke down at least once a month. Besides that the interior started falling apart right away(handles breaking, windows that wouldn't go up, etc)
That was the shortest period she ever owned a car. She traded it in for a Nissan.
If Lemon laws existed in that country then she would have had a case.
Yep, not to mention the recent scandal with car security (keywords: kia, usb cable) because they cheaped out and didn't include security keys until 2019.
Those kia/hyundai engines with issues (theta ii) are based on mitsubishi engine (4b11t) that don't have any issues.
I think the issue was added gas recirculation, which made the engine run hotter and causing a negative feedback loop ending in piston rings getting clogged with burnt oil and scraping the cylinder walls.
I watched a podcast (9 Hole Reviews) with asian gun dealers in the USA and China sold high quality firearms to the US which they used the profits to reinvest in machines for factories etc.
Essentially modern Chinese industry was financed in no small part by selling guns to Americans.
China has always had a spectrum of workers and production, and was able to exploit the gaps in labour rates, which aren't as great and therefore Chinese manufacturing is less competitive but is still sticky because of the massive supply chain.
> But I’m not sure if Chinese cars will make a significant dent in the US market.
Spoken like someone who has not driven a Polestar 2 or checked out its build quality, I believe. Of course they're really Volvo built by the super modern Geely factory in China, last i saw.
I owned a Great Wall for two years (H5/Haval). It wasn’t terrible (it had a Mitsubishi gasoline engine and GM engine computer), but GW did the integration engineering themselves and it showed. My go to example was the belt tensioner. It tensioned the belt, but all the forces went through one bolt head. Whereas my ‘95 F-150 had a specific boss cast into a bracket that accepted a half inch ratchet allowing you to use a breaker bar.
Ford and GM have more than a hundred years of experience in what works and what doesn’t (although cost-cutting may not really let the former shine). It’s not until these vehicles see widespread adoption in the native market that the industrial practitioners will build their own knowledge base.
Chinese made cars are heavily tariffed into the USA, which is why polestars (and their sibling Volvo EVs) are so expensive. Geely will solve this by setting up a factory in the USA.
MG have a couple of cars in the top 10 sales, depending on the month etc...
Buying the MG brand was incredibly smart! People dont realise they are Chinese owned! The two people I know who own an MG say they wouldn't have bought one had they realised!
The cars themselves are not good according to my generous sample size of two! :-)
I was really surprised to see large electric trucks when I visited China. But they still have little three-wheel one piston trucks on the road at the same time. It's an interesting dynamic.
As a Swede, I say: Sweden needs to deal with the Chinese majority ownership of Volvo Cars for strategical reasons. Conflict is brewing between US/EU and China. It will be cheaper to deal with it sooner than later.
The newly installed Swedish PM has a strong hands-on understanding of the issues at hand - he spent years working in China. He's also strongly critical of China's policies.
(Geely is the majority owner of the now public Volvo Cars company. Volvo Cars AB is one of the largest Swedish companies in terms of number of employees.)
Ford drove Volvo into the ground before selling it Geely. While I agree CPP needs to be kept at arms length, sentiment like this is pure nationalist dog whistle.
Hang on a moment here. You're saying my resistance to CCP ownership of Volvo Cars is a "dog whistle"? Well, it's not, I'm saying it out loud. It's a really bad idea that Sweden needs to do something about. It doesn't have to be Swedish ownership, but it can't be the CCP.
Volvo Cars will also be more successful without any ties to the CCP.
You are saying "national security" out loud and it's dogwhistle for xenophobic nationalism. Taking a company that's being successfully turned around in the name of national security is wrong.
People often can't see their blind spot so I'm going to try one more time to explain this. This has nothing to do with "national security". If it did Swedish government would have rescued Volvo along with Saab when it was worth pennies. Geely is a private company that took the risk and made the investment to turn Volvo around. People like you see things through the lens of race and nationalism. That gives you justification to rob others. You Swedes are amateurs in this game. US was founded on the idea of robbing other race groups in the name of security.
It's CPC - Communist Party of China. Calling it CCP, Chinese Communist Party, is also a dog whistle, as it dates back to the various "Chi-Com" slurs of the John Birch era, in which they were focused on Chinese communists (emphasis communism) as opposed to, say, Russian communists.
You may not like the CPC, but you should at least be able to correctly identify it. Getting the name wrong is a signal of being misinformed, no different than someone talking about UAS - or United American States, instead of USA - reveals they don't even know basic things about the USA, but are repeating what they heard online from others who are equally uninformed about the USA.
