Sam Matey's "The BYD Dealership of Iztacalco"
Off-Ramps for 12 June 2025
Normally on Thursdays I publish "Off-Ramps", an annotated list of three-to-four articles I think the readers of Changing Lanes would enjoy reading. Today, I'm departing from that practice to instead draw your attention ton a single article by
in ; it's so important that I want to give it all the spotlight that I can.
One of the unspoken baseline assumptions of growing up in the United States is that our country has the best stuff... When it comes to material goods, especially anything with wheels or a screen, it's an article of faith that the best version of it will be sold by an American company.
That's really, really, really no longer true for cars.
This observation is why Matey's piece, embedded in the link above, matters.
Earlier this year, I wrote about the strategic dilemma facing Western nations in the electric-vehicle (EV) transition: meet our GHG-emission reduction goals, by relying on Chinese production; or preserve industrial competitiveness in automobiles, by shutting it out. One or the other, not both.
The Glasgow Declaration, Four Years In
Four years ago in Glasgow, the world's governments and automakers committed to ending sales of gas-burning vehicles in leading markets by 2035. That deadline is now a decade away: let’s check in on how it’s going.
My take was abstract. Matey's take hits you in the face. Standing in what feels like an Apple Store, surrounded by Chinese vehicles featuring integrated air quality monitoring and high-tech entertainment systems—priced at a fraction of what comparable vehicles cost in North America—he sees, first hand, the reality of the West's lost grip on technological leadership.
While we've been amusing ourselves in North America and Europe by arguing over the right level of EV subsidy, and charging standards, and incentives for public EV charger infrastructure, Chinese manufacturers have built an entire vertically-integrated supply chain for vehicles that are simultaneously cheaper and more sophisticated than anything we can produce, and cleaner as well.
The only way we can compete with these products is to bar them from our shores. Which is to say, we can’t compete with them at all.
The cognitive dissonance Matey describes—feeling both hope at genuine technological progress and frustration at the policy environment that prevents it from happening in the USA—is a foretaste of what the Glasgow Declaration world will look like. We will achieve our goals, but on a foundation of Chinese manufacturing dominance.
My Glasgow piece was centred around a dilemma: do we meet our climate goals, or do we defend the manufacturing capability of the liberal, democratic, free-trading West? My timing was poor, publishing it as I did on 7 January 2025, just weeks before the hegemony I had taken for granted collapsed.
I am still trying to figure out what progress-movement people should advocate for in this new world. Reading pieces like Matey's are part of how we will figure it out.
It’s hard for me to imagine that people in our consumerist society won’t notice that the rest of the world has better, cheaper cars, and start getting agitated about it. On the other hand, we can be so insular at times. But Americans are obsessed with cars… this feels like technology the masses will notice we’re missing out on.
What I really don’t understand is what’s going on in the minds of western auto execs. At some point, surely, they can see they they’re at risk of irrelevance. When does one of them finally take the leap and try to compete?