China’s electric vehicle industry, it’s now well understood, is churning out cars that rival or exceed the best products coming out of the West. Chinese EVs are cheaper, cooler, more innovative, and have better range. And now they’re surging into car markets around the world — markets where consumers are hungry for clean, affordable transportation.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Ilaria Mazzocco about her new report on how six countries around the world are dealing with the rise of Chinese EVs. Why do countries welcome Chinese-made EVs, and why do countries resist them? How do domestic carmakers act when Chinese EVs come to town? And are climate concerns still driving uptake?
Mazzocco is the deputy director and senior fellow with the Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Ilaria Mazzocco: Chinese batterymakers have persisted in focusing on LFP batteries with some spectacular results, I would say. And partly I think that’s been thanks to just being able to deploy them at really large scale and just testing and getting them out there.
But I think BYD is really a great example of that. They invest so much in R&D that it’s really hard to compete with them on some of these things. That’s really the big challenge, where, if you want to make a cheap car, you need LFP. That’s why Ford sought out that licensing deal with CATL, was to acquire LFP battery technology. And LFP batteries are really something that Chinese batterymakers have really excelled at.
Now, there could be breakthroughs in other chemistries. There could be a catchup game with non-Chinese batterymakers that actually become good at making LFP. That’s entirely possible. But right now, if you’re an Indian carmaker and you want to make a cheap car, your best bet is probably to get it from BYD or CATL, or maybe Gotion or something like that. That’s really what you’re looking at.
Robinson Meyer: It also, though, really changes how we talk about a lot of the development of auto industries abroad. Because I mean, I realize this is how cars were made for a long time, but I think … basically like if you were to say, Oh yeah, we make our own internal combustion cars here, we simply import the engines from Detroit, and then we place them in our otherwise finished vehicles that we’ve made domestically, and then we put it under a domestic label. We’re very proud of that. That’s essentially what is happening when countries import batteries. The batteries are so central to the operation of the EVs and what the EVs are capable of that when you import your batteries, you’re really relying on your trade partner for a lot of the core physical capacity of that vehicle, and a lot of the core, underlying chemical engineering capability that that vehicle affords you.
It suggests to me that in terms of when you think about the global EV industry, there are companies that are dependent on some kind of Chinese battery export. There are companies that are dependent on some kind of Korean battery export. There’s a few American entrants — mostly Tesla. There’s a few European entrants. And that’s kind of it. Everyone else is piggybacking on the back of one of those core technologies.
Mentioned:
Ilaria’s new report: The Global EV Shift: The Role of China and Industrial Policy in Emerging Economies
Previously on Shift Key: How China’s EV Industry Got So Big
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
