AD #3838 - China Handed Out $230 Billion EV Subsidies; BMW Scraps $2B Northvolt Deal; Canada Considers China Tariffs
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This is aut Aline Daily, the show dedicated to enthusiasts of the global automotive industry. It's getting tougher and tougher for foreign car companies to compete in China.
Nissan is closing one of its plants in Changzhou as sales slump in the face of intense Chinese competition. One reason Chinese EV makers are doing so well
is that they've been massively subsidized. The Center for Strategic International Studies estimates the
Chinese automakers have received two hundred and thirty billion dollars in subsidies over the last fifteen years, or fifteen point four billion dollars a year. Those subsidies came
in the form of sales tax exemptions, rebates to buyers, R and D support, and government spending on infrastructure. And this is a conservative estimate.
It does not include subsidies from large cities like Beijing and Shanghai, nor does it include support for battery companies. But China is starting to phase out subsidies
to force EV makers to stand on their own two feet. Last year,
those subsidies came to forty five hundred dollars per vehicle, which is less than the seventy five hundred dollars rebate available to EV buyers in the US. But
even though they're being slowly phased out, those subsidies in China are still significant and they continue to push more consumers into any v's or new energy vehicles.
The China Passenger Car Association estimates that sales of locally made cars will fall seven point six percent this month compared to last year, but it expects sales of nyv's to go up seven point one percent and reach a new high of forty nine point one percent share of the entire market. It expects consumers to buy
eight hundred and sixty thousand evs and p haves. Canada watched as the US
added one hundred percent tariffs to imported Chinese cars, and then it watched the EU put tariffs as high as thirty eight point one percent on some evs, and then it decided it better take action of its own. Bloomberg reports that
publicly, Canada is studying the issue, but behind the scenes, it's preparing to take action, probably with higher tariffs. BYD's planned plant in Mexico is
going to be one of the larger ones in the country. The company's General
Director of Mexico says the facility will create ten thousand jobs, but not all of those workers will be directly employed by BYD. The number will also include
contractor in supplier employees, but that will still make it larger than other car plants in Mexico. Volkswagen operates the largest plant in the country, which employs
sixty one hundred assembly line work and five thousand supervisory employees. Mexico is becoming
an important market for BYD, and it's on pace to sell fifty thousand vehicles there this year. And in other BYD news, the company is expanding its
car insurance business in China. BYD began offering its own insurance in twenty twenty
one, but it was limited to a few markets. Now the automaker is
expanding it to seven major provinces in China. Tesla pioneered offering car insurance to
customers back in twenty nineteen. This is a good source of revenue for the
automakers, and with connected car technology, they can monitor how owners drive and then write a policy tailored to them. Intrepid's NEOVIPI allowing automotive engineers to interface,
capture, and monitor vehicle data using Raspberry Pie. As a matter of
fact, it's the automotive industry's first robust platform for Raspberry Pie churing, intrepid canefting technology, and Raspberry Pi compute module. The NEOVIPI is designed for automotive
environments, allowing use with relative power ranges and applications. In addition, the
NEOVIPI enables you to use the Raspberry Pie for compute while avoiding additional development to adapt to network environments. That makes the NEOVIPI powerful enough to solve your vehicle
network problems, yet small enough to fit in your backpack. One of many
intrepid tools used for developing zonal architecture and software divine vehicles. Here's a car
I'll probably never be able to afford, but I'm still awestruck and will probably spend hours reading articles and watching videos about it. This is the Bugatti Tour
Beyond, which is the successor to the Sharon and gets its name from a mechanism in high end watches that increases accuracy. It's also fitting because the driver
cluster was developed by a Swiss watchmaker, and crystal glass like you might find on the face of a watch, is used on the center console. The
cockpit appears to wrap around the two seats, with an arch forming over the door dash in center console that draws your eye out into the horizon. The
exterior design of the Torbyon is not a far departure from the Sharon. The
nose and tail of the car look like they've been elongated, but actually the car is only an inch longer and the styling is a bit more aggressive.
You might think it has the same quad turbo eight liter W sixteen engine, but surprisingly a new engine was developed for the car. It's still a sixteen
cylinder, but the block setup is in a V pattern, there's no turbos, and the displacement has been increased to eight point three liters. The naturally
aspirate engine makes a thousand horse power, but since this is the age of electrification, there's also a front e axle with two electric motors and another electric motor on the rear axle. Combine, the three motors make eight hundred horse
power, so total system output is eighteen hundred horse power. Bugatti says it
will do zero to one hundred kilometers an hour in under two seconds and tops out at two hundred and seventy seven miles an hour. It also has a
decent sized eight hundred volt battery pack at twenty five kilowat hours, which provides a range of sixty kilometers or about thirty seven miles. The Tour Beyond will
cost three point eight million euros, but it will be limited to two hundred and fifty examples and won't start reaching customer hands until twenty twenty six. Chinese
evymaker Neo recently rolled out its fourth generation swapping station. They can now perform
automated battery swaps. Owners just have to tap a button on the center screen,
and they don't even have to be in the car. The new stations
can perform swaps in just one hundred and forty four seconds, which is twenty two percent faster than before, and they can swap up to four hundred and eighty batteries a day. Another benefit is they can accommodate multiple brands in different
models. Neo operates the largest battery swapping network in China with more than twenty
four hundred stations. BMW is scrapping its two billion dollar battery deal with Sweetish
cell maker Northfolt. According to reports, Northfolt was not going to be able
to deliver on a contract that's signed with BMW in twenty twenty. Instead,
it will now help BMW develop cells and BMW will try to work to build its own battery network in Europe, but we think it may have to turn to the Chinese for help now. For airbags to work properly, the front
occupants have to be properly seated and upright. But what happens when level three
autonomy hands off in eyes off becomes commonplace. People may tilt back or sprawl
out in the seat, and that means the airbag may not protect them in an accident. So ZF developed an airbag for autonomous cars, and they call
it ZF Lifetech. It features a contour design that can inflate to two different
sizes depending on the person's seating position and their weight. Interestingly, the company,
which is an autoline sponsor, established an R and D center in Michigan for its global airbag development. Automakers will take cars all over the world to
test them in the freezing cold and sweltering desert, but Portia doesn't have to do that. Two years ago, it created a climactic wind tunnel. You've
probably heard of Climate chambers that do the hot and cold thing and win time have been around for a long time, but Portia is the first that we've heard of to combine the two. And it's not just hot and cold.
It can simulate a monsoon or a drizzle, and even mimic the changing positions of the sun. But that brings us to the end of today's show.
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