> “In order to be a global player, we have to win in terms of our quantity,” Great Wall’s European president Meng Xiangjun told the Financial Times. “The priority for us now is to enter the European market.”

If the quality is in fact superior than the competition at the same price points, then I don't see why not. Big question IF, howver. As the article states, they could potentially mirror the success of the Japanese cars in the US market, starting in the 80s and the in the European markets in the 90s.

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Great Wall is preparing to build the next version of the electric Mini through a joint venture with BMW in China. The company is also looking to secure a European site in time.

Henrik Fisker, a former BMW and Aston Martin executive who runs the start-up electric vehicle company Fisker, said eventually the quality of the products will win over new customers.

“When I look at these Chinese cars, I actually don’t see any real price advantages,” he said, while sitting in the new Fisker Ocean manufactured by Magna Steyr in Austria.

“Quite frankly, I think, yeah, some of them are pretty nice electric cars.”

European carmakers face rough road in China

China’s car industry leads the world in sales of electric vehicles, leaving foreign companies at risk of being left behind.

“Among the top 15 EV producers in China, only four can be considered to have foreign ownership,” according to a new report by Berlin-based think-tank Merics. “In 2021, BMW and Mercedes-Benz had market shares of less than 0.3 per cent in China’s EV market, having sold fewer than 10,000 units each in a market of 3.3mn units.”

Volkswagen fared better but still had only a 3.7 per cent share of the EV market, compared with 11.3 per cent of the overall market, it added.

The German carmakers have deepened their investment in China to try to catch up with local rivals. In June this year, BMW opened its fourth factory in the country, while Audi’s new joint venture with FAW broke ground on a plant in Changchun, a city in the north-east, this year.

China is also one of the largest profit pools for the German car groups, which makes them reluctant to comment publicly on the nation.

Only Carlos Tavares, the Stellantis boss whose brands include Germany’s Opel, has warned about the need to cut reliance on China as a market. His company, which has struggled there, recently pulled out of its Jeep factory in China, and is considering closing its Peugeot and Citroën plants in the country as well, he told an audience at the Paris Motor Show last week.

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He also forecasts that traditional carmakers will limit electric sales before 2025, when CO₂ targets in the region tighten, in order to eke out as many higher margin petrol or diesel sales as possible.

This, he said, presents an opportunity for the Chinese brands.

Already, with little fanfare, China’s carmakers have built a toehold in the European market.

One in 20 electric vehicles sold in the region in the first six months of 2022 were Chinese owned brands, led by SAIC’s MG, and Polestar, backed by Geely.

But this is just the start.

BYD will begin selling its three new models before the end of the year, premium brand Nio has recently announced its plans to sell outside European EV outlier Norway, and Aiways, a mass-market brand backed by Jiangling Motors, claims to have orders for 10,000 vehicles.

Transport and Environment, a green lobby group, expects the Chinese share of Europe’s fast-growing battery car market to grow to one in six cars by the middle of the decade.

“If Europe wants to maintain the competitiveness of its car industry, the EU must introduce a strong industrial policy of its own to match the Chinese and Americans’ muscular support for EVs,” said Julia Poliscanova, director at the agency.

A wave of factories are likely to follow sales, as was the case with both the Japanese and then Koreans, as they establish production closer to their customers.

BYD is already in talks with several countries, including the UK, according to two people, about setting up a factory making both batteries and vehicles. The company will decide how many plants it needs based on its sales, Shu said, while declining to comment on its possible locations.

Nio, which launched in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands and will enter the UK next year, expects to build a site once it passes 200,000 sales, said Li.

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Michael Dunne, a former General Motors executive in China who runs the ZoZoGo consultancy, said: “To triumph, they must win trust on two fronts: Customers unfamiliar with their brands. And political leaders wary of China’s master plans.”

Shanghai’s SAIC has swerved the brand issue by buying MG, which is already the top selling electric brand from a Chinese company in the region.

But the political hurdle will be harder to clear.

Stellantis’s Tavares warned that the new Chinese companies, some of which are backed by the state, will sell their vehicles at a loss in order to undercut European brands and grow market share.

“We don’t want to have Chinese neighbours that sell at a loss in Europe, and then put the automotive industry on their knees,” he said, calling for the EU to impose tariffs on cars imported from China.

Nio chief executive William Li said he was not concerned by political opposition, pointing out that many US car buyers opted for Japanese brands during the height of a trade war in the 1980s.

The company will focus “on user interests” that will outweigh “any potential trend against the brands for China”, he told the FT.

Europe is no stranger to the breakthrough of Asian brands, having witnessed the arrival of Japan’s Toyota, Nissan and Honda in the 1990s, and then Korean labels Hyundai and Kia since 2000.

