“China's Tesla” NIO slashes thousands of jobs as losses mount

[sremani]

China has around 25 electric car manufacturers not too unlike Detroit in its hay-day in 1920s. Sooner or later many will crash and burn and some merge to become bigger players. Long story short, industries with heavy CapEx sooner or later end up being handful of players.

BYD buses and ABQ rapid transit saga is an interesting one. Most of the Chinese electrics are not up to the snuff and so Albuquerque decided not to order any new buses and send back the ones delivered.

[reaperducer]

Sadly, the people in ABQ I know blame their city government for this fiasco, and not the manufacturer. They're still sore about the empty bus-only lanes running down some main streets that were built for this.

[vermontdevil]

Yet Indy is using BYD electric buses for their new Red Line rapid transit. The line just opened a few weeks ago.

Be interesting how it'll function during the cold weather - there were problems with these buses that BYD is scrambling to fix.

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/transportation/201...

[sangnoir]

Are you including Geely in your list of manufacturers? Geely owns Volvo, and I'm eagerly looking forward to the (electric) 2020 Polestar 2 going on sale[1].

The tech will likely percolate downwards to Geely's non-flagship cars over the next few years.

1. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/volvo-spinoff-polestar-...

[cmarschner]

Yes and I recently read overall investment is around $28 billion in electric vehicles, across all these startups. By comparison, VW alone is investing €80 billion.

[duxup]

Yeah there are some good articles noting how many manufacturers there are and they basically expect a large % to fall by the wayside dude to being behind with tech, funding, connections, etc. My understanding is there are maybe a handful at most that investors and analysts think have nearly enough of what is needed to make a good longer term run at it.

[kwhitefoot]

Could buy them from Volvo in Sweden instead. That's the truck and bus company that is still Swedish not the car company that was sold off to Ford in 1999 and is now owned by Geely.

[gamblor956]

Same with LA Metro's BYD order. Their buses are some of the newest in the fleet but have the same quantity and severity of maintenance issues as the oldest operational buses in the fleet.

[mycall]

I'm surprised as Shenzhen has 16,000+ electric buses (BYD?)

[gibolt]

It seems to me like China wants the electric car manufacturing revolution to mainly be under their control/borders. My guess is that the reason they allowed Tesla so willingly is that Nio and other local companies had already started crashing hard and BYD with their tiny battery packs were unlikely to drive sufficient adoption, especially for export. The only way to grab the market was to lure in the best and drive more internal competition.

[JumpCrisscross]

> The only way to grab the market was to lure in the best and drive more internal competition

Post-Xi China isn't really about internal competition. More likely they're hoping to replicate Tesla's IP. (Tesla, in turn, bets it can gain more from selling in China than the IP it will lose in domestically-fabricated components.)

[toinetoine]

  BYD with their tiny battery packs

My friend bought a BYD sedan last year for 100k RMB ($15k) and it gets ~300km per charge.

[natch]

Makes sense. I think there’s also a bit of the killer being killed by Tesla here, because people want Teslas more.

[d2161]

I got the impression you feel that's a bad thing, but I think it's just me. To me a rational governments would want its country to grow. And economic growth is accomplished by having new or growing businesses.

I agree Tesla was allowed as part of their benefit. I don't think Tesla benefits any of those Chinese automakers. No one wants a competitor. Sure, Tesla would help the crap companies die faster and force the rest to adapt to higher standards. But I think the real intention is for Chinese consumers to benefit from a superior and less polluting product. They are aggressively environmental nowadays afterall.

[xvector]

I am convinced that everyone prefixing headlines with "China's Tesla" is trying to short Tesla.

[navigatesol]

Yes, everyone criticizing the company is a short seller making up lies to earn a few bucks. The lawsuits, fraudulent buyouts, sketchy accounting, executive overturn, ridiculous promises, lousy financials...

It's all made up. A giant conspiracy of short sellers.

[yalogin]

Well the problem with cars is they cost a lot to make and the leeway for do overs is very less. China can co-opt IP but getting things right is very different with cars compared to consumer electronics, where they can iterate and improve.

[ivankolev]

Somewhat tangential, I just visited a Polestar 2 booth set-up downtown Toronto, it's designed by Volvo but will be manufactured in China, it is really impressive vehicle, both looks and specs.

[throwaway1777]

Over 50k euro price though. You get what you pay for.

[cpursley]

While I agree the Polestars are neat from a performance perspective, Volvos are some of the most unreliable vehicles that you can buy. But Luxury && Performance != Quality.

[baybal2]

I once wrote about them here. I questioned their rationale of trying to "beat" Tesla when Tesla itself was deep in red.

Were they took the enormous amount amount of money they got from investors, and put it into making electric Suzuki Alto lookalikes, they would've been bathing in cash now.

But no, those guys not only did not recognise Tesla's failure, but they doubled down on it, and ran a car company as if it was some Internet dotcom.

[nickik]

Tesla has not failed and is clearly not a failure.

[dayaz36]

"China's Tesla" IS Tesla

[Leary]

It took Tesla 16 years to become profitable, does Nio have enough cash to last another 12?

[DSingularity]

Do you mean does China have enough cash?

[blang]

Is it profitable?

[akhilcacharya]

Has an "X" Killer company or product ever actually Killed X?

[rnhmjoj]

Mozilla comes to mind.

[Apocryphon]

Blackberry, iPhone