It's 中国共产党, which is quite literally "China Common-Production [Communist] Party". The party's preferred translation is indeed CPC, but CCP is arguably more correct.
Chinese grammar is so different from English grammar that it's entirely unclear whether CCP or CPC is the more correct translation (from a grammatical perspective).
Just to begin with, Chinese does not modify words through endings, conjugations, etc., so it doesn't even have an equivalent to "Chinese" (an adjectival form of "China").
中国共产党 is just literally, "China-Communism-Party." There are several ways to render that in English, all equally valid, from a grammatical point of view.
It's strategical to Sweden because of the branding, the number of employees and the dependencies on a very large number of component suppliers in Sweden.
At one point the PRC will decide to just pull the design part of Volvo Cars out of Sweden. It would be incredibly naive to not think this would happen. Hence there needs to be an intelligently designed government intervention.
> the Model Y is ahead with 3,063 units, followed by the ID.4 (903), Enyaq (629) and Model 3 (602). Also well placed are the Polestar 2 (343) and the Volvo C40 (338) – with the electric version of the Volvo XC40 adding another 239 new registrations. The BMX iX establishes itself with 296 units ahead of models such as the Hyundai Ioniq 5 (262), Audi Q4 e-tron (250) and VW ID.5 (237).
It looks like 80% of cars were made in China. Tesla, Volvo, Polestar.
> He says he wanted to show that a Chinese company, his company, was able to produce a similar car. And therefore he decided to build a “Chinese Benz”.
And then it turns out what he actually does is buy another Chinese car based on an Audi 100, and replace the body panels while keeping the drivetrain, suspension, and interior. As far as I can tell, that proves absolutely nothing. Am I missing something?
If you want to prove you know how to program, and you take some well known open source software but change it substantially enough to make it a different product that’s useful to some customers. Does that prove you can write software? I think it’s arguable, but it does prove you’re at least not completely incompetent around software.
I mean I learned programming typing in programs from printed magazines and then modifying them a tiny bit, then a lot, then just glancing at the source, and then not at all.
There is nothing wrong with learning by disassembly and modification. Tesla outright sold Lotus rolling chassis for their first car. Learnings from that produced the model S.
No this is more akin to you buying off the shelf software from a local reseller, slapping a new UI, and then reselling it as a look-a-like competitors software.
Don't know where you are from but in the UK MG are outselling a whole bunch of the big car makers. I think possibly even the 3rd biggest by sales volume at the moment.
The age of the Chinese car is coming. I think in the transition to electric cars they are going to take a big chunk of the lower end of the market. I get a feeling this is why a lot of mid market brands like Mazda and Volvo are trying to push into the upper end of the market.
Cars like the MG4 are getting rave reviews for example.
Japanese cars were cheap shit till they took over the world. Korean tv/devices were shit till they took over the world. Same is going to happen with China made stuff.
Exactly, Korean cars, Taiwanese semiconductors, and Brazilian jets are also good examples. Seems like GP is not yet acquainted with Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation.
Both. The important thing is that in the beginning they were considered inferior to American cars in all relevant respects, so they were not taken seriously. The oil crisis happened to highlight one of their key strengths and accelerated their adoption. But it’s highly likely the same end result would’ve eventually happened anyway because the incumbent American automakers were unwilling/unable to respond to the threat for several decades.
I drove both the ZS EV and MG4 and neither one felt like "cheap shit". In fact they felt more premium than some more expensive EVs - and you could see a lot of parts from VW, which shouldn't be surprising as VW is part owner of SAIC.
I leased a MG ZS EV recently and was quite surprised at the apparent quality. Sure there were some cheap-feeling bits like the glove box and panoramic roof shade, but generally it felt solid, felt we'll put together, and drove reasonably nicely (corners were not it's best bits, but otherwise pretty good)
OTOH the MG3 (1.5L ICE) is a piece of garbage. The engine vibrates/rattles like an old tractor. The 4 speed transmission revs like mad at the slightest incline before going up a gear and almost stalling the engine with the huge jump in gear ratio, and causing heaps of knocking until the engine crawls it way above 2.5k RPM only to do it again with the next gear.... The suspension was horrible again, much too soft making the whole car bounce up and down long after hitting pot holes (I'm taking seconds.) The interior quality was quality was okay for the price of car but definitely very plastic-y. Seats were like seats on LCC planes.
