China's slow EVs register fast exports growth

In a gated community outside Phoenix in the United States, a family rolls to the neighborhood pool in a small, open-sided electric vehicle. A rancher in Texas uses the same machine to haul feed across the property. On a California golf course, it becomes a golf cart; in a Florida retirement village, it is simply how you go for dinner. The vehicle is quiet, tops out at around 40 kilometers per hour, and costs a fraction of a regular car.

The conventional story about Chinese manufacturing is that it competes on price and stays stuck there, good enough and cheap enough to be forgettable. Tao Motor, a company in East China's Zhejiang province that has become one of the world's largest makers of these electric low-speed vehicles (LSVs), challenges that story. With most of its revenue generated overseas and a significant footprint in the US low-speed EV market, the company has grown into one of the global leaders in the LSV industry. It did not get there simply by being the cheapest thing on the lot.

What crossed the ocean was not a cut-price product, but the same product in a different scene. It is the scene, not the discount, that created the value.

It is easy to miss that a vehicle's worth is not solely inside its specifications; it is determined by where and how it is used. In a Chinese city, a slow electric cart competes with subways, scooters and cars, and loses on every parameter but price. In a US subdivision, a resort, a campground or a ranch, the same slowness becomes an asset: safe around children, easy to park, pleasant in the open air, perfectly suited for the two-kilometer trip where a regular automobile would be excessive. Tao Motor's real achievement was not engineering but noticing that a machine dismissed at home had a natural home somewhere else.

Once you understand the scene, you can sell far more than transportation. The cart starts as a bargain, but buyers soon start noticing what else it does: the fun of the school run, the ease of errands, the small pleasure of being visible in the neighborhood. It becomes the household's second car, a lifestyle object rather than a discount purchase, and that shift from cheap to meaningful is what transforms an exporter into a brand.

Much of this repositioning happens on social media, where a familiar object is quietly given an unfamiliar purpose. A golf cart is an old idea, but a golf cart as the center of family weekend life is a new one, and it spreads through short videos: someone filming the morning drop-off, the beach run or the chores on the farm, with a comment below telling viewers where to buy one. These clips are less advertisements than demonstrations of a use that did not exist before, and they let a Chinese brand do more than meet the demand: they helped it define what the category is for.

Underpinning all this is an unglamorous but decisive division of labor. The platform, meaning the battery, the chassis and the cost structure, is kept standard and efficient, while everything that touches the scene is localized: safety certification, dealer and repair networks, styling, and the story told around the product. Tao Motor sells through an extensive dealer and retail network, and runs a family of brands from mass-market to premium. None of that shows up on the price tag, but it is precisely why the price tag is no longer the point.

A warning is folded into this success, the same one that trips up every company reaching for a story it has not earned. If "made in China" is treated only as a discount sticker, buyers get exactly what they pay for and move on. If the scene is a gimmick — all retro paint and lifestyle hashtag over an ordinary product — they notice quickly, and say so online. The durable version of this business does the harder thing: it keeps reading the customer's actual life and builds a category worth belonging to, not a coupon worth clipping.

None of this has changed the cart itself: it remains slow and simple, and cheap to build. What has changed is that a Chinese company learned to see where such a machine belonged, and who would want to own one after watching a neighbor glide past. This act of perception, reading a foreign life closely enough to know what a product can mean in that setting, is the real upgrade from selling goods to building brands. It is also the part no competitor can reverse-engineer from a spec sheet, which is exactly why that perception, and not the low price, is the export that will endure.

The author is a professor of marketing at the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.