The BYD Seagull retails here in Uruguay for less than that and we tax cars at about 100%. On China it seems to go for 10-12k.
It's a proper, basic city car. 4 to 6 air bags, ~300km range (more than what this article's car indicates), all basic security features and standard gadgets out of a modern car.
Our EV infrastructure is not viable if you don't have a charger at work/home and yet these have sold like hot cakes.
Legacy carmakers are making increasingly worse ICE cars for the most part (btw does GM sell a C-segment hatchback on any market, anymore?) and their EVs are simply uncompetitive. What's it going to take for them to wake up to the fact they're going to have to stop fleecing their customers with crappy products? Bankruptcy?
It's too expensive for an affordable EV in half the world I am sure. The wealthier half of the world will never let Chinese auto makers in. China wants to do the same thing they've done with other manufacturing, use government subsidies, borderline slave labor, and artifically low currency to eat the market and kill everyone else's manufacturing capacity until they have the market entirely.
There's no way we let that happen to cars. China's average auto worker pay is $4.20 an hour. America's is 6x that. What you call fleecing customers we call paying workers a living wage.
We'd rather pay $25k for a cheap EV and have a thriving auto industry than pay $10k and have none. We'd happily choose paying more for cars over Latin America-style wealth inequality, though lately it seems as if we're going to manage both at the same time.
Autoworker salaries have very little effect on the price of cars. The final assembly labor costs are a single digit percentage of the sale price. The corporate workers (myself included) are about the same again, despite being a much smaller percentage of the workforce.
The majority of costs are just the price of raw materials and manufacturing anything, whether in the US or abroad. What Chinese OEMs are doing isn't anything secret, it's just optimizing the other things to hit those price targets. Cutting out dealerships, better value engineering, lower executive/corporate salaries and benefits, cheaper electronics, limited features, vertical integration, and most importantly being willing to sell lower margin vehicles.
Also, Chinese manufacturers will do the same as Japanese and Korean manufacturers before them: work around tariffs by building assembly plants in the US and Europe.
>The wealthier half of the world will never let Chinese auto makers in
Australia and the UK have modest barriers to entry - especially in Australia a large part of the market is Chinese.
In the EU they are allowing Chinese imports because otherwise the Chinese would restrict the sale of German cars in China. So they are coming in though still a small percentage of the market in the EU/UK.
I'd rather pay for a transition out of car-centricity instead of subsidising a dying industry that lobbied against every single move forward in the past few decades. Against air quality, against electric transition, for fossil fuel, against cycling infrastructure, against the safety of other road users. Right now they build only SUVs, mostly hybrids, when we actually need electric Twingos.
VW and Stellantis need to go bankrupt and their technical workers need help to transition to being part of industries that will strive in a low-carbon economy: public transports, bicycles, two-wheels EVs, etc. [0] As for the management of these companies, they can all bloody starve, frankly.
They don't sell the seagull here in Australia, but the entry level Dolphin retails at about US $1000 less than this new EV.
With this not due to start production for two years, it does look like they're well behind the game and unlikely to be able to compete on price.
(edit - I realise this is at least in part because the Chinese government subsidise the industry, and here in Aus we have no tariffs on them because we have no car industry to protect)
In October I bought an MG4 (350km range) for 31k (AUD).
Its very much cheap and cheerful. but its a great little car, with all the issues it has I still would not hesitate to recommend it. Its perfect for our commute car, and I charge it by solar panels so drive it for free.
The VW model is likely to be about the $40-45k (AUD) which is nowhere near the "affordable" range they think they're trying to hit.
I have the GWM Ora.Very similar feelings about it. Not perfect, but very good. Mainstream/legacy automakers have already lost; They will seek to erect market barriers.
You can probably always find a cheaper car, but that's not the point here. VW's goal isn’t to offer the cheapest EV in the world. The company is clearly targeting the European market.
It’s also important to note that car prices aren’t directly comparable across different global markets. China heavily subsidizes its local car manufacturers. An EV for €8,900? That doesn’t even cover the material costs.
Right now, VW offers the ID.3 for around €30,000, so the price gap is significant. When the BYD Seagull launches in Europe, it likely won’t be priced at €10,000 either—various factors will probably drive up its cost.
