> China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.
European car manufacturers have been given every opportunity and encouragement to build EVs and the phrase "dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century" springs to mind.
People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.
Honestly, VW spent years developing the ID line which was just too expensive, buggy, and constanly positioned as an alternative to much cheaper and better equipped Golf/Polo lines - it's like they were afraid to canibalize their own products. I don't know a single person who owned an ID.3 and was actually happy with it.
Or Mercedes, where they decided to build extremely expensive EVs that departed from their core design so much their core audience didn't want to buy them, then they were surprised EVs don't sell.
Or Audi who were probably a masterclass in offering the worst possible value for money you could imagine with their EVs - £50k Q4 that still had manual seats, like what are you competing with exactly?
Only Skoda could really kinda buck the trend with the Enyaq, which proves that VW could be competive if they wanted to, but they actively decided not to.
And don't start me on the Peugeot/Renault/Opel cars, which initially looked incredibly interesting and actually competitive, but I can only guess that Stellantis told them to tone it down because again - have to protect their core business of ICE cars, can't be too good.
And then MG came in with very well specced working EVs, and then other Chinese brands moved in, and big european manufacturers are crying that they are eating their lunch. Like, you guys had literally years to address this, but you decided to protect your legacy product over investing in the future = you're reaping the results now.
It might very well be a case of trying to maximize the return on the investment that they already made with the old vehicles.
Building out a new production line for vehicles is insanely expensive. Billions upon billions of dollars. You need the old cars to sell well enough to pay for this and all of your other expenses.
China got to get into the EV space with a mostly-clean slate. Their domestic manufacturers made absolutely horrid products at the turn of the century. They did what they do best: copy successful people with investment from the successful people.
They only let Western manufacturers sell in China with the cooperation of a local vehicle manufacturer. That necessitated a bunch of investment and IP transfers to Chinese manufacturers who didn't have to shell out themselves, and when they did, it was with the complete backing of the state.
When EV technology really became something viable in the last 10-15 years, they just used that capacity, lower wages, and lax environmental regulations around mining, to undercut the rest of the world on EVs.
It's easy to act like the rest of the world just isn't competent enough, but there are layers to this.
Developing software that doesn't constantly bug out for the ID line doesn't require billions of investment though. The car itself, the technology behind the motors and batteries was very good. It's the interior design and software that held it back.
Just a small nitpick: Renault isn't Stellantis and have been quite competitive (if a bit timid) in the EV space. First with the Zoe and now with the Renault 5.
BYDs are certainly better than VWs, Fiats, Citroens and Renaults. The only problem is getting parts - you'll have to wait at least a month or so for the part to arrive from China if it isn't locally available (which often is the case).
I mean, it's their industrial base. They can do what they want with it.
I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
It was good... for a while. And it was a "small amount of directly affected people". I mean, so long as you ignore places like St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Camden, etc., and the powers-that-be seemed to be okay with doing that. It's a major part of why the center of the country turned out the way it did politically, but whatever. What's done is done.
But then China expanded outside of cheap low-value-add goods and started to get into higher-value-add goods, and started directly competing with our industries in those spaces. They could source stuff cheaper and put major chunks of industry out of business. Now the US is a service economy, has major problems with cranking out large quantities of high-quality goods, and the Chinese are starting to look at Taiwan with even more malicious intent.
Now Europe seems to want to sign up for the same package, because of supposed American political and diplomatic instability, even though the instability is the US government acting at home more and more like the Chinese government does (censorship, thin-skinned leadership, excessive exercise of the state's monopoly on violence, etc.).
Nothing to be done about it. The continent will have to learn the hard way, as we did.
China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.