I have contacts in an automotive design department at a Chinese university, they helped design the software and UX for Li Auto. Most of us here have never even heard of Li, I certainly hadn’t. Yet they sold nearly as many cars as Audi did globally in 2025.
Most of their production line is robotic, their factory runs on renewables and they build cars that the Chinese middle-classes can afford and that offer more luxury than the European/Japanese premium brands. We (in Europe) are still convinced the quality of our vehicles is better, yet these cars outperform most equally priced competitors with a significant factor. This isn’t just about the size of the market being enormous, this is about the level of competition being murderous. If you don’t make something people want, you just disappear.
Yet our newspapers are still claiming that it’s all because of Chinese state sponsorship. A story we like to perpetuate as an excuse for not competing on what really matters.
Azsnee09 on
They [CEOs] do this to prompt government action against Chinese companies
fractal_snow on
Honda, which didn’t have a viable EV product until 2024, suddenly realized they are late?
sutroheights on
Honda and Toyota have done nothing for 15 years or more to move to EVs, touting hydrogen as a possible solution that’s always five years away. They absolutely could have been solid competitors for the future against the Chinese brands and stuck their fingers in their ears and closed their eyes instead. They are soon to be the Betamax to China’s VHS and they deserve it completely.
Dunky_Arisen on
There’s a million ways this could have been prevented. If the US had competent leadership over the last decade, if Brexit never happened and the EU grew to dominance, if Nato had quashed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine early instead of sitting on their hands… But at this point competence is at a premium, and in terms of trade deals and alliances, that’s all that really matters.
If the last decade of the fall of the west was all part of the CCP’s plan, then there’s nothing to say other than that plan was absolutely evil, and absolutely genius. They win. Best we can hope for now is that the EU can build itself into enough of a power that it won’t just get subsumed into a patron state like Russia in a few decades.
dcdttu on
Congrats Honda president, you had to go to China to realize what we all knew already.
Legacy automakers didn’t want to convert from gas to electric because that would have meant they needed to innovate, so, it was done for them and they are getting left in the dust for it.
The current American political insanity is the nail in the coffin for any legacy automaker that relies on the USA. Mexico and Canada are now welcoming Chinese EVs because of this.
It’s done. It’s over.
BasvanS on
We tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!
ottwebdev on
I recall talking to an software lead from RIM (for anyone who remembers they made the blackberry) – after laughing at the iphone they got their hands on one and it was sheer panic once they saw how it was constructed on the inside
iphone 1 launched in summer of 2007 and RIM stock peaked about a month later before falling off a cliff.
Reality is humbling.
Ren_Lol on
I hate when companies like this don’t just say, “Challenge accepted”, and put some actual R&D into these things. Car market has become so lazy, short term gain, little advancements.
RoboNerdOK on
It looks a lot like the dominance of American manufacturing in the last century. China has many interconnected industries in close proximity to each other. You can order custom supplies in the morning and have them that afternoon, made to tight tolerances. Even injection molded plastic parts.
Cold_Specialist_3656 on
US and Europe are finally seeing the consequences of allowing oligarchs and mega corporations to corrupt their governments and destroy the free market.
Noncompetitive companies designed to funnel money into their owners pockets. Propped up as “too big to fail” by purchased politicians.
Nonfunctional anti-trust and monopoly enforcement. Again because the government is being paid not to.
Smash and grabs at any promising competition. Using the legal system as a hammer to keep competition down.
Regulatory capture making it impossible for new companies to navigate the legal minefield.
China is going to steamroll US and Europe as they flail helplessly. Because all the existing megacorps have long since been converted into ATM’s for the ultra wealthy. The US especially is owned and run by the ultra rich. Who will suck it dry then fuck right off to one of a dozen other countries where they purchased citizenship.