And while I don’t want to rely on the outdated "Made-in-Germany" argument, we should wait and see how the ID. EVER1 actually performs before comparing cars based on price alone. I know that the BYD Seagull is of a decent quality. So let's see, what VW will offer.
>btw does GM sell a C-segment hatchback on any market, anymore?) and their EVs are simply uncompetitive.
for whatever reason GM ended Bolt, and now the cheapest/smallest seems to be Equinox EV SUV with starting MSRP 33600 (before tax credits if any, etc). While it is on smallish side SUV-wise for US market, for the European and similar markets i guess it would be pretty large.
With Tesla being the leader in EV the second officially is Ford with 6% followed closely by GM, yet the Hyundai + Kia together have 10%, and anecdotally i see around SF Bay Area a lot of Kia/Hyundai EVs (sedans or SUV-ish sedans).
Well, the Golf is an extremely popular car, yet isn't the cheapest in the C segment by far. They achieve this not by cost cutting, but by making the benchmark car to beat.
I don’t really trust BYD quality. I’ve seen way too many videos leak out of Chinese social media about build issues they refuse to acknowledge, thin or weak structural materials, fires, etc.
Easier to trust Tesla or VW. I wonder if they would make different quality vehicles targeted at different markets.
They are massively popular here in Australia, and I've not heard of any issues with quality or safety. They are held to the same standards as everyone else.
I don't either, but simply on account of there not being a 10, 20 year old Dolphin to see how they'll do in terms of reliability years down the line.
History shows that pretty much no one who set out to make a reliable design the got it right the first time, things tend to fail in unexpected ways.
From the teardowns, BYDs seem to be pretty much unrepairable - batteries are glued together, and the motor/inverter/charger/heatpump/etc seems to be put together into one sealed unit - something they're pretty proud of, but let's hope nothing fails in there.
From what I hear from the Chinese, they aren't big on the second hand market, so that's another worrying aspect.
Teslas are now old enough to be subject to mandatory yearly inspection in EU. They are dead last in the German and Swedish rankings based on the number of issues found during the yearly inspection.
German TÜV EV+ICE ranking:
1. Honda Jazz
2. VW Golf
...
110. Ford Mondeo
111. Tesla model 3
Sorry but reading Volkswagen and "crappy products" in the same sentence means either you never drove one or you've got very high standards, but then you're happy with BYD...
These new Chinese cars are literally flooding the market with the usual way we are used nowadays to think: buy cheap, change again in 2 years. (Which we didn't do before this cheap manufacturing existed.)
In this context it makes totally sense.
Cars, though, at least how we're used to think, are made to last. A car is not just a bunch of features, it's also a lot about the quality of the components, and there are videos showing how poor BYD quality is. If you're happy with that, that's OK.
Having driven an Audi A3 for a while... and that's the "premium" VW, it was not really great at all.
And having been to China and sitting in plenty of BYDs... they're on par. Decent.
The cars can be obviously cheaper, and yet aren't. Chinese market may be subsidized, but international? Not really. Coming back to VW, ID3 in China was half the price compared to the one in Europe, so there were even people trying to import them back and sell for less than official distribution - that effort was shut down thanks to VW's lobby.
However good this thing is otherwise, "ID Everyone" is a horrible slogan for a new car. I wouldn't mind some manufacturer agreeing to not buy/sell your sexual history, creating radios which aren't vulnerable to remote controlling the car via buffer overflows, and otherwise treating cars like physical goods you own and can rely opon instead of hooks into your personal life.
I might be too old but I still don’t understand why carmakers have to do electric vehicles weirder than gas vehicles in every sense, weirder lines, weirder lights, weirder names, weirder interiors.
EVs have less inherent character than internal combustion cars. They're all quiet and refined, with stable handling thanks to a low centre of gravity. Most of them offer far more performance than any normal person needs. A small electric city car doesn't feel all that different to a large electric sedan, it's just smaller. That's an existential threat for legacy auto manufacturers, because it offers fewer points of differentiation against much cheaper Chinese brands.
EVs are less constrained in terms of packaging. The battery and all the working parts are stashed down in the floor, so you can do whatever you like from the wheels up, without having to worry about where you're going to fit the engine or transmission or gas tank.
