China may lead the electric car revolution | Hacker News Reader

China may lead the electric car revolution

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110 pointshappy-go-lucky102 comments

The incentives to go electric in Beijing are high. Beijing has high-pollution days when only even or odd license plate cars are allowed to operate. Electrics are exempt. Taxis are being forced to go electric. Electric cars are exempt from the Beijing license plate lottery. Still, the 60,000 plates a year reserved for electrics aren't all being used yet. Buyers want SUVs.

Yes - Shenzhen has had a 3 RMB premium (tax) on gas powered taxi hire for 3-4 years now. Electric taxis are blue and in demand

3 RMB is $0.5, is that relevant?

more close to US$.7, but depends on how much you earn, a short cab ride might be 10-20RMB - it matters

Correct me if I'm wrong but 1 USD ~~ 7 Yuan so it's closer to $0.4, not $0.7?

In PPP terms, 3 RMB is closer to $3 than to $0.4. The official exchange rate is not relevant to questions about daily life.

Yes you're right I don't follow the yuan day to day, but I do visit many times a year, my mental exchange rate is a red Mao (100rmb) is approx $20 ... I guess it's slipping, good for my manufacturing

An elderly relative now needs oxygen which makes journeys difficult. So, challenged with the task of getting a machine that fits in the car and can be carried around, to supply 15 hours of oxygen a day, what is the solution? China! So, if you want a quiet, affordable machine that does the oxygen for you then a Chinese supplier is exactly what you want, some British room-sized, noisy kit costing many thousands just does not cut it on 'e-bay' compared to what ships from China. I am sure the British supplier gets their slot in the hospital where the taxpayer pays rather than the e-bay seller. But, the practical solution for my relative that is far better that what the NHS is all there on e-bay, with speedy shipping.

I can see a similar thing happening with e-cars, people will find the battery-box-on-wheels from China is absolutely fine for enabling their lifestyle, which could include getting about the city emission free. You don't need a space age Tesla with extra buttons for your cup-holder if you are just going to the shops or doing other city travel, you will just need something that does the job.

I also think that charging 'stations' will become redux, i.e. some socket on the lightposts that you just plug in to with no console/buttons/screen or anything else except the plug and socket. These will just appear one day when the utility companies get proper demand coming their way.

I think the tech in the drive train, battery and other electric components play a big role in the mileage equation.

In China, in smaller cities every restaurant will charge your stuff for three to five extra rambos

Tencent has recently invested $1.7 billion to become one of Tesla’s largest shareholders. They invest on Didi, who is the largest car sharing service in China, and on WeChat, that is one of the most used money transfer plataform in Asia. And they are investing Big in AI.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-23/tencent-j...

tencent may lead the electric car revolution.

Wrt money transfer, maybe Alipay is more widely used

Tencent has also invested in Zoox, a self driving car startup

Not a particularly informative article.

China already has the most PEV's on the road

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_use_by_country

And this article projects lithium battery manufacturing capacity in 2020 with China having 62% of world capacity vs 22% for the US (with virtually all of that being Tesla's Gigafactory)

http://www.visualcapitalist.com/china-leading-charge-lithium...

I never understood why the Gigafactory is viable with China around. Does this have to do with location of the mines?

Probably? Batteries seem relatively dense compared to most products... But there's probably more at play.

Labor is a smaller fraction of the costs to produce batteries. Consider they only have 850 workers, so even if moving to China saved 50k per worker it's not actually that valuable vs much better IP protection.

And vs. low shipping costs to Tesla factories and to target markets.

I would bet Singapore as one of the forefront runners for EVs to be tested and accepted amongst the masses. The political structure allows for a greater deal of control to test and deploy such a machine.

EVs are expected to be launched mid 2017 and deployed in every Housing & Development Board (HDB) town by 2020.

https://www.lta.gov.sg/apps/news/page.aspx?c=2&id=e030e95d-a...

Also an extremely high cost of ownership for automobiles, due to a required $50,000 certificate of entitlement. This means that the cost of the actual car is less important. Or rather everybody buys a luxury vehicle. See [1]

[1] https://blog-cdn.moneysmart.sg/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/tr...

