Shanghai's Automotive Metamorphosis

I’m sitting in an electric car in a large Chinese city right now. Looking around I count 7/10 cars are electric, easily recognizable by green license plates, all from brands I’ve never seen in the US. The electric cars are cheap and I don’t see any evidence that they are poor quality. It feels like there’s absolutely something transformative happening here which the US is missing out on.

I was in Shanghai this year, and in the city center, it is actually unsettling how quiet it is. Every motorbike is electric and probably 70% of the cars (at least in the CBD). It's not silent by any means, but the background hum of motors is mostly absent, it took me a while to even realise that is what felt off. Like watching a movie with the sound effects removed.

They're going to eat our lunch because we let our legacy ICE vehicle manufacturers dictate the terms of the shift to electric. We have to be better about identifying economic developments that are likely to be concerns for domestic stability and national security, and not let greed and fear in the corporate class stop us from making the necessary changes. Another arena where we've already lost, in a sense, and will need to play hardball catch-up is healthcare: other countries have a more stable and hour-for-hour productive workforce because their workers can get preventative care and treatment for illnesses quickly and without a fuss. If we have to trash the medical insurance industry to reach parity with our peers, so be it.

Amongst other things, I believe one of the motor-vehicle electrification catalysts in China is the fact that China's electric grid uses 220V AC as its standard for normal receptacles/outlets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country

Even though the prevalence and availability of EV Charging stations is a general issue across countries, having 220V AC makes the current state more bearable especially for residential charging use cases. For many in the US, adding a new 220V circuit, or having the option to add one, ends up being a cost-driven obstacle for adoption.

Electrification in China has happened across all modalities of motor-vehicles, where all the previously hyper-prevalent gas-powered motor scooters of yesterday are also EVs.

Despite being massively impressed by those EVs I can’t help but wonder what the end games will be for all these EV makers that are ALL losing money. Worldwide only BYD and TESLA are actually making a profit. And leaders of the market seem to have little enduring advantage. Who remembers HTC smartphones that were all the rage? If someone comes up with actual autonomous driving, it’s gonna sweep all the net profits away just like Apple did with smartphones. And it probably will matter little if the autonomous software is run on ICE or BEV platforms.

I think the author forgot to see this.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/

What a fantastic visual representation of the progress of China over the last 20 years. Just really well done.

I own (formally, since it's the OEM the de-facto owner being a connected closed source device) a MG ZS EV 2022 long range and I'm happy enough, I also seen the IMMENSE price delta from the west and the rest of the world (less than 10k€ in BRICS and adjacent countries, less than 40k€ in the EU, for the very same car).

My take is that:

- we, the west, are failed. Chapter 11 if you are from the USA;

- current BEVs ALL are national security and citizens serious threats because they are rolling surveillance stations able do create strategic disruption targeting specific people or a whole country;

- Chinese EVs have even BETTER design the westerners (which are (more than) half Chinese anyway in most cases) but have a terribly crappy crapware, so to came back to the first point, we are failed but we still have some point of excellence only usable to save us IF we annihilate the current finance-focused management to came back to an industry focused one.

Just as an anecdote: having a p.v. system and working from home I want an integrated system to charge "my" car. Well, first of all there is exactly NO ONE able to charge DC-to-DC directly even if cars and p.v. batteries are normally 400V lithium with similar BMS and a direct DC-to-DC charge exists since years (CCS in EU, I do not know in USA the correspondent name, ChaDeMo in JP etc). This alone means around 30% of wasted energy, much more electronics, much bigger costs for nothing.

Anyway in the whole market of a gazillion of domestic charging station ONLY TWO VENDOR exists with LIMITED p.v. integration Fronius and Victron. All the others talk about green new deal in advertisement but have no p.v. integration and even worse they are cloud-bound and hyper priced for what they are.

Anyway, having already a Victron battery inverter to be semi-autonomous in case of blackouts (AC coupled p.v., when I build my p.v. hybrid inverters was not a thing) I choose Victron EVC, formally a semi-FLOSS Debian based platform... Well... The EVC it's as open as a bank vault for it's customer, I can't set a gazillion of useful stuff like "hey I want to charge from p.v. as much as possible BUT I also want to charge from the grid if needed at this amount of amps", not to count all issues (not start charging from the p.v. even if power is available demanding manual actions to make it so, charge from the grid while in p.v. mode stating the contrary for a non-settable amps and hard-coded time and so on).

The car itself allow for a LIMITED V2L usage, but have no integration with a home inverter, so no way to simply "plug in the big battery on wheel" and keep the home powered during an outage even if it's damn simple to do so. Anti-islandic devices (to decouple the home "microgrid" from the national grid, to avoid feeding the grid during an outage) are potentially cheap, small and simple enough anyone with p.v. should be mandate to own one with a standard protocol so it's damn simple plug in the car and being on battery and eventually available p.v. The tech is there since years, simply nobody have enforced or even sell this option.

Long story sort it seems 99% of those who push electric convergence, like those who have pushed the similar all-to-IP convergence, have no damn clue on how to proper implement the green new deal and damn really going all-electric. OR maybe they have a clue but they do dislike the fact that such new deal only work if in end-user ownership, hands, not as a service...