Jason Hall

As these Chinese EVs get access to big Western markets, it's going to disrupt things in ways that are positive for consumers in the long run.

In part, because of something that Japan had 40 years ago, South Korea had 20 years ago, it's labor arbitrage, plus the government playing a bigger role in the industry.

These Chinese companies also have something that Japan and South Korea never did.

Massive natural resources and the world's biggest steel and electronics components manufacturing infrastructure.

That's where the real silver bullet is for China when it comes to EVs.

Yeah, for the most part, directionally, for certain.

I agree with Lou.

I think Chinese EVs are going to take share and challenge Western automakers, force them to innovate and improve.

But I'm just less concerned that investors in those Chinese EV companies are going to be big winners.

Look, the CCP doesn't really care about the share price being a big winner.

It cares about building a durable industry that will employ large numbers of Chinese and generate lots of revenue that it can take its share of.

We should be honest too, Lou, you hinted at it, but I want to be very clear about it.

Automaker stocks that beat the market, writ large, they're rarities to the point of possibly being extinct.

Instead of looking for the next Tesla, we should either be looking for pockets where there's predictable profitability, and we'll talk about that next, or disruption that's happening somewhere else.

I would be far more terrified if the CEO of any of these large automakers was making product decisions about what they were predicting the oil markets were going to do in the short term, even over a two-, three-, or five-year period.

If I'm running a big legacy automaker, I'm just trying to get it directionally right, not perfect.

I think we should acknowledge, too, that something else that's happened over the past 15 years, certainly over the past 25 years, is these larger vehicles that are still such an important part of the profit for these companies, they're far more fuel-efficient, they're more reliable, so maintenance costs have come down.

And even though fuel costs a lot more in terms of how much it hits your wallet is less when you're getting 50% higher fuel economy on a large SUV today than you would have if you bought it back in 2005.

As much as there's growth in markets like China, globally, the auto industry is pretty mature.

As a result, it's kind of zero-sum to some degree.