LawrenceSpiveyR on
China mandated common specs for auto parts which means most parts are easily interchangeable by other makes/models/years. (this may or may not be directly related to the article)
Old_Man_Game on
Plenty of blame to go around for the legacy automakers falling behind. But I keep going back to their u.s. dealers who are god-awful and all hate electric vehicles because they make so much damn money at their freaking service departments even just changing oil.
furism on
China will win because they have a long term perspective on things – I think it’s cultural, correct me if I’m wrong. Whereas in the West companies are only worried about the next quarter earnings call. This works for a while, but China is playing the Long Game and in this day and age it might be the right move, especially when it comes to major changes (like switchting away from fossil fuel).
russian_hacker_1917 on
china has been planting the trees that are starting to bear fruit. The US has been chopping their trees down and making the seeds illegal.
blueblocker2000 on
Make something that isn’t a disposable, made-to-break POS that costs a fortune each time it needs repaired and people will figure out they should buy from you instead.
MattInSoCal on
I was in Beijing late last year, my first trip since COVID. Electric cars are taking over. Charging is plentiful and cheap. The fit and finish of the cars are great and they are comfortable and quiet. Performance is between good and insane. Connectivity is key, and the navigation systems not only show you the state of the traffic lights ahead of you _in real time_, but also how much longer it will be before it changes. The U.S. are pitifully far behind, and it’s unlikely we will ever get close to catching up.
ConkerPrime on
They should be. China’s ability to scale is unrivaled and when China cares about a thing it produces, it can be the best in the world.
Also suspect in car case, instead if copy/pasting Tesla like all the other companies did and now having to unwind that poor user experience, China was much more selective in what they copied and level of unnecessary complication they added to vehicles. The rest have made their vehicles overly complicated with an eye towards perpetual subscriptions that China does not have an interest in.
Vayshen on
Did these people not grow up wirh the Tortoise and the Hare story?
psychoCMYK on
Free market 🤷♂️
Dry_Control_6530 on
Honda, who forgot to use their xp to build electric motorcycles?
el_salinho on
Of course he doesn’t. I worked for years for a japanese car maker, in japan. There is literally no innovation. Development is slow, “safe” and has to run through 5 circles of approval for the simplest change. Oh, and if a competitor doesn’t already have it? Forget about it. Zero risks and relying completely on their market position.
GreyBeardEng on
The world sent all its manufacturing to China so the 1%, Epstein Class, and shareholders could get rich by not paying a livable wage, now they are starting to get concerned over the obvious outcome.
TBCNoah on
Was just talking about this recently while looking at the BYD cars since they are coming to Canada. Not even in the market for a new car and im thinking a BYD will be my next car. Chinese cars are going to decimate every other company out there and the only thing holding them back is government policies keeping them limited or out lol. I say fuck it and let the other companies either die out or force them to innovate and compete. They have enjoyed their safe market for how long now and all they have done is use that stance to gouge and profit while offering no real innovation or improvements, at the cost of consumers. The Chinese auto industry is cut throat and has forced them to innovate and achieve in 10 years what everyone else took how long to achieve?
AdComplete8564 on
Honda doesn’t have a chance because they fucked all their cars up. Though maybe this will force them back to making simple, reliable, economical vehicles again some day.
So_spoke_the_wizard on
And no one saw this coming. [fingers in ears] La la la la la.
SteveJobsDeadBody on
How ironic is it that China is the one making it clear that capitalism is a race to the bottom with no winners..
Disgruntl3dP3lican on
They have 2 choices. Continue playing their reputation with their finger in their nose up to the elbow and lobbying the governments to put protectionist measures to prevent them to compete with the Chinese EV, taking their consumers hostage. Or they could stop blocking the innovation and at least try to follow the market with new interesting products, which they should have done decades ago.
ConclusionTop6134 on
Germany said the same thing about the US during WW2 when they realized how insane our manufacturing output was compared to them, and everyone else. It’s not quite the same scenario, but when a nation has an insane industrial manufacturing base like this, everyone else just gets dominated.
