Overseas purchases

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tonyp
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Overseas purchases

Post by tonyp »

Normally I wouldn't place much store in a Daily Mail article, but this one is quite good, including a summary of vehicles/vessels built overseas. Unfortunately, it omits all the Chinese buses being purchased. It ends on the upbeat of Constance publicising the locally-built Custom Denning, but will they actually get any preference from the government? The current situation seems to be driven by two factors: price and inability of local manufacturers to meet demand within the required timeframes.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... China.html

The impetus for the study is from NSW Labor, but it's a valid exercise, even though the guilty parties in recent years have been from both political sides and more than one state!
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by 1whoknows »

The real guilty party was the AMWU whose Campaign 2000 started the death of manufacturing across Australia. They were told if they went on with it that car manufacturing would be gone in 15 years. Got that about right!
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by boronia »

The story has overlooked the fact that the original 80 Waratahs were ordered from China under a Labor Government, and that the current 17 are simply an extension of that order.
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by Linto63 »

tonyp wrote: Normally I wouldn't place much store in a Daily Mail article, but this one is quite good, including a summary of vehicles/vessels built overseas.
Not an overly well researched article with a number of errors, e.g.

*"Liberal premier Robert Askin tasked A. Goninan & Co at Broadmeadow in Newcastle to make the S set trains from 1972, with 509 carriages built..." The first couple of contracts were awarded to Comeng, Goninan only built the last 150 from 1979.

*"Under Liberal premiers Nick Greiner and John Fahey, Goninan kept building the Tangara between 1988 and 1995." All 450 Tangara carriages were ordered in one hit by the Unsworth government, the Greiner/Fahey governments merely inherited the contract, although they did amend it by having the last 80 built with loos and reversible seating to replace the U boats.
tonyp wrote: It ends on the upbeat of Constance publicising the locally-built Custom Denning, but will they actually get any preference from the government?
No, and nor should it, Custom Denning like every other bidder should win orders on coming up with the highest score against the assessment criteria.
tonyp
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by tonyp »

boronia wrote: Fri Jul 09, 2021 8:04 am The story has overlooked the fact that the original 80 Waratahs were ordered from China under a Labor Government, and that the current 17 are simply an extension of that order.
Ordered from an Australian supplier who sub-ordered from China, typically what happens.

This is why I mentioned that the guilty political parties are from both sides and in other states as well, but the report was commissioned by NSW Labor from the McKell Institute, so has a slant towards supporting the Labor position and glossing over or mis-stating some dates on which the respective parties were in power when vehicles were purchased, which the journalist has accepted uncritically. That doesn't undermine the general point being made and it's a worthy campaign by Labor regardless of whether they were complicit in the problem in the past. We all learn from mistakes.

Unfortunately, while Australian foreign policy towards China is still pitched towards responding to unreasonableness with reasonableness, there's nothing at present on that front to block import of vehicles and chassis from China, other than being more diligent about enforcing conventions on use of forced labour. The alternative to the possibility of war is quiet disengagement (alternative sourcing), which is what the Morrison government has been encouraging for some time. Legally, that's not an easy path to pick through and it very much depends on end-consumers simply refusing to buy products from China and of course many people don't think enough to make that choice.

With public tenders, it's even more difficult, as assessment criteria can't be seen to be in conflict with trade rules. However, TfNSW could be stricter with its presently slack minimum design standards and filter out low-entry electric buses, for example, which would knock off BYD and BCI, but not Yutong which could readily offer its international standard E12 instead of the variant modified for Australia. At least that would be a step in the right direction. Having better minimum design standards is nothing difficult, as other states or cities have kept the stepped-doorway Bustech design at bay, or at least modified, through minimum standards (Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane), so achieving the same with electric buses is no big thing. Obviously it could also be done with diesel buses but, since they are going to be phased out, it's probably not worth the effort now. The lifespan issue of Chinese buses is another, but more difficult, issue that could be used as a purchase constraint. The problem is that a lot of Australian agencies and operators are very slack in their understanding of best practice in passenger transit vehicle design and, like the general public, too driven by price to the exclusion of any other consideration.
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by Campbelltown busboy »

