Is Tesla out of China?

Zeyi Yang: yes she is.

Zoe Schiffer: Can you talk to me about that relationship? Also, what is Tesla’s Chinese position? Is it still considered a popular cool car?

Zeyi Yang: For a long time, Chinese car brands have been viewed as far inferior to foreign brands, so it’s still a kind of thing. Tesla still has that Hello as this American electric car company. But it’s lost it as we speak. Also, when I talk about Tesla and China’s relationship, I sometimes forget how much it goes back. There is one very interesting number we have to talk about. His name is Zhuanglong. He was once the Minister of Industrial and Information Technology in China. Basically, he is China’s Prime Minister of Innovation. He went to San Francisco in 2008 and tried out one of the Roadsters, one of the first electric vehicles Tesla made. He was an electric car nerd because he came from the automotive industry. That’s how this all started. He then met this man again in 2014, as Musk first visited China. He really tried to push himself to sell his car in China, but later knows he built Gigafactory in Shanghai in 2020. It is a long history of how Musk and Tesla entered China. But what we know for now is that China is one of Tesla’s most production facilities. It is also one of Tesla’s biggest markets. Tesla can never lose China.

Zoe Schiffer: It’s really appealing because you know that with other tech companies like Google and Meta, it’s really tough to get into China and that they haven’t been that successful or, in some cases, completely failed. But Elon Musk managed to win. Do you know why it was like that?

Zeyi Yang: I think it will help him work on car companies instead of social media companies as he has more control over information and the internet in China. On the other hand, if you’re just building a car, it won’t actually pass through those red lines that China has. China is also simply helping to think for the past 20 years that “maybe I should bet on electric vehicles as the future of transportation.” Tesla was part of its epic experiment and welcomed the investment to build an EV empire. So Tesla has become a very central part and contributed to how China has achieved it so far.

Zoe Schiffer: Well, that leads to my next question as China has really invested heavily in electric vehicles. I think in part it is to reduce our dependence on foreign oil imports. How has that been so far?

Zeyi Yang: That’s going pretty well, I say. Yeah. China does not have a very abundant oil reserve and has long imported oil from many other places. That’s why the Chinese government has always been so careful about it. For example, if World War II occurs, those oil supplies will be cut off. What is it going to do? In the early days, I think the idea of ​​electric cars was the Moonshot idea in the early 2000s. “One day, if all cars have electricity, there’s no need to import this oil, and it’s much safer if war breaks out.” That’s when they really started investing in research on batteries and electric vehicles as university research funds. However, this gradually leads to the Chinese companies building up. They have subsidized a significant amount of auto companies that actually operate on the roads and can produce products that customers can buy. All of that leads to what we have now after years of heavy spending. This is a very booming electric vehicle market in China. According to the latest data, more than 50% of consumers say they go to electricity rather than gas cars when they are about to buy a new car. That’s pretty notable.