this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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They would stop being cheap if that were the case. They are able to build competitively in China because of huge government support. Building Overseas, they would become just another car maker.
Name one Ontario automaker that hasn't received huge government support. This industry sucks billions from governments every year, federal and provincial. China is estimated to boost automakers by $8B, peanuts.
Detroit automakers have seen >$88B in government support...so where are the affordable EVs? How many EVs do we make in Canada? Just this laughable POS @$75,000.
7,400 total sales worldwide.
That's just part of the story.
China has massively subsidized EVs in the last decade. Subsidies amounted to 45 billion dollars in 2023 alone. However it is true that subisdies are now reduced. This aligns with Chinas industrial policy: Subsidies are used to inflate certain sectors and once the state money dries up its survival of the fittest creating competitvly successful market leaders. Basically evolution on a makro economic scale. Perhaps a wise policy but the state wise hedging of markets is also part of the story.
/edit: Source https://www.csis.org/blogs/trustee-china-hand/chinese-ev-dilemma-subsidized-yet-striking
Well there is obviously a reason they dont do it, or you would see them doing it. Its just finding the reasons why at this point.
Except that's not really the case. While EVs do receive some subsidies in China because there's a push to out ICE vehicles, they're cheap because they essentially make all the components and there's insanely high competition. There are more EV manufacturers in China than there are Auto-manufactuers in the entire rest of the world combined.
Most have nearly completely automated factories at this point, because that's the only way to compete. Others have found very specific niches early enough that it would be too expensive to develop the tooling to compete, like XMCG's current relative domination in electric construction vehicles.
The problem then being if any of them go international in production the number of jobs produced are pretty low, and either extremely high skilled requiring imported Chinese labor or extremely low skilled providing very little tax revenue.
There's also the history of Chinese EV companies really not vetting local or partner construction companies, resulting in awful PR and lawsuits.