For years, China’s own carmakers were confined to their home market, and even there struggled to compete with western or Japanese brands with petrol engine models.

But the advent of electric vehicles has given the brands their first shot at dominance — not just in their own market, but finally on the international stage.

“Chinese carmakers, once having been the butt of all automotive jokes following failed crash tests and poor quality standards, now feel confident enough to give it another shot with a fully-charged line-up,” said Matthias Schmidt, an independent car analyst. “The class of 2022 is almost unrecognisable from those models arriving 15 years ago.”

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BYD, Great Wall and Nio among groups with big growth plans

Former Volkswagen chief Herbert Diess was once asked privately which carmaker he feared most.

Instead of Tesla, the Californian pioneer of electric cars, or one of his traditional rivals in Europe or the US, he chose BYD — a Chinese carmaker, little known among western consumers.

The Warren Buffett-backed group is one of nearly a dozen Chinese brands preparing to use electric cars to storm Europe’s market.

Their ascendance, said industry leaders and analysts, will reshape the continent’s automotive landscape over the next decade.

“The market is wide open to the Chinese,” said Stellantis chief executive Carlos Tavares, in a warning to established carmakers in Europe.

He was speaking last week at the Paris Motor Show, where BYD and Great Wall each erected large stands directly opposite the exhibition’s French stalwarts Renault and Peugeot.

Great Wall’s Ora brand aims to break into the bottom of the market with its £30,000 Ora Funky Cat model and the premium sector with its Wey nameplate.

BYD prices its cars at the same level as VW’s battery models, but says its range of services on its three new vehicles will set it apart.

The company also makes everything in its vehicles except the tyres and glass, preventing it from falling into the same supply chain trap that has snared most other manufacturers.

“In order to be a global player, we have to win in terms of our quantity,” Great Wall’s European president Meng Xiangjun told the Financial Times. “The priority for us now is to enter the European market.”

BYD’s Michael Shu, who leads its European rollout, said the company has not set sales targets, but focuses exclusively on customer satisfaction.

“We believe that is the core to help the business for us,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter about the politics, doesn’t matter there is a lot of competition, doesn’t matter there is the earthquake from the energy prices going up. We focus on customer satisfaction, that is our major focus.”

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It would cost $65 million to deploy an ad made by 50 satellites, according to the study.

Because space ads would need some sunlight to reflect, but also a dark enough sky to be visible from the ground, they’d be most visible at sunrise and sunset. It’d make sense, then, for the formations to travel with the sun, moving over one populated city after another.

The researchers calculated a possible path for a satellite formation, with the assumption that it would display an ad for about a minute over one city before moving to the next location, and then estimated the revenue to be made during a deployment.

“The revenue estimates are derived from outdoor advertising costs, population, and factors that limit the number of people noticing the space ad: cloudiness, cold weather keeping folks indoors, and the city’s demographic composition,” said first author Shamil Biktimirov.

Based on those estimates, they determined that a space advertising mission could generate up to $2 million in revenue daily — enough for the space ad to pay for itself in about a month.

Why it matters: The prospect of a billboard circling the Earth raises some obvious aesthetic concerns. But it could also create practical issues for studying the night sky.

“Astronomy is facing a watershed moment of increasing interference with observations and loss of science.”

Astronomers have been vocal about their concerns that the expected increase of satellites in low-Earth orbit will hinder their ability to study space, track potentially dangerous asteroids, and more.

“As the number of satellites continues to grow, astronomy is facing a watershed moment of increasing interference with observations and loss of science,” Connie Walker from NOIRLab told BBC News.

This controversy might deter major brands from giving space advertising a go at first, but it’s all but certain that some company will put a billboard in space — and if they end up making a lot of money from it, we might start seeing space ads all across the sky at twilight.

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They claim a three-month ad would pay for itself in one month.

Space advertising would cost a lot upfront but wouldn’t be too expensive to turn a hefty profit, according to researchers from the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT).

“As unrealistic as it may seem, we show that space advertising based on 50 or more small satellites flying in formation could be economically viable,” they write in the journal Aerospace.

Space ads: Thanks to cheaper rocket launches and low-cost CubeSats, space is more accessible than ever before, making it easier for scientists, startups, and others to get into orbit — performing groundbreaking experiments in microgravity, for instance.

But the situation is also making space advertising seem viable. The idea is to use CubeSats equipped with sun-reflecting sails as pixels in giant ads, which would be visible to the naked eye below on Earth — kind of like drone light shows.

“Space advertising based on 50 or more small satellites flying in formation could be economically viable."

It sounds like science fiction, but some think it’s becoming a feasible marketing option.

While many have talked about space advertising — including beverage giant Pepsi — no one has actually created one of these off-world billboards, though, so we don’t know exactly how they would work, what they would cost, or whether they’d even be worth it.

