I'm sure they can produce crash-worthy cars. The question is whether they'll continue to do so once they're past the crash testing stage. I seem to recall reading quite a few cases in a range of industries where Chinese manufacturers substituted cheaper, lower-grade materials when the thought they could get away with it.
Personally, I would feel bad making such a negative characterization based on something I seem to recall. I'd look it up. If I was right, I'd provide the source, if I was wrong I'd be silently embarrassed.
It's a fairly well known phenomenon. There is a book called "Poorly Made In China" about it, and the term for it is "Quality Fade".
The concept is that after winning the contract (sometimes at a price below their own costs, in order to beat competing manufacturers), the Chinese manufacturer increases their profit margin by "optimizing" the product design - using cheaper components or omitting parts without the knowledge of the buyer, until the products are rejected.
Here's an article I found from a random search on "Quality Fade" [1]. For a counter-viewpoint, the China Law Blog [2] argues it isn't Quality Fade if customers still buy the products. It was written in response to a recall of 23,000 Chinese-made cars in Australia after they were found to have asbestos in their engine gaskets. Great Wall Motor had argued that "their own in-house testing [had] concluded that the asbestos was not a danger to human bodies" [3].
Thanks for posting this! I was on mobile and didn't have the time to dig up sources, but the asbestos-in-vehicles incident is one of the specific examples I was thinking of.
The baby formula example that a sibling poster mentioned is another. Where I live the supermarkets have had to limit customers to 1-2 tins of formula each because people were buying trolleys full of it to ship to China, where middle-class Chinese buy it because they can't trust locally sold formula to be safe for their babies.
The argument in [2] that if customers still buy products then everything is fine, when in fact both the immediate client and the end customer are being defrauded, just underscores the mindset behind the problem. Any company (local or foreign) doing serious fabrication in a country like China needs their own comprehensive QC system in place to oversee the entire build process.
I wouldn't. They prefaced their statement with "I seem to recall", which is a sufficient acknowledgment of the author's own uncertainty toward the statement that follows.
I applaud the poster for stating that the veracity of his memory is debatable instead of certain. I wish people would do it more often.
I don't think it's worth shopping from China unless you're in China or reselling stuff made in China and have deals directly with the suppliers. A lot of products are cheaper buying from retailers outside of China if you're also outside of China. The cost isn't worth it to ship to individuals outside of China unless you're willing to pay the shipping fee, and that erases the cost benefit that most people would hope to get?
If you are talking about retailers like the merchants on Aliexpress, many of them offer free shipping. So the prices are lower and the shipping is free. It's crazy that I sometimes buy an item that costs less than US$1 that comes with free shipping. I read somewhere that the Chinese postal system subsidizes a lot of it - not sure if true.
Shipping via regular post from AliExpress is often free or very cheap while the same items on Amazon cost 3-5 times more and shipping to my country is $10-15. The downside is 1-2 months waiting times vs. a week from Amazon but I can wait.
You're paying your saved shipping fees in taxes. It still costs the postal services the same amount to deliver the package from the import warehouse to your door but they cannot charge you nor the seller according to international agreements.