Good thing it was only a rental.
The MG3 has absolutely nothing to do with the ZS EV and the MG4 though - it's based on an ancient platform that was made long before SAIC started putting money into MG and into their electrification. While I'm not surprised your experience with the MG3 was poor, I don't see how that's relevant to their current EV vehicles.
The one thing which made the MG4 feel cheap to me was the dash board. It looked to me like it was using programmer graphics, waiting on the design team to decide how to make it look nice. Mismatched icons and text sizes everywhere. Someone said shipit and they went to production.
Other than that it was a fun easy to drive little car.
Because good process design doesn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Like how Toyota was the only car maker able to keep going through the silicon shortage because they recognized the limits of lean manufacturing and that chips are not commodity items, as much as we like to think of them as one. So despite having everything that was a commodity as JIT lean manufacturing they still kept a massive stockpile on stuff that might become hard to source on hand.
This is an extremely dated take on where Chinese cars are sold - you haven’t visited or paid attention to what is happening in the European auto industry recently. Xpeng, MG, Ora - lots of new Chinese car brands on sale across Europe, and often offering better electric car range for less money than say a VW ID 3. We just don’t see them in USA as politics and tarrifs have prevented it to a large extent.
If you are curious - tons of videos by British/European YouTubers reviewing Chinese cars on sale in Europe today.
Here’s a review of the Xpeng p7 by famous uk auto publication Autocar, as another example. On sale in Norway and several European countries:
Etc etc. there are a lot more coming too, and the traditional big European auto makers are extremely scared of competing at entry level with these brands who already offer more tech and range for less money on their entry level EVs. Just like the Koreans managed (KIA, Hyundai etc), these brands will eventually crack how to style for western audiences too. Polestar already has. The MG is extremely competitive especially at low price.
I've generally found most mainstream attitudes to China being a decade out of touch. There's still the perception that "China only makes cheap trash" when even a cursory glance at all the stuff in their house will show them that half the stuff is made in China, and that you can get practically any quality made in China - as long as you're willing to pay for it.
I think that most conversations about where cars are designed or made aren't very clear cut with the _exception_ of a lot of Chinese brand cars, which is an interesting commentary in and of itself.
For example, Polestar cars are designed in Sweden on joint Swedish-Chinese engineered platforms and made in China.
Most vehicles are highly globalized like this until you get to the Chinese-market ones, which are designed (or "designed," depending), engineered, manufactured, and sold just in China.
The now public Volvo Cars is majority-owned by Geely. (Volvo Cars, not Volvo.)
Volvo makes trucks, buses and construction equipment. It's one of the largest manufacturers of heavy-duty trucks globally, including e.g. the Mack brand. Geely owns 8.2% of Volvo. I think it's still majority Swedish-owned, but I'm not certain.
They share the Volvo brand via a long-standing agreement.
Also I would add that Geely really revitalised the Volvo car brand after Ford almost ran it into the ground. The Geely Volvos have a much clearer (and better looking IMO) design and are strongly pushing into the luxury market.
> I'm not sure those count as an example of China's design prowess, since those cars aren't designed in China
How about manufacturing prowess then? A number of Volvo/Polestar models are only made in China.
Design is far easier to outsource or hire lead designer from Germany/Switzerland/Italy while bootstrapping talent locally, compared to manufacturing. KIA went this route to good effect by hiring Peter Schreyer.
Polestar is a joint venture between Volvo (majority owned by Geely anyway) and Geely themselves. Their cars so far are indeed made in China, with a US manufacturing facility coming online soon.
I’m not sure if they share a platform with actual Volvos but yes Volvo owns the majority share, followed by Geely.
All Polestars are manufactured in China as opposed to other Volvo models, lots of which are still coming out of Sweden and Belgium if I’m not mistaking.
The Volvo XC40 EV is also currently made in China, in the same factories as the polestars. As far as I can, these are the only cars exported to the USA (other Volvos are made in Europe).
They are. The MG SUVs are sold here in Spain and they are selling like hotcakes. They look nice, they have every modern feature you need as standard equipment (apple carplay, dual-zone A/C), 5 star crash test, all for a laughably low price (13k EUR, cca. the same in USD). Every car that has the same equipment (and looks) cost at least double, or triple. I think they are using Spain as a test market and will expand soon.
China sells some to Australia and other countries. You won’t see many of them in the USA due to huge tariffs (reciprocated by China), but any polestar you see was made in China (by Geely).
