https://insideevs.com/news/734623/byd-seagull-best-selling-china/ The pint-sized BYD Seagull EV sold 46,830 cars in August in China, making it the country’s best-selling vehicle regardless of power source. Its most affordable version costs the equivalent of just under $10,000, and for that, you get a Chevrolet Bolt EV-sized vehicle with four doors and a 30-kilowatt-hour battery that’s rated for 190 miles (305 kilometers) of range on the Chinese test cycle.
For around $12,000, buyers can upgrade to a 38 kWh battery that pushes the claimed range to 252 miles (405 km).
Seven of the first ten best-selling cars in China last month were made by BYD. The BYD Qin Plus was in second place with 42,765 sales, followed by the Song Plus in third spot with 39,799 sales.
BYD sold 373,000 plug-in vehicles (EVs and PHEVs) in August, of which around 148,470 were fully electric.
I occurs to me that ‘merica is less than 5 percent of the world population. I BYD sells cars that actually have value to all of “not ‘merica” than all of “not ‘merica” will have a growing GDP not based on the USA.
Imagine, Argentina and Namibia with a growing GDP and a growing house hold income. Pretty scary. If you remove wealth from your customers, pretty soon you don’t have customers.
Ford and GM have shrunk their market reach significantly. GM abandoned Europe and India. Ford abandoned India, and all of South America. Here in Shiny-land, they both started trimming their product lines from the bottom.
Meanwhile Ford and GM have failed to compete in China, so are looking at China more as a base to produce for export.
If you saw the bit I posted a few minutes ago, you see how their plan to export from China, at least to the US, is being cut off.
But, from their perspective, I am sure they are OK with sacrificing a couple models of their own, to make sure they will never need to compete with Chinese cars, either EV or ICE, in their home USian market.
It occurs to me that I don’t really know enough about the Chinese market to make an informed decision about this.
For example, who is buying these “pint size” cars? Are they second-cars for a family which already has one big enough to carry kids and groceries, and the second is just going to be a “mommy car” (pardon the sexist trope). My family started off with one car, big 50’s Plymouth. Our second was a Rambler, because … second car.
Or maybe these are being snapped up by college age kids and those just starting a tradesman career (there is it again) and it’s enough to get them back and forth to work, to ditch the motor scooter because it rains, and to avoid public transit because, well, nobody likes public transit.
Are these really “full use” cars, or is there a market - peculiar to China (and other “on the cusp developing countries) but for which there is really no significant market in the US or other wealthy economies?
As I say, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t take the emergence of this low-low-low cost vehicle as a harbinger of much, at least until I knew more about who is buying them. (And China has a TON of “not-wealthy” people for whom this might be their “Model T”: affordable but unluxurious transport.)
That doesn’t mean they can’t move thousands or millions of them. There are all sorts of economies from Mexico to areas of South America, much of Africa, and obviously Asia where they will. Whether it’s a “threat” to US manufacturers remains to be seen, I think.
If the Chinese move into Latin America (Stellantis is currently selling a couple GAC built models, in Mexico, badged as Dodges), GM and Ford will simply abandon those markets as well. (Ford already abandoned all of South America). GM and Ford can easily do the Welchist thing and withdraw into the US only, selling only huge SUVs and pickups, and hiding behind the government’s skirts…because that is what Shiny “JCs” do.