중국 전기차의 부상: 테슬라를 향한 경쟁

중국 전기차 제조업체들은 가격에 민감한 소비자들에게 어필할 수 있는 합리적인 가격의 기술 탑재 차량으로 Tesla에 빠르게 도전장을 내밀고 있습니다.

### 경쟁력 있는 가격과 첨단 기능으로 테슬라의 아성에 도전하는 중국 전기차 제조사들
* 🚗 Nio 및 BYD와 같은 중국 전기차 제조업체는 글로벌 전기차 시장에서 **Tesla의 지배력에 심각한 도전**을 제기하고 있습니다.
* 💰 중국 정부는 **2009년부터 2023년까지 약 2,310억 달러의 보조금과 세금 감면 혜택**을 제공하는 등 전기차 산업에 막대한 보조금을 지급하고 있습니다.
* 🔋 중국 최대 전기차 제조업체 중 하나인 BYD는 **배터리를 포함한 부품의 75~80%를 자체 생산**하는 수직 통합의 이점을 누리고 있습니다.
* 💻 중국 전기차에는 **AI 비서, 커넥티드 기능 등 첨단 기술 기능**이 탑재되어 '스마트 전기차' 시장을 겨냥하고 있습니다.
* 🏷 중국 전기차는 가격 경쟁력이 뛰어나며, **BYD Tang과 같은 모델은 7인승 구성으로 Tesla Model Y보다 11,000달러 저렴**하게 제공됩니다.
* 🌏 중국 전기차가 중국에서 인기를 얻고 있지만, **성능과 품질 문제**로 인해 해외 시장에서의 성공 여부는 여전히 불확실합니다.
* 🇺🇸 바이든 행정부는 중국의 잠재적 경쟁으로부터 미국 시장을 보호하기 위해 **중국산 전기차에 100% 관세**를 부과했습니다.
* 📊 글로벌 전기차 시장의 미래는 중국 제조업체가 **서구 시장에서 브랜드 충성도와 품질에 대한 인식을 극복**할 수 있느냐에 달려 있습니다.

Would you please park the car? Lately, we've been hearing a lot of this. You've got companies like Nio, companies like Li Shan, these Chinese EV makers that are frankly as good, if not better than Tesla right now. This I know people will say Americans won't buy Chinese. You know what you ask somebody, do you want to pay $9,000 for an SUV, or do you want to pay $19,000 or $20,000 for an SUV? No contest. And this is causing some concern to the likes of Elon Musk and Tesla and a number of other carmakers. China is the largest auto producer in the world. One in three cars is built there. In fact, it has become so productive its own market can't absorb the inventory. And so the age of the much-feared Chinese auto export has begun for Americans. It's hard to process that because we don't see Chinese cars on American roads.

Trust me. Go to Australia, to Mexico, to Brazil, to Israel, to South Africa. You're going to see Chinese cars all over the place. American trade groups and others worry that China will do with cars what it has done with countless other industries: eradicate competition with cheap labor and materials, and abundant government support. Chinese firms are already pushing out competitors at home. The Biden administration slapped a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs in an effort to stop the onslaught before it starts. Tesla got caught flat-footed in the China market because no one anticipated such a severe turn to clean energy vehicles, and we're seeing the effects of that. All the legacy automakers are scrambling. They're not just shopping them because they're cheap. They've super scaled the set of features that consumers are demanding. So how formidable are Chinese EVs? How do they stack up against the world's most popular model, the Tesla Model Y?

CNBC tried a few to find out. So, this is the Tesla Model Y. This is currently the best-selling car in the world. Woo! The acceleration on these things is incredible. Tesla is a really highly respected brand in China, but homegrown Chinese automakers are really catching up and, in some cases, surpassing. In fact, there are around 140 EV brands in the country, and at least in China, some of them are outselling Tesla. This is Eunice Yoon, CNBC's Beijing bureau chief. She set out to try some of the Chinese crossovers comparable to the Model Y, with a few technical exceptions, like Chinese-owned brands such as Volvo, Polestar, and Lotus. Chinese cars aren't available in the US yet. I was surprised myself driving these cars. First, let's address price. The BYD Tang, for example, made by Tesla's biggest Chinese rival BYD, is known for making cars very cheaply.

