What's your opinion on this?

[razorlab]

Putting on my serious hat for a moment:

I don't believe there is any intellectual value in seriously dropping the "China turbos" line. Pretty much every turbo on earth is, at this point, assembled wholly or partially from components made in China. It's a vapid brainrot comment designed to end nuanced thinking or conversation on the topic. Academics call it a "thought-terminating cliché."

As a manufacturer, quality is a spec. It has a price. The tighter the tolerances and/or the more stringent your requirements, the more it costs. That is true regardless of where the product is made, including China.

Furthermore, there are entire armies of engineers at design and manufacturing companies worldwide who make it their entire career to control or reduce costs in the bill of materials. "Lower cost" can come from simplifying the design, or by lowering the quality of the materials. Lower quality doesn't automatically mean "bad," either. You can better characterize your design and learn that you had more margin or guardband than you thought, so you can bring down (for example) the tensile strength here, or switch to a lower cost bearing over there. But soon you approach a point where the business is deciding between profit or durability, and that takes us to...

"Made in China" has become synonymous with cheap because Western companies outsourced their labor and reduced quality requirements to improve margins. That's what they wanted to pay for. Garbage in, garbage out. China is also capable of remarkable quality and engineering, if you want to pay for it.

At this point, I live under the assumption that anyone who seriously deploys the "China turbo" line falls into one (or more) of six buckets:

* Implicit racism/sinophobia/FUD
* Can't tell the difference between a $400 eBay turbo and anything better
* Has no grasp of supply chain or BOM management
* Denial about the West's role in putting maximized profit over quality
* Entrenched in their subjective view of quality, which always seems to overlap with the parts on their vehicle, or the vehicles in their social circle (what a coincidence)
* Cannot intellectually separate their political views of Chinese gov't policy from labor or material quality

Refusing to discuss or consider the topic beyond "hurrdurr China turbo bad" is a tacit admission that the person is unwilling to or incapable of considering a complicated topic. They just want to justify their own purchase, shut down conversation, and move on.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Just wait until those tariffs hit. Suddenly all the China turbos are going to cost $4,000+

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