I think Norway has the best cards to play this game in a fully integrated way. They have the right tax policy in place, they have consumers who are trained to buy cars based on value-for-money as opposed to status, they have hydro energy in excess.

Sell oil. Become so expensive no other industry exists. Buy electric cars. Live off government welfare?!

Norway has a huge and profitable IT industry.

Can confirm, currently working for an IT firm in Oslo, but god i'll be lying if i said it's not an expensive city to leave in.

Norway's super secret masterplan(?):

1. Lead electric vehicle revolution, increasing demand for renewable energy in Europe

2. Sell abundant, clean hydro-electricity to Denmark, Germany, and the UK via new HVDC interconnectors

3. $$ Profit $$

I have my tin hat on so here's an upvote!

Norway has a population about the same as Sydney's metropolitan area.

Place's like Norway can be fun demonstrator setups, but China will likely win the race by all other metrics.

Agreed. As much as I love Norway it seems to me only wishful thinking could explain the idea that such a small market could "lead the electric car revolution".

> Norway has a population about the same as Sydney's metropolitan area.

This is an absolutely meaningless argument.

Whenever I see a headline that has the verb "may" in it, in my mind, I add "...or not" at the end.

I think your idea works out in most cases. Examples:

"Theresa May promises 'No snap election'"

"James May to stay sober for entire season of shooting The Grand Tour"

To be fair. He did say the verb "may" not the word or noun "may".

Both of the example famous people could become "verbified" quite easily.

Verbing weirds language.

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

Tesla tripled its sales to china in 2016, which means it was about 1/4 of total Tesla sales https://electrek.co/2017/03/03/tesla-triple-sales-china-2016...

(Tesla represents about 4/7 of the total electric car market)

China taxes automobile imports by emission. This makes Tesla cheaper than other cars similarly priced in the western markets. (However, the price does not matter to the target audience though.)

Interesting brochure coming from Southampton University today: "Please don't buy an Electric car." The brochure is for their Electronic and Electrical Engineering programme.

"Did you know that if 1/3 of us charged our current petrol cars for comparable electric vehicles and plugged them in to charge overnight, then the electricity supply network couldn't cope and we'd either have power cuts or may be told to switch everything off?"

Then it explains: "Currently all our power stations (UK), working flat out, can generate about 70 GW electricity and this figure is dropping as older and less efficient stations are closed down.

"Imagine 10 million cars all charging at the same time - that's already 80,000 million watts - more than we can generate. We'd have to switch off everything in our houses and keep the power stations all on full power!"

Edit typo.

I mean, I'm not entirely sure that moving from millions of small gas/diesel generators (which is, functionally, what modern cars are) to using the grid should be bashed because the current grid can't support it. That seems like a fully general argument against change.

For instance, no one claims you shouldn't vote because, if everyone voted, then Americans would have intolerable wait times at polling places (they wouldn't handle that volume). It's true, but I think the expectation is that we'd expand capacity. At least power generation (unlike voting) is done for profit, so I don't see the concern.

> the expectation is that we'd expand capacity

Yes but electric cars are often touted to be the "green solution". What's the point if we're just going to have more - and we're talking about lots more - power stations? They still eat resources, and spout pollution. There's the nuclear option but hey..

The thing you have to keep in mind is that, almost always, the bigger a generator is, the more efficient it is.

Even if everyone's petrol-burning cars were swapped out for electric ones that were just as energy-intensive (i.e. required the same amount of joules of converted energy, to go the same distance, that petrol vehicles do) and then we took all that petrol, and burned it in a few big power-plants to generate that electricity... we'd still end up using less petrol. Because the big power plant would be far more efficient, in almost every sense, than the small ones in our cars. (Including senses like "sequesters more CO2.")

And that's a pessimized case; in reality, electric cars get far better "miles per gallon" (more literally, miles per megajoule of stored energy) than petrol cars do. Look at (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_per_gallon_gasoline_equi...): if you converted one gallon of gasoline into electricity using a regular, inefficient petrol car engine, and then charged an electric car's batteries using that generated power, the electric car would go quite a bit further than the same amount of stored energy would have taken the petrol car. (This being what hybrid cars do: use a regular petrol engine to charge batteries, and then run off those batteries.)