One of BYD's big selling points is that they're able to give you a car that is a seven-seater, a little bit of a shorter range than a Model Y, but at the same time it's $11,000 cheaper. How do they get the cost down that much? Well, then you get into that kind of secret Chinese superpower of state capitalism, where you have entrepreneurs driving costs down, innovating, designing better products while at the same time getting tremendous support from city, provincial, and national political leaders who want China to win. Between 2009 and 2023, the Chinese government handed out an estimated $231 billion in subsidies and tax breaks. BYD, which is not government-owned, received $3.7 billion in direct subsidies between 2018 and 2022, most of it in that last year. But one of BYD's biggest advantages is its ability to drive down costs through vertical

integration. BYD sold roughly 3 million cars in 2023, about half of them electric and half plug-in hybrid. This year they're forecasting 4 million. Contrast that with Tesla, which saw sales fall year over year in the first two quarters of 2024. BYD is also one of the largest battery makers. About 40% of China's cost advantage is attributable to its edge in batteries, which make up about 20 to 30% of a vehicle's total cost. BYD has done a phenomenal job of making in-house 75 to 80% of the parts that go into their cars, so they own the batteries and the battery supply chains. That's clear, and it contributes to lower cost and higher quality. And then apart from batteries, pretty much across every other category, BYD's costs are lower than its Chinese competitors, Tesla, and drastically lower than legacy competitors like Ford and GM. But all Chinese automakers benefit from low costs and a localized supply

chain. This can be seen in the G6 from Xpeng, a relatively small company that listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020. It hasn't done so well, although results were solid in the last two quarters of 2023. What's their pitch to the consumer? What made them different from the others? Price. So they have a lot of other features in there as well. So we were in the Xpeng G6. When you look at the specs and the dimensions, it's almost identical to the Model Y, but at 27K it's almost $9,000 cheaper. This is crucial. Chinese cars aren't just cheap, they offer value for money. What Henry Ford did to this industry is he took something that was a rich person's toy and made it so that anybody working in a factory could afford it. China is democratizing the smart EV, and smart is the key word here. This means connected to the internet and loaded with tech.

Chinese EVs tend to have a lot of bells and whistles. For example, I can ventilate my seat to deal with the summer heat. Oh yeah, I can feel it. I could change the settings so that this EV sounds as though it's running on gas. Oh. And I could tell the AI assistant to park the car without me. This is very handy. EV makers leverage these affordable tech features to target specific customers. This could be said of the Li Auto L6 shares of its Nasdaq listed manufacturer. $20 billion market cap have had a rocky time while the company carves out its brand identity. Li Auto does market itself as more of a family type of car maker. To pull that off, the company offers extras you won't find in a Tesla. Technically, this one wasn't an EV. It has a gas powered range extender on board. The extender appeals to road tripping families or the many drivers stuck for hours in the city's

notorious gridlock. Li Auto L6 is about the same price as a Model Y, but has a longer range at 893 miles. So we are driving during rush hour in Beijing traffic. But this five-seater is designed for families in a Chinese context, that means that a lot of extra creature comforts are common in the cabin family. In the front seats can watch TV or get a massage by their chairs. And if you want a cold drink, there's a fridge in the back. At the higher end. There are innovations that companies like Tesla have only talked about. Take Nio for example. It was a hyped IPO on the NYSE back in 2018, but shares are down 90% from a 2021 high due to sluggish sales growth and high cash burn. The company is relatively small, with a $9 billion market cap, and it only sells electric vehicles, about 160,000 of them in 2023.

Nia has had its own way of dealing with charging challenges: battery swapping, something that Tesla had considered. Nio actually did it. If you want to swap your battery first, you find a station. You check what batteries they have, and then you place the order. There are 3,500 battery swapping stations around the country, most of which are Neos. So we're 92% charged. And that took a little less than ten minutes. Well, they say three minutes. My experience was about a little under ten. It's not difficult to find charging points here in Beijing. This map says eight out of the ten near me are available. China currently has 3 million public charging facilities. A lot of China auto industry analysts say the tech-forward features in and around these cars are really where Chinese automakers have a leg up on global competition. They are turning cars into connected devices that can work within the larger Internet of Things.

