Cheaper EVs?

20 April 2024

Here is an article praising China’s Electric Vehicle industry and noting that Apple gave up trying to do EVs and China has successfully taken up the slack.

It also boasts that Chinese EV technology is excellent and that they have not lowered prices, and it warns that trade tariffs to stop Chinese exports will be counterproductive.

More conventional views are that China has a glut of EVs and a coming economic crisis due to their property bubble.

Australia has no tariffs on EVs and is currently paying too much for them.  Despite the tone of this article, China must want to dump EVs somewhere.

I am still not sure that EVs are good for the environment in that the carbon footprint from mining and processing their components is much greater than the simpler components of internal combustion engines, and the factories that manufacture them are mainly powered by coal-generated power.  It takes many km of petrol saved to overcome this initial deficit. Hopefully this situation will gradually improve in time, but in the shorter term, will Chinese EVs be cheaper here?

What does China’s electric vehicle rise mean for the global market?