This. Exactly this. With Chinese goods, as with any goods, you get what you pay for. If you’re only willing to pay a buck, you get a buck’s worth of goods.
When I was a kid, “Made in Japan” was a joke way of saying “low-quality, crappy goods”. Of course even when I was a kid the reality was way in advance of popular culture; people were citing a '50s joke in the '70s. Japanese industry had already woken up and was making high quality electronics and mid-quality cars, the latter easily the equal in terms of reliability and durability of the rolling piles of rust that American cars had become by that point. By the '80s American cars were such an embarrassment that my father swore off of them for the rest of his life, buying only Japanese or German from then on, starting by ditching a Chrysler and replacing it with a Nissan at the time. I also lived through the “Made in Taiwan” jokes and “Made in Korea” jokes because people never learn from getting bitten on the ass by their bigotry. (You want a REAL joke? “Made in Germany” was a forced label to protect British subjects from cheap German knock-offs. How well did that age?)
That being said, a lot of the stuff made in China, when you’re willing to shell out real dollars instead of dollar store junk, is cheaper than goods of equivalent capability and quality made in the west. It’s really hard to beat the sheer scale of industry in China. So not only do you get what you pay for, you get more than what you’d pay for at that price in the west.
Now I can’t talk about Chinese bikes because motorcycles aren’t really a thing here, so you’re not likely to see a lot of stuff in that realm that’s comparable. I can talk about electric cars, however. Like how the bare-bones Xiaomi SU7 is priced below a Tesla Model 3 and performs like a mid-range sport car. Oh, also has a longer range than a Model 3 Long Range because of course.
Or how the SU7 Max is a car that can sit in the mid-range Porsche territory for performance for a significantly lower price. It can walk away from a base Porsche Taycan for a fraction of the price, and indeed can keep a Taycan turbo guessing for a much smaller fraction of the price.
And then we get the new SU7 Ultra which needs a fully-kitted Taycan Super Turbo GT to come close to it, and even then it’s down to the driver who wins. The SU7 Ultra set a record for the fastest electric executive vehicle around the Nürburgring Nordschleife. For a third the price of the Porsche. It took a special kitting (the Manthey-kitting) of a Taycan STGT to take that record back. The SU7 Ultra was stock. I could buy one right now if I had $88,000 to throw away.
Sports cars not your jam? BYD, without even touching their Denza, Fang Cheng Bao, and Yang Wang specialty sub-brands (premium luxury, professional/personalized, and ultra luxury respectively) has something that will compete successfully with every price point of most western consumer EVs, usually at a lower cost. And if you hit the sub-brands, it’s got shit you’ve never seen before. Like the Yang Wang SUV that can do tank turns and launches a paired drone from a roof enclosure so you can take auto-guided video of your adventures climbing mountains in an overdressed car or whatever.
Cars in general not your jam? How 'bout phones? You know how everybody’s going gaga over Apple’s new foldable? The iPhone Duo starts at $1,999. Meanwhile, Samsung launched the first mainstream foldable seven years ago in 2019—and yes, it was not very durable. But Chinese phone makers haven’t been sitting idle either. Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, Honor, and Vivo all have foldables on the market, many of them years ahead of Apple’s entry. Most undercut Apple significantly. Huawei, notably, doesn’t—it competes at the top end rather than on value. They’ve been iterating on the hinge and crease problems for years while Apple was still figuring out how to make one fold.
Do I even need to mention drones (and paying 2-3× as much for a lesser drone)? Solar cells? Batteries (BYD and CATL)? Home appliances (Haier/Hisense and Midea)? E-bikes?
Anybody who still holds the “Chinese cheap junk” meme in their head is as ignorant as they are bigoted. You get what you pay for. And in the case of many Chinese goods you get MORE than what you pay for against western prices because of the sheer scale of operations.
Question, does the design of chinese cars come off as sorta well, soulless?
Like by performance metrics and features, CFmoto/QJmotors blows anything similarly priced out of the water, but nothing really feels like a passion project of the engineers, they all look like “just another bike” or a bizarre mix of aesthetics.
I don’t really pay attention to chinese electrics, though I’ve riden in a few.
I like the designs of the firms like Xiaomi, Zeekr, NIO, and others like that better than their western counterparts for the most part. I find it particularly bizarre that a country with five thousand years of sophisticated arts behind it is being called “soulless” by westerners, mind, so I’m probably not in the market to answer your question.