The AI assistant Nomi is a draw as well. While other car AI systems respond to direct voice commands such as turn off the air conditioner, people on social media say that Nomi sounds more like a person. Hey, Nomi, I feel so cold. Well, Han. Long. So, for example, instead of saying turn off the air conditioner, I would say, oh, I'm feeling really cold right now. And then it would say, oh, okay. And then it starts and it's like, how about I just turn down the air conditioner? You know, and then it would also make some jokes sometimes. So. So, you know, when it was signing off, it was like, bye. It's no longer how many units of hardware you sell. It's all the data and analytics and aggregation and monetization of services that happen after you sell the car. That's the new business model. If you look.

At a company like Apple, they sell us things that we didn't know we needed, and they charge a 35% premium for it. Does it really feel like you're in some sort of space age? Uh, you know, cabin or something? Were there any that really stood out in terms of, you know, being like especially tech-heavy? No. And I think actually, that's the point. All of these Chinese EV makers are trying to distinguish themselves somehow. So they keep putting in all these different technology features. Some of them were really, really fun. But then there were some that weren't as useful. And in fact, um, didn't really work very well. So we in two different cars, we tried the auto parking, and it was a little stressful. So please park the car. So that didn't quite work. We're about 7 or 8 inches from the car next to us.

We didn't hit it, so that's a good thing, but I think we're going to have to try parking again. When we speak to a lot of analysts, they say that Chinese drivers really like these technology features. But on the other hand, it's unclear how these tech features are going to resonate with drivers outside of China. But driving a tech-forward Chinese EV comes with its own costs. What struck me about all of these Chinese EVs is how they didn't focus as much on performance, and it kind of showed when I was in the Model Y. You could have pretty good control in the car, and that wasn't really the case on the whole for the cars that we were in that were from the Chinese EV makers. You didn't have that same level of precision when you were making a turn, for example. And in fact, that's a trend and something that is almost common knowledge among Chinese drivers.

They'll talk about, oh, there's the Tesla, there's the model Y, the model three, there, the performance cars. And one reason Chinese carmakers can keep prices low might be that they sometimes don't offer more bang for buck. They make compromises. You could really tell the difference from the ones that were pricier. They had nicer finishes. They had nicer interiors. They felt better. There weren't as many kind of junky or odd designs that were inside the car. For example, in one of the cars that I was in, the steering wheel was kind of off compared to where I'd be sitting. The windshield wipers were placed in an odd place for my hand, and even the premium vehicles show signs that these are new companies, new models, new designs, and automakers haven't worked out a lot of the kinks yet. There's one car that I was in that had really nice leather chairs, but the way that the chairs

moved it when you're driving. It's just squeaking the entire time. One of the other models that I was in, you know, it was so loud. Maybe these Chinese companies still don't have it down. So are foreign automakers doomed in China? Some industry watchers have said they suspect it will be hard for non-Chinese firms to compete when homegrown brands are tapping in so well to the Chinese preference for tech. And then there's the question of which of these companies and which business model can succeed. The highly integrated firm that can just beat on cost, or the highly connected smart EV maker that makes money off of services and subscriptions? BYD is already established that the proof of concept that they can execute on a business model and be competitive with anybody worldwide in terms of quality, design, and cost. This other notion of a greater ecosystem built around a digital system may very well be the future, may be the TikTok of cars, but I'm not ready to say absolutely they're going to run away with

everything because they have a better digital experience. Don't know yet. And can they duplicate in different languages and different cultures a comparably high level of enjoyment as they do at home for their own consumers? That's a big cultural step for them to take. And their own financial situation is by no means secure. Most of these companies aren't profitable. That's another characteristic of tech. Most of the tech companies, until they reach a critical mass or a certain inflection point from a sales cycle standpoint, they're not going to be profitable, and the price war is exacerbating that a bit. So will Chinese EV makers dominate the global industry? For Chinese EVs, the big challenge is going to be to convince people overseas who have brand loyalty to the GM's and the Toyotas and the VW, and to be able to convince them to switch not only to EVs, but to Chinese EVs that they've never heard of.