Ad it up: The Russian researchers’ new study addresses some of the mystery surrounding space ads.

Based on their calculations, it would cost $65 million to deploy an ad made by 50 satellites equipped with 32-square-meter reflectors — the largest size that’s been successfully deployed on a CubeSat — for 1 to 3 months, including the costs of the satellites, launch, and engineering.

The team then estimated the potential revenue that could be generated from one of the ads.

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A chiral object has a mirror image that cannot be superimposed on itself. A common example is the human hand. The left is a reflection of the right, but the two cannot be placed on top of each other or rotated in a way that would make their shapes appear identical.

The researchers used 3D printing to create a device that mimicked the passion fruit’s dehydration process. They created hemisphere-shaped moulds with a hexagonal pattern on the surface, which they filled with liquid silicone to make a ball. The ball has a small hole that serves as an air channel connecting an internal cavity and an external tube for air extraction.

When air is pumped out, the soft silicone ball shrinks like a dried passion fruit, tightly grasping any item next to it and locking it in place. When the device’s cavity is inflated, it releases the object.

The team tested the device with a diamond, the hardest known material, grabbing it from multiple angles. They also used the device to grab other small objects, including nuts, screws, mung beans, soybeans, blueberries, heart-shaped candy, glass fragments and a glass ball.

Xu said the team would develop similar devices in other shapes, such as a human hand or animal paw, to recreate the precise grasping ability of fingers.

According to Xu, smart materials such as magnetic powder and liquid crystal could be used in future devices, allowing them to morph into different shapes.

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• Silicone ball forms deep wrinkles that can ‘grab’ nearby items, from diamonds and glass to blueberries and soybeans

• Invention could be used to retrieve hazardous materials, hard-to-reach objects and debris that could harm spacecraft, researchers say

A box of withered passion fruit inspired Chinese scientists to invent a device they say could be used to clean up space debris and hazardous materials. The researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai and Tsinghua University in Beijing developed a soft silicone ball with a bumpy texture resembling the wrinkled skin of the dried fruit.

The deep wrinkles on the device’s surface can grasp a variety of objects – from diamonds to blueberries – and could even be used to clean up tiny particles of space junk floating in orbit, according to the scientists, whose findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Computational Science on Monday.

Xu Fan, a professor with the department of aeronautics and astronautics at Fudan University, said the simple and agile device could be made in sizes ranging from millimetres to metres and be deployed in places people could not reach.

“A robotic arm equipped with the sphere grasper could collect small space debris with high precision,” Xu said. “On Earth, it could pick up dangerous particles such as explosives.”

According to Nasa, there are about half a million marble-sized pieces of debris stuck in the Earth’s orbit, while another 100 million pieces as small as a pencil tip are circling the planet. Even the smallest pieces of debris, such as paint flecks from rockets, can damage spacecraft as they collide at extremely high speeds in low-Earth orbit.

The idea started with a box of fruit that was left at the office. Xu’s colleague at Tsinghua called to say he saw some interesting patterns taking shape in the withering produce, so the scientists started dehydrating passion fruit to observe them. e They found that the fruit first buckled into a buckyball shape, with hexagons and pentagons covering their surface in a pattern that resembled a football. As time passed, they developed a network of ridges that deepened as the fruit continued to dry out.

As they studied the ridges, they were inspired to mimic the patterns in the lab and put their observations to use. They found that the pattern of the ridges could “grasp” things, thanks to a property called “chirality”.

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AstroForge is another company that believes space mining will become a reality. Founded in 2022 by a former SpaceX engineer and a former Virgin Galactic engineer, AstroForge still believes there is money to be made in mining asteroids for precious metals.

“On Earth we have a limited amount of rare earth elements, specifically the platinum group metals. These are industrial metals that are used in everyday things your cell phone, cancer, drugs, catalytic converters, and we’re running out of them. And the only way to access more of these is to go off world,” says AstroForge Co-Founder and CEO Matt Gialich.

AstroForge plans to mine and refine these metals in space and then bring them back to earth to sell. To keep costs down, AstroForge will attach its refining payload to off-the shelf satellites and launch those satellites on SpaceX rockets.

“There’s quite a few companies that make what is referred to as a satellite bus. This is what you would typically think of as a satellite, the kind of box with solar panels on it, a propulsion system being connected to it. So for us, we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel there,” Gialich says. “The previous people before us, Planetary Resources and DSI [Deep Space Industries], they had to buy entire vehicles. They had to build much, much larger and much more expensive satellites, which required a huge injection of capital. And I think that was the ultimate downfall of both of those companies.”

The biggest challenge, AstroForge says, is deciding which asteroids to target for mining. Prior to conducting their own missions, all early-stage mining companies have to go on is existing observation data from researchers and a hope that the asteroids they have selected contain the minerals they seek.

