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Comment by extheat | Hacker News Reader

Misleading if you consider “EV” as referring to fully battery electric vehicles. BYD was able to surpass in sales for the second quarter purely because their factories were outside Shanghai (which was locked down). Another thing to note is China’s BYD also makes considerably less margin (if at all from their sales, mostly serving the domestic market in China). Clickbait, because most people don’t bucket hybrids as EVs in part because most people simply use them as ICE cars.

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Also, Tesla is in the process of roughly doubling their capacity with their new factories. Texas and Berlin only came online fairly recently. The plan with all four of the Tesla production sites is to get to 500K vehicles per site per year. That's 2M vehicles per year, up from around 1M last year. Originally the plan was to get the monthly production rate there end of this calendar year.

I think there will be a bit of back and forth between Tesla, Byd, and Volkswagen in the next few years. I don't think there are many more contenders for the #1 postion in terms of volume. Volkswagen seems to believe they can overtake Tesla in a few years and they are certainly investing heavily in their production capacity.

More interesting is who will have the guts to start targeting the low end market in Europe and the US. There's no technical need for cars to cost more than 10-15K in the low end price range. Existing manufacturers are happy to lurk at the high end with fat product margins.

However, there are a few cars well below 10K in the Chinese market already and it sure must be tempting to sell those with a fat margin in Europe. Even with a 5K markup they'd still be way cheaper than anything else in the market. The main cost driver is the size of the batteries. Light cars can get a lot more miles out of a relatively small battery. And of course battery prices continue to drop as well.

A small reasonable car could sell much higher volumes than the current batch of ridiculously oversized SUVs that people seem to spend many tens of thousands on. IMHO that would create some challenges for legacy manufacturers that are currently very dependent on selling cheap crappy ICE cars to cost conscious consumers. A cheap EV with large fuel and maintenance savings is basically going to kill that market in no time. Some people are predicting 2028 as a key year where a lot of the demand for that will start dipping to problematic ranges. By that time a lot of new factories will be producing batteries and cars.

Plug-In Hybrids (PHEV) are distinct from hybrids, and usually cost thousands more than the base model hybrid, so I wouldn't expect people to purchase one if they don't use it (I plug in my prius every night and the EV-only range covers all my daily driving, I don't know the last time I bought gasoline, it's been months)

I bought my PHEV to get carpool stickers and use better parking with free charging at work. The stickers expired and I don't work there anymore, but it never made sense to get rid of, so I still drive it, but rarely charge it.

It's way more convenient to pump gas for a few minutes every 600-700 miles than plugging in every 20 miles. Especially since I would prefer not to charge to full; I live on a hill and pick up 1-3 miles of charge on the way out of my neighborhood, I wouldn't want to miss out on that if I filled up.

But your PHEV still needs oil changes and other maintenance, and has all the same failure modes that conventional ICEs have: plugs, coil, belt-driven water pump, the belt itself, timing belt, etc. One of the really nice things about EVs is the reduced maintenance.

Just out of curiosity, how much EV range does the Prius have? I drive 51 KM each way to/from work. So every day I drive 102 KM (about 60 miles), that's about 15 kilowatts-hours and costs $2.50 to recharge at home. If I sign up for day/night rates that will drop, but I don't know by how much.

I can pull into an Autozone parking lot and buy all the parts and tools to replace a water pump.

Tesla's have a completely new set of failure cases that are exponentially more complicated.

I have a Nissan Leaf from 2013 now with 100k km on it, after our old petrol car went to junkyard. All the maintenance that was necessary was new brake pads (once) and a new coupe filter.

*less complicated

Teslas have many faults, but "complicated" is not any way that I would describe it. The drivetrain is extraordinarily straightforward, and is pretty accessible. Today I fly a desk but in the past I was a Ford technician. I wish the vehicles I was working on at the time were are accessible as my Model 3 is. Not to mention how clean the mechanical bits of the cars are, even those with over 100,000 km on them. The underbody moulding and lack of big shaky boxes of fluids vibrating is very apparent on the cleanliness of the drivetrain, at least those that I've seen as the Tesla repair shop once let me in the garage a bit. I'm sure that the gearboxes have fluids in them, but the smooth electric motors don't shake it out past the gaskets.

>The drivetrain is extraordinarily straightforward

Even ignoring the battery (and all the other gizmos an EV is loaded with), the motor controller refutes this point. Efficient, high-powered motor control in a lightweight package is a relatively new solution, and requires a lot of up-to-date electronic and sofwate design techniques. Fault-finding on one of those is no easy feat.

It also depends how you define "complicated". If you mean, "dependent on the cutting-edge of mass-manufacturing capability of almost all forms of currently produced technology", then EVs are necessarily absurdly complicated.

It would be possible to source and manufacture (and fuel!) an ICE (of somewhat comparable quality to what most people require) domestically in many countries.

Obviously this is not possible for an EV (even China has to import some of the stuff needed to make one).

For me, my daily transportation being dependent on such a complex global system is not acceptable. The current "component shortage" makes my point. How can something that is "extrodinarily straightforward" currently have a lead time stretching into the years (depending on model and country)?

I'm not saying personal ownership of an ICE is the solution, btw.

My 2014 Prius plug-in can do about 7 miles on battery, the quoted range is 12 I believe? I get one way to work on that but it's great for just popping out to the supermarket and back.

