EU manufacturers need to get better then
What does “get better” mean? Lower the salary and working conditions for workers in car factories? Lower the quality of the cars?
The VW ID.3 was available for $18k in China for a limited time. Meanwhile the current price in EU is around under 40k€. It seems VW won’t be able to use EU market to subsidize their sales in China.
I don’t know about the EU, but in the US, they still only want to push the high-end, luxury bullshit EVs, so yes, lower the quality of the cars. I don’t need heated seats. I need to get from a to b.
Heated seats and better yet steering wheel are important because running the cabin heat really kills the range.
But yea, plenty of unnecessary dodads. Give me something cheap.
Heated seats don’t make me feel warm, though. They just warm my butt. The rest of me is still cold.
I wouldn’t call that quality, I’d call that feature set (or perhaps luxury). I’ve heard people using Chinese EVs in China saying that using them long term often is a pain because they’re so poorly designed. That’s the kind of quality I meant, and also how well they hold up over time.
I’ve heard people using Chinese EVs in China saying that using them long term often is a pain because they’re so poorly designed
Source for that claim?
I don’t remember where I read it since it was maybe a year ago. But it was someone who talked about the difference between test driving a Chinese car (I think he was talking about one or two specific brands) and using it longer term. That a lot of things you don’t notice during a test drive but you realize over time how things are poorly designed and integrated. And I’m pretty sure I saw someone mentioning something similar on YouTube as well, but I have no idea if he was talking about the same brand. It might partially have been connected to why Volvo is an important company for the Chinese car industry.
And to be fair, those could very well be a brand specific things. Shitty brands are everywhere, in and outside China. But it’s easy to draw a parallel with other Chinese products where they historically have ripped off western designs without knowing why things were designed the way they were and then did their own thing with it that missed the entire point of the design and just ended up bad.
PEOPLE WANT ELECTRIC CARS.