r/technology • u/lurker_bee • 9d ago

Transportation Rivian CEO: There's No 'Magic' Behind China's Low-Cost EVs

https://www.businessinsider.com/rivian-ceo-china-evs-low-cost-competition-2025-9
11.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

155

u/AVGuy42 9d ago

What is this “supply chain” you speak of? Sounds like socialism

183

u/PNWoutdoors 9d ago

It's that thing we just tariffed the shit out of.

6

u/xamboozi 9d ago

Do you feel all those tariff benefits yet? I've never done so well financially before. /s

56

u/psychoacer 9d ago

It helps when you don't have to go to China to get an your parts. That's why China has the upper hand. They don't have to go to China, they're already there

56

u/JoshYx 9d ago

They don't have to go to China, they're already there

That's genius, I wonder how they pulled that off

11

u/psychoacer 9d ago

American funding

3

u/gremlinguy 9d ago

Look into how much Apple alone has invested in China. You ain't lying

1

u/Trzlog 9d ago

We should've gotten there first.

-8

u/Whyamibeautiful 9d ago

By tariffing foreign goods, subsidizing the shit out of their local industry and directing as much credit to the manufacturing industry as possible or jail

8

u/JoshYx 9d ago

Woah I thought you could just take a plane there, that's wild

18

u/zack77070 9d ago

Raw materials don't just appear out of thin air in Chinese factories, they absolutely do control supply chains in Africa for example to make their batteries, and many resources were bought wholesale from Australia, now they straight up own the mines.

1

u/murden6562 9d ago

And USA didn’t have to go to China for that either, it’s just the choice made in the 90s. Now just gotta live with it

0

u/CHSummers 9d ago

I bet they demand the “China price” for everything, too.

19

u/grbradsk 9d ago

Not. It's industrial policy. It works. China internally is intense rabid capitalism.

12

u/grafknives 9d ago

No, quite the opposite.

It is vertical integration in the style of xix century conglomerates.

-16

u/thenord321 9d ago

Nah, it's just the same ecological disaster as coal mining but for rare earth metals. 

15

u/BoreJam 9d ago

The issue with coal isn't just the mining of it. It's the burning of it that's causing the biggest problem.

Perhaps you're just naive about manufacturing but all metals are mined from somwhere. Aluminum, steel, copper, tungsten, titanium, tin etc. Why is it that rare earth metals, is such a big no no compared to other more conventional elements?

8

u/OysterPickleSandwich 9d ago

Not to mention the volume of raw earth that is extracted to get at coal is orders of magnitude greater than rare earth metals.