Splurch on
Sure they can, they just have to turn instead of driving right into that brick wall they’ve been staring at for a decade. Japan did the same thing to the American car market in the 70’s and 80’s when American car makers ignored trends and got destroyed by Japanese manufacturers, including by Honda. This isn’t a new lesson, it’s just an ignored one in the pursuit of short term profit.
Esfahen on
Americans have no fucking idea the scale of investment happening in China for various industries.
PinotRed on
Oh no. If only they had seen the writing of the wall for the last *checks notes* 10 years?!
foodfighter on
I’m old enough to remember when the very first Lexus LS400 was introduced in 1989 – it was such a fundamental, core-shaking wake-up call for the US Domestic auto industry so see how far ahead of them Japan had advanced at that time.
Thirty-five years later, it’s quite remarkable to see a high-profile Japanese car maker now saying the same sort of thing about the Chinese auto industry.
flexible on
Didn’t this exact thing happen to the US manufacturers during the gas crisis of 1973? US Manufacturers doubled down on large cars, let Datsun, Honda and Toyota own the small car market that exploded. They don’t ever learn from history/
baronvonpennytree on
Honda needs new leadership. The fact that you have to travel to China to see the obvious is telling IMHO.
American manufacturers are so swaddled and kept safe by corporate welfare in the US that even if the Chinese cars come, they’ll just be rebadged and sold by the Big Three for three times the price.
bakeacake45 on
We now have no chance against the Chinese alternative energy industry either thanks to Pedo Trump and his submissive Republican Party. China will unfortunately control much of the world because of US Republicans
Avoidtolls on
Oil backed petrodollars have a TON of sway globally and have been stifling progress.
Except it’s old tech and China has smelled blood in the water and developed a plan. Trump is speeding up the process.
China is skillfully banking on not just EVs but batteries and infrastructure and solar panels, on top of manufacturing EVERY electronic device, networking device, capacitors, motherboards, chips, GPUs..and cherry-picking all that tech.
Once a 1000 mile EV that can actually tow 5000 lbs is developed things will get crazy. And China is full on Space Racing to that benchmark.
The US will be leapfrogged and petrodollars will become unstable.
BigHungryFlamingo on
Anyone who works in manufacturing, especially electronics, sees that China is about to be a world superpower for a long time and everyone else is going to be stuck 1) buying from them or 2) playing catch up.
Undeadly123 on
Honda eFit, $25-30k barebones base price. Honda eLement, $35-40k base.
40 Comments
Reality sets in , either join them or bow out.
I have contacts in an automotive design department at a Chinese university, they helped design the software and UX for Li Auto. Most of us here have never even heard of Li, I certainly hadn’t. Yet they sold nearly as many cars as Audi did globally in 2025.
Most of their production line is robotic, their factory runs on renewables and they build cars that the Chinese middle-classes can afford and that offer more luxury than the European/Japanese premium brands. We (in Europe) are still convinced the quality of our vehicles is better, yet these cars outperform most equally priced competitors with a significant factor. This isn’t just about the size of the market being enormous, this is about the level of competition being murderous. If you don’t make something people want, you just disappear.
Yet our newspapers are still claiming that it’s all because of Chinese state sponsorship. A story we like to perpetuate as an excuse for not competing on what really matters.
They [CEOs] do this to prompt government action against Chinese companies
Honda, which didn’t have a viable EV product until 2024, suddenly realized they are late?
Honda and Toyota have done nothing for 15 years or more to move to EVs, touting hydrogen as a possible solution that’s always five years away. They absolutely could have been solid competitors for the future against the Chinese brands and stuck their fingers in their ears and closed their eyes instead. They are soon to be the Betamax to China’s VHS and they deserve it completely.
There’s a million ways this could have been prevented. If the US had competent leadership over the last decade, if Brexit never happened and the EU grew to dominance, if Nato had quashed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine early instead of sitting on their hands… But at this point competence is at a premium, and in terms of trade deals and alliances, that’s all that really matters.
