Xpeng is building in Austria in plants that used to make AUDI.

Legacy automakers chose to kill electrics in the 90s, and then when they came back, they sold price gouging EVs with insane profit margins.

There are no reasons why EVs should not be cheaper than ICE, other than higher priced cars make more money. They painted themselves into a corner, addicted to lockdown era price gouging, ignoring a huge market of low cost vehicles and designing ICE cars with pointless complexity and designed to fail.

If China didn’t do it, someone else would have, the market was ripe for perturbation…exactly like the time a German company started selling a cheap, small car to most of the world in the 60s and sold 23 million of them, when the alternatives were expensive bloated unreliable cars.

lol rest of world should be everyone but the big three

Funny how EU car companies support capitalism so long as they profit continually. As soon as someone else comes in with a better product for cheaper, all the sudden they are against it! They force the government to levy taxes and tariffs and ban competition to protect their established non-competitive products and profit margins.

In a world where competition could lead to innovation the traditional manufacturing systems chose profits first and are being left behind… “What got you here won’t get you there”