alt Hacker NewsBut are Chinese EVs attractive to consumers if they are built in Canada with union wages? At that point people will just keep buying Toyotas/Hondas that are also built in Canada.
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oaiey • yesterday at 9:52 PM
Or you just setup lower price limits for cars like Europe did with China. So that state support is not affecting the market. Because guess what: producing a car in far far away land and then ship it around the world and pay some 10% tariff is also not that cheap.
I'd expect quite a few consumers would still want them. Canada has cheap electricity and expensive gasoline. For those who don't live in some part of Canada so cold that the efficiency of an EV drops massively due to heating an EV can save quite a bit on energy costs.
Around 65-75% of Canadians live in parts of Canada that have winter temperatures similar to those of Norway's major cities and EVs perform fine in Norway so will probably also be fine in Canada.
The US and Japanese and Korean car companies are putting most of their EV effort, at least in the US and Canada, into the more expensive models. They don't have much that is the EV equivalent of a Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic for non-SUVs, or the equivalent of a RAV4 or CR-V for EVs.
Honda for example only has the Prologue, which is built on top of GM's Equinox EV platform and starts at about $15k more than an Equinox EV.
The Chinese EV companies seem more willing to address that segment. Even if they have to pay union wages to build them there will be demand because it will still be cheaper than the EVs that are aimed at a more upscale market the other companies are mostly making.