this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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The thing is, cheap or expensive everything is made in china. You can buy a BYD and have state of the art technology in a car or a Chirey and pay peanuts for a car that does the job. Just like you can buy an iphone, made in china, or a Xiaomi for 50 bucks.
And here we are. Full circle.
The original Ender3 is a good example of a cheap 3D printer that went through almost zero QA. By some miracle, most printers worked and still do. However, it doesn't take much to dig and find all the ones that were shipped with fake XTC connectors and were a fire hazard. There are plenty more examples I could dig up from personal experience. (We won't even get into all the tools I have fixed where the chassis is referenced to mains or high voltage components had no, or insufficient, grounding.)
What a coincidence! I work for a 3D printer farm with about 2000 printers. We have had all the different kinds, and we finally settled for the ender V3
The V3 is relatively new. I am referring to the originals that made Creality and I know those printers inside and out. While they were a good starter printer, they had dozens of flaws. You name an issue, I saw it.
I was using that as an example of bad QA for consumers. Anyone who can rebuild printers can identify and fix those issues, but it shouldn't be that way.
Here is a good example of your average Amazon product where MOSFETs have been sanded down and laser etched with fake branding and part numbers:
If you like a good mass production story, just look back on YouTube on the Linux Tech Tips channel about the Chinese company that decided to cost cut when he was finalizing his screwdriver for production.
There are quality products from companies like DJI or Bambu Lab, or, domestically designed products where companies have to babysit production. Hell, even PCB fab companies are generally OK, but even they have randomly cropped parts of my PCBs for no reason.
These have been getting pumped out of China for years, too: https://www.temu.com/home-appliance-voltage-regulator-energy-saver-intelligent-power-saver-smart-home-power-saver-new-power-saver-g-601099538791191.html
Just Google for ODB2 fuel savers, another scam that has been around for years.
Is there no regulation on scams? All authorities would need to do is search Temu, eBay or Amazon for those two products, over and over again.
As long as you are a smart buyer and understand what you need Chinese companies will provide it. If you are looking for the lowest price then you'll get it, if you are looking for high standards, like the iphone smartphones, you'll get it as well. Same with EV cars. If you want a top quality EV you buy a BYD, if you want a piece of metal with a battery to take you places you can go as low as you want. But don't get me wrong, I really like that the US is blocking the EV cars from China because their market is very big and it would make the prices go up and the stocks would dry from everywhere else to supply the US market.
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.
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.)
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
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.)