Some manufacturers are making EVs that look just like their gasoline-powered equivalents, but there's a real possibility that they're headed down a blind alley. I think that manufacturers who fully embrace the design freedoms of EVs and find new ways of creating distinctive experiences will stand a much better chance of surviving the next decade. Weird doesn't mean good, but bland is just a concession of defeat.
They want attention for sales from a younger demographic. That is because old people are too set in their ways to be willing to buy newer models and getting the young to adopt it will eventually produce a new generation of old people who will only buy it. That is how Toyota killed the Avalon. They chased after young people by making the car weirder and weirder, and then the people who actually wanted it could not stand to look at it anymore.
That is my personal opinion that is the result of a small sample set of observations.
My problem is the exact opposite - they don't really explore the possibilites of a fully free form design, and the weirdness is always on the surface level.
For example, I'd love to get a car which doubles as a mobile work pod, where I could drive to a foresty car park, set up a hotspot, run the A/C, plug in my computer and do my days work from there.
But despite all the bells and whistles, interior layout is still very conservative.
So, VW had the eGolf and the eUp. They looked so similar to their petrol siblings that most people ended up thinking that the id.3/4 was VW's first electric car. Meanwhile, everyone knew about, say, the BMW i3 and the Nissan Leaf and the gratuitously weird Hyundai Iconiqs.
At least slightly weird-looking electric cars seems to be what the market _wants_.
Well, I was looking at cars passing by while waiting for a bus and new ICE cars don't look normal either today. The bodywork is too busy for my taste, they resemble toys rather than utilitarian vehicles.
You kid but the median four doors and a hatch appliance car buyer (EV or otherwise) is probably some accountant or school teacher who actually believes that sort of if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear type stuff.
The significant part of that story is there's no claim he used cocaine or recreational drugs "on the job" in China ...
A senior executive for Volkswagen in China has been deported for allegedly using cocaine and marijuana while on vacation in Thailand, according to Chinese authorities and German media reports.
Germany’s top-selling Bild newspaper [..] reported he tested positive for drug use after returning from a holiday in Thailand.
Drug use is an administrative offense in China punishable by a 10- to 15-day detention and a fine of up to 2,000 yuan ($280).
Thailand legalized marijuana in 2022 but Chinese authorities have warned that use of the drug overseas is equivalent to using it at home and subject to the same penalties.
The specs are great for 2025. Let’s wait for 2027 when BYD has a better performing model for much less.
I am all vouching for VW’s electric efforts. I drove the ID Buzz which is great. I just wonder if they could sell competitively without tariffs in the EU.
Sounds like the US needs to target it with tariffs quick. Surely it will be better for our economy to ensure the survival of a couple zombie automakers than it would be to bring accessible EVs to all.
Not an expert but my understanding is Trump's announced but not yet enacted 25% tariffs on EU goods, cars being one of the main motivators[0].
So assumung 25% tariff then 8% sale on top, the $20,000 would wind up at $27,000 sale price for the USA (although like other people have pointed out, this isn't going to be sold in the USA)
And that’s a good thing. Modern cars are rolling surveillance devices. We don’t need CCP eyes in every garage in America. We also don’t want to lose the manufactiring capacity that the domestic auto makers bring.
> one reason Chinese EVs aren’t available here is that there’s a 100% tariff on them
Our egg prices are also high because we block Mexican and Canadian imports. Trump continues a multi-decade trend of taxing consumers to subsidise business owners.
Last time I was in Germany, I was looking forward to driving something smaller than the usual beasts here in the US, and something with a manual transmission. But when I got to the Munich airport rental counter, they had “upgraded” me to the biggest automatic Volvo SUV I’d ever seen, because they were out of everything else. It was nice enough on the autobahn, but it was a pain in the rear in the small towns.
As someone in the US who generally likes VWs and is interested in an EV as their next car, but who also finds the ID4 way too big this car has my attention.
If they released it right now, they could sell like hotcakes, at least in my country. Being for 2027, seeing how things are evolving, it will probably be just one more alternative, surviving in the market thanks to tariffs to Chinese cars. Nothing special.
Really - a massive, fuck-off tablet serves as the interior controls?
