I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked

I think the saddest thing about modern American engineering and tech is that they would all be fucking psyched about Chinese tech and cars if they were born in China. Like, the only reason these people are so blinkered about China is because they were born in the U.S.

They are so sure that they can see past the propaganda, that they are just eating shit the whole way down.

pretty sure the saddest thing about modern American engineering and tech is that most of it is used for either military weapons of mass death or software tools of unimaginable surveillance and data collection
- Nah, that's just scary and pretty par for the course, not sad.
- Military weapons of mass death that either don't even work, they can't field, or are ineffective!

phoenix-objection-1 phoenix-objection-2

All of the "amazing" Chinese cars pictured in the article are full of touchscreen infotainment systems. China is cooked as well.

I am here to tell you that america communists are wildly out of touch with the consumption tastes of the average Chinese public.

Not that we aren't right to be cynical about our own engineers achieving the same results as Chinese manufacturing.
- Touchscreens are ludicrously dangerous interfaces for cars that have basically only proliferated because of techbro dipshits mucking about with things they don't understand. Cars need fixed controls that provide physical feedback and which don't require reading or light to operate. Like that's not a matter of taste, that's a basic "this is usable and safe" thing.
- I hate them so much, but every American I know likes them so it doesn't surprise me that Chinese people do too.
  
  I want analogue switches!
- Touchscreens are becoming very popular in the American car market as well. All the motorists are wrong.
I prefer physical controls too, but you have to understand that touchscreen car interfaces aren't meant to be used while driving- ie, you're supposed to set climate presets and use voice controls to replace the constant fiddling with buttons and dials. I hate speaking to gadgets and sure as hell don't want to talk to my car, but this is where everything is heading.
- Naw dog, there's nothing saying you can't use both physical dials and voice controls. False dichotomy. There should be physical controls that you don't have to look at + voice commands, not touch screen that you have to look at + voice commands.
- I don't particularly mind that everything is gonna be a touchscreen at some point but I feel like it's gonna break down more, especially the software.
What's wrong with touchscreens?
- They're terrible in a car (for at least some functions) because you have to look at them instead of relying on feel
  
  edit: and screens tend to encourage nested menus so they just progressively worse.
- Ever feel that frustrating moment where you try to click something on your phone and end up clicking one of the buttons near it, so you go back to try again and hit another wrong button, so you go back to try again and
  
  Now imagine that while moving at 100 kmh trying to adjust the AC
God I hate touchscreen systems on cars.

Nobody Cares About Western Brands in China

All of the press conferences for the model debuts were in Chinese, and I didn’t always have a translator or interpreter at hand. When I could, I wandered around, looking to see what else I could learn while in China.

The first stand I stumbled upon was Buick’s. It unveiled two GM Ultium-based concepts, the Electra L and Electra LT. It had also unveiled a PHEV version of its popular GL8 van. But where the hell was everyone? It was barely 10 a.m., on the first day of the Beijing Auto show; two concepts were just revealed sometime earlier that morning, yet there were only a handful of spectators at the Buick stand. There was no information on either concept. No one seemed to care.

He goes on to describe the same scenario at basically all the other western brands.

Can you imagine if the Soviet Union had operated this way? Just let the western brands in and then utterly demolish them with soviet industry prices and quality. You get the benefits of competition pushing your industry to do better while demolishing any argument that your people want or would prefer western luxuries to what's available.

Closing to the capitalists was always a mistake when you could just let your own industries demolish and embarrass them.

Parenti discussed in Blackshirts and Reds how people in the Eastern bloc were seduced by Western consumer goods. The real and perceived superiority of Western treats is a form of soft power. China will not make the same mistake as them.
- The Soviet Union censorship was at a time without social media and university students finding out all the details in person. The underground radio stations and western music being played really leveled up the mystique of western goods, and the only people traveling to the west were more likely to be PMC or boojie in attitudes.
  