Oddly, I find all of Tesla’s offerings “soulless” and devoid of any passion (or sense of quality; they’re utter garbage in construction). And I haven’t seen an American car of any kind I liked since the late-'60s, early-'70s cars like the GTO or Mustang. I did like '70s and early-'80s BMW aesthetics, but when they moved away from their Bauhaus aesthetic I lost interest. They just started looking like every other car. “Organic”. They lost anything resembling an identity and could easily, if you needed glasses but forgot them, be confused with a pedestrian Buick or the like.
Similar things started happening with all the European cars outside of Italy and Britain. Then Britain fell.
I also can’t help but notice that “soulless” was thrown at every upstart that came into the western markets. First Japanese cars. Then Korean cars. Now Chinese ones. I’m not saying there’s a pattern here. But I’m also not not saying it.
I don’t remember Japanese cars ever being called soulless.
I heard of them being called low quality, but the designs were always iconic.
As far as Tesla goes, they are Elon Musk’s passion. Its a stupid vision carried out suprisingly competently given the task of adhering to a passionless non-expert’s whims.
I find it particularly bizarre that a country with five thousand years of sophisticated arts behind it is being called “soulless” by westerners
I find it bizarre to experience. I basically live there when I’m not in Vietnam or Japan, so its not that I don’t want to like them, but none of bikes I’ve seen have stirred anything in me.
The architecture and urban design I see in public places has more creativity and passion often in the designer’s vision amd much moreso in the way they’ve been able to carry it out than anywhere I’ve been in America or Japan, but there’s often a certain coldness to public spaces, like the space wasn’t made for me.
I don’t remember Japanese cars ever being called soulless.
You weren’t around in the '70s apparently.
I find it bizarre to experience. I basically live there when I’m not in Vietnam or Japan, so its not that I don’t want to like them, but none of bikes I’ve seen have stirred anything in me.
What I’m reading here is “I don’t know the design language, so it’s soulless”.
Of course I have no meaningful opinion on motorcycles. They’re really not a thing here. I see maybe one motorcycle a week. So it could very possibly be that they’re not well-designed. But the cars? Sorry. Here I just hard disagree. It’s not styled like a western car would be, but that’s the design language at work.
I mean yeah there’s language I’m not getting, but most of the time it’s “we copied this really cool engine from bike A and great design from bike B, cleaned up/straighted the lines a bit, and priced 40% cheaper than either.”
They seem really nice and I will buy an srk421 tomorrow if anybody imports them to vietnam, but very few bikes have a coherent identity, which is even weirder considering they’re operating in spaces nobody else is; putting v4s in cruisers, high-revving i4s in small cc, non-supersport bikes, bringing back styles drom the 80s.
This. Exactly this. With Chinese goods, as with any goods, you get what you pay for. If you’re only willing to pay a buck, you get a buck’s worth of goods.
When I was a kid, “Made in Japan” was a joke way of saying “low-quality, crappy goods”. Of course even when I was a kid the reality was way in advance of popular culture; people were citing a '50s joke in the '70s. Japanese industry had already woken up and was making high quality electronics and mid-quality cars, the latter easily the equal in terms of reliability and durability of the rolling piles of rust that American cars had become by that point. By the '80s American cars were such an embarrassment that my father swore off of them for the rest of his life, buying only Japanese or German from then on, starting by ditching a Chrysler and replacing it with a Nissan at the time. I also lived through the “Made in Taiwan” jokes and “Made in Korea” jokes because people never learn from getting bitten on the ass by their bigotry. (You want a REAL joke? “Made in Germany” was a forced label to protect British subjects from cheap German knock-offs. How well did that age?)
That being said, a lot of the stuff made in China, when you’re willing to shell out real dollars instead of dollar store junk, is cheaper than goods of equivalent capability and quality made in the west. It’s really hard to beat the sheer scale of industry in China. So not only do you get what you pay for, you get more than what you’d pay for at that price in the west.
Now I can’t talk about Chinese bikes because motorcycles aren’t really a thing here, so you’re not likely to see a lot of stuff in that realm that’s comparable. I can talk about electric cars, however. Like how the bare-bones Xiaomi SU7 is priced below a Tesla Model 3 and performs like a mid-range sport car. Oh, also has a longer range than a Model 3 Long Range because of course.
Or how the SU7 Max is a car that can sit in the mid-range Porsche territory for performance for a significantly lower price. It can walk away from a base Porsche Taycan for a fraction of the price, and indeed can keep a Taycan turbo guessing for a much smaller fraction of the price.
And then we get the new SU7 Ultra which needs a fully-kitted Taycan Super Turbo GT to come close to it, and even then it’s down to the driver who wins. The SU7 Ultra set a record for the fastest electric executive vehicle around the Nürburgring Nordschleife. For a third the price of the Porsche. It took a special kitting (the Manthey-kitting) of a Taycan STGT to take that record back. The SU7 Ultra was stock. I could buy one right now if I had $88,000 to throw away.