“The technology piece you can control, the operations pieces you can control, but you can’t control what the asteroid is until you get there,” says Jose Acain, AstroForge Co-Founder and CTO.

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Just a couple of years ago, it seemed that space mining was inevitable. Analysts, tech visionaries and even renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson predicted that space mining was going to be big business.

Space mining companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, backed by the likes of Google ’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, cropped up to take advantage of the predicted payoff.

Fast forward to 2022, and both Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries have been acquired by companies that have nothing to do with space mining. Humanity has yet to commercially mine even a single asteroid. So what’s taking so long?

Space mining is a long-term undertaking and one that investors do not necessarily have the patience to support.

“If we had to develop a full-scale asteroid mining vehicle today, we would need a few hundred million dollars to do that using commercial processes. It would be difficult to convince the investment community that that’s the right thing to do,” says Joel Sercel, president and CEO of TransAstra Corporation.

“In today’s economics and in the economics of the near future, the next few years, it makes no sense to go after precious metals in asteroids. And the reason is the cost of getting to and from the asteroids is so high that it vastly outstrips the value of anything that you’d harness from the asteroids,” Sercel says.

This has not dissuaded Sercel from trying to mine the cosmos. TransAstra will initially focus on mining asteroids for water to make rocket propellant, but would like to eventually mine “everything on the periodic table.” But Sercel says such a mission is still a ways off.

“In terms of the timeline for mining asteroids, for us, the biggest issue is funding. So it depends on how fast we can scale the business into these other ventures and then get practical engineering experience operating systems that have all the components of an asteroid mining system. But we could be launching an asteroid mission in the 5 to 7-year time frame.”

Sercel hopes these other ventures keep it afloat until it develops its asteroid mining business. The idea is to use the tech that will eventually be incorporated into TransAstra’s astroid mining missions to satisfy already existing market needs, such as using space tugs to deliver satellites to their exact orbits and using satellites to aid in traffic management as space gets increasingly more crowded.

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Biktimirov and his team say the descent of the satellites and any potential collisions could be monitored, but some are sceptical of how accurately this could be done. “The debris is especially concerning, given that tracking objects and satellites across a range of sizes and orbital parameters is inherently challenging and is affected by many factors including solar storms,” says Aparna Venkatesan at the University of San Francisco, California.

The only way to really mitigate this risk is by taking the satellites down as soon as they stop functioning, says John Crassidis at the University of Buffalo in New York. “Until there is a mandate to immediately remove the satellites once their formation is no longer maintained, then they will be a problem,” he says.

As well as the risk from debris, the reflected light could interfere with important telescopes, both on Earth and in space, including asteroid monitoring systems. “Astronomy already contends with the interference from the thousands of satellites already in orbit and faces a future in which that number may be as much as 100 times higher than it is now within a decade. Space advertising will only make this worse,” says Barentine.

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Falling launch costs for satellites mean space advertising may now make commercial sense, according to a feasibility study, but the idea remains controversial

Constellations of satellites that reflect sunlight to Earth could be used for space advertising at a commercially viable cost of $65 million per mission, according to a feasibility study. But the idea is controversial among researchers, who warn of a pile-up of dangerous space debris and light pollution for ground and space-based telescopes.

Previous proposals for space advertising didn’t make commercial sense – the cost of launching enough satellites, which tend to remain in the correct orbit for only a short amount of time, has been prohibitive for any serious attempts.

But as launch costs have decreased with the advent of private space companies, Shamil Biktimirov at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow, Russia, and his colleagues think it could now be viable if the mechanics of how the satellites are used as advertising are reassessed.

To do this, they borrowed techniques that describe the dynamics of mega-constellations, such as that of Starlink’s communications satellite fleet, and used this to calculate how much revenue companies could get for keeping their satellites in the sky for certain lengths of time.

They propose that a fleet of about 50 satellites equipped with curved reflectors could orbit around the line where day turns to night and reflect the sun’s light to a patch of ground below. They would be arranged to form an image made of bright pixels showing a logo or a basic image. Viewers on the ground would see the constellation move across the sky in around 10 minutes around dawn or dusk, growing from half-moon size to two to three times bigger than the moon at its peak.

To maximise revenue, the satellites would change formation around 25 times to target different locations in a three month period of operation before the satellites run out of fuel and slowly descend towards Earth and – Biktimirov hopes – burn up.

But this long descent could be a problem. “The spaceflight risk from debris related to these objects is considerable,” says John Barentine of Dark Sky Consulting, a company based in Tucson, Arizona. “Left derelict in orbits with long lifetimes, every single object becomes a potential ‘bullet’ that threatens every other object in similar orbits. Any one might set off a catastrophic cascade of debris generation.”