The two factors combined mean that there is every reason to centralize the generation of electricity. Even if we still burn petrol to generate all that electricity (unlikely), we'd still be burning far less petrol.

Thanks for this.

I do like the idea of centralising the generation of electricity. But while I understand the economies of scale aspect, I still think that we may be over-simplifying the whole picture. Sure, we may have greener cars. But what are the costs of this? You know we're talking about changing the whole infrastructure - and that's messy, and painful, and can take many years. And there's a few other questions which are too loosely connected for now but nevertheless still quite nagging, like nuclear as a resource and the growing global population which inevitably means more drivers..

> You know we're talking about changing the whole infrastructure - and that's messy, and painful, and can take many years.

Not as painful as you might think, and it's already happening. At the home level, it's very straightforward to add a charging station to your house, and at the grid level utilities have been preparing for this for a while now, evidenced by the fact that they offer EV-specific rate plans to their customers.

The harder part is public charging infrastructure, which is still too sparse, but it is less critical than gas stations because of home charging.

If all 26 million cars in the UK were replaced with electrics, overall grid demand would only increase by about 20%.

Will the grid need to get smarter? Sure. Will we need to improve aspects of it in the coming years and decades to support electrification? Obviously.

But the idea that the existing grid cannot be adapted to support widespread adoption of electric vehicles is absolutely false.

Hey, ho investment opportunity!

How efficiently can an electric car be charged using a gasoline generator, anyway? If "1/3 of us charged our current petrol cars for comparable electric vehicles", there'd suddenly be a lot of gasoline sitting around doing nothing. We could always burn that while bringing more base-load capacity online. Sort of an 'electric-engine polyfill'. ;)

I'd assume you could power a combined cycle generator with whatever feed stocks go into making gasoline which gives you 54% total efficiency. Bonus turning oil into gasoline consumes energy.

It actually takes a lot of electricity to refine oil into gasoline. If we need less gasoline, then that's a lot of electricity freed up for general grid use.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BQpX-9OyEr4

EVs won't all charge at the same time, any more than all petrol and diesel cars are filled up at the same time.

Besides, EVs are essentially storage batteries on wheels. They can be configured to charge overnight when grid demand is low and supply is abundant. V2G technology will mean that they support the grid, not burden it.

Electrical engineering programmes should be embracing EVs for exactly this reason - there are lots of really interesting challenges and problems to solve.

But they certainly are not unsolvable, and by putting their heads in the sand, the University of Southampton just sound like backwards-looking luddites.

"EVs won't all charge at the same time, any more than all petrol and diesel cars are filled up at the same time. "

This isn't really true. I imagine most people would put them on charge after coming back from work or at night.

But there exists charge timers. You can plug in the car, it starts charging at a selected time. As soon as their count is noticeable, there will be incentives to have the energy suppliers determine the charging speed to stabilize networks and get cheaper rates.

"I imagine most people would put them on charge after coming back from work or at night."

That's true, and it would indeed present a significant problem as the early evening already represents a peak demand period on many grids.

However: plugging in doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as charging. Pretty much any EV already supports scheduled charging. It's useful to take advantage of cheap off-peak energy rates that start around 10 or 11pm (here in the UK, you can get overnight off-peak rates that are about 30% the cost of a typical all-day or peak rate).

The next step is to have the chargers (or the EVs themselves) interact with the grid so that they automatically slow or stop charging during peak periods, in exchange for some incentive from your utility company.

There are already trials of these smart chargers going on with in places with high EV uptake like California and the Netherlands.

Taking that concept further, V2G will mean that your car can not only stop charging during demand peaks but actually sell some energy back to the grid. If your car needed, say, to top up 20 kWh overnight, it could first sell 10 kWh to the grid, receiving a high peak-time feed-in credit, then "buy" 30kWh later in the evening when prices are much cheaper. The net result could mean that the overall cost of charging is much cheaper or even free!

Finally, as EV range gets bigger, the need to actually charge every night less frequent. Where I live, there are several EVs that are typically parked on the street (without access to a charger) and only seem to get charged every week or so. The owners probably only average 10 miles or so a day so daily charging isn't really needed.

