Minkara #3 - The Once and Future Shark

Minkara is a Japanese social media website that is fully dedicated to the automobile. It's primary focus is allowing people to share their stories, experience, and knowledge with the car that they own and have that available to other people, using the website's blogging capabilities and thorough sorting and filtering capabilities for brands and types of parts. If you have a JDM car in The West and are wanting an additional resource for information and parts review, there are few better places to go than the website who's title roughly translates to Everyone's Car Life.

But this chapter isn't about my JDM car, because it's about a car that doesn't exist in Canada; at least, not yet.

I participated in the yearly Ladysmith Show and Shine over the weekend: a run of the mill small town car show filled with American iron strewn across the main drag of the town where you're never over the hill. Old-timers where their piece of Americana is their pride and joy, and this is a major fixture of the season where it's not on a diet of a Battery Tender and Sta-Bil. It's idyllic of small town North America that wishes to shelter itself from decaying empire, and the intersectional crisis that it handed down to the younger generations. But they cannot hide from the housing affordability, cost of living, or the drug toxicity crisis forever, or from the future that lies in store for the automotive industry in the so-called true north, strong, and free.

And I mean, someone had to bring some JDM machinery right?

Going into one of theses events you almost certainly know what you're going to get between all the makes and models of American iron and the variances that they could have. For these cars, I'm here for the people who own them: the chosen family that come together these engineering marvels that come to live. I stay for the friend who's first car was a General Lee at 22, and the 1939 Chevrolet that's been turned into a gasser by a former employee at my day job. But I see them every time there's the weekly car show at a local establishment, I do need something more when I do my walk around the show. Something that catches my eye.

The oddballs and curiosities that come out will always be my personal highlights of theses shows, like a Mazda RX-3 station wagon that stayed with the owner's family since the car was new in the 1970s. There was a white Pontiac Firefly convertible with teal and pink graphics; idyllic of a early 1990s that tried to escape from the wood paneling, dreary greys and the depressing realities of Reaganomics from the decade prior without putting in the effort. They were my personal highlights of the car show, but they weren't one of the most important cars on the road in Canada.

A car that's set to be either exported or destroyed come Halloween.

There is a non-zero chance that perhaps the only BYD Shark 6 in Canada was at the Ladysmith Show and Shine. One of the members of the Mid Island EV Association bought a Shark 6 in Mexico, drove it, enjoyed it, and brought it back to Canada. First landing on the island in May, I had seen it in passing on the Trans-Canada Highway in July before it turned off the highway. This one came with the Baja, Mexico license plates from it's previous life and the reality that, under the Motor Vehicle Safety Act, it has to be sent back or destroyed as of October 31st.

It feels like a glimpse of what is perhaps to come here in Canada. A PHEV using it's 1.5 litre turbo four cylinder as a generator, it's capable of more than 500 kilometers of range under the right circumstances and can tow up to two and a half metric tons can tick a lot of the boxes. It's already proven a worthy truck for commutes and campers alike in Australia, but there isn't quite the same level of competition for it in Canada as in the land down under for what it's able to accomplish. There aren't any PHEV trucks in Canada, and the selection of PHEV and all-electric SUVs is slim though Hyundai and Kia are doing their best to expand what's out there beyond the ever-present Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. The BYD looks to come as some manufactures are in a bid to try and roll with the punches of the lack of charging infrastructure, a unstable cost of oil after the bombing of Iran by the United States, and a lack of buying power across the board as car costs continue to increase while wages continue to lag behind.

The question is when vehicles like the Shark 6 will make the trip across the Pacific Ocean to land on Canadian shores as well as what. The deal between Canada and China that eased the tariffs on Chinese EVs and on Canadian canola and other food products never gave a timeline on when the vehicles would come. What BYD, Geely and the competition are intending to bring remains up in the air, but the potential for them to underprice the competition while bringing a lot more technology and features might be the shock to the system that the new and used market needs.

That was the big thing looking at the Shark 6 up close: how is this going to do compared to the likes of Chevy, Ford and Ram that haven't had to truly innovate in decades? How are people going to be when they get into it for the first time and realize that they've always accepted less because that's what they've always accepted thinking it was good enough?

I got a chance to sit inside and take a look around, get grounded in a car that is set to be exported back to Mexico or destroyed on October thirty-first. The owner asked me to pull up on the center armrest and pull it left and right as if I was trying to reef it out of place; it felt heavy. It felt like a firm handshake that you weren't ready for and now understood the importance they put on a handshake. The seat was super comfortable, and all the materials felt good to the touch. This is a nice place to be if you need to do some towing or long distances, though the lack of proper HVAC dials is a hard sell to some.

It's exterior looks like a cross of a Ford F-150 and a Mitsubishi Triton, but strikes a good proportional balance with all of it's body features and the black plastic cladding on all the door panels. This sort of style of mid-sized pickup truck, which took over the ute moniker in Australia, still feels alien here: the small sized bed, the full-sized cab and short but high up windows moves the visual balance down on the body while making the back half feel squished. A spiritual precursor to these kind of dimensions was the Chevrolet Avalanche which too looked alien compared to the contemporary trucks, but it having a full sized cab was underappreciated back then. It was made too soon before the proliferation of using trucks and SUVs as daily commuters fully took hold, but now it's often the center of the venn diagram of what the manufactures want to sell to maximize profits. The current Ford Ranger tries to tick that box, but without the PHEV option it has overseas, or all the tech and accoutrements of the Shark 6. The BYD Shark 6 is nice, really nice.

The big question will always be when the Chinese manufactures do finally come to Canada, what's going to happen? Sinophobia has been on the rise in Canada after the misinformation regarding the origins of COVID-19 and anti-China sentimentality coming out of fascist leader of the United States Donald Trump.

Canada bent the knee to the Americans and arrested Huawei deputy chairperson Meng Wanzhou in 2018 purely because the Americans asked them to over their fears of the company's business dealings with Iran. China would promptly arrest Canadian spies Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig with all three being released as a part of a release deal between the respective parties. It was a story that rocked the country, as The Two Michaels became front page news without much introspection as to why they, or Canada, was being used in this chapter of the geopolitical battle between America and China. The Two Michaels were spies, you know that right? Huawei, and ZTE, would then be banned from working on Canada's 5G telecommunications infrastructure in 2022 over fears regarding "security concerns." There has always been a red-scare paranoia about Communist states and spying on The West, but what is there to be said about what's being done at home with Flock cameras and programs like OnStar?

But now their cars are coming, and the owner of this Shark 6 was mindful of the past. It was only in the last ten years that Korean cars stopped being associated as the worst cars on the market here, when they had been selling cars here since 1983 and steadily improving since then. Those first cars, namely the Hyundai Pony II, were seen as a joke compared to what was already here, and that reputation was hard to shake for Hyundai. He believed that the BYDs of the world have to hit the ground running the right way from the onset, or fear not being able to shake a first impression that may last for years if not more. The difference being Hyundai and Kia have come a long way since the Pony, and the Chinese manufactures have come an even farther way in a fraction of the time.

The time this BYD Shark 6 has in the unceded territory of the Stz’uminus and the Halalt First Nations may be coming to a close, but it's already left a big impression on me. While a lot of cars will make me turn my head to process what I just saw, it was a truck of all things that made me take a step back. How will an unshakably white town like Ladysmith, named that by anti-union coal baron James Dunsmuir, react to the wave of Chinese automobiles coming having seen the very first of what they have to offer?

If it wasn't for my Scion xB, a BYD Dolphin or a Racco would be mighty tempting. Hopefully, others will see it the same way instead of accepting good enough from what's already here.