"Beyond Your Dreams"
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"Beyond Your Dreams" is the expansion John Kiriakou was given for the letters BYD on his first visit to China, and the anecdote he uses to argue that Americans are being kept from Chinese technology rather than choosing against it.

The exchange

In one telling, Kiriakou was travelling with a group and asked a member of it, an attorney from Hong Kong, what the car was. "She said, yeah, it stands for Beyond Your Dreams. It's our electric car. I said, this car is gorgeous. They're amazing. The design, it's just beautiful to look at."

Her account of its prospects: "they're really cheap. They're gonna be the number one car in a lot of different countries around the world." Kiriakou adds that they are now number one in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with sales booming in Europe.

Why he had never seen one

When he said he had never heard of the car and that they are not sold in the United States, the answer he reports was commercial: "because you guys banned them from the United States to protect Tesla. Well, these cars are a third, a fourth of the cost of a Tesla. And they're better than Tesla. And the design is certainly more attractive. But we're not allowed to have them."

The second telling

Two days later Kiriakou told the same story with different figures and a different date. There he says he went to China "two years ago for the very first time" and saw "these gorgeous cars" with a BYD logo. "I said, 'What in the world kind of car is this?' And my host said, 'Oh, that's beyond your dreams.'... I said, 'It's gorgeous. It looks like an Audi, like a very sporty Audi. Are they expensive?' He said, 'No, they're about $18,000.'"

The answer to why he had never heard of it is sharper in that version: "Because the United States is the only country where they're not available. The only one."

The trip is dated variously as the previous year and as two years earlier, and the interlocutor is variously a Hong Kong attorney in his group and simply "my host"; the price is given as roughly $18,000 in one account and as a third to a quarter of a Tesla in the other.

What he draws from it

Kiriakou's interest is in what the batteries mean beyond cars. Told of new sodium-ion and sulfide chemistries that would outlast the vehicle, he agreed, "the seats will wear out before the car does", and moved to the consequence: "those batteries will go into military drones. They will go into military robots. They will go into all kinds of other equipment. And the US won't have that technology."

The frustration he attaches to it is explicitly patriotic. "This is why you can hear frustration in my voice because I'm an American. I love America. I want America to do well. And I'm frustrated that we seem to be, pardon my language, just pissing away every opportunity to be a leader. We're just sitting back with fraud and waste and cover-ups and not being the America that we were meant to be."

See also

- China as economic threat
- The Hyundai Robots
- The Rare Earth Calculation
