While part of me is looking forward to affordable minimalist EVs that aren't trying to be self-driving smartphones on wheels, I'm certainly not looking forward to reliving no-name chinesium smartphone knockoffs with batteries that try burn your house down the first time you forget them charging overnight...
The difference is that it’s not designed in China. Foxconn certainly provides input to the manufacturing process, but the engineers in the US keep the quality bar high.
Nope. Anyone can build iPhone quality devices in China. They will just cost as much as an iPhone.
What happpens is that there is a demand for cheap crap so that's what they design in China. If you were willing to pay Apple level prices for a Chinese brand they'd build you Apple level quality.
If you were willing to pay Apple-level prices for a Chinese brand, provide significant oversight at every step of the process, and constantly quality check every batch delivered, then you might get Apple-level quality.
I think it is still true that they have a higher dynamic range. They can build on the highest level of quality (iPhone, DJI) but also produce loads of cheap but dangerous stuff.
Keep in mind that vehicle safety is heavily regulated pretty much everywhere, and once you've paid the money necessary to make your car safe you might as well make it not garbage as well or nobody will buy your product.
Since they're making cars for international markets they have to meet safety standards for the entire world, which are stricter than those for any one country and so harder to meet. You can't compare them to the shitty airpod ripoffs you get for $60.
> Since they're making cars for international markets they have to meet safety standards for the entire world, which are stricter than those for any one country and so harder to meet.
They'd have the scale to manufacture for individual markets, like any large auto manufacturer. Already I've seen videos/articles of people buying various (typically non-EV) cheap Asian vehicles that are not road-worthy in the US, but allowed for use on large parcels of land.
That's not the Chinese products though, that's Amazon natively supporting the faulty knock-off market. Every country has rort factories, if you look hard enough. And Amazon's binning system is perfectly designed to platform them to captive audiences.
