tl;dr: There is much more to this than just having “smart consumers” and there are some very real reasons why Chinese products can be cheaper to make and sell. Cost cuts always come from somewhere.
If you want a top quality EV you buy a BYD
That’s a bold statement. I’ll be more comfortable when I see more third-party teardowns of the vehicles that are conducted outside of mainland China. There have been a few that seem independent, but not enough to my liking. (In fairness, I have no love for Tesla at all. If anything, I have a stronger bias against Tesla.)
Battery fire data, that I can find, has been heavily obfuscated by both Tesla and BYD with floods of soft propaganda on that subject. Reports of battery fires seem to be more common with BYD, but even that is unreliable. For example, BYD fires have some reports between 2x and 10x more than that of Tesla, while other reports have them a 2x lower. (Uncertainty is a pure propaganda win, I suppose.)
As long as you are a smart buyer and understand what you need Chinese companies will provide
if you are looking for high standards, like the iphone smartphones, you’ll get it as well.
That’s my point. A person basically needs an EE degree to understand what they are getting unless a Chinese company puts a massive emphasis on QA themselves, which is rare. Otherwise, US companies have to implement strict guidelines for Chinese manufacturing and testing themselves.
We also need to go deeper into component counterfeits. While there are numerous clones of standard ICs on the market, there are just as many fake and mislabeled ICs that make it into brand products that were sourced from China as well. Component swaps are extremely common unless major component distributors implement their own QA processes. Mouser and DigiKey have to charge a premium for this, where LKR or LCSC seem to specialize in clones and can cut costs that way.
The most well known issue I can think of is the electrolytic capacitor scandal that happened between 1999 and 2007. (That comes to mind first as I just replaced several dozen caps in a legacy CD player and MIDI keyboard.)
if you want a piece of metal with a battery to take you places you can go as low as you want.
That is where I have a bit more faith in the structure of the US legal system, for once. Buying a faulty LED dimmer is one thing but buying a car is another. If BYD (or Tesla) cars start killing other people that haven’t bought an EV, I would expect that any ensuing lawsuits would get the FTC and the US DOT sufficiently motivated to clamp down harder on shoddy construction. (Strict regulation has its own disadvantages, of course.)
tl;dr: There is much more to this than just having “smart consumers” and there are some very real reasons why Chinese products can be cheaper to make and sell. Cost cuts always come from somewhere.
That’s a bold statement. I’ll be more comfortable when I see more third-party teardowns of the vehicles that are conducted outside of mainland China. There have been a few that seem independent, but not enough to my liking. (In fairness, I have no love for Tesla at all. If anything, I have a stronger bias against Tesla.)
Battery fire data, that I can find, has been heavily obfuscated by both Tesla and BYD with floods of soft propaganda on that subject. Reports of battery fires seem to be more common with BYD, but even that is unreliable. For example, BYD fires have some reports between 2x and 10x more than that of Tesla, while other reports have them a 2x lower. (Uncertainty is a pure propaganda win, I suppose.)
That’s my point. A person basically needs an EE degree to understand what they are getting unless a Chinese company puts a massive emphasis on QA themselves, which is rare. Otherwise, US companies have to implement strict guidelines for Chinese manufacturing and testing themselves.
We also need to go deeper into component counterfeits. While there are numerous clones of standard ICs on the market, there are just as many fake and mislabeled ICs that make it into brand products that were sourced from China as well. Component swaps are extremely common unless major component distributors implement their own QA processes. Mouser and DigiKey have to charge a premium for this, where LKR or LCSC seem to specialize in clones and can cut costs that way.
The most well known issue I can think of is the electrolytic capacitor scandal that happened between 1999 and 2007. (That comes to mind first as I just replaced several dozen caps in a legacy CD player and MIDI keyboard.)
Here is some more interesting stuff. It goes beyond criticism and into the bizarre and quirky: Fake OPamps that have been discovered recently: https://youtu.be/NSgqYLLPUSs?si=C8Nca5zJZXcyf0Hi
That is where I have a bit more faith in the structure of the US legal system, for once. Buying a faulty LED dimmer is one thing but buying a car is another. If BYD (or Tesla) cars start killing other people that haven’t bought an EV, I would expect that any ensuing lawsuits would get the FTC and the US DOT sufficiently motivated to clamp down harder on shoddy construction. (Strict regulation has its own disadvantages, of course.)