tonyp wrote: Fri Jul 09, 2021 11:23 am With public tenders, it's even more difficult, as assessment criteria can't be seen to be in conflict with trade rules. However, TfNSW could be stricter with its presently slack minimum design standards and filter out low-entry electric buses, for example, which would knock off BYD and BCI, but not Yutong which could readily offer its international standard E12 instead of the variant modified for Australia. At least that would be a step in the right direction. Having better minimum design standards is nothing difficult, as other states or cities have kept the stepped-doorway Bustech design at bay, or at least modified, through minimum standards (Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane), so achieving the same with electric buses is no big thing. Obviously it could also be done with diesel buses but, since they are going to be phased out, it's probably not worth the effort now. The lifespan issue of Chinese buses is another, but more difficult, issue that could be used as a purchase constraint. The problem is that a lot of Australian agencies and operators are very slack in their understanding of best practice in passenger transit vehicle design and, like the general public, too driven by price to the exclusion of any other consideration.
Adelaidemetro and TransPerth give their operators a agency picked chassis body and spec options when it to chassis/body ideas when it comes to ordering buses where Transport For NSW gives their contracted operators the option of selecting everything down to the operator preferred spec options ie fabric seats v vinyl seats single piece sealed windows v openable hopper windows or single piece windscreen v two piece windscreen
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by Merc1107 »

Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, and anywhere else contracting for large volumes of vehicles seem to have the right idea. There would surely be significant cost savings to be had in a large-scale order, not to mention reduced ongoing costs in terms of needing a smaller stock of spare parts versus having several different types in the fleet.

Ending up in a situation where the fleet is almost-exclusively from one chassis & bodybuilder, though, does not seem wise in terms of parts pricing or availability in the long-run.
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by tonyp »

Campbelltown busboy wrote: Sat Jul 10, 2021 9:01 am Adelaidemetro and TransPerth give their operators a agency picked chassis body and spec options when it to chassis/body ideas when it comes to ordering buses where Transport For NSW gives their contracted operators the option of selecting everything down to the operator preferred spec options ie fabric seats v vinyl seats single piece sealed windows v openable hopper windows or single piece windscreen v two piece windscreen
These are the two agencies with the highest design standards in Australia, though SA slips badly on allowing stepped doorways and single leaf doors on artics. WA's uniform standards in particular produce Australia's best looking and most functional city bus fleet. Indeed, I would like to see WA's standards expand to mandate a fully low floor and provision for a third door behind the rear axle for electric buses, something that would benefit their busiest services, including the CATs. Obviously I would like to see those things Australia-wide, but they have the greatest chance of starting in Perth.

Certainly no agency should be allowing door stairs or single leaf doors on city commuter buses, particularly with the growing return to all-door loading across the country. Having recently experienced all-door loading with a bit of a crowd through stepped, single leaf doorways in Canberra, it is an absolute joke and shameful for the agency''s bus engineers that they evidently completely fail to comprehend such issues which are usually widely understood in urban transit practice around the world.

Anyway, plenty can be said on that subject, the issue here is how agencies, if they set their mind to it, can set minimum design standards to constrain the import of unwanted products from overseas, a method that is often used in Europe to overcome the risk of having to acquire an unwanted or inferior product as a result of open tendering. The best leverage we have is that external manufacturers of a product with worldwide sales will rarely significantly modify their product for the tiny Australian market, particularly with buses where no other bigger RHD market (UK, Singapore, Japan etc) wants that modification. So insisting on a fully flat floor should knock out BYD and BCI because they don't do that for the RHD market. Yutong does (UK and SIngapore). A requirement for RHD design provision for a door behind the rear axle (requiring some fairly significant re-engineering) should knock out all China-sourcing because, while Yutong and BYD they do that for the LHD European market, none of the bigger RHD customers so far require that.

So there are ways of filtering purchases better, but the question is whether there is the political or bureaucratic will to do that. Brisbane City Council is getting some flack about it so they may come around. TfNSW is like a brothel, anyone can walk in the door with anything. Victoria, ACT and Tasmania seem pretty apathetic about design standards, though Victoria has had a brainwave with fully low floor but I'm not sure if this is consistently applied - certainly not to the only (Chinese) electric bus so far.