I don't know the British numbers, but in Germany a car travels less than 50km per day on average, that would consume about 8kWh of electricity. You can load these 8kWh in about 8 hours at 1 kW, that is less than the load of a vacuum cleaner and much less than a kitchen stove. Incandescent lightbulbs used to consume up to 100w each. So I cannot see where a grid overload would come from, if e.g. the cooking times are mostly avoided.

In general, as soon as there are enough electrical cars on the road to be noticed by the utility companies, there will be incentives to preferably load at times where the grid benefits from their consumption, as late at night, or when there is a surplus of solar energy. In this function, electrical cars can rather help supporting the grid stability.

As far as I could tell on a trip last year, China already leads, but not with electric cars. Instead, their masses are leading the way by huge adoption rates of electric scooters/bikes. There are way more Chinese who are buying these than cars, and will be for the short-term future at least. It will be ironic if Tesla's Gigafactories end up spewing out more battery cells for scooters/bikes in the developing world than cars in the developed world. I was really surprised because I would have expected really old and refined ICE tech to be cheap enough to beat electric drive tech, but nearly every two-wheeler I saw was battery-driven.

There is an interesting confluence of factors that seem to be attributed to the explosion of e-bike popularity in China [1].

Can someone who lives there comment upon what seemed to be a mass adoption trend to a tourist? Is this isolated only to the Tier 1-3 cities, or just the CBD's of the Tier 1-3 cities, or is this really widespread even into the small villages? Are the recharging costs lower than equivalent fuel costs of comparable scooters, even after accounting for battery replacement?

[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph240/perrot1/

It would be nice to see more adoption of electric motorbikes and scooters in western cities, too.

Motorbikes and scooters are some of the noisiest and smelliest vehicles on urban streets, and in cities like London and Paris there are huge numbers of them used for commuting and food deliveries, over relatively short distances.

Unfortunately, unlike in China, so far they don't seem to be catching on as fast as electric cars are!

No longer live there, but did for a couple of years - e-bikes there are dirt cheap, require no tax, no insurance and no licence and in Beijing at least, there is pretty decent cycling infrastructure that the e-bikes share.

Car ownership is comparatively expensive and most foreign cars have (I think) a 50% tax markup on purchasing them, there is also (at least in Beijing, and I believe Shanghai) a lottery system for getting a license plate on your car.

E-Bikes are basically the new bicycle, and are treated as such. However, I think they are starting to clamp down on them and treat them more like motorbikes, but the enforcement is still very lax (rumoured because it will enrage the residents of the cities who can't afford a car)

When I was there, I owned one that cost around $300USD, took six lead acid batteries (could upgrade it to lithium-ion) had about a 100km range and an alleged top speed of 60km/h. Disk brakes, remote ignition and alarm. It wasn't super fast, but fast enough to cause trouble (as it's silent) and would certainly outperform 50-60cc mopeds/scooters.

I can't comment on the villages, but I'd expect you would find less of them there, as the rules on vehicle ownership in generally are likely to be more lax as well. It's also absolutely not restricted to the CBDs, in the more suburban areas of the cities there are still plenty of them!

I think Tesla will have a lot of success in China. Chinese carmakers will probably also produce some great electric cars due to how much capital is available there.

The Chinese government generally requires that foreign companies have a local partner that has the controlling interest in the venture and that key technologies be transferred for local manufacture. Would Tesla agree to this and would it be considered a success if it did?

The government is looking to relax those rules. This article suggests Tesla is waiting for the changes to come into effect.

https://electrek.co/2016/12/21/tesla-china-other-foreign-aut...

It seems there's an assumption in the article and in the comments here that "more EVs == net positive impact on pollution / greenhouse gases". This is not obvious at all. It depends on the way you produce electricity, and when 75% of it comes from coal, you may end up worsening the problem. This could be a smart move if the automobile market had a bigger inertia than the energy one, but I doubt it's the case...

They've been having basically zero success exporting plain old internal combustion based vehicles. Let's see how they do with electrics.

The reason for that is that Chinese cars are notorious for being unsafe.

Thing is, they don't really need to export anything. Car sales are already higher in China than e.g. the US.