  Now you have kids living in working apartments from Shenzhen and Lanzhou going to schools like University of Oklahoma going, “this is it?!?”, and sharing their complaints on WeChat
- The USSR walked so China could run 🏃‍♂️
The supporting technology is different today. It's easier to run centralized operations and productions than it was in the 20th century.

i'm extremely pissed that melon-musk convinced everyone that the aesthetic of the future was putting a big ass screen for all the car controls. dogshit. asking everybody to drive into each other and die. chinese automakers could be innovating extremely retrofuture tactile controls that do all this cool shit, but no, we just have this nonsense.

That shit should be outlawed and the marketing people who forced the engineers ti make this should be sent to siberia
Looooooooooooooooooong Taaaaaaaaaaaablet
The big "infotainment" screens in cars genuinely give me the heebie jeebies, I can't stand looking at them. It doesn't help that reading text in a moving car as a passenger makes me motion sick.
Maybe the one big screen is a surrogate for the 3+ smartphones each and every Chinese DiDi driver I've ever seen seemingly has.
- He did say one of the cars run HarmonyOS so yeah that might be more capable than Android Auto.
I think the Xiaomi SU7 still has physical buttons in addition to the screen. That's what they show in their promo videos anyway. That car looks so good.

Edit: yup, it has a bunch of physical switches and even a volume knob, Xiaomi keeps winning.
though that looks like it has some kind of all-in-one physical interface with the buttons and dial on the middle partition, and also stuff on both sides of the steering wheel

the screen looks awful but it doesn't seem like you'd use it as a touch screen while driving
Is that a WiFi router on the dashboard???
- A handful of cars have these weirdo dash pods now, they usually contain massive speakers, a bunch of sensors, or both at the same time.

Forget electric cars show me the train-shining

A new line that just opened up in Fujian, with bonus mention of readiness to run high speed rail to Taiwan
- run high speed rail to Taiwan
  
  That can't be right, can it? That's like a hundred miles of tunnel.

Cope in the articles comments section

Riot police brutally bashing unarmed college students in the background Aha! The cracks in communism are finally starting to show.

and the cars it wants to foist on the public are cut-rate spyware machines designed to murder American citizens whenever the Chinese Communist Party flips the kill switch.

sicko-wistful

But at what cost!?

Usually $10-20K

Those cars are undoubtedly impressive, but I hate the interiors. Screens should be integrated into the center console and nowhere near the gauge cluster.

I tend to agree; I think BYD's latest Seagull strikes the balance well, though it could do with more buttons and dials
- Ngl that interior looks like shit. Looks like a 2010 car except for the large screen.
- We could always do without the 13 inch laptop screens being directly below where the driver is supposed to look…..
- I still don't like that one. I generally am not a fan of ipad glued to the dashboard. The 8" screen in my Infiniti is basically the limit of what I'll tolerate. I love screens outside of my car, but I'm a hater when it comes to being in the car
Only a matter of time before all the windows and windshields are just one giant LED panel
- That'd be awful, but at least it wouldn't be an iPad glued to the dashboard. I hate that Tesla-inspired look so much
I actually like digital gauge clusters. Being able to see the exact speed you're going displayed as a big number is so much better than having to guess based on the position of a hand overlaid on some tiny numbers.

Also, imagine being unable to configure the positioning of elements, see the instant fuel consumption, or change between mph and km/h.
- I like the hybrid designs. I just don't like when they replace the whole cluster

Probably didn’t waste enormous time and resources on ‘self-driving’ AI

They're beating the west when it comes to that too.

Oh, you think these are affordable? Have you forgotten the $10,000 "China Bad" fee? eco-porky

Wouldn't want one here anyway, our charging infrastructure is shit. Literally all owned by lord bazinga. Meanwhile in Shenzhen there are more ev charging stations than there are gas stations and 258 dc fast charging bays at the airport.

Amerikkka is done, planned economies are just superior. We will never admit to it, but we've already lost on the two major manufacturing technologies for the 21st century, evs and renewables

At least we have shitcoin and AI

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That xiaomi car is sick. Nothing remotely close to available here at that price point