I thought car manufacturers had realised that touch-screen interfaces are simply terrible for drivers, and I thought customers were largely agreed in their hatred for them.
I would like to know how many accidents are caused by modern cars' usage of screens in the interior.
Readit News
The BYD Seagull retails here in Uruguay for less than that and we tax cars at about 100%. On China it seems to go for 10-12k.
It's a proper, basic city car. 4 to 6 air bags, ~300km range (more than what this article's car indicates), all basic security features and standard gadgets out of a modern car.
Our EV infrastructure is not viable if you don't have a charger at work/home and yet these have sold like hot cakes.
Legacy carmakers are making increasingly worse ICE cars for the most part (btw does GM sell a C-segment hatchback on any market, anymore?) and their EVs are simply uncompetitive. What's it going to take for them to wake up to the fact they're going to have to stop fleecing their customers with crappy products? Bankruptcy?
There's no way we let that happen to cars. China's average auto worker pay is $4.20 an hour. America's is 6x that. What you call fleecing customers we call paying workers a living wage.
We'd rather pay $25k for a cheap EV and have a thriving auto industry than pay $10k and have none. We'd happily choose paying more for cars over Latin America-style wealth inequality, though lately it seems as if we're going to manage both at the same time.
The majority of costs are just the price of raw materials and manufacturing anything, whether in the US or abroad. What Chinese OEMs are doing isn't anything secret, it's just optimizing the other things to hit those price targets. Cutting out dealerships, better value engineering, lower executive/corporate salaries and benefits, cheaper electronics, limited features, vertical integration, and most importantly being willing to sell lower margin vehicles.
https://www.salaryexplorer.com/average-salary-wage-compariso...
Also, Chinese manufacturers will do the same as Japanese and Korean manufacturers before them: work around tariffs by building assembly plants in the US and Europe.
I’m happy for you that you can afford to plop $25K down for a car.
Australia and the UK have modest barriers to entry - especially in Australia a large part of the market is Chinese.
In the EU they are allowing Chinese imports because otherwise the Chinese would restrict the sale of German cars in China. So they are coming in though still a small percentage of the market in the EU/UK.
VW and Stellantis need to go bankrupt and their technical workers need help to transition to being part of industries that will strive in a low-carbon economy: public transports, bicycles, two-wheels EVs, etc. [0] As for the management of these companies, they can all bloody starve, frankly.
[0] https://ilnousfautunplan.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Indus..., Claude's summary in English: https://claude.ai/share/695d7c05-25e5-4295-aa09-2bdc8717f8ca
With this not due to start production for two years, it does look like they're well behind the game and unlikely to be able to compete on price.
(edit - I realise this is at least in part because the Chinese government subsidise the industry, and here in Aus we have no tariffs on them because we have no car industry to protect)
Its very much cheap and cheerful. but its a great little car, with all the issues it has I still would not hesitate to recommend it. Its perfect for our commute car, and I charge it by solar panels so drive it for free.
The VW model is likely to be about the $40-45k (AUD) which is nowhere near the "affordable" range they think they're trying to hit.
It’s also important to note that car prices aren’t directly comparable across different global markets. China heavily subsidizes its local car manufacturers. An EV for €8,900? That doesn’t even cover the material costs.
Right now, VW offers the ID.3 for around €30,000, so the price gap is significant. When the BYD Seagull launches in Europe, it likely won’t be priced at €10,000 either—various factors will probably drive up its cost.
And while I don’t want to rely on the outdated "Made-in-Germany" argument, we should wait and see how the ID. EVER1 actually performs before comparing cars based on price alone. I know that the BYD Seagull is of a decent quality. So let's see, what VW will offer.
for whatever reason GM ended Bolt, and now the cheapest/smallest seems to be Equinox EV SUV with starting MSRP 33600 (before tax credits if any, etc). While it is on smallish side SUV-wise for US market, for the European and similar markets i guess it would be pretty large.
With Tesla being the leader in EV the second officially is Ford with 6% followed closely by GM, yet the Hyundai + Kia together have 10%, and anecdotally i see around SF Bay Area a lot of Kia/Hyundai EVs (sedans or SUV-ish sedans).
