Automotive Industry

tl;dr: There is much more to this than just having "smart consumers" and there are some very real reasons why Chinese products can be cheaper to make and sell. Cost cuts always come from somewhere.

If you want a top quality EV you buy a BYD

That's a bold statement. I'll be more comfortable when I see more third-party teardowns of the vehicles that are conducted outside of mainland China. There have been a few that seem independent, but not enough to my liking. (In fairness, I have no love for Tesla at all. If anything, I have a stronger bias against Tesla.)

Battery fire data, that I can find, has been heavily obfuscated by both Tesla and BYD with floods of soft propaganda on that subject. Reports of battery fires seem to be more common with BYD, but even that is unreliable. For example, BYD fires have some reports between 2x and 10x more than that of Tesla, while other reports have them a 2x lower. (Uncertainty is a pure propaganda win, I suppose.)

As long as you are a smart buyer and understand what you need Chinese companies will provide

if you are looking for high standards, like the iphone smartphones, you'll get it as well.

That's my point. A person basically needs an EE degree to understand what they are getting unless a Chinese company puts a massive emphasis on QA themselves, which is rare. Otherwise, US companies have to implement strict guidelines for Chinese manufacturing and testing themselves.

We also need to go deeper into component counterfeits. While there are numerous clones of standard ICs on the market, there are just as many fake and mislabeled ICs that make it into brand products that were sourced from China as well. Component swaps are extremely common unless major component distributors implement their own QA processes. Mouser and DigiKey have to charge a premium for this, where LKR or LCSC seem to specialize in clones and can cut costs that way.

The most well known issue I can think of is the electrolytic capacitor scandal that happened between 1999 and 2007. (That comes to mind first as I just replaced several dozen caps in a legacy CD player and MIDI keyboard.)

Here is some more interesting stuff. It goes beyond criticism and into the bizarre and quirky: Fake OPamps that have been discovered recently: https://youtu.be/NSgqYLLPUSs?si=C8Nca5zJZXcyf0Hi

if you want a piece of metal with a battery to take you places you can go as low as you want.

That is where I have a bit more faith in the structure of the US legal system, for once. Buying a faulty LED dimmer is one thing but buying a car is another. If BYD (or Tesla) cars start killing other people that haven't bought an EV, I would expect that any ensuing lawsuits would get the FTC and the US DOT sufficiently motivated to clamp down harder on shoddy construction. (Strict regulation has its own disadvantages, of course.)

It's not a contest. The point was that there are affordable ways to go electric, so you're just supporting my argument. Congrats on deushing your own oil, but where did you buy 5000+ gallons of gas for less than $3,800?

Good for you that you are recycling old cars. I do the same - our 2nd car is a 1993 Corolla with 275k on it. Drives fine. For you an EV doesn't make sense and that's just fine. But:

People will quickly learn that buying an old EV means they’ll have to tack on an extra $15k for a battery.

This is the sort of crap people spew when they can't be bothered to research stuff and just use "facts" they "heard". They generalize and round way up and now these are the new "facts". I have to imagine you can do better.

1. Not all batteries are $15k - far from it. Many are $6-7k Given that maintenance and TCO at that point are extremely low, that's not bad over the lifetime of a car. Ever had to replace an engine? Easily in the same range for some cars.
2. It's not a given that an "old" EV needs a new battery. Lifespans are easily 10 years or more and lose range at about 1-2% per year or 10% every 200,000 miles.
3. Battery costs have plummeted and continue to fall.