this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024

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Volvo is moving EV production from China to Belgium as the EU eyes tariffs on Beijing (fortune.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Good. But European firms must also stop putting European intellectual property and national security at risk by outsourcing the making of sensitive technology to China or other countries, and Chinese and other foreign companies shouldn't be allowed to take over European companies (the latter being a corresponding rule in China for foreign companies btw).

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I moved to sweden and this is one of the things i hate. Think of any big swedish company. Its probably not swedish anymore. Skype-sold, volvo(cars)-sold, ikea-registered in another country so they dont pay taxes, etc

Edit: then theres H&M and all the fucked up shit they do...

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Volvo already is a Chinese brand because it's owned by Geely. It's not an independent Swedish car maker that just happened to outsource production to China.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

It is chinese owned but Volvo is still a thing in Sweden. Geely bought them(Volvo Cars), gave them infinite money, so that Volvo could design and make cars like the 2nd gen xc90. In return Geely acquired the technology and know how on how to make quality cars.

Nowadays, Volvo can combine their world leading car design with Geely's electric vehicle platforms. Thats how you get a car like upcoming volvo ex30, that is cheap and (probably) good.

When Volvo was owned by Ford, it was about to go the way of the Dodo(aka Saab). Geely saved it and made it a competitive car brand.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

GM killed off SAAB for no good reason. We could have had Koenigsegg as the owner of SAAB.....

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

GM almost killed Opel, until Peugeot saved them.

I don't know how GM operates but it doesn't look healthy.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Will the components still come from China?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What do you think?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Of course they will 🤣

[+] [email protected] -14 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Tariffs make us all poorer in the long run. Did we learn nothing in the 20th century?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It is impossible to compete when the playing field is not level. If state subsidies, energy production, co2 impact (not bullshit certificates and offsetting) could be equalized, then tariffs wouldn't be so badly needed.

I too would like to have no VAT, import tax etc, and for everyone to get along nicely. The reality is, that we live in a highly competitive world where major powers are fighting for control over critical industries and raw resources.

[+] [email protected] -9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

So let them compete, isn't that the idea? Countries and economies can compete with each other just like companies do. China can subsidize their EVs, America can subsidize its defense industry and corn, Europe can subsidize cheese and wine or whatever it is they make, each country specializes and offers the best product at the cheapest prices for consumers. Or make WTO have more 'stick' and less carrot so we can make countries stop subsidizing their own industries.

Either way, a return to trade tariffs and isolationism doesn't sound great to me. It sounds like everything getting more expensive and less efficient (and therefore, more environmentally wasteful). It also sounds like countries being less dependent on each other, which means less reason to not go to war. We live in a very rare, peaceful time in human history. International trade (and massive technological/scientific breakthroughs) are a major part of that.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

@makeasnek, this may be fine if and when all countries apply to the same rules, but this is not the case. China is heavily protecting its market, and they do so much more than the EU or the US. In China, foreign companies can't even run a subsidiary in the country, they need a Chinese parther firm to create a joint venture. Recent Chinese 'security laws' even make simple market research almost impossible as it may be seen as 'espionage' by China, which made many consulting firms close their Chinese offices. And these are just two examples.

[+] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

There are two factors at play here which have to meet in the middle: where is the most efficient place to produce the product and what is the most efficient way to ship the product? The answer to the first question is: wherever has local access to the resources (people, iron ore, etc) and energy required and has the scale required to efficiently build those products. The more cars your country produces, the bigger your factories are going to be, and the more efficiently you can make cars. The answer to the second is by sea. Always by sea. Boats are vastly more efficient than rail, truck, anything.

from: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jzhebc/eli5_why_are_ships_more_efficient_at_transporting/

Container ships are reallyyyy big and reallyyy slow so they experience relatively low drag

Drag on a plane is high, they have two massive jet engines that try to push them through the air burning literal tons of fuel to do so. Obviously not the best if you want to be efficient.

Drag on a train scales with the weight of the train. A long heavy train will have more rolling resistance that sucks away energy from it. You can't scale this down without going through and making your wheels harder so they deform less, but you already have steel wheels on steel rails so you're not going to get much better.

Drag on a ship scales with the surface area of the ship that is touching the water, putting more weight on a ship causes a bit more of the surface to touch the water, but not very much. Moving an empty ship is going to use a surprisingly large amount of fuel because the drag is pretty similar, but your fuel consumption isn't going to go up linearly with load like it would for a train.

Consider something like a Maersk Triple E, it carries over 18,000 20 foot containers. It can get them up to 23 knots (26 mph) but generally runs at 16 knots for efficiency and does this with just 80,000 HP of engine capacity. Those 18,000 containers would turn into a train 68 miles long! With 140,000 tons available for cargo, that's just 0.57 HP/ton at full speed, and significantly less at the lower cruising speed(where the ship is built to be efficient). Trains will generally run around 1 HP/ton so this big ass cargo ship is using half to a third as much power to move its cargo.

The downside of this is that it takes 6-8 weeks for a ship to go from China to California, but the upside is that it did that with a crew of just 13 and just had a big diesel running in its happy spot the whole time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

@makeasnek, it's not only that you are using a lot of words to say nothing, it doesn't address the issue either (because China, among other things, close its own markets, they don't play by the rules they want others to follow, see my other post in this thread).

[Edit typo.]

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

Tariffs make us all poorer in the long run. Did we learn nothing in the 20th century?

A bold statement without any economic or political context. It is Tthngs like that which make the foundation of misinformation and disinformation imo, and, in that case, play into the hands of Chinese disinformation campaigns.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

And you don't think it will make people poorer to let China do the Amazon thing for everything?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

One of the lessons we are learning the hardest way possible is that moving all your industrial base over seas to a country with autocratic tendencies makes you dependent on them, while also removing skill and knoedge from your country resulting in long term risk and damage.

Capital moves easily, supply lines do not. The 0 covid policy showed that this dependence on only china is dangerous for companies. And since companies are generally risk averse they will start spreading across more countries.