There's also a potential bit of local collateral damage from such an approach - Bustech, which may fail on one or two counts. However, a significant part of an exercise in raising standards is to encourage design excellence, so it would certainly incentivate all manufacturers to produce a better-designed product and isn't that what we should aim for?
Last edited by tonyp on Sun Jul 11, 2021 12:27 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Nugget
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by Nugget »

Back to protectionism and the white Australia policy boys.
tonyp
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by tonyp »

Nugget wrote: Sat Jul 10, 2021 11:54 am Back to protectionism and the white Australia policy boys.
Completely missed the point haven't you?
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by Merc1107 »

Nugget wrote: Sat Jul 10, 2021 11:54 am Back to protectionism and the white Australia policy boys.
If wanting at least some local content in buses is 'protectionist', then what of the EU and the extents they go to to protect manufacturing?

Protectionism is appropriate in the context of emerging industries, or those of strategic importance. Public transport is either one, the latter in the sense that it allows society to function...
If there was an oil shortage, you could bet that private automobile use would be strongly discouraged and the resources would go towards ensuring critical infrastructure continued to function.
tonyp
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Re: Overseas purchases

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One issue that electrification of all our transit is about is energy security, an issue in which Australia is very vulnerable, with its large reliance on imported oil. However, we can generate our own electricity. Unfortunately, there's a mindset in the Australian bus industry, influenced by all the spin, that the holy grail of electric buses is China. That's simply not true at all. Electric buses were invented in Europe which has more than a century of experience with them. Where does anybody think that China got the ideas and technology from? It's just that China has gone ahead and manufactured scores of them for their own cities and then marketed them very successfully overseas. With their new local designs, Custom Denning and Volgren (and maybe Bustech, I don't know yet) have got their electric technology from Europe and it shows with a much better product. Ultimately, we should be able to do even more of it locally and that's the way to go. But these manufacturers have to be supported.

The point that some are missing is not about protectionism or whereabouts in the world products come from, but that PRC is not just another normal country. We're in the same position as we were with Germany in the late 1930s, ostensibly a "normal" country that we could trade with, but in reality a totalitarian country with an ideological agenda that it's determined to conquer the world with. The world was stupid (and China was very, very clever) in opening up trade with it, thinking that China would "normalise" under the influence of international commerce. This was egged on by the average commercial entity that would sell its own grandmother to make or save a buck and so it turned into an unholy rush. How wrong they were.

So now, when it was all seemingly running sweet, the Chinese government (i.e. the CCP) has made its move and the world has been thrown into disarray, with China presenting itself as the white knight to rescue everybody (at a severe economic and political cost), as was the plan. Like most other countries, we now have to backpedal out of that, but we're trying to do so in an orderly fashion by honouring existing agreements, even though they mean absolutely nothing to China. We're in a terrible situation because the alternative will end up being war of some sort. Meanwhile, anybody who buys a product from China is not helping and what I've been suggesting for bus purchases are ways to facilitate quietly backing out while presenting an outward facade of staying "reasonable" and within the rules. It's quietly happening everywhere around the world nowadays. It has to be done.
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by Centralian »

Well said.
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by Nugget »

tonyp wrote: Sat Jul 10, 2021 1:55 pm We're in the same position as we were with Germany in the late 1930s, ostensibly a "normal" country that we could trade with, but in reality a totalitarian country with an ideological agenda that it's determined to conquer the world with.
This is the problem that the west has is that it is not so much that China does not want to export it's form of government to the world, it is quite happy that the west does what it wants in it's own country. But what it doesn't want is to import it from the western country. Whilst the west is quite happy to impose it's values on another country the east is just happy to live as they want but just don't tell them what to do.
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Re: Overseas purchases

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Nugget wrote: Mon Jul 12, 2021 6:09 pm
This is the problem that the west has is that it is not so much that China does not want to export it's form of government to the world, it is quite happy that the west does what it wants in it's own country. But what it doesn't want is to import it from the western country. Whilst the west is quite happy to impose it's values on another country the east is just happy to live as they want but just don't tell them what to do.
Except that there's absolutely no equivalence in the values of communist China and the democratic world. The CCP is more sophisticated than the Nazis, it's looking at economic conquest without military occupation and thus ultimately to gain political control through indebtedness. Build cities in your enemy's territory. They're not simply another normal international partner, they're a malevolent player. This won't "just blow over" and we can return to "normal". The end game is now in motion.
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by boronia »

