HEADLINE: China's EV Market Faces Global Headwinds and Domestic Overcapacity GUEST NAME: Alan Tonelson SUMMARY: Despite innovation, China's electric vehicle market, led by BYD, is experiencing production drops, price wars, and significant international p
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
HEADLINE: China's EV Market Faces Global Headwinds and Domestic Overcapacity
GUEST NAME: Alan Tonelson
SUMMARY: Despite innovation, China's electric vehicle market, led by BYD, is experiencing production drops, price wars, and significant international pushback due to quality, surveillance fears, and predatory trade practices, exposing a broader economic deflation. China's EV market leader BYD saw production drops amidst price wars and over 150 producers. Global markets, including the US, Japan, Germany, and South Korea, resist Chinese EVs due to surveillance concerns and predatory trade practices. Beijing maintains employment through municipal loans, but widespread overcapacity and deflation are significant challenges.
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| 0:00.0 | Building a coffee business? |
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| 0:23.7 | This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Bachelor. Gordon Chang, my colleague and co-host, |
| 0:29.2 | and I point especially to the Gordon Chang report by the Pacific Research Institute about |
| 0:34.4 | China's EV car business. Big time, you hear wonderful things out of the innovations |
| 0:40.5 | that have been brought to the vehicles being sold worldwide by China. EVs, magical, recharge |
| 0:49.2 | quickly, can do everything for you, including ordered dinner on the way home, except Gordon and I welcome our friend Alan Tonneson, who's our guru on manufacturing and trade. |
| 1:00.0 | We're looking at the big and famous and best-selling and Shenzhen-based B-Y-D company, world's largest maker of electric vehicles. |
| 1:13.2 | Gordon, I come to you because it's in your most recent column for the Pacific Research Institute, that if you're the biggest and best and |
| 1:19.3 | most innovative company on earth, how is it your car production in August of 2025 dropped |
| 1:25.2 | 3.8 percent? What is that? Good evening to you, Gordon. Good evening, John. |
| 1:30.2 | And yes, this does sound anomalous. The problem, though, is the Chinese car industry as a whole. |
| 1:36.6 | They're about 150 producers. There should only be about a dozen if the market had a say. |
| 1:43.1 | And right now, we are seeing big price wars. Everybody is |
| 1:47.8 | making less money than they were before or they're losing money. And we are now witnessing. |
| 1:54.0 | And this is significant. Drops in production by B.YD, the market leader, because that is a sign of the market as a whole. |
| 2:02.9 | Alan, I come to you because this is one of the stories we could tell, a really good example, |
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