Fun choice of words for the company that famously got caught cheating at the benchmarks
History shows that pretty much no one who set out to make a reliable design the got it right the first time, things tend to fail in unexpected ways.
From the teardowns, BYDs seem to be pretty much unrepairable - batteries are glued together, and the motor/inverter/charger/heatpump/etc seems to be put together into one sealed unit - something they're pretty proud of, but let's hope nothing fails in there.
From what I hear from the Chinese, they aren't big on the second hand market, so that's another worrying aspect.
Teslas are now old enough to be subject to mandatory yearly inspection in EU. They are dead last in the German and Swedish rankings based on the number of issues found during the yearly inspection.
German TÜV EV+ICE ranking:
Swedish Besktining EV car maker ranking Source:https://www.carscoops.com/2024/11/tesla-model-3-comes-bottom...
https://www.tjanstebilsfakta.se/teslas-besiktningsresultat-a...
These cars are garbage, people are happy because they are cheap, shiny and have all multimedia and can do 400KM... why not.
These new Chinese cars are literally flooding the market with the usual way we are used nowadays to think: buy cheap, change again in 2 years. (Which we didn't do before this cheap manufacturing existed.)
In this context it makes totally sense.
Cars, though, at least how we're used to think, are made to last. A car is not just a bunch of features, it's also a lot about the quality of the components, and there are videos showing how poor BYD quality is. If you're happy with that, that's OK.
And having been to China and sitting in plenty of BYDs... they're on par. Decent.
The cars can be obviously cheaper, and yet aren't. Chinese market may be subsidized, but international? Not really. Coming back to VW, ID3 in China was half the price compared to the one in Europe, so there were even people trying to import them back and sell for less than official distribution - that effort was shut down thanks to VW's lobby.
The rest of the car is fine I suppose but the infotainment unit in my brother's ID.4 is most certainly crappy.
The touch is horrible, the unit is slow AF both in latency and update rate, and the menus kinda suck.
Sure it's a small part of the car, but it's pretty integral to the operation of the car given they removed most knobs and buttons.
Not saying is bad, just saying.
EVs are less constrained in terms of packaging. The battery and all the working parts are stashed down in the floor, so you can do whatever you like from the wheels up, without having to worry about where you're going to fit the engine or transmission or gas tank.
Some manufacturers are making EVs that look just like their gasoline-powered equivalents, but there's a real possibility that they're headed down a blind alley. I think that manufacturers who fully embrace the design freedoms of EVs and find new ways of creating distinctive experiences will stand a much better chance of surviving the next decade. Weird doesn't mean good, but bland is just a concession of defeat.
That is my personal opinion that is the result of a small sample set of observations.
For example, I'd love to get a car which doubles as a mobile work pod, where I could drive to a foresty car park, set up a hotspot, run the A/C, plug in my computer and do my days work from there.
But despite all the bells and whistles, interior layout is still very conservative.
At least slightly weird-looking electric cars seems to be what the market _wants_.
If you have a Golf vs E-Golf, you will compare everything from range, weight,...
https://apnews.com/article/china-volkswagen-executive-deport...
The specs are great for 2025. Let’s wait for 2027 when BYD has a better performing model for much less.
I am all vouching for VW’s electric efforts. I drove the ID Buzz which is great. I just wonder if they could sell competitively without tariffs in the EU.
This looks like it is just a replacement for that in the "ID" range.
Before that there will be the ID.2 scheduled for 2026: https://www.whatcar.com/news/new-volkswagen-id-2-electric-ca...
As if VW would ever bring this to the U. S. Which they’re not.
So assumung 25% tariff then 8% sale on top, the $20,000 would wind up at $27,000 sale price for the USA (although like other people have pointed out, this isn't going to be sold in the USA)
[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/18771/passenger-car-trade-bet...
Our egg prices are also high because we block Mexican and Canadian imports. Trump continues a multi-decade trend of taxing consumers to subsidise business owners.
Americans like cheap, especially when there's a lot of economic pressure.
Dead Comment
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I thought car manufacturers had realised that touch-screen interfaces are simply terrible for drivers, and I thought customers were largely agreed in their hatred for them.
I would like to know how many accidents are caused by modern cars' usage of screens in the interior.