There is no incentive for US companies to improve their products when they are protected from market forces by import restrictions.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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What US companies? Only three remain (GM, Ford, Tesla) and they make up a fraction of sales here in the US. The Chinese government is dumping truckloads of money into subsidies and development, control nearly all rare earth minerals, and don't shy away from environmental disasters and human rights abuses which is why they're the only nation on the planet that's able to develop this rapidly and sell their vehicles for way less than anyone else on the planet. Once they control everything you can kiss those low prices and rapid development goodbye, but you'll still buy from them because nobody else will be left standing.
If all that is true, then the US should subsidize US ev’s to the point where they are price competitive and open the market to competition where US manufacturers can market against the environmental and human right issues with their Chinese competitors. That would put competitive pressure on Chinese manufacturers to clean up their supply chains and consumers worldwide would benefit.
The US is battling the environmental and human rights issues that so agitate them about China by promoting 'clean coal' and rounding up brown people in concentration camps without due process.
It's almost as if environmental and human rights issues weren't their real concern 🤔.
Right there on the top of Mount should. But we've seen the self destructive nature of my country and elected leaders.
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A loss of overall competitiveness of the local companies is actually a well known and studied problem with using tariffs and import restrictions to protects said local companies.
So any competent government which desires for their local companies to survive and prosper will seek different ways to strengthen then which don't suffer from that problem. The Chinese government is doing just that, the US government is not.
By all indications, US politicians are spectacularly incompetent and/or are following a strategy of burning the future of US companies for a short term boost in the money they yield for current CxOs and investors.
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They're fully in thrall to market forces. Those forces simply dictate that they lobby for protected markets. It's far cheaper to buy off a lobbyist than to build a cutting edge battery factory
"Burning the future of the company for extra personal upsides in the short term" is pretty much MBA-Age management strategy summarized in one sentence.
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China has also implemented the world’s most stringent standards for battery safety. They require automakers to ensure that batteries don't catch fire or explode for at least two hours after a single cell enters thermal runaway. If it does go ablaze, Chinese automakers are experimenting with some unusual ways of protecting the car and occupants from the battery fire.
I like it way more than charging speeds. But also - I'm interested in how many recharge cycles they supposedly can live through, and that's not in the article.
Is it really even a road trip if there is no chance of the vehicle catching fire or exploding? Sounds boring TBH.
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Meanwhile ford wants to charge you a monthly fee for the luxury of opening the trunk n you e-mustang
I can't find any information on this. Can you tell me where you read this so I can get more info? I do see they're charging $495 for the plastic tub in the frunk now.
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😆 what a joke
How uninspiring are these "features" like charging for heated seats and using a "frunk" it really is pathetic.
On the 2026 model of the Mustang mach-e, it doesn't have a frunk anymore, they used that space for a heat pump.
Nothing screams US engineering like that bay. Pass the 11/274ths socket....
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It's now, literally, a $495 option for the plastic tub.
Not exactly. In the 2025 they made the frunk smaller to add the heat pump, but it was still free. With the 2026 they're literally just charging money for the same thing that the 25 had.
I bet they actually have incentives to create better technology.
chinese companies are often run by engineers not management consultants, lawyers and accountants.
They also pour money into many hands. Usually their industries are pretty competitive internally. they have more EV car makers than I can remember
the new 1,500 kilowatt (1.5 megawatt) Flash charging stations
Must be nice. In Spain the charging infrastructure looks like it's literally designed to torture EV owners.
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[...] only around three minutes slower than it charges in normal temperatures.
No. The cold tests starts at 20% and the normal test at 10%. My guess is that charging from 10-20% at -30 C takes a lot longer. Still a good battery, but they're fudging the numbers here.
True, but I don't need to charge at -30C, and this thing charges FAST.
I do need to charge at those temps. Not all of us live in warm climates.
Considering the speed of 20%+ charging, what would you predict 10-20% to be?
Even if you add another 10 minutes making the total 22 minutes, at that temperature I'd be impressed
Wow. I think if I lived in that sort of climate I might not be driving an electric car. But I also think the likelihood of me moving to a climate that hostile is low. Keep safe out there!
if I lived in that sort of climate I might not be driving an electric car.
People living in -30°C don't necessarily do so all year round. The temperature varies between -30 and +30 during the full year where I live. Our EVs handle it just fine, even for long trips. 👍👍
A fossil fuel car also consumes more gas in cold temperatures, as far as I've understood. Doesn't stop anyone in colder climate from using a car at all.
Charge time sounds great, but what about the number of charge cycles (I.e. longevity), the article did not mention that.
They don't mention it, but I highly suspect its actually not significant.
I used to think fast charging did the same thing, but it turns out that even the heaviest wattage implementations have negligible effects on cycles and health.
As long as your driver is smart enough to control or manipulate the voltage at certain capacities (<15% and >85%), the higher power won't affect the cell quality.
You are correct. This is for phones, where it is worse than for EVs, but:
As long as your driver is smart enough to control or manipulate the voltage at certain capacities
I feel like this is the important detail here...
When buying a car, you can't have a clue whether that is the case.
I used to believe fast charging is harmless in phones too. It isn't. I charge my phone only to 80%, and not daily. I haven't lost a single % of battery health in almost a year. Meanwhile my friends charge to 100% and very often, always on fast charging. I got a friend to install accubattery to check their health and it was at 93% after only about 1.5 years.
Tl;dr: I suspect the driver will be dogshit and cause batteries to get destroyed in anything but the flagship car models to increase battery service revenue BY A LOT...
Do I understand correctly - you charge to 80%, have zero degradation, but also only use 80% of your battery at most because of that.
Your fast-charging friend, meanwhile, has been using all 100% down to 93% battery for these 1.5 years. Maybe, in a bad scenario his battery will degrade to 80% in 1-2 years and he'll start using only 80% of his like you?
Where's the upside in this, unless you're both planing to use same phone in e.g. 5 years and you might get ahead in battery capacity finally?
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Every time I’ve seen someone test this hypothesis - as in doing a long-term experiment with the specific purpose of testing whether fast charging harms battery health - the result has come back that it doesn’t make much deference at all
It’s also worth pointing out that every battery is different and apps like Accubattery are imprecise. It’s entirely possible that your 100% and your friend’s 93% are actually exactly the same. It’s also possible that their battery would have displayed 93% when brand new
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can charge from 10-70% in just about five minutes
Why is that always a metric? Yeah, with a tiny battery or a kilowatt line maybe.
More important is the cycle count.
~~Edit: btw, why don't charging stations have a supercapacitor?~~
Because the power charging curve is non linear. You have to charge the battery slowly when it's almost depleted or full. So they only post the numbers that make them sound best.
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Cycle count is important for the lifetime estimate on the battery, how long before you have to spend a large portion of the cost of the car on replacing / refurbishing a key component.
"Fill up" time is the most obvious and common 'maintenance' anyone will ever do on their vehicle. One of the biggest objections large swaths of the population have about EVs is/was that could take an hour or more for each stop on a long road trip or if you can't charge at home. (apartment / street parking / etc.) They usually do 10-70%r 80 or whatever because the speed trails off exponentially closer to 100%. (logarithmically? whichever.)
Energy density or GTFO.
I'm tired of articles that purposefully skip the actually important data
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