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The China Example: How US Automakers Need to Drive EV TransitionThe China Example: How US Automakers Need to Drive EV Transition

Industry experts advocate a wholesale culture shift, from manufacturing methods to vehicle cost, to compete globally.

Geoff Giordano

January 23, 2025

6 Min Read
NIO production line in Hefei, China
Workers from Chinese electric vehicle (EV) company NIO do final quality control inspections on the production line at the company’s manufacturing hub on January 17, 2025 in Hefei, China.Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

The continued global transition to electric vehicles hinges on a key question, according to some industry insiders: Will the U.S. be willing to learn from China’s “just get it done” model of EV production?

Experts agree it’s time to get real about how best to drive the EV transition—and how the U.S. must re-energize its work ethic and reframe economic and even social expectations. In short, it will take long-term vision and commitment to staying the course toward new energy—while allowing fast failures in the short term.

“It's a steep learning curve for everyone in the industry,” said Brian Engle, business development director at Amphenol, in staging a panel conversation at The Battery Show North America in Detroit in October. “There is everything from consumer perception to global politics to technology and material supply chain challenges that we're all faced with.”

With China dominating the current EV supply chain, “the technology is evolving very quickly over there, where the U.S. is kind of playing a game of catch up,” Engle asserted. He pointed to recent scaling back of mining and refining plans among some major battery suppliers, as well as gigafactory plans.

The big picture

The first piece of the EV transition puzzle is the U.S. legacy automakers and the cultural changes industry experts say they must make. Even if China isn’t the main competitor, there’s still Tesla to contend with, as well as high-tech companies. For instance, Waymo is collaborating with Uber on autonomous vehicles. Even Amazon and Apple have automotive groups.

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Beyond Detroit, in researching the rechargeable battery space, “we noticed that there were lots of problems in companies being able to execute projects, and being able to find talent that actually knows how to do things and has the experience of actually completing major projects,” said Michael Sanders, senior adviser at Avicenne Energy. That said, “we have two engineering firms we're working with, and we're about to add our third. We've designed two gigafactories which are under construction. So, we're excited to see that companies are looking at the space differently and looking at it as, ‘How can I get my project done?’”

Unrealistic perception of China

In terms of China’s status as the EV leader, Sanders noted that “the perception here is not reality. The perception is they've fully converted everything to battery electric vehicles. If you see the latest data from S&P, they're at 35% full electric, they're at 17% plug-in hybrid, and they're at mostly hybrid vehicles at this point.”

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While the U.S. conversion rate is considerably lower, Bloomberg business reporter Gabrielle Coppola noted that a good deal of EV innovation and breakthrough happened here—and yet, “the commercialization and making it a business and a reality happened in China. America is still grappling with how not to repeat that same mistake. And I think things have changed a lot. I think it started when [President Trump in his first term] said … ‘we’ve got to break this relationship with China of just consuming everything and not making anything here.’ I think the pandemic reinforced that lesson.”

‘Idea men’ vs learning by doing

With more than two decades in the battery industry, Lyten’s Chief Battery Technical Officer Celina Mikolajczak offered a culinary analogy:

“There's a world of difference between writing a recipe or seeing a recipe and going, ‘Yeah, I know how to do that,’ and actually producing the dish. When you're making batteries, you're doing the cooking,” Mikolajczak said. “Asia has been doing the cooking. They have been making the cells and learning all the little things, all the little details, all the little bits and bobs of what makes a good cell, what makes a high-volume production line, how you get that to work.

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“And that's something that as Americans, we like to not think about. We like to be the idea guys … ‘I know how to solve this.’ [But] getting in there and actually solving it, that's really grueling, hard work, and we don't tend to celebrate it as much. Unfortunately, that's the bit we've been missing. So we’ve got to get in and do it.”

Dave Roberts, program director at Libridge, concurred, adding: “We think that doing it is the easy part, that the manufacturing must be the easy part. The inventing of the core chemistry was the hard part. And we completely dismiss how difficult the doing of it is, especially when you've got to watch so many pots at the same time as you're cooking.”

Making EVs more affordable is a key component of the future of mobility and future U.S. competitiveness, asserted Tu Le, managing director at Sino Auto Insights.

“OEMs here need to play their part” to the develop the cars customer want now, Le said,  noting the discrepancy between, for example, the quality and features of a roughly $30,000 EV in the U.S. vs. China.

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Strategic production, not mass production, could facilitate that change, added Roberts. That might mean prioritizing production strategic utility over EVs to some extent. Further, “we need to be thinking about how to retain technology in the U.S. and start it here, even if it's going to be mass produced somewhere else."

‘Nothing wrong’ with bringing in, learning from Asia tech

Some experts view that line of thought as “giving up” on the U.S. car industry, at least in terms of exports. But the reality is that “the car industry is a global industry, so you can't look at it as saying the U.S. needs to dominate that the way it did back in the ‘40s and ‘50s—those days are gone,” Sanders said.

For the U.S., the question is: struggle now to forge a leadership role or import Asian technologies and learn first. The U.S. must gain strategic leverage, Sanders advised.

“There's nothing necessarily wrong with bringing in the leading technology from Korea or from China and learning. There's so many subtleties on how to make a battery and how to do it well that trying to do it all on your own is a fool's proposition. … The idea here is not to say, I'm going to let the Chinese or Koreans or whatever come in and run it and run it for multiple years and so forth. You have to get to the point that your team learns to where you can take control to whatever strategic destiny you want to be.”

Mikolajczak concurred that a new ethic must take hold among U.S. manufacturers. Recalling her stint at Panasonic, “we had 300 Japanese people in there helping us run this thing (and they) didn't think we could run that factory on our own. They assumed it was crash and burn. Eventually you’ve got to … figure it out.”

About the Author

Geoff Giordano

Geoff Giordano is a tech journalist with more than 30 years’ experience in all facets of publishing. He has reported extensively on the gamut of plastics manufacturing technologies and issues, including 3D printing materials and methods; injection, blow, micro and rotomolding; additives, colorants and nanomodifiers; blown and cast films; packaging; thermoforming; tooling; ancillary equipment; and the circular economy. Contact him at [email protected].

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