If the last decade of the fall of the west was all part of the CCP’s plan, then there’s nothing to say other than that plan was absolutely evil, and absolutely genius. They win. Best we can hope for now is that the EU can build itself into enough of a power that it won’t just get subsumed into a patron state like Russia in a few decades.
Congrats Honda president, you had to go to China to realize what we all knew already.
Legacy automakers didn’t want to convert from gas to electric because that would have meant they needed to innovate, so, it was done for them and they are getting left in the dust for it.
The current American political insanity is the nail in the coffin for any legacy automaker that relies on the USA. Mexico and Canada are now welcoming Chinese EVs because of this.
It’s done. It’s over.
We tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!
I recall talking to an software lead from RIM (for anyone who remembers they made the blackberry) – after laughing at the iphone they got their hands on one and it was sheer panic once they saw how it was constructed on the inside
iphone 1 launched in summer of 2007 and RIM stock peaked about a month later before falling off a cliff.
Reality is humbling.
I hate when companies like this don’t just say, “Challenge accepted”, and put some actual R&D into these things. Car market has become so lazy, short term gain, little advancements.
It looks a lot like the dominance of American manufacturing in the last century. China has many interconnected industries in close proximity to each other. You can order custom supplies in the morning and have them that afternoon, made to tight tolerances. Even injection molded plastic parts.
US and Europe are finally seeing the consequences of allowing oligarchs and mega corporations to corrupt their governments and destroy the free market.
Noncompetitive companies designed to funnel money into their owners pockets. Propped up as “too big to fail” by purchased politicians.
Nonfunctional anti-trust and monopoly enforcement. Again because the government is being paid not to.
Smash and grabs at any promising competition. Using the legal system as a hammer to keep competition down.
Regulatory capture making it impossible for new companies to navigate the legal minefield.
China is going to steamroll US and Europe as they flail helplessly. Because all the existing megacorps have long since been converted into ATM’s for the ultra wealthy. The US especially is owned and run by the ultra rich. Who will suck it dry then fuck right off to one of a dozen other countries where they purchased citizenship.
China mandated common specs for auto parts which means most parts are easily interchangeable by other makes/models/years. (this may or may not be directly related to the article)
Plenty of blame to go around for the legacy automakers falling behind. But I keep going back to their u.s. dealers who are god-awful and all hate electric vehicles because they make so much damn money at their freaking service departments even just changing oil.
China will win because they have a long term perspective on things – I think it’s cultural, correct me if I’m wrong. Whereas in the West companies are only worried about the next quarter earnings call. This works for a while, but China is playing the Long Game and in this day and age it might be the right move, especially when it comes to major changes (like switchting away from fossil fuel).
china has been planting the trees that are starting to bear fruit. The US has been chopping their trees down and making the seeds illegal.
Make something that isn’t a disposable, made-to-break POS that costs a fortune each time it needs repaired and people will figure out they should buy from you instead.
I was in Beijing late last year, my first trip since COVID. Electric cars are taking over. Charging is plentiful and cheap. The fit and finish of the cars are great and they are comfortable and quiet. Performance is between good and insane. Connectivity is key, and the navigation systems not only show you the state of the traffic lights ahead of you _in real time_, but also how much longer it will be before it changes. The U.S. are pitifully far behind, and it’s unlikely we will ever get close to catching up.
They should be. China’s ability to scale is unrivaled and when China cares about a thing it produces, it can be the best in the world.
Also suspect in car case, instead if copy/pasting Tesla like all the other companies did and now having to unwind that poor user experience, China was much more selective in what they copied and level of unnecessary complication they added to vehicles. The rest have made their vehicles overly complicated with an eye towards perpetual subscriptions that China does not have an interest in.
Did these people not grow up wirh the Tortoise and the Hare story?
Free market 🤷♂️
Honda, who forgot to use their xp to build electric motorcycles?
