Vox talks about the Slate, which looks like it is—or at least aspires to be—the Model T of electric vehicles.

As is inevitable in any contemporary discussion of electric vehicles, #China came up. While you wouldn’t know this to look at American streets, the country with the world’s largest automotive industry is not the U.S., Japan, or in Europe: it’s China, and has been for the past twenty years. China’s electric car industry is vast, with sales worldwide. Moreover, Chinese electric cars are now both cheaper and, arguably, better than American ones, and the American auto industry does not want the competition.

This is where we get to the quote of the day, from Andrew Hawkins, transportation editor at The Verge:

In so many ways, the automotive industry is a stand-in for our whole economy. We hold up the auto industry as being this kind of beacon which represents our innovativeness and our leadership on the global stage. And I think that we’ve ceded that leadership now to China.

China is now leading. They sell the most cars, they export the most cars, and they have the best technology. They’ve cracked the code on cheap EVs. I feel like America is always going to have an outsized reputation, but whether that reputation is actually earned anymore…is a very open question.