Mysterious billion-dollar car company is taking on Tesla

Manufacturing high end tech in China isn't as cheap as one might think, when it comes to really high end electronics China/Taiwan is usually really cheaper only at extremly high volumes same goes for any other type of high end manufacturing where human labor isn't a factor anymore. Other "over-seas" manufacturing cost reductions come mainly when you delegate the entire production operation to a sub-contractor this means that much of your engineering post the prototyping phase such as the "design for manufacturing", tooling, and assembly line engineering are delegated to local engineering firms which while are much more expensive now than even 10 years ago still considerably cheaper than US or European engineers. If you can't or do not want to do it when the volume isn't huge, and when pretty much all of the work has to be done outside of china you won't see any real cost benefits to it.

So when you combine the already existing experience in both automotive and high tech engineering fields as well as government grants in the US for green/renewable energy and emerging technologies making a Tesla 2.0 in China will probably not cost you sufficiently less to justify the costs of having to build it in China and import it into the US. And if you also going to replicate Tesla's artificial scarcity business model well then at that volume China might become even a more expensive place to produce in.

There's nothing to say they won't. The article says they're operating out of an old Nissan research facility right now, not that they've bought a factory in California. Everybody else doing autonomous and electric vehicle research also seems to be operating out of california right now as well. It's where the people who know that stuff are, so if a Chinese company wants to build an electric car, it makes sense that they'd set up shop in California too. When it comes time to move to manufacturing, they can do that anywhere.

One Ford bought Saab and dumbed down the cars, the writing was on the wall.

Bankruptcy was inevitable.

Made in the same factory too. But owners are new

Typical average power plant efficiency is around 33%

http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_02.html

That's slightly better than the typical maximum efficiency of an internal combustion gasoline engine (and way better than the average, including idling and other inefficient operating conditions).

Electric cars suffer from two additional conversions, each of which adds inefficiency, but it's not obvious to me that this overcomes the efficiency benefit from having a central power plant using fossil fuels more efficiently than in the auto. To me, it seems close enough that it takes actual analysis to determine the winner.

> In countries that have electricity coming from fossil fuels, it's inherently less efficient

"Inherently" less efficient? As in, "electric cars are inherently less efficient that gasoline cars in fossil-fuel countries?" What a claim! And untrue! Unless you meant "electric cars in fossil-fuel regions are less efficient than electric cars in nuclear regions" then sure. But that's obvious.

Even in India, which has the worst carbon emissions coming from coal in the world, electric cars are about on par with gasoline ICEs. In India, it costs about 350 grams of CO2 emissions per kilometer of EV travel. That's roughly equivalent to a 25-30 MPG gasoline vehicle when you look at well-to-wheel for both.

In every other country in the world, coal emissions are better, which means that categorically electric vehicles are better for emissions than gasoline vehicles, even if the power source is coal.

Source: was a hybrid vehicle powertrain engineer.

In general electric cars, even from fossil fuel derived sources, are more efficient then internal-combustion engine vehicles when comparing "well to wheel" numbers.

They are also definitely cleaner for local environments - it is easier to regulate emissions from a couple dozen central powerplants then millions of individual engines.

That's just the engine efficiency. They estimate that refining a gallon of gasoline uses 4kw/h of energy, that energy by itself can power a Tesla for 12 miles, and you're not even accounting for fuel transport, storage and handling yet.

It is true. A Tesla on coal power is roughly equivalent, emissions-wise, to a 25-30 MPG gasoline ICE.

Source: I was a hybrid vehicle powertrain engineer.

A Tesla uses around 300Wh per mile.

Coal power emits about two pounds of CO2 per kWh according to this page: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=74&t=11

2lbs/kWh * 0.3kWh/mile = 0.6lbs of CO2 per mile. However, that's before transmission losses and inefficiency in the charger and battery. Transmission is about 94% efficient (from http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=105&t=3), charging is about 92% efficient, and the battery is about 90% efficient. That's about 78% efficiency in total, so divide that 0.6lbs by 0.78 to get 0.77lbs of CO2 per mile.

Burning gallon of gasoline emits about 20 pounds of CO2. Dividing by 0.77lbs of CO2 per mile gives us an equivalent of 26MPG, approximately.

Not spectacular, but not bad. The Model S is a big and powerful car, and similar gas cars have similar or worse efficiency. You'd be better off driving a Prius in this contrived situation, but then the "no real-world grid is 100% coal" thing comes in. For example, my local grid is about one-third coal, one-third natural gas, one-third nuclear. That cuts CO2 in about half compared to 100% coal, so now it's more like 52MPG. And coal's share is constantly sliding downwards, so over the lifetime of the car that number will improve.

I don't know as much about other emissions, but I'm confident the coal version will easily be better there. Big power plants are easier to run cleanly (they're easier to monitor, they don't care about weight nor much about space, and there's a single stationary point to install scrubbers, filters, and whatever else) and they tend to be far away from people.

Edit: I forgot to mention losses in the system from before the act of combustion. For a proper accounting, you need to account for emissions for the whole chain, from getting the stuff out of the ground to moving the car. Coal is much more efficient at getting out of the ground and into the combustion chamber, since it's already in burnable form, and then gets shipped in huge bulk by freight train. Efficiency losses there are single-digit percentages. Gasoline needs to be refined which alone takes something like 15% of the energy in the gasoline, plus transportation involves lots of small quantities being trucked all over the place. Total losses are about 20%.

I also want to say that I'm not really defending coal here, and I'd be quite happy if we could just stop burning it entirely. But the reality is that it's there, and it sucks, but even sucking as much as it does, it's still better than burning gas in hundreds of millions of little motors.

The "crossover" market isn't for car people. It's for regular people who actually want a minivan, but who are too embarrassed to drive a minivan.

There's one born every second, eh?

One thing that's likely to attract downvotes are comments to the tune of "+1", "I agree", or in this case, "good one!". The sentiment can be expressed with the little up-arrow next to the comment you like, and then it doesn't clutter up the thread. HN tries to keep a high signal to noise ratio, and part of that is greying out comments that really don't add anything. FWIW, I didn't downvote you, but that's probably the reason that people did.