The Blip Report for Tuesday, May 14th 2024
Car wars
I read a story about the United States imposing tariffs on cars from China - ‘Even higher tariffs cannot protect the US automotive industry’, that the Biden administration will raise the tariffs from 25% to 100%!!!
But how can the American government try to reduce their auto emissions when they are banning the best and cheapest electric cars in the world from being sold there? And will their bullying of the Chinese auto manufacturers make the American auto manufacturers better able to compete with them?
So then, I read a story by Kevin Williams about his trip to the Beijing Auto Show - ‘I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked’, that compared the Beijing show to the Detroit show :
“the [Beijing] auto show had more than 100 new model debuts and concepts. That’s a far cry from the Detroit Auto Show last September, which only featured one fully new model.”
“A basic infotainment system in any given moderately priced Chinese EV beats the brakes off some systems in cars that cost six figures.”
and he wrote about why western auto manufacturers were losing so much ground in China:
“[he] blamed it partially on Western brands' inability to electrify quickly while offering low-quality software and mediocre value in their products.”
“Instead of competing, they’d rather just shut out competition entirely. The concerns about cybersecurity don’t address the elephant in the room here: Your product sucks, compared to what China is putting out now. It doesn’t go as far. It’s not as well-made. It’s not as nice. It’s not as connected.”
His conclusion was :
“I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. We’re cooked.”
I would like to see the western auto manufacturers actually compete with China, because bullying your competitors doesn’t seem to be working.
Then I read a strange story about the infamous Peter Daszak, the head of the EcoHealth Alliance, that was partnered with Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and that was doing some very controversial experiments with coronaviruses, and who would try to bully us into believing that the covid-19 came from bats and wasn’t man-made.
well … the story looks at his earlier life of crime while he was a university student - ‘Drunken Student Stole Madonna Statue's Head, Later Killed 6 Million People with a Deadly Virus He Designed’, when:
“he broke off and stole the ‘head of a Madonna statue’ and even painted its lips with lipstick.”
For that crime, he was sentenced to four months at a detention centre. I wonder what his sentence will be for his latest crime spree?