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this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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Cutting features doesn't cut costs as much as you might think.
LED strips are very cheap. Going back to real buttons costs more than touchscreens, not less.
Chinese vehicles are so much cheaper for lots of reasons. From cheaper labor generally, to actual under the counter government subsidies.
Chinese EVs are cheaper because the components are made in the same country, often in the same city, and perhaps in the factory down the street. Transporting stuff costs money and forward-thinking industrial planning can reduce these costs.
Yup. A huge part of the cost is the batteries, the electric motors, the sensors and controllers that manage charging and discharging.
Looking around at home battery backup solutions, for example, simply having the same storage capacity as an EV (50-75 kwh) can cost almost as much as an EV itself.
Jackery has add on batteries for about $1000 for 5 kwh, Ecoflow and Anker Solix cost $2000 for 6 kwh.
At those prices, a 60kwh battery pack in an EV basically represents $12,000 to $20,000 in battery cost alone, plus a whole system around charging it and using it for an electric motor, and then a whole car around that.
It's not a perfect comparison, but it does show that the actual material cost of what goes into an EV is primarily the electric drivetrain and battery.
Jackery, Ecoflow and Anker are all going to be crazy overpriced because they spend all their money on marketing. That's why you see them absolutely everywhere.
Some of the good Chinese brands are selling 5kWh for ~$800. And even that has a markup that these Chinese auto brands won't.
Like Amazon undercutting dipers to take over and then raise the prices. China is doing similar on the scale of nations. They want to be the next US in 50ish years. They're using economics to do it.
China is intentionally undercutting the rest of the world in clean energy tech, to establish a global monopoly. They see how important it will be, and want the world to be dependent on China for its energy.
That sound too virtuous. They're heavily investing in lots of different emerging technologies in order to dominate them, yes. Creating cost-efficient energy storage is wildly profitable.
I do wonder how much it would cost to build a code-compliant, UL-certified/listed system for home battery backup at 50 kwh, with a system that knows to balance things between cells over many charge/discharge cycles.
I gotta imagine a lot of the value add of the established names is that they actually operate in the U.S. (even though all 3 companies I named are Chinese owned). That's not just about marketing (even if it is true that having U.S. operations helps significantly with marketing), but the cost of certifying for different third party safety standards, and having assets/operations that bring them within reach of U.S. courts and regulators.