> But your PHEV still needs oil changes and other maintenance, and has all the same failure modes that conventional ICEs have: plugs, coil, belt-driven water pump, the belt itself, timing belt, etc. One of the really nice things about EVs is the reduced maintenance.

They're used much less, what kills cars are cold starts and short commutes/city driving. The average driver drives something like 40km per day, which is doable in full electric mode with a lot of plug in hybrid and won't strain the IC engine.

Full electric in the city and gas on the highway is what we should have strived for since the 2000s, best energy efficiency, less pollution/noise where people live (better for health), least amount of maintenance, least amount of change needed, no grid problem, no need to completely reshape the entire infrastructure, &c.

Full electric is nice but carrying a 1 tonne battery everywhere when most people could do with 100kg is an aberration. Most people, especially in Europe, don't need more than 100km range with the exception of occasional vacation trips.

  > Full electric is nice but carrying a 1 tonne battery everywhere when most people could do with 100kg is an aberration.

Though I agree with this, I do like having the extra range available if something comes up - and that does happen about once a month. And the Model 3 regens really well. I touch the brake pedal less than once per week, and half the time I realize that I didn't even need to.

Nobody was really concerned about carrying 40 liters of petrol when 10 liters would have met their daily needs.

> Nobody was really concerned about carrying 40 liters of petrol when 10 liters would have met their daily needs.`

The thing is you can fill only 10L if you want and gain the weight. An empty battery weights the same as a full one, and they're heavy as fuck to begin with.

In any major city in Europe I can rent a gas car for 60 euros a day, for this once a month event this is more than fine.

It depends if you think in term of personal comfort or in term of global optimisation/pollution. Everyone would love top have a v10 maybach, but the world would be a better place with 200km range e fiat 500.

Replacing the 1.4B ICE vehicles we have on this planet with tesla like cars is far from optimal if people use 10% of the range/perf

Maybe it's changed, but in the Netherlands PHEVS were mostly bought because of lower taxation when driving them as a company car. Because the companies paid gas, people used them as regular cars and ended up polluting more due to the weight of the batteries.

We've had some changes in the taxation scheme though, so this may no longer be relevant.

Sometimes the purchaser is not the user. I've seen plug-in Prius bought with grant money... and never plugged in.

PHEVs are pointless. All the disadvantages of an ICE vehicle with no benefit over a regular hybrid; they get worse gas mileage, the added cost (~4000-5000 dollars) is probably never paid back by the first owner in electricity vs gas, and they have less cargo room.

Just a heads up, gasoline can go bad on you https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/how-long-can-ga...

"Considerably less margin" isn't a bad thing, when the competition heats up it's far easier for a producer that is lean and mean from the start than for a company used to fat margins.

Or maybe it's the high margin that is a good thing?

When competition comes and both Tesla and BYD have to lower the prices, which one will be better off?

The one with slightly lower margins?

Or the one that is now unprofitable?

I think the implication was that competition has already come and BYD sells a roughly similar car (in terms of range and size) at a cheaper price, because they are willing to accept a lower margin than Tesla. Tesla might have to lower prices just to match BYD.

Or they're subjected to far-less-stringent standards and most likely propped up with illegal subsidies. So... yeah.

We can safely assume that all companies are maximizing their margins. Ockham's Razor.

BYD isn't "willing to accept lower margin". They just can't price their cars higher or lower the cost of production.

Given Tesla's months-long waiting list for new orders and recent price hikes, they don't seem affected by competition from BYD.

If you look at revenue, in Q3 2018 Tesla and BYD were neck-to-neck with ~17.5 billion.

By Q4 2021 Tesla pulled ahead by over 50% ($53 billion vs. $30 billion).

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4486902-tesla-vs-byd-ev-sto...

So far in Tesla vs. BYD, Tesla is pulling ahead.

And don't get me wrong: BYD is doing very well in EV market, much better than Toyota or Honda, but they're not a threat to Tesla.

As Jeff Brzos put it: Your margin is my opportunity.

> people don’t bucket hybrids as EVs in part because most people simply use them as ICE cars

This would warrant a "[Citation needed]", if I had any idea what source would even be acceptable to settle such a question as what portion of the system PHEV owners use their vehicle the most for.

Most PHEV prioritize battery and switch to combustion only when battery is depleted, so in short everyday trips, the ICE might never engage for instance. My personal experience in the EU was these cars mostly running at low speed in urban settings in electric mode (noise is different so you can tell)

I’d agree with you. If there’s gas in it, then I don’t consider it an EV.

"the company was able to avoid the lockdown-spurred factory closures"

But the "article" conspicuously fails to say HOW.

This whole thing is as bullshit as the hype over Android's "market share" being higher than iOS's. Sure, when you're troweling out third-world junk to undiscerning customers, you can "dominate."

What exactly is "bullshit" about the fact that there are way more Androids out there than iPhones? And how is (say) a Samsung any more "third-world junk" than an iPhone assembled in India or Brazil?

I didn't say Samsung was third-world junk.

And what's bullshit about it is that the OS has no significance to a huge number of those users. If you're in the far east slapping together phones as cheaply as possible, you have only one OS choice: Android. Hence the "huge market share." But what is that share actually worth? People buying commodity phones are unlikely to be big spenders on apps or other high-profit add-ons that make the iPhone such a huge profit center for Apple.

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