Beijing will now require government licenses for any effort to transfer abroad the technologies crucial for producing inexpensive electric cars.
Interestingly enough the restrictions used to go the other direction. Now China is the one with the tech Edge
The technology to make them this cheap are human exploitation and massive subsidies. It’s nothing that others haven’t figured out but most lack the resources or motivation to do that and that isn’t a bad thing.
I’m going to guess you did not read the whole article and have not been to any big Chinese factories specifically the big boys like BYD.
Most of them heavily use robotics to automate.
Specifically for this article, human exploitations have nothing to do with the tech to increase charging and capacity, unless you’re living in the Matrix.
OP is referring to resource extraction and refining, more than assembly lines.
BYD might be a bad example as they rely heavily on treating their supply chain debt as an equity (funky accounting)
Also the know-how to produce great batteries isn’t everywhere. Northvolt in Sweden went bankrupt because they couldn’t deliver what they promised — to produce batteries only from local materials. They couldn’t make the batteries without importing some of the things necessary for production from Asia (can’t remember what, exactly). They just never got out of the R&D phase and were always dependent on third parties to finish production batches.
Raw materials are not secret technology. China is simply sitting on rare earth mines that run on human exploitation and environmental destruction like a hoarding dragon. China couldn‘t build an electric battery in line with Sweden‘s regulations with Swedish resources either.
It wasn’t about access to raw materials, it was something about treating them or something. They couldn’t get it right, some detail in the production.
Edit:
🇸🇪 Den del av fabriken som blandar ihop råmaterial som ska användas i batteriets katod har, enligt Norrans källor, inte lyckats nå tillräckligt bra kvalitet på materialet. I stort sett allt har gått till återvinning. Och utan katod – inget batteri.
🇬🇧 The part of the factory that mixes raw materials to be used in the battery’s cathode has, according to Norran’s sources, not managed to achieve a sufficiently good quality of the material. Virtually everything has been recycled. And without a cathode – no battery.
Agreed, some of the more tech advance cities that I’ve been to in China runs on 90% electric vehicles bar a few diesel BMW’s and Mercs.
They are replacing their “cheap laborers” with scientists.
They bought the robots from Germany, a champion of automated manufacturing. That‘s not the secret sauce here.
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