When is a new car like Covid 19? When you try to keep it in China

We keep saying that China is the place where – Covid 19 permitting – Electric Vehicles will emerge from to conquer the world. Now General Motors’ Chevrolet is proving this point by launching a cheap EV, not in the US or Europe, but in China only. We assume that the idea is that if it cannot survive up against the literally 100s of Chinese EV firms, then it is not worth bringing it to the rest of the world, because at some point all those Chinese firms will spill out into the wider world. In the 1900s it was Detroit, but in the 2020s it is any of the Chinese cities of Shanghai, Changchun, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Hefei. The new…