alt Hacker NewsThe short answer is VW doesn't have the ability to compete with China's best EV car company on EV price, factory automation, or raw input (labor, electricity, metals) economies of scale. The complaining is to get politicians / regulators to prevent the Chinese EVs from being imported into their domestic markets.
Chinese structural advantages: monetary policy, lower cost of living, better infrastructure (electrical and transportation are all new within the last 20 years), lower cost of {concrete, factory machinery, metals, electrical} due to economies of scale.
Chinese EV manufacturers advantages: they don't sell ICE cars, so they don't have any legacy customers, factories to retool, or brand migration issues. And they mostly stole their technology from hiring Tesla factory workers to moonlight for them and share the design, technology, tooling, and RE the Tesla finished product.
Major Western legacy car company disadvantages: Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, etc... all have significant reasons why they can't or won't make the super risky attempt to go all-EV. They all have $10s of billions in debt they are still paying off for their current capital improvements. Those debts assume they contribute selling ICE because EVs last longer so they would sell fewer units per year. It's simply less risk to avoid making any EVs and pay politicians to protect their businesses than to try to compete with 10 year old Chinese phone-companies-turned-EV companies. On top of that, the worldwide demand for EVs is only about the volume of the single most popular model of Toyota. They would have to go into massive debt on a giant risk that consumers will want more EVs (and that the EVs they design/build will sell better than the current ICE cars they have meticulously crafted for 50-100 years).
> And they mostly stole their technology from hiring Tesla factory workers to moonlight for them and share the design, technology, tooling, and RE the Tesla finished product.
Did they successfully steal Tesla's low-cost EV plans too? Using the traditional definition of "steal" (depriving the owner of their property.) The argument that all China is good for is stealing falls apart[1] the second Chinese products become superior (see battery chemistry).
Perhaps Tesla should pay Chinese EV designers and PMs to moonlight for them to shorten their model development cycles.
Domestic Chinese EV competition is fierce, if one can survive or thrive in that boiler, dealing with VW, Ford, or even Tesla is a cake-walk.
1. Nevermind the growing body of fundamental research papers published. An area the US is turning it's back on because some people are gassing themselves up on they idea they are intrinsically, and immutably great/superior, therefore there is no cost to wrecking stuff to "own the libs"