The Blip Report for Friday, May 17th 2024
dreams and nightmares
I read another story about China’s EVs, especially my favorite car, BYD’s Seagull - Small, well-built Chinese EV called the Seagull poses a big threat to the US auto industry, that the Seagull has ‘American automakers and politicians trembling’, because:
“The car, launched last year by Chinese automaker BYD [Build Your Dreams], sells for around $12,000 in China, but drives well and is put together with craftsmanship that rivals U.S.-made electric vehicles that cost three times as much.
Any car company that’s not paying attention to them as a competitor is going to be lost when they hit their market. BYD’s entry into the U.S. market isn’t an if. It’s a when.”
And the story said that the problem is in the west!
“The Western markets did not democratize EVs. They gentrified EVs. And when you gentrify, you limit the size of the market. China is all about democratizing EVs, and that’s what will ultimately lead Chinese companies to be successful as they go global.”
And the solution for their nightmare:
“A small ‘skunkworks’ team is designing a new, small EV from the ground up to keep costs down and quality high.”
Woulda, coulda, shoulda, perhaps?
Then I read a story about how imposing more tariffs on Chinese cars won’t work - ‘Cargo cult: Why America cannot have nice things’, that compared to Chinese cars, ‘Americans are paying outrageous prices for absolute dog piles’.
“Biden’s saving grace is that most Americans do not know that they don’t have nice things. Few Americans lament the lack of high-speed rail. How can you miss what you never possessed?
If you’ve never experienced 300 Mbps download speeds, you won’t question AT&T marketing 100 Mbps as 5G. If every student goes $40,000 into debt to pay for college, it’s not considered a burden on America’s young.
Two years after Congress allocated $7.5 billion to build 500,000 EV charging stations, seven have been completed.
This leaves us wondering:
“Expecting the Big Three to catch up to China’s EVs under government protection is cargo cult behavior which will become increasingly obvious as consumers in the Global South start driving better cars than Americans.”
Perhaps, we need to start building our dreams, and enter the coming multi-polar world, instead of being in a nightmare, and becoming a cargo-cult in the old world.
And then I read a story about US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Kiev – ‘His voice almost made Ukraine deceived’ that in the evening, Tony stopped at a bar, got up on stage with the band and was playing his guitar and singing ‘keep on rockin in the free world’.
I guess he was telling Ukrainians not to worry about their country being destroyed, but just to be happy with what they have. And maybe he was really singing 'keep on blinkin in the Ukraine'.
And a little birdie whispered that perhaps when he goes over to Tel Aviv, he sings ‘this land is my land, your land is my land … this land was made for Israelis’.
And I started wondering that maybe we, North Atlanteans, are being lulled to sleep and told the same thing by our World Economic Forum influenced governments – ‘you will own nothing and be happy’, and that maybe our future will be just sitting there, with our drugs and video games keeping us happy, and we’ll be humming away - ‘keep on blinkin in the free world’!
Whoa!!! that’s not a dream, that’s a nightmare!!!