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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • There’s like a 15% tariff on imported cars (from memory), they’re definitely over priced there and always have been. There’s foreign brands thar aren’t imported, ie produced locally. For a while GM Shanghai was making a fuck load of cars there but its slowly been tapering off. My CN Telsa was bit cheaper than the same one in the US. But I couldn’t tell you that it’s apples for apples, sometimes the local model of something is cheaper because it’s made of cheaper stuff.

    The bigger issue for big city china when buying a car is the plates. If its an ICE the cost of getting plates can be 100x that of a EV. Regardless of where it’s made.

    As for stuffing products in a friendly customer or by some kind of stupid regulation is not common but happens. There is a complex web of incestuous company ownership and an equally complex web of influence and indirect ownership by the government. If someone needs to hit their numbers real bad it’s possible they’ll ask / insist / regulate that another company buys up to help make it happen. There are a few laws that are supposed to prevent it, but if nobody complains then probably nobody investigates.

    I’ve seen this happen a few times with stuff much cheaper than diggers.


  • hello~

    westerner tech guy in China here. they haven’t thrown me out yet, but then they haven’t grown up an equivalent of we do yet either. they haven’t tried to steal it or learn our secrets either.

    nope for the last 3 or 4 years they’ve asked to license it to a local firm or better yet sell it outright to them. each time the price goes up and I suspect at some point it will become so irresistible that the founders will do it.

    interestingly the sanctions closed us off from a lot of big institutes and companies who faced with losing the capability entirely just went ahead and acquired a bunch of Japanese stuff and jerry rigged it together. so that sucked.

    because that’s it, if we don’t sell it to them someone else will and that’ll be the end of the party for everyone.

    pretty sure this has played out in history before.






  • I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but i live there now for about a decade.

    a lot of people own a house by default. at some point all the houses where people live were somehow given to them. then the values sky rocketed, or where their building got developed and the developer paid them out.

    so families brought more than one house or prepared money for their kids to get a house, and the property market continued to grow.

    On top of this, Chinese are more accustomed to living in what could be called extremely efficient housing. small apartments in big apartment blocks with 99% of what they need in life 10 minutes walk away.