Chinese EVs are an outcome of global innovation

October 6, 2025

A couple of days ago I tried to interest my 21-year-old daughter in the way many technologies had come together to produce the current offering of Chinese EVs. It is not dissimilar to how we ended up with the iPhone.

I am an IT industry veteran who remembers working with individual transistors. It is not what exists now that I was holding out as our climate hope. It is how fast change happens when you reach these technology inflection points.

I couldn’t see it when I was in my 20s, working in the mini-computer industry and the PC arrived. Only five years later it was all over for mini-computers. In 2014, Elon Musk personally delivered a Tesla Model S to Lei Jun, founder of Xiaomi. In 2024, the Xiaomi SU 7 was released, one was imported and driven in the US by Jim Farley, chief executive of Ford.

Understanding the convergence of technology is easiest when watching videos. If readers of P&I want to see where EVs are at today, listen to interviews with American car industry experts like Farley and Sandy Munro. We could be easily left behind in Australia if we only listen to American politicians.