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.
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.
(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-...
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.
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.