There is something uniquely pathetic about the human animal’s desire to replicate failure while calling it progress. Currently, the world’s most populous surveillance state is engaged in a frantic, foam-flecked sprint to determine which of its smog-choked metropolises will earn the dubious honor of being the ‘Detroit of electric vehicles.’ It is a phrase that should, by any metric of sanity, be a threat rather than a goal. Detroit, for those who haven’t visited the crumbling mausoleum of American industry lately, is less a thriving hub of innovation and more a cautionary tale about what happens when you tie a city’s entire soul to a four-wheeled box of planned obsolescence. Yet, here we are, watching cities like Hefei, Changzhou, and Shenzhen cannibalize their own resources to become the primary manufacturer of adult-sized lithium-ion toys.

The premise is simple and predictably stupid: the internal combustion engine is the devil, and the electric motor is the savior. It’s a convenient fiction that ignores the reality of how these things are built. To save the planet, we must apparently strip-mine it until it resembles a Swiss cheese of ecological despair, all so we can commute thirty miles in a vehicle that weighs three tons and features a tablet on the dashboard that will be software-locked into uselessness within five years. The 'fierce battle' occurring in China is not one of visionaries or heroes; it is a cage match between state-subsidized behemoths and local bureaucrats who have realized that their career advancement depends entirely on how many gigafactories they can cram into their provincial borders. It is industrialism as a fever dream, a desperate attempt to maintain growth in an economy that is increasingly looking like a Ponzi scheme built on rebar and concrete.

Let’s look at the contestants in this race to the bottom. In the West, we have the usual suspects—clueless politicians screaming about ‘national security’ while their own domestic auto industries produce vehicles that cost more than a suburban starter home and have the reliability of a screen door on a submarine. On the other side, we have the Chinese model: throw enough state credit at the wall until something sticks, or at least until the wall collapses under the weight of its own debt. The Chinese government is subsidizing these EV start-ups with a ferocity that suggests they believe they can outrun the laws of thermodynamics. They are churning out brands faster than the average consumer can learn to pronounce them, creating a glut of inventory that will eventually end up in those vast 'EV graveyards' we see in drone footage—thousands of pristine, white-painted cars sitting in fields, slowly leaking toxins into the soil while their venture capital funding evaporates into the ether.

The absurdity of the ‘Detroit’ comparison is where the real comedy lies. Detroit didn’t die because people stopped liking cars; it died because the very system that created it—a hyper-specialized, rigid industrial monoculture—was incapable of adapting to a changing world. By striving to be the ‘Detroit’ of EVs, these Chinese cities are effectively volunteering to be the next generation’s urban ruins. They are building massive infrastructures dedicated to a technology that is still in its volatile, infant stage, betting their entire futures on the hope that some other technology—hydrogen, solid-state batteries, or perhaps just a return to the horse and carriage once the grid collapses—doesn't make their current investments obsolete by next Tuesday.

And what of the ‘green’ revolution this is supposed to represent? It’s a performative farce. We are told that by switching from gasoline to electricity, we are saving the world. We conveniently ignore the fact that much of the electricity in these manufacturing hubs is generated by burning coal with the reckless abandon of a Victorian chimney sweep. We ignore the child labor in the Congo and the ecological devastation in South America required to harvest the guts of these batteries. We are simply shifting the location of the exhaust pipe from the back of the car to a smokestack five hundred miles away, and then patting ourselves on the back for our moral superiority. It is the height of human arrogance to believe that we can consume our way out of a crisis caused by overconsumption.

In the end, it doesn’t matter which city wins the title. Whether it’s Hefei or some other concrete sprawl, the result will be the same: a brief period of artificial prosperity followed by a long, slow decline as the market realizes it doesn't need six hundred different brands of battery-powered SUVs. The 'Detroit of EVs' will eventually be exactly like the Detroit of internal combustion: a monument to the hubris of thinking that growth can be infinite on a finite planet. Enjoy your new car while it lasts; the battery is already degrading, the software is already out of date, and the city that built it is already planning its own bankruptcy. It’s the circle of life, if life were a cynical marketing campaign designed by people who hate you.