Is that true? There was a policy push here to sell EVs, though there of course is continuing debate about what the magnitude of that push should be. The market so far in the US has spoken against greater adoption of EVs, for various reasons.
OP's article doesn't mention or discuss two very salient factors: one, that EV use in Shanghai is massively subsidized, both at the point of sale (EVs are free to register, whereas ICE vehicle registration starts at $15k) as well as to the producers; and two, whether such a subsidy is in fact for the long-term benefit of the public.
> other countries have a more stable and hour-for-hour productive workforce because their workers can get preventative care and treatment for illnesses quickly and without a fuss
No one would argue that healthcare in the US couldn't be improved, but I disagree that the payment model is the biggest issue. The way I see it, the biggest issue by far is that people are just very, very unhealthy! A full three quarters of adults are either overweight or obese. No country can have a cost-effective healthcare system with this kind of population.
And the distribution of healthcare spending is extremely lopsided, with the top 5% of spenders accounting for over half of all healthcare expenditure, and the bottom half of spenders comprising a mere 3% of spending[0]. (A few countries with socialized healthcare are starting to toy with the idea of just letting those high spenders die, with assisted suicide.) I don't know that a better system can be achieved without first promulgating a culture that values being healthy.
[0]: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
Where I live in Germany we have a system I would characterise as somewhere in-between a fully socialized single payer system and the American system (you have insurance companies you choose between, but you're required to have some kind of insurance, and there are a set of "public" insurances that must meet a certain standard at a certain price). But here I can't buy a sugar free Fritz Limo, nor go to a popular bar or club without inhaling smoke.
Obviously countries can enact such policies without socialized health care, and things are not all sunshine and rainbows in the NHS. But I reckon that waiting around until there's a healthy populace before bringing in a better health system might not necessarily be the best strategy.
too many double negations?
where I live in Germany, smoking is plain banned in clubs. and sure there are sugar free drinks both on the menu and in shops.
so I don't get what you mean?
Chinese cities are very very dense, and very new due to urban redevelopment projects in the 2000s-2021. For example, the urban core of Shanghai is around 20 miles end-to-end, so the same size as Wichita end-to-end, yet has a population of around 20mil compared to 350k.
This helps sustain both public transit as well as EVs with minimal range anxiety.
The industrial policy aspect of EVs also helps ofc, but big picture it works with the range and size of Chinese metropolitan areas.
The issue is the sprawl factor simply can't be solved in a country as spread out as the US, so long range batteries (looking at you Idemetsu Kosan and Toyota) or hybrids are the best solution in a sprawly semi-urban environment.
That's basically Obamacare. Except in the US most people still get health insurance through their employers.
It's worth noting that car registration in Shanghai was staggeringly expensive before electric cars were a possibility. That's just a continuation of existing Chinese policies; it obviously helps electric cars, but that was no part of the intent of the policy. (I assume the intent was some combination of reducing traffic times and reducing pollution from exhaust.)
The support by local governments is a major factor for the EV boom (along with other booms like renewables).
The mixture of federal, regional, and local support is a fairly critical part of the Chinese development model.
Although there doesn't seem to be any obvious evidence here that the US could be lagging behind. Per-person the US is still a bit of a productivity outlier to the upside. When they aren't legislatively restrained they tend to work hard and in an organised way.
Strictly speaking the incentives don't change much. People have a strong incentive to stay healthy no matter what system is in place, and the insurance companies have a strong incentive to make sure people know about the risks of sugar drinks etc.
(Technically there's no federal government, period. There's just the bureaucracy and the party. The party's leadership determines policy, the bureaucracy carries it out. Local decisionmaking exists when micromanagement reaches its limits, and ultimately it is a system of gap-filling. Or, in a sense, it's a system that the 9th and 10th Amendments of the US Constitution anticipated and therefore needed to be addressed, 200 years early)
As though there isn’t a glut of underutilized parking lots littering literally every American metro where the local forests were bulldozed decades ago
> paying workers prevailing wage
Subsidies are there to pay for wages and for automation to be less reliant on labor costs, of which China automates waaaay more than the USA does
> running a low government deficit
Industrial subsidies have the potential to pay back far more than the government puts in, and would be much smaller in size than other boondoggles the US government pays for
Honestly I think this is all just excuses and China just took advantage of the incompetence of our leadership to leapfrog us. Since when did Americans not want to be #1?
Yes there de facto is, especially due to the post-Mao reforms.
If you want to dig into how Chinese federalism works, I'd recommend these sources [0][1]
[0] - https://cjil.uchicago.edu/print-archive/cooperative-federali...
[1] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262534246/how-reform-worked-in-...