If I had to pick an adjective to describe my (former) Chinese car* , it wouldn't be "unsafe". It ticked the right boxes for people who might not know a lot about cars, but it left a lot to be desired when it came to maintainable. Still, there was quite a bit of value for money, and if you can deal with the high maintenance requirements it wasn't a bad car.

*2011 Haval H5. Or, as I explained it to others, 4Runner knock-off with Mitsubishi engine and styling.

Agree. Also just like in India, if you are crawling around in a traffic jam most of the time what's the point of all that safety? Local cars are designed for local conditions.

China has a large, high-speed highway system similar to the ones you find in developed countries.

I'm presently getting around on a Chinese made petrol driven scooter. It's cheap (maybe 1/3 the price) but not nearly as well built as the Japanese ones. They'll likely get better as time goes on. It got exported as far as Vietnam but I doubt it would meet US/EU standards.

China is just China even for what car making is. They copy and they have troubles doing that too. They are struggling to implement new emission regulations. They tried to copy something from both US and EU regulations and ended up with an endless "draft" state of the future "CN6" emissions standards. But they are supposed to start having effect in 2019-2020 and all manufacturers are puzzled about what to do (because cars destined to market in 2019-2020 are in development since last year already). So can China drive any type of development, especially EV, this way? Hell, no!

As far as the article's references to Porsche and Maserati sales go... What does it have to do with anything? 1+ billion people, of course they have some rich people spending money on sports cars. They do not necessarly drive new technologies, like EV, to advance, but maybe some rare animal leather to end up on more dashboards.

For fuck's sake, the new XXX (can't say brand name) light commercial vehicle for 2020 in China has 2010 tech in it (except the SCR system, which will probably be required if the Chinese decide once and for all to freeze the regulations)! Shit old 10 years tech because, to quote a XXX manager "this is what they want", and by they, he means the actual Chinese masses, not the rich guys buying sports cars.

RIP in your sweet dream China can't deliver anything.

It's Americans now that can't make progress

My bet is not on the Chinese neither on the Americans. It's on the Germans (and other EU car makers in general).

The Netherlands passed a law last year that requires all new car sales to be only electric cars starting 2020.

Source?

There is none because this is not true.

Not quite true (but not quite false either) - they have half passed such a law:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/18/netherlan...

Range anxiety ... any word on the hydrogen powered car revolution? Perhaps we should move on that one.

Clean hydrogen production takes about 3x electricity for driving the same distance, than directly charging a battery powered car. And that does not even take the difficulties of transporting hydrogen into aspect. So hydrogen might have a future for airplanes, but much less so for cars.

Honda thinks otherwise, and just rolled out a new model based on fuel cell tech this month iirc. The biggest issues have been lack of filling stations, and decreased trunk space. Hydrogen is similar in safety to lpg, and filled in a similar way.

If you look at the complexity of a fuel cell vehicle, you can easily see why car manufacturers like this technology :). Toyota, who did create the Mirai, recently launched an electric car program. Hydrogen is more complex to handle than lpg, which as the name says, is liquid at 5-10 atmospheres, while hydrogen is a gas and stored at 300 atmospheres pressure, the filling stations have to compress it to 700 atmospheres to fill the tank in reasonable time. This compression is a big factor in the energy overhead of hydrogen.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. This is the reality of the situation. I don't really see hydrogen being used in aircraft either, honestly. It's not even the energy imbalance, it's storage in the vehicle. It's not Hindenburg levels of unsafe but it's definitely worse than batteries and maybe gasoline. The amount of energy you can store per unit volume is only about twice a Li-ion cell (slightly better by weight, but that's not the issue in cars and supporting equipment further hurts this) and will likely be no better than the next generation of LiS cells.

I agree about the infeasibility of hydrogen cars but I always imagine that if you were going to run a hydrogen gas station you'd just manufacture the hydrogen on-site taking advantage of the already existing water and electrical grids.

... then it might be more like 4 or 8x as much, since you'll be operating at a lower scale and thus likely to have a less efficient electrolysis unit. Additionally, your electricity tariff will likely be much higher than the rate of a centralized electrolysis station.

Isn't most Hydrogen made from Breaking up Methane anyway?

That would be interesting, considering methane is a surplus gas in landfills etc.

