In 2025, 1 in 4 new automotive vehicle sales globally are expected to be an electric vehicle—either fully electric or a plug-in hybrid.

That is a significant rise from just five years ago, when EV sales amounted to fewer than 1 in 20 new car sales, according to the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization examining energy use around the world.

In the U.S., however, EV sales have lagged, only reaching 1 in 10 in 2024. By contrast, in China, the world’s largest car market, more than half of all new vehicle sales are electric.

The International Energy Agency has reported that two-thirds of fully electric cars in China are now cheaper to buy than their gasoline equivalents. With operating and maintenance costs already cheaper than gasoline models, EVs are attractive purchases.

Most EVs purchased in China are made there as well, by a range of different companies. NIO, Xpeng, Xiaomi, Zeekr, Geely, Chery, Great Wall Motor, Leapmotor and especially BYD are household names in China. As someone who has followed and published on the topic of EVs for over 15 years, I expect they will soon become as widely known in the rest of the world.

What kinds of EVs is China producing?

China’s automakers are producing a full range of electric vehicles, from the subcompact, like the BYD Seagull, to full-size SUVs, like the Xpeng G9, and luxury cars, like the Zeekr 009.

Recent European crash-test evaluations have given top safety ratings to Chinese EVs, and many of them cost less than similar models made by other companies in other countries.

What’s behind Chinese EV success?

There are several factors behind Chinese companies’ success in producing and selling EVs. To be sure, relatively low labor costs are part of the explanation. So are generous government subsidies, as EVs were one of several advanced technologies selected by the Chinese government to propel the nation’s global technological profile.

But Chinese EV makers are also making other advances. They make significant use of industrial robotics, even to the point of building so-called “dark factories” that can operate with minimal human intervention. For passengers, they have reimagined vehicles’ interiors, with large touchscreens for information and entertainment, and even added a refrigerator, bed or karaoke system.

Competition among Chinese EV makers is fierce, which drives additional innovation. BYD is the largest seller of EVs, both domestically and globally. Yet the company says it employs over 100,000 scientists and engineers seeking continual improvement.

From initial concept models to actual rollout of factory-made cars, BYD takes 18 months—half as long as U.S. and other global automakers take for their product development processes, Reuters reported.

BYD is also the world’s second-largest EV battery seller and has developed a new battery that can recharge in just five minutes, roughly the same time it takes to fill a gas-powered car’s tank.

Exports

The real test of how well Chinese vehicles appeal to consumers will come from export sales. Chinese EV manufacturers are eager to sell abroad because their factories can produce far more than the 25 million vehicles they can sell within China each year—perhaps twice as much.

China already exports more cars than any other nation, though primarily gas-powered ones at the moment. Export markets for Chinese EVs are developing in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Australia and elsewhere.

The largest market where Chinese vehicles, whether gasoline or electric, are not being sold is North America. Both the U.S. and Canadian governments have created what some have called a “tariff fortress” protecting their domestic automakers, by imposing tariffs of 100% on the import of Chinese EVs—literally doubling their cost to consumers.

Customers’ budgets matter too. The average price of a new electric vehicle in the U.S. is approximately $55,000. Less expensive vehicles make up part of this average, but without tax credits, which the Trump administration is eliminating after September 2025, nothing gets close to $25,000. By contrast, Chinese companies produce several sub-$25,000 EVs, including the Xpeng M03, the BYD Dolphin and the MG4 without tax credits. If sold in America, however, the 100% tariffs would remove the price advantage.

Tesla, Ford and General Motors all claim they are working on inexpensive EVs. More expensive vehicles, however, generate higher profits, and with the protection of the “tariff fortress,” their incentive to develop cheaper EVs is not as high as it might be.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there was considerable U.S. opposition to importing Japanese vehicles. But ultimately, a combination of consumer sentiment and the willingness of Japanese companies to open factories in the U.S. overcame that opposition, and Japanese brands like Toyota, Honda and Nissan are common on North American roads. The same process may play out for Chinese automakers, though it’s not clear how long that might take.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

While there is a lot of work to do, Tedrake says all of the evidence so far suggests that the approaches used to LLMs also work for robots. “I think it’s changing everything,” he says.

