Sandy Munro: The Coming Wave of Chinese EVs
In this final piece in a series on Sandy Munro’s Q&A at TeslaCon Florida, I’m highlighting a section of the Q&A where he talked about the coming wave of Chinese electric vehicles (EVs). He was asked, “You mentioned by 2030, one-third of the cars in the market will probably be Chinese. So, what do you think the Chinese will bring to America — it’s going to be a cheaper or a lower quality car to get on the price point that everybody will be able to afford? What do you think is it that they are bringing for 2030?”
Sandy’s answer deflates some of the assumptions inherent there. His response: “So I can tell you right now because I worked on a lot of the cars that are going to be coming in from China. These are not poor quality cars. I have one of the cars — we have at the office — is a Chinese vehicle. It’s not one of the ones that I worked on, but I worked with BYD, I worked with Beijing Automotive EV Group, […] the NIO, the Geely cars — I mean, I would do workshops that had 500 people in a tiered audience learning how to use our techniques, and we only worked on electric vehicles. These guys have had a lot longer to work on electric vehicles than the guys here in North America or Europe.”
He went on to talk about that a bit more before going into the matter of EV battery minerals and claiming that, if the US doesn’t allow these Chinese companies to sell EVs here, “you won’t get lithium, you won’t get cobalt, you won’t get nickel, you won’t get anything.” This could be debated, but the general point is clear: right now, these EV battery minerals come from or at least go through China, and the Chinese government could put up roadblocks for Western EV producers if they aren’t playing nice with the Chinese brands.
To close out this segment, Sandy Munro discusses how volatile gas prices help with EV adoption and a couple of political matters in that regard.
Let’s wrap up this series with a little introspection. In this final video, Sandy discusses how “Munro Live,” his very popular YouTube channel got started, what he initially thought of it, and how it’s going.
Who knew Sandy Munro was an innate comedian?
Well, for those who are Munro Live fans, there’s one silver lining from the COVID-19 pandemic and associated government shutdowns.
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