China seems eager to slap hefty tariffs on selected Australian products imported there; it is a shame Australia can't do the same on their exports.
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by Jurassic_Joke »

Article mentions 60 overseas built light rail vehicles (LRV’s) but really should be 76 - can easily recognise 60 refers to L1/L2’s Citadis, what should be 76 if you include 12 CAF Urbos for L1 and then the follow-up batch of 4 that was just ordered
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by Campbelltown busboy »

Hasn't Australia been getting bus chassises from MAN Mercedes Benz Scania and Volvo imported from Europe for years and then you can go back to the British Leyland days where they where importing bus chassises from England
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Re: Overseas purchases

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Campbelltown busboy wrote: Fri Jul 16, 2021 6:29 pm Hasn't Australia been getting bus chassises from MAN Mercedes Benz Scania and Volvo imported from Europe for years and then you can go back to the British Leyland days where they where importing bus chassises from England
And before that from USA. Electrification has the potential to bring all that to an end, as we can potentially do most of it here, importing mainly electronics only.
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Re: Overseas purchases

Post by blow1940 »

I find it funny that so many people state that we should be building in Australia yet every item going into the vehicle is fully imported, then you move to the European chassis that are 100% imported. So why can we import from the Europeans but China is shunned when let's face it they have built more electric vehicles than anywhere else in the world and put more R&D into the vehicles to not only get efficiency but total vehicle life cost-effective with extreme safety.
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Re: Overseas purchases

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blow1940 wrote: Wed Jul 21, 2021 7:04 pm I find it funny that so many people state that we should be building in Australia yet every item going into the vehicle is fully imported, then you move to the European chassis that are 100% imported. So why can we import from the Europeans but China is shunned when let's face it they have built more electric vehicles than anywhere else in the world and put more R&D into the vehicles to not only get efficiency but total vehicle life cost-effective with extreme safety.
There's a somewhat profound political issue ongoing with China at the moment in case you haven't noticed and it's not going to blow over any time soon! There's no equivalence between European countries and China in general. On one side there is a group of stable democracies that are reliable international players; on the other side is a totalitarian country with an ideological agenda that is now being actioned. The world was stupid to get in so economically deep with China and now everybody is paying the price for commercial greed and political opportunism and trying hard to backpedal out of it.

So everything is being reset and the wisdom of returning some key manufacturing to our shores is being realised and overseas sourcing is gradually being shifted away from China. I think anybody would be nuts to buy a Chinese bus, car or truck in the present environment because they're looking into a black hole as far as the future is concerned.

As for the alleged superiority of Chinese electric buses, that is a complete falsehood. The electric bus was invented in Europe and they've been innovating and manufacturing tens of thousands of them for over a century. Where do you think the Chinese learned all about (and copied) them in the first place? Yes they've no doubt overtaken European production numbers because China is a huge country with scores of cities and they've flooded them with electric buses (and new trams and metros), but they're also very good at propaganda (and being cheaper), which the naive don't investigate or question, and so China has been very successful with overseas sales too. However, numbers and price don't necessarily mean a good product.

I've been following the Chinese buses for some years and their progress with design has been slow, often with equipment taking up valuable internal space and weight being excessive, resulting in reduction of capacity and poor seat pitch in an effort to fit more passengers. They've refined some of those issues only through having to lift their game to break into the European market with its demanding standards. Nevertheless, a lot of them are still behind modern design standards. Notably, European electric buses transitioned directly from high floor to fully low floor more than a couple of decades ago (after all, there's no diesel engine under the floor now), but the Chinese are still producing and exporting low entry (high floor at the back) buses, though some are now being produced as low-floors, notably Yutong. In Australia, it has taken a local manufacturer, Custom Denning, to produce a proper low-floor electric bus and it looks like they're getting the best performance of any on the local market. Yes, imported French electronics, but they're better.

This issue still has a way to play out, but the trend is going to be away from China. Eventually we'll likely produce more components locally, but in the meantime sourcing from Europe is preferable and safer than sourcing from China - and will give us a better product.
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