If you're on a public insurance in Germany, you rarely pay any substantial copay, and there's no concept of a deductible. Not only that, but the price of the policy is a percentage of your income (capped at some absolute upper limit), so if you make little, you pay little.
Prices paid by public insurers to healthcare providers are fixed, and even the private insurers aren't allowed to pay providers more than a certain multiple of the public rate.
In other words, in Germany, the government has a much stronger hand in setting prices for both patients and insurers than under the Obamacare system.
For example, countries with socialized healthcare have significantly more walkable and bikeable cities. That’s not a coincidence.
The most plausible link would be if people couldn't afford cars under a socialised healthcare system; but I doubt anyone is going to try and argue that seriously.
No. It does not. Not "suddenly" or "magically".
What does happen is that social health concerns and advice feed back into other public policy making decisions.
Advertising agencies get contracts for campaigns to improve health awareness, walking and biking paths become routine considerations in city planning, etc.
This takes decades to iterate through from non existent to commonplace.
The average round trip commute in the US is 42 miles [0] versus 11 miles in China [1]. This means the average American needs to charge almost 4x more often. Alternatively, imagine the range anxiety a Chinese driver might have with an EV with a range of 80 km/50 mi.
When you purchase a vehicle, you also take into account edge cases like interregional or intercity travel like roadtrips, family, or business.
Charging infra can get spotty very fast outside of dense regions. With the sheer density that most of China has, you don't have to worry about dead zones as much. Furthermore, that density also means you have alternative options for inter-city transit (eg. Sleeper Buses, Trains) that don't really exist at the frequency needed in the US.
The differences in expected distances also plays a major role in EV design - a number of Chinese EVs at the lower price range (eg. BYD Seagull, Wuling EV) have much smaller trunk sizes compared to Western oriented hatchback EVs like the Nissan Leaf, because there isn't the need or the expectation to do almost all your shopping with your car when high density urban environments allow you to have various options downstairs or rapid delivery (like 1 hour delivery).
Consumer Habits for Chinese are different from Americans, and the model that worked for China doesn't necessarily work for the US. That said, the Chinese style model would work well in similarly dense Western+Central Europe and Japan.
[0] - https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us...
[1] - http://service.shanghai.gov.cn/sheninfo/specialdetail.aspx?I...
And there are lots of factors that reduce the range - hilly or mountainous terrain, aircon/heating, number of passengers or load, and driving style.
Longer range also improves security since people don't necessarily have to stop in places where they feel unsafe.
A fast charging solution massively improves things for EV though - gleaning from TA, the battery packs of Chinese EVs seem to be exchanged at charging stations.
Nio (a Shanghai firm) is the primary battery swap EV car brand, but by market share (BYD and Tesla) most EV cars in China don't support battery swapping.
That said, Geely, Changan, JAC, and Chery are looking at battery swapping as well in order to differentiate themselves in the Chinese EV market which is dominated by BYD with secondary marketshare for SAIC and Tesla.
Given BYD's dominance in the Chinese EV space, I'm not sure how much market share secondary brands can gain, and this is influencing the mass EV export attempts by Chinese players leading to multiple trade wars as smaller players in the Chinese market who tend to be funded or owned by regional governments are subsidized by those local governments to export abroad and/or start price wars domestically in China.
> A fast charging solution
Battery Management Systems and Battery Chemistry are hard. BYD is a leader in the space because they've been manufacturing batteries for decades (ever used a cellphone in the 2000s or an iPhone before 2016? - it was using a BYD battery)
Other EV players in China not so much.
BYD is basically a battery maker who became an automotive manufacturer, but the other players in the Chinese market are automotive players who don't have the domain experience in battery technology.
Also if the US makes very expensive widgets, but can't make cars cheaply, it would still show up as high worker productivity. It's not really the same as engineering efficiency per (PPP) dollar.
You might like to check whether the layout of the citys involved were decided on before or after the invention of the car - and the introduction of universal health care - before you post anything. That'll probably come up.
The other dirty secret is that government debt is actually very high in China and it’s a bit of a problem. Local and provincial governments in China have very little taxing power and so have been financing via opaque off-balance-sheet shell companies, and the exact number is not known but estimated at $8T. And now local government services are cutting back or even collapsing since the Chinese property market that was the collateral for a lot of this debt is in dire straits. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/China-debt-crunch/C...
Given that most of these governments are now in a pinch with this debt, it remains to be seen if this was a good idea.
But I’m optimistic that if the federal government could wrest control away from (selfish) local governments and set a national agenda people can get behind, progress will happen. The CHIPS act demonstrated some amount of this, but it can go much farther, both into other industrial verticals but also in reversing dumb local NIMBY policies.
The USA can do this in a more fiscally responsible way than China did if they can get corruption under control. Anyway if there’s anything the USA has a lot of, it’s money.