Gauging progress in robotics has become more challenging of late, of course, with videoclips showing commercial humanoids performing complex chores, like loading refrigerators or taking out the trash with seeming ease. YouTube clips can be deceptive, though, and humanoid robots tend to be either teleoperated, carefully programmed in advance, or trained to do a single task in very controlled conditions.

The new Atlas work is a big sign that robots are starting to experience the kind of equivalent advances in robotics that eventually led to the general language models that gave us ChatGPT in the field of generative AI. Eventually, such progress could give us robots that are able to operate in a wide range of messy environments with ease and are able to rapidly learn new skills—from welding pipes to making espressos—without extensive retraining.

“It’s definitely a step forward,” says Ken Goldberg, a roboticist at UC Berkeley who receives some funding from TRI but was not involved with the Atlas work. “The coordination of legs and arms is a big deal.”

Google has escaped a breakup of its Chrome browser in a major US competition case, but the judge imposed remedies whose impact remains uncertain just as AI starts to compete with search engines.

Here is what we know about how the antitrust ruling could affect the company, the wider tech sector and ordinary users of the giant’s services.

—What is the impact on Google?

Judge Amit Mehta, who found a year ago that Google illegally maintained monopolies in online search, did not order the company to sell off its widely used Chrome browser in his Tuesday ruling.

Neither did he halt Google’s agreements with companies like iPhone maker Apple or Firefox browser developer Mozilla, under which it pays them to make Google their default search engine.

Instead, he ordered remedies including requirements to share data with other firms so they could develop their own search products, and barring exclusive deals to make Google the only search engine on a device or service.

The ruling was “far milder than feared… (it) removes a significant legal overhang and signals that the court is willing to pursue pragmatic remedies,” Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Matt Britzman commented.

Google chiefs nevertheless still “disagree… strongly with the Court’s initial decision in August 2024,” the company’s Vice President of Regulatory Affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland said in a blog post—hinting at a likely appeal that could go all the way to the US Supreme Court.

Stock in Google parent company Alphabet surged on Wednesday as investors welcomed the ruling.

—How will this affect the wider tech sector?

Mehta himself noted that the landscape has changed since the US Justice Department and 11 states launched their antitrust case against Google in 2020.

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence as a challenge to traditional search “give(s) the court hope that Google will not simply outbid competitors for distribution if superior products emerge,” he wrote in his ruling.

“Competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want,” Google’s Mulholland agreed.

Others in the sector were unhappy with the ruling.

“Google will still be allowed to continue to use its monopoly to hold back competitors, including in AI search,” said Gabriel Weinberg, chief executive of privacy-conscious search engine DuckDuckGo.

Beyond Google, observers have pointed out that Apple and Mozilla are both big winners from the decision.

Ending tie-ups like theirs with Google would “impose substantial—in some cases, crippling—downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets and consumers,” Mehta wrote.

“This is a huge win for Apple, but perhaps even more so for Mozilla, which may very well have died” without the cash infusions, former Google Ventures investor M.G. Siegler wrote on his blog.

—What about ordinary search and AI users?

In the near term, some search data will be shared by Google with competitors under the ruling—with Mulholland saying the company has “concerns about how these requirements will impact our users and their privacy”.

Looking further ahead, “Google Search is in the process of being disrupted” by chatbots, Siegler said.

A future where the company’s flagship search product is completely displaced may yet be far off, as Google Search notched up more than 85 billion individual visits in the month of March 2024, the most recent with data available from Statista.

That compares with around 700 million weekly users reported by OpenAI for its ChatGPT chatbot, the biggest-name generative AI product.

What’s more, Google is not barred from entering into the same kinds of distribution deals as it struck for online search to place its own AI products on partner devices or services.

The company already reports 450 million monthly users for its Gemini chatbot app, and offers competitive tools in other areas like video generation.

© 2025 AFP