They're building Teslas in China. Almost all Teslas sold in Europe come from China, because they're of a much better build quality than US-built Teslas.
That's because Tesla is a company that advertises itself as saving the world, curing cancer, crafting a backup plan for humanity...
Then you see the thing and it's ugly as sin outside, you get inside and it's cheap and empty with an iPad sticked there to save money on components.
The richest country on Earth can't possibly have that as their flagship car brand. China however considering where they were just 15 years ago, you look at a 2022 Geely and it feels like it's attacking the Japanese brands positioning and by the end of the decade they could take on the Germans. They will never be able to attack the Italians but Ferrari and Lamborghini are special and nobody can touch them anyway.
Just because VW has a controlling stake in Lamborghini doesn't make Wolfsburg the capital of supercar design. For a whole bunch of reasons, mostly cultural, it will always be that triangle between Florence, Milan and Turin.
Foxxcon might become big enough to buy Apple one day. Still if you were to visit the 2 HQs, and the 2 cities you'd understand where the devices are designed, regardless of the cap table and who owns who
I don't know, when I look at an R8 I can sense that it was designed in Germany, whereas if I look at a Lamborghini Aventador it's clear it was designed in Italy.
The new Corvette C8 feels like it comes from Italy as well. In fact the Corvette has been Ferrari-zed both in external design as well as engine positioning
Stylings and interior obviously differ, but R8 has long shared engines, drive trains, and chasis with Lambos. Engine is from Lambo, but I believe the drive train might be Audi-first?
Maybe you haven't seen the newer cars like the Zeekr 001 which is amazing (Zeekr is one of Geely's sub brands). Nio ET5, Xpeng P5, BYD Seal, are also very attractive cars aimed squarely at Tesla.
I had a Volvo V90 with the Polestar software upgrade, and I’d say we are both fortunate. It became much more driveable with extra power in all the modes. Perhaps Volvo would have sold more units if it was standard instead of $1500, but at least it wasn’t a monthly subscription.
I hope the American auto companies can respond quick enough. Rivian, Tesla, Canoo and similar are exciting to watch. American car companies didn't have the industry's attention until recently.
Have you visited r/rivian lately? I think Rivian can sustain itself given the market opportunity and the end product is well received. Their R1 platform has won accolades across the auto community both established and new like Doug Demuro.
I had a 1998 W210 diesel Mercedes. The drivetrain and cabin were great; the body was painted with a new environmentally friendly primer/paint process that was an utter failure, resulting in many of those cars being driven early to the junkyard with a great drivetrain and terminally rusted chassis.
It'd be a coin-toss for me to take an unknown Geely over the actual, known W210 in New England.
I think it was the new waterborne paint process or something that ruined an entire generation of those cars.
If you see one today, it's guaranteed to have rust on the bottom of the doors, rear wheel well and especially surrounding the mid-door rub strips ... all with factory paint and no accident damage.
Some quick searching failed to turn up anything official from MB. I do know my car had both spring perches replaced at 5 and 7 years (an almost unheard of repair on other models at even 4x that age). One of those was covered by MB. It had both front fenders replaced, a quarter panel repair, and two outer rockers replaced, all out of pocket and all in the first 10 years. I ultimately scrapped the car rather than doing a full inner and outer rocker replacement to keep the car safe.
The next series (W211) changed the prep process to better galvanized panels and the rust problems returned to “the other cars of that age” level.
Googling “w210 rust” will give you plenty of forum and owner experiences, but nothing about the particulars of the water-based primer/finishing process.
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Which is…not a shock? Japanese cars used to be jokes. And certainly, within my living memory, South Korean cars were regarded as abysmal little shitboxes—hence Kia’s 10-year warranty plan. But now those countries and corporate cultures produce fantastic cars, and compete at the highest levels. (Check out Genesis reviews, world-beating luxury cars from Hyundai.)
But I’m not sure if Chinese cars will make a significant dent in the US market. The US, both by regulatory standards and consumer expectations, puts a lot of demands on the content of cars. Very strong safety standards on the regulatory end, and expectations on mileage and features and lots and lots of cupholders in pseudo-SUVs that never ever go anywhere near offroad on the consumer end of things. By the time you get all the laws covered, and by the time you design and manufacture a car that meets customer demand, you have a vehicle that’s pricey to make, and then has to compete in a saturated market.
And that’s before any incipient trade wars.