Fuel cells can run directly on methane, for that matter, but then there are some CO2 emissions

3x the electricity isn't an issue if transporting the hydrogen were reliable. There's a reason energy-gobbling industries like the aluminum foundries are situated along rivers where hydroelectric power is nearly free.

Using the hype of yesterday to vaccinate against hyperitis of tomorrow? That sounds like meme-medicine.

Almost no hydrogen station infrastructure. 34 total stations nationwide (most are in California) http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen_locations.html

Pretty good case to be made that you'd have a LOT more range anxiety in a hydrogen car.

Take the Toyota Mirai, for example. 312 mile range, slightly less than the best Tesla. So right off the bat, not at all clear you're better off from a total range perspective. Filling stations are 4 minutes for hydrogen. Tesla has shown battery swap in about 90 seconds. But it turns out that's not really necessary, as Supercharging can be done fast enough, ultimately in about 10 minutes.

But there's another thing: unless you install a hydrogen station in your home, you'll always be on the look-out for a hydrogen station (which are incredibly rare). In an electric car, you leave your house with a full charge (or nearly full) just about every day. And the Supercharger network is big enough to easily go cross-country. Same can definitely not be said for hydrogen.

This ability to leave home with a full charge every day is why electric cars (with Supercharging capability) can actually have LESS range anxiety than gasoline, diesel, or hydrogen vehicles, especially as more high power chargers are installed.

As it stands now, you'll have FAR less range anxiety in a Model S (or model 3 when it comes out) than a hydrogen car, and this will only get better as more stations are installed. And even for the same number of stations, a Model S/3/X will do better than hydrogen simply because you leave home with an (almost) fully charged battery.

(additionally, workplace chargers aren't uncommon, and even some other destinations include chargers... With the high capacity and high charge rate enabled by large-battery electric vehicles, "range anxiety" is basically a thing of the past.)

>LESS range anxiety than gasoline

I don't have much range anxiety in my gasoline powered car. The last hackathon I attended I chatted to a girl who arrived 6 hours late having set off from a home 2 hours drive away. Turned out she was driving an electric BMW, took a wrong turning, ran out of range as a result so then had to drive to a charging station, wait for it to charge and continue. So these things are not totally fixed.

You chopped off my quote. "can have LESS". "can" be an operative word, there.

An electric BMW is not compatible with the Supercharger network, which is faster and more extensive than other networks. Additionally, it has one-half the electric range of even a lower end Tesla, and about a third the electric range of a large-battery Tesla. It's really not a good example of what "can" be done.

You also picked a 2 hour drive. For a lot of people, this isn't super common. More common is commuting every day, when you might run low on gas and have to worry about when in your schedule to fit in a trip to a gas station while if you have an electric vehicle, you simply charge at home each night and so don't have to worry about it.

Virginia is avoiding regulating self-driving cars to drive self-driving vehicle innovation.

It has no choice. Kids are growing up thinking the sky is grey instead of blue.

By all practical metrics using absolute numbers, it already does.

As a potential customer - "Go China!". Competition is good.

May, mostly with dependencies on who they steal the IP from.

Is Tesla relocating to China?

Can't help but think that selling cars for $80K and up is really leading a revolution of any kind.

Model 3

I see $35K "base price" for the Model 3. Reviews I'm seeing suggest that "base model" is a joke. Once you add the things everyone will really want:

"$74,500 on top of the $35,000: a cool $109,500."

https://www.inverse.com/article/13670-how-much-real-tesla-mo...

Very vague article.

Chinese production methods and quality - or lack of it - may be a defining factor alongside domestic demand volume.

Getting EV's to mass production is very tricky, Tesla are striving to get to profitability in what could be a make or break year.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-assemblyline-idUSKBN...

Every single year, people say it's "a make or break year" for Tesla (and SpaceX, for that matter).

That's because every single year so far has been.

So far it hasn't been so much "make or break" as "survive or break" though

When you're in the rocket business, and you don't have a big warchest, every year is a make-or-break year. One crash, and your entire cashflow seizes up.

You may not be liable for the rocket exploding, but you sure aren't going to be flying any more rockets, until your customers are assured that it won't happen again.

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