Of course he doesn’t. I worked for years for a japanese car maker, in japan. There is literally no innovation. Development is slow, “safe” and has to run through 5 circles of approval for the simplest change. Oh, and if a competitor doesn’t already have it? Forget about it. Zero risks and relying completely on their market position.
The world sent all its manufacturing to China so the 1%, Epstein Class, and shareholders could get rich by not paying a livable wage, now they are starting to get concerned over the obvious outcome.
Was just talking about this recently while looking at the BYD cars since they are coming to Canada. Not even in the market for a new car and im thinking a BYD will be my next car. Chinese cars are going to decimate every other company out there and the only thing holding them back is government policies keeping them limited or out lol. I say fuck it and let the other companies either die out or force them to innovate and compete. They have enjoyed their safe market for how long now and all they have done is use that stance to gouge and profit while offering no real innovation or improvements, at the cost of consumers. The Chinese auto industry is cut throat and has forced them to innovate and achieve in 10 years what everyone else took how long to achieve?
Honda doesn’t have a chance because they fucked all their cars up. Though maybe this will force them back to making simple, reliable, economical vehicles again some day.
And no one saw this coming. [fingers in ears] La la la la la.
How ironic is it that China is the one making it clear that capitalism is a race to the bottom with no winners..
They have 2 choices. Continue playing their reputation with their finger in their nose up to the elbow and lobbying the governments to put protectionist measures to prevent them to compete with the Chinese EV, taking their consumers hostage. Or they could stop blocking the innovation and at least try to follow the market with new interesting products, which they should have done decades ago.
Germany said the same thing about the US during WW2 when they realized how insane our manufacturing output was compared to them, and everyone else. It’s not quite the same scenario, but when a nation has an insane industrial manufacturing base like this, everyone else just gets dominated.
Sure they can, they just have to turn instead of driving right into that brick wall they’ve been staring at for a decade. Japan did the same thing to the American car market in the 70’s and 80’s when American car makers ignored trends and got destroyed by Japanese manufacturers, including by Honda. This isn’t a new lesson, it’s just an ignored one in the pursuit of short term profit.
Americans have no fucking idea the scale of investment happening in China for various industries.
Oh no. If only they had seen the writing of the wall for the last *checks notes* 10 years?!
I’m old enough to remember when the very first Lexus LS400 was introduced in 1989 – it was such a fundamental, core-shaking wake-up call for the US Domestic auto industry so see how far ahead of them Japan had advanced at that time.
Thirty-five years later, it’s quite remarkable to see a high-profile Japanese car maker now saying the same sort of thing about the Chinese auto industry.
Didn’t this exact thing happen to the US manufacturers during the gas crisis of 1973? US Manufacturers doubled down on large cars, let Datsun, Honda and Toyota own the small car market that exploded. They don’t ever learn from history/
Honda needs new leadership. The fact that you have to travel to China to see the obvious is telling IMHO.
American manufacturers are so swaddled and kept safe by corporate welfare in the US that even if the Chinese cars come, they’ll just be rebadged and sold by the Big Three for three times the price.
We now have no chance against the Chinese alternative energy industry either thanks to Pedo Trump and his submissive Republican Party. China will unfortunately control much of the world because of US Republicans
Oil backed petrodollars have a TON of sway globally and have been stifling progress.
Except it’s old tech and China has smelled blood in the water and developed a plan. Trump is speeding up the process.
China is skillfully banking on not just EVs but batteries and infrastructure and solar panels, on top of manufacturing EVERY electronic device, networking device, capacitors, motherboards, chips, GPUs..and cherry-picking all that tech.
Once a 1000 mile EV that can actually tow 5000 lbs is developed things will get crazy. And China is full on Space Racing to that benchmark.
The US will be leapfrogged and petrodollars will become unstable.
Anyone who works in manufacturing, especially electronics, sees that China is about to be a world superpower for a long time and everyone else is going to be stuck 1) buying from them or 2) playing catch up.
Honda eFit, $25-30k barebones base price. Honda eLement, $35-40k base.
Done.