Sports cars not your jam? BYD, without even touching their Denza, Fang Cheng Bao, and Yang Wang specialty sub-brands (premium luxury, professional/personalized, and ultra luxury respectively) has something that will compete successfully with every price point of most western consumer EVs, usually at a lower cost. And if you hit the sub-brands, it’s got shit you’ve never seen before. Like the Yang Wang SUV that can do tank turns and launches a paired drone from a roof enclosure so you can take auto-guided video of your adventures climbing mountains in an overdressed car or whatever.
Cars in general not your jam? How 'bout phones? You know how everybody’s going gaga over Apple’s new foldable? The iPhone Duo starts at $1,999. Meanwhile, Samsung launched the first mainstream foldable seven years ago in 2019—and yes, it was not very durable. But Chinese phone makers haven’t been sitting idle either. Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, Honor, and Vivo all have foldables on the market, many of them years ahead of Apple’s entry. Most undercut Apple significantly. Huawei, notably, doesn’t—it competes at the top end rather than on value. They’ve been iterating on the hinge and crease problems for years while Apple was still figuring out how to make one fold.
Do I even need to mention drones (and paying 2-3× as much for a lesser drone)? Solar cells? Batteries (BYD and CATL)? Home appliances (Haier/Hisense and Midea)? E-bikes?
Anybody who still holds the “Chinese cheap junk” meme in their head is as ignorant as they are bigoted. You get what you pay for. And in the case of many Chinese goods you get MORE than what you pay for against western prices because of the sheer scale of operations.
Question, does the design of chinese cars come off as sorta well, soulless?
Like by performance metrics and features, CFmoto/QJmotors blows anything similarly priced out of the water, but nothing really feels like a passion project of the engineers, they all look like “just another bike” or a bizarre mix of aesthetics.
I don’t really pay attention to chinese electrics, though I’ve riden in a few.
I like the designs of the firms like Xiaomi, Zeekr, NIO, and others like that better than their western counterparts for the most part. I find it particularly bizarre that a country with five thousand years of sophisticated arts behind it is being called “soulless” by westerners, mind, so I’m probably not in the market to answer your question.
Oddly, I find all of Tesla’s offerings “soulless” and devoid of any passion (or sense of quality; they’re utter garbage in construction). And I haven’t seen an American car of any kind I liked since the late-'60s, early-'70s cars like the GTO or Mustang. I did like '70s and early-'80s BMW aesthetics, but when they moved away from their Bauhaus aesthetic I lost interest. They just started looking like every other car. “Organic”. They lost anything resembling an identity and could easily, if you needed glasses but forgot them, be confused with a pedestrian Buick or the like.
Similar things started happening with all the European cars outside of Italy and Britain. Then Britain fell.
I also can’t help but notice that “soulless” was thrown at every upstart that came into the western markets. First Japanese cars. Then Korean cars. Now Chinese ones. I’m not saying there’s a pattern here. But I’m also not not saying it.
I don’t remember Japanese cars ever being called soulless.
I heard of them being called low quality, but the designs were always iconic.
As far as Tesla goes, they are Elon Musk’s passion. Its a stupid vision carried out suprisingly competently given the task of adhering to a passionless non-expert’s whims.
I find it bizarre to experience. I basically live there when I’m not in Vietnam or Japan, so its not that I don’t want to like them, but none of bikes I’ve seen have stirred anything in me.
The architecture and urban design I see in public places has more creativity and passion often in the designer’s vision amd much moreso in the way they’ve been able to carry it out than anywhere I’ve been in America or Japan, but there’s often a certain coldness to public spaces, like the space wasn’t made for me.
You weren’t around in the '70s apparently.
What I’m reading here is “I don’t know the design language, so it’s soulless”.
Of course I have no meaningful opinion on motorcycles. They’re really not a thing here. I see maybe one motorcycle a week. So it could very possibly be that they’re not well-designed. But the cars? Sorry. Here I just hard disagree. It’s not styled like a western car would be, but that’s the design language at work.
I mean yeah there’s language I’m not getting, but most of the time it’s “we copied this really cool engine from bike A and great design from bike B, cleaned up/straighted the lines a bit, and priced 40% cheaper than either.”
They seem really nice and I will buy an srk421 tomorrow if anybody imports them to vietnam, but very few bikes have a coherent identity, which is even weirder considering they’re operating in spaces nobody else is; putting v4s in cruisers, high-revving i4s in small cc, non-supersport bikes, bringing back styles drom the 80s.