Legacy automakers like Ford and Volkswagen try to blame their declining global market share on unfair subsidies and cheap labor. As a global supply chain expert, I expose the brutal reality: they are actually losing a war of industrial physics.
In this video, I break down “The 18-Month Death Sentence.” We explore how traditional Western automakers are paralyzed by a rigid 4-5 year R&D cycle, launching vehicles with technology that is already obsolete. Discover how Chinese EV manufacturers are treating cars like consumer electronics on wheels, utilizing extreme supply chain modularization to compress development down to an astonishing 18 months. Learn why tariffs and protectionist policies cannot save a fundamentally slower iteration cycle, and why hardware founders must learn to iterate at the speed of software to survive.
A quicker iteration cycle with input direct from customers is a common aspect to Chinese business operations across many sectors. They clearly want to collaborate with customers on fixing flaws and innovative new features to maintain market share, a completely different value proposition to traditional western brand loyalty and monolithic design cycles.
There was a good article I can’t find about how Chinese electronics manufactures did with with cheap “feature phones” for African markets. The iterations were ridiculously fast as they evolved the designs to include market-specific features like extra battery storage, dual sims, skin-tone adjustments for the camera software, flashlights and integrated carabiners. These all had specific use cases for the customers based on things like unreliable grid power, swapping sims based on local carrier promotions and deals, and being able to use the phone as a emergency light.
Poor, innocent legacy auto maker smol beans like Ford and Volkswagen…
Man, if only these tiny mom&pop outfits had the ability to plan ahead or do anythin,g but sadly they are just too tiny.
What new features are chinese cars getting that people care about? Pretty much every innovation I’ve seen in my lifetime has only served to make cars worse.
As much as this is true, this is true for western cars. And even then, finding that an issue is mostly relegated to people who don’t want everything to morph into the minimum 2,5t SUV. This group consists nigh exclusively of driving enthusiasts whose ideal car is something like an E30 or an MX5 because the gizmo-SUV sucks to drive and active travel people because the gizmo-SUV will kill you if you’re not in a car maybe even if you are.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I agree that western cars are shit, my point is more that I doubt rapid iteration and new “innovative features” have much to do with success of chinese automakers. Rather I suspect they succeed because they have the easiest access to the largest market in the world, China.
I’ve seen the claim that Chinese customers prefer Chinese cars nowadays because of modern features that western cars lack. No idea what those features are, though.
Like in this article from 2023:
Chinese buyers think local brands are more interesting to look at and make Western cars look years behind both in terms of design and technology.
faster charging, cheaper batteries, safer batteries, entry and mid cars often come with features amerikkkans associate with paying $10k more for like a built in refrigerator, multiple large screens, advanced ventilation/AC controls.
in the US a lot of cars have cruise control, and you can pay extra for cruise control v2 (adaptive cruise control?). but when shopping in China, cruise control v3 (yes I’m just making up versio numbers for cruise control) is just standard feature on non-western cars. like imagine thinking “I like the tesla stuff but I don’t want to pay $20 to $40k extra for a car and I don’t want to support Elon Musk” and then you take one look at BYD’s entry level car and most of it’s features eclipse the tesla features and Ford’s in the corner deperately trying to hold back the tears because again it has no competitive features at any price point except for the webs of brand new tariffs clogging it’s supply chain.
GIT EM GIT EM
China dunking on capitalists for their five year plans.
I am not convinced the fast iteration cycle is as desirable with physical goods as it is with software, looking at this from both a safety and consumerism lens (think fast fashion).
With cars a lot of it iterative over the lifecycle anyway. First years have issues and are fixed (usually) as it goes.
Of course that’s not at all why Ford and vw are having issues since they’d still rather focus on the expensive massive vehicles instead of actually improving
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
