They genuinely aren’t, Muerza in South Africa and a variety of other local brands across Africa and Asia have cheap cars.

China cuts it down further by completely subsidizing education and opening vocational schools near factories that specialize in what those factory owners need, allowing hyper specialization. When you have an entire neighborhood able to produce all the parts of a car, instead of importing parts from across the world and assembling it like us car manufacturers do, you’re able to massively cut costs.

All manufacturing in china takes this approach of having almost enclaves of specialized knowledge and factories, and is genuinely an engineers wet dream to work in since you can get any part you could possibly want the same day, even if you just designed the part yesterday.