alt Hacker News> but they’re still complex, especially the internal combustion variants.
I'm not sure China is known for their ICE designs. Like Korea, I suspect China partially pushed hard for EV specifically because the complexity in a battery + motor system is meaningfully simpler than the ICE equivalent and there's relatively little overlap in many facets outside of some first principles.
Jet engines are like ICE, but with a very reliability threshold. ICE is already complicated, but OEMs will accept a certain deviation on reliability if they need to because occurence might be low and severity is manageable. Not so in jet engine design. A single failure is a big deal.
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Chinese automakers do (or did) make ICE and hybrid cars, too.
I suspect it's wouldn't have been good strategy to try to build those cars for the US, CA or EU markets. An ICE engine is relatively straightforward, but hitting emissions and fuel efficiency targets is complex. [1] And the future of ICE cars, especially in those markets, is limited... why build out emissions expertise, when you can get your foot in the door with EVs?
[1] I recently bought a 1981 VW Vanagon which I try to maintain. That's a perfect time period to see how emissions control forces engine design. My engine has fuel injection and EGR, but a few years back has the same engine block with a carburetor; california emissions uses the same engine, but adds electronic ignition and an o2 sensor in the exhaust for closed loop injection control. A couple years later and they added water cooling. Every so often emissions and efficiency standards got harder to meet and you have to do more stuff.
The Jaecoo 7 is the #3 top selling car in the UK right now and it has an ICE powertrain.
Low reliability and safety issues kills car brands. Consumers really don’t like it.
Sure, jet engines are on a very different level of reliability standards, but it seems to me that the concepts are all the same: highly regulated market of low-margin complex heavy machinery where it’s difficult to be a new entrant in the market.
China pushed EVs for multiple reasons:
1. Geopolitical risk of oil dependence. Domestic Chinese EVs are not dependent on imported oil. Oil imports would be at risk in case of a Taiwan conflict.
2. China already had established battery manufacturing. EVs are essentially batteries on wheels. For example the BYD Company (formerly named Shenzhen BYD Battery Company Limited) manufactured batteries long before manufacturing cars.