So that's, to me, where the performance issues and also these little odd design quirks really count because a car is different from a mobile phone, for example. A car is something that you put your family in. And then, of course, there's the price. You know, you have all these discussions about, oh, the government subsidies, and there's so much competition in the market. And I think all of that doesn't necessarily matter because, at the end of the day, it's going to be the consumers who decide who's really going to be ahead.

How BYD, Nio And Other Chinese EVs Compare To Tesla

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중국 전기차 제조업체가 자동차 산업에 미치는 영향

니오, 리산과 같은 중국 전기차 제조업체는 훨씬 저렴한 가격의 SUV를 선보이며 Tesla의 강력한 경쟁자가 되고 있습니다.

중국은 최대 자동차 생산국이며 과잉 재고로 인해 미국을 비롯한 다른 국가로의 자동차 수출을 주도하고 있습니다.

바이든 행정부는 중국 전기차의 성장에 대응하여 중국산 전기차에 100% 관세를 부과했으며, 중국 현지 자동차 제조업체들은 빠르게 테슬라의 판매량을 따라잡고 있으며, 경우에 따라서는 이를 능가하고 있습니다.

BYD는 중국의 국영 자본주의와 정부의 막대한 지원을 바탕으로 Model Y보다 11,000달러 저렴한 7인승 자동차를 제공합니다.

수직 통합, 자동차 부품의 75~80%를 자체 생산, 배터리 제조 분야의 강점을 통해 비용을 절감할 수 있었습니다.

Xpeng과 같은 중국 자동차 제조업체들도 스마트 전기차의 대중화를 목표로 저렴하고 기술이 집약된 차량을 선보이며 경쟁하고 있습니다.

중국 전기차는 특정 고객을 유치하기 위해 시트 통풍 기능, 가스 엔진 소리, AI 보조 주차 등 다양한 기술 기능을 제공합니다.

Li Auto는 가스 구동식 주행거리 연장기, 더 긴 주행거리, TV와 안마의자 같은 추가 편의 기능을 제공하는 L6 모델로 가족 단위 고객을 타깃으로 삼고 있습니다.

반면, Nio는 충전 문제를 해결하기 위해 배터리 스와핑 기능을 도입하여 중국 전역에 3,500개의 충전소를 운영하고 있으며, 중국 자동차 업계 분석가들은 이러한 기술 선도적인 기능이 중국 자동차 제조업체에게 경쟁력을 제공할 것으로 보고 있습니다.

노미: 자동차에 탑재된 특별한 AI 비서

차량용 인공지능 비서인 노미는 직접적인 명령이 아닌 감정적 신호에 반응하여 더욱 인간과 같은 느낌을 주는 것이 특징입니다.

자동차 회사의 새로운 비즈니스 모델은 판매 후 데이터, 분석, 서비스 수익화에 초점을 맞추고 있습니다.

중국 전기차 제조업체들은 기술 기능으로 차별화를 꾀하고 있지만, 중국 외 지역의 운전자들에게 이러한 기능의 효과와 공감을 이끌어낼 수 있을지는 불확실합니다.

중국 자동차 제조업체가 자동차 산업에 미치는 영향

중국 자동차 제조업체들은 디자인과 마감재에서 타협을 통해 가격을 낮추고 있으며, 그 결과 고가 모델과 눈에 띄는 차이를 보이고 있습니다.

이 신생 기업들은 아직 미숙함을 보이는 프리미엄 차량과 함께 아직 미숙한 부분을 보완하고 있습니다.

업계 전문가들은 중국 현지 브랜드가 기술 및 혁신적인 비즈니스 모델에 대한 현지의 선호도를 활용하는 데 탁월하기 때문에 중국 외 기업이 중국에서 경쟁하는 것에 대해 회의적인 시각을 가지고 있습니다.

중국 전기차 제조업체가 직면한 과제

중국 전기차 기업들은 언어와 문화가 다른 자국에서 성공을 재현하는 데 어려움을 겪고 있습니다.

이러한 기술 기업 중 상당수는 수익성이 좋지 않으며, 가격 전쟁으로 인해 상황이 더욱 악화되고 있습니다.

중국 전기차의 가장 큰 과제는 브랜드 충성도가 높은 소비자들이 자사 차량으로 전환하도록 설득하는 것이며, 궁극적으로 업계의 리더를 결정하는 것은 소비자들이 될 것입니다.