Almost all new cars sold in Norway last year were fully electric, according to official registration data published Friday. It puts the Nordic country within touching distance of effectively erasing gasoline and diesel cars from its new car market. “2025 has been a very special car year,” Geir Inge Stokke, director of the Norwegian Road Traffic Information Council, said in a statement.
I tried the new Volvo EX30 which I believe is Chinese made, compared to my EX40 which is not. What a huge difference. The 30 felt so cheap in every aspect. Didn’t even have a speedometer behind the wheel. I had to look at the middle display for that shit. Imagine looking to the middle of the car all the time. It was awful. Felt unsafe. All the buttons felt flimsy and didn’t have markings to show what they did. No physical buttons to control anything. Weird controls for controlling the back windows.
The glove compartment is opened from a menu like two to three clicks down. Instead of a lever like on mine.
The driving feel was terrible. The list goes on. Just, everything about it sucked.
I really hope the EX60 will be better, but I’m gearing up for disappointment.
They’re a newer industrial power and still at the lower end of manufacturing prowess, basically.
Like, you can find high-end manufacturing in China, but not at the same scale. For most performance stuff they import from the West, like everyone else.
And a good deal of the parts were manufactured in China, with a spec which didn’t request trash.
Depends. If it’s a jet engine, the wires might ultimately trace back to China, and the aluminum in the faring. The more demanding parts will be made in the West, though. Otherwise there’s no reason not to assemble in China as well.
If the specs are really tight it might be harder to find someone over there who can meet them, basically, and I would guess the ones who can are in high demand and not that cheap.
Okay, sure, I was thinking cars and consumer products, not aerospace.
With more limited volume products like jet engine parts the savings of manufacturing in a lower cost country probably also diminish. There’s a constant overhead in outsourcing things to somewhere far away, and without enough volume to spread that cost over it doesn’t always make sense.
Plus they probably can’t outsource a lot of the stuff being made for the military, so there has to be domestic manufacturing capabilities for that sort of thing anyway.
Yeah, consumer products are usually easier, although there’s exceptions. Cutting edge semiconductors are the obvious example, but China has also struggled for a long time with the humble ball-point pen and it’s tiny, ink-spreading ball bearing.
My view about Chinese manufacturing is that they make things to spec. If the spec says cheap garbage, you get cheap garbage. If the spec says more premium stuff, you get that.
In my experience, the main indicator of whether something will be garbage is not the country it was manufactured in, but whether the target demographic is Americans. If it’s destined for an American retail store or webshop, it will be cheap trash. There are exceptions (as much as I hate their OS, Apple hardware is pretty nice), but generally American businesses will trade quality for margin almost every time.
There was a period where more or less all car manufacturers, regardless of country, were abandoning physical buttons and levers, and that trend is thankfully reversing. The Tesla Model 3 at some point had buttons for turn signals, and one was above the other, so you had to memorize which was in which direction. I believe The shifter was also on the touchscreen. The Cybertruck famously turns into a doorhandle-less cremation chamber in case of fire. I’m not sure I’d blame Chinese ownership/manufacturing for what appeared to be a global trend.
Considering the Volvo, I don’t think they’ve had a major shift in the market demographic as far as I know. Here in the home country of Volvo, the XC60 is like the most popular car. And they suddenly turn to shit right as the switch to Chinese manufacturing starts? (At least a Chinese platform.)
I thought I heard something about the US banning Chinese-made products and goods? So that, if true, would make the market even smaller in the US, which shouldn’t influence the quality in that way you say. But maybe other markets are also willing to compromise on quality.
Yeah, those two first paragraphs were more about Chinese manufacturing in general, not about the Volvo. The US is still full of Chinese-made stuff, it’s just a bit more expensive now. And there are no BYD cars, but as far as I know you can still get Volvos.