I thought it was for Banana Yellow Dildo.

Now I’m a little less excited to get one.

If you don’t like that, then you probably don’t own a smart phone or a computer then, because the minerals required to make these devices operate is almost entirely from the same mine in the DRC where workers are buried alive by cave-ins and left to die. The magnets used to make electronics work mostly comes from a Chinese mine that has destroyed an entire village and caused the deaths of thousands of people from cancer. Probably don’t eat chocolate also because it’s almost impossible to buy chocolate that doesn’t have child slaves somewhere in the supply chain. Also there are children at the mines in the DRC, they die in cave-ins too.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You can pick any one item, trace it back to the raw materials required to produce it, and you will likely find something that is ethically wrong with how it was produced. It’s all horrible, the whole system is fucked and I don’t know what to do about it but I don’t think singling out any one company for their morally bankrupt policies is the way to go about it. You can say don’t buy this or that, but then you’d eventually have to say don’t buy anything, which isn’t the way to go about changing things.

In any case, there is a definite need for affordable electric vehicles because people have been raised on the belief that owning a vehicle is somehow the only way to survive. It’s really difficult to change peoples minds on that, and it shows in how we’ve designed our cities and not invested any money at all into building a national rail network that would reduce the need for a personal vehicle. But here we are, with the climate slowly failing and most people just going on with their lives as if it wasn’t. We need something to satiate their need/want for a personal vehicle that doesn’t rely on fuel and BYD seems to be the only option for Canadians in terms of affordability. I do wish dacia and renault would open up shop in Canada but they haven’t. So now we only have the larger auto makers and fucking tesla which is unaffordable or you give slightly less money to a fascist oligarch in the states. With BYD we now have a third option: give a relatively small amount of money to a Chinese automaker with a long list of labour violations that they’re not going to do anything about. Most people will go with BYD because it’s the only one they can afford and it’s not a tesla.

Tl;DR - We need a cheap EV to help reduce the damage being caused by climate change. ‘Traditional’ manufacturers are not providing this option, so now we have BYD. They have no respect for workers rights (like every international company) but the cheaper EVs they can provide will help reduce fossil fuel usage.

AFAICT, the BYD factory in Zhengzhou is mostly automated. I mean, the Chinese government is awful, and I can’t afford to buy a vehicle anyway, but simply having another option other than expensive luxury electric car or support the american fascist oligarch is a good thing for Canadians. It’s still a choice between a turd sandwich and a piece of shit tho, at least BYD should be cheaper and has less risk than supporting a guy that’s actively undermining American democracy.

I know there are cheap electric cars from renault and dacia (also renault), and idk why they’re not sold in Canada. Maybe they don’t have the capacity to serve the Canadian market. I’m sure they’d blow BYD out of the water if they did, considering how car centered our infrastructure is and what I perceive as a thirst for cheap electric cars *and general support for increasing relations with Europe.

Anyway, their cars are made in Morocco, so I’m not sure if the workers there are treated any better than ones in China, or the states for that matter.