BYD Seagull EV Priced from $11,400, Gets 10k Orders on First Day | Hacker News Reader

BYD Seagull EV Priced from $11,400, Gets 10k Orders on First Day

insideevs.com

28 pointsxbmcuser25 comments

Nice. The low end of the market has been neglected in too many things for too long. I get why -- dollars are votes, and the dumbfuck who wants the $150k Escalade gets more -- but it's a serious problem. We need cars under $15k and houses under $300k. This is what mass-production is supposed to provide. Otherwise we're better off living in the trees.

Plenty of cars less than $15k in the US; they’re just not new. Plenty of houses less than $300k; they’re just not near any hot urban centers.

BYB - 'Build Your Dreams' - went from being a battery maker for cell phones, before becoming the No1 EV manufacturer. May in time become the No1 auto manufacturer of any category on the planet. Great business story

Here in the EU we're asleep at the wheel. Can't have such start-up success stories because they'll disturb the oligopolies of the 100 year old car companies.

Thank god Tesla made them wake up a bit. Fingers crossed BYD does the same.

I remember Fiat was once a very innovative company, experimenting with EVs way before they were cool, even being the first to mass produce one[1], but now, I'm struggling to find a car in their portfolio I would want buy. Much like Philips, they seem to be dying a slow death.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4OE4GPJITw

Incumbent resistance to innovation, probably won't get a better case study than that of European (and Japanese) auto manufacturing. You could include US into this also, as Tesla was pretty much free radical which entered the market from left field, Ford / GM etc equally committed to ICE

Philips isn't really dying a slow death. The company has been split into pieces. Some of which are very successful like ASML. Some are doing OK like NXP and Signify. Some are struggling like the leftover Philips that only does healthcare now. Other parts have been sold like the consumer goods and the Philips brand licensed as part of those deals. I'm not sure the outcome would have been better had they not split the company.

Yeah but these companies aren't Philips anymore, they were 20 years ago. Present time Philips itself is dying, only chugging along on their healthcare business they bought themselves into.

I'm sort of amazed the "ancient brand under license" business idea hasn't burnt itself through over the years.

It's so often applied to products that are huge shifts from what their original credibility was in, and/or with a huge gap, long enough for any original brand equity to have seemingly reset.

Furthermore, it's almost exclusively used in low-end markets where they aren't even trying to say they're competitive with today's leaders.

I could see it working better if it was an immediate cutover, potentially where existing designs and R&D were licensed along with the deal. Then you're still exploiting "fresh" brand equity rather than trying to engage in brand necromancy. Maybe there's a short enough gap for Philips to pull that out, but in the US, their brand was sort of shot already for a lot of consumer goods. They mostly traded as Magnavox or briefly Philips/Magnavox, and it seems they mostly ended up in markets like rent-to-own shops (where they want to sell marginally different crap from Walmart so you can't directly cost-compare and realize that $20 per week means spending $3,000 for a $600 TV)

I saw a Fisher branded Bluetooth speaker the other day. Feels like we had both models there-- the name got sold a couple times in the 60s/70s, but they remained a consistent market presence under the new ownership, slowly degrading over the next 20 or so years. Sanyo, who I think was the end owner then, probably got a lot of value out of the brand. Now someone's trying to jab electrodes into the corpse long after the value is gone and I suspect the new-brand won't last 20 years.

If you believe their success to be organic or in anyway comparable to your average western company, you are Mistaken.

They and other countires work in a much different way in terms of tech and company successes.

Its still a good story but not really comparable, similar to the stellar success of Aramco.

there is no such thing as 'organic' success. Free market was always propaganda

Freedom to play dirty is not a bug, it's a feature!

True, although I would still say its not comparable

Free market is the race to be the first at the government money/feeding through. Elon Musk is a person particularly well in finding the quickest or even the only routes to those money through.

Many American tech companies would not be where they are today without the US government.

Oracle, from the CIA. Google and GMaps and the road data... heck, the internet in general.

Don’t worry, the organic EV incentive reserved to US brands will protect the organic Ford & GM!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Samaritans:_The_Myth_of_...

This is a good read related to this topic.

This looks great. Too bad I won't be allowed to buy one stateside, and am forced into too-big vehicles.

I've always wondered why US cars are so expensive compared to the rest of the world. My home country of Malaysia has cars starting at $8000, this new EV is $11k, but the cheapest new cars in the US start at $18k, basically double. Why is this the case? Why don't we have new $10k cars?

Is it because of tariffs? Ford et al are politically powerful and managed to get vehicle tariffs? Union lobbying to make sure that you need to get American labour involved to make the cars, driving costs up? Regulatory capture to make sure that suppliers are US-based? Is there a good explanation?

Edit: a quick search found that right across the border Mexico has new $8-10k cars, why can't we have that here in the US?

If they really sell that for £8000 with a 200 mile range then that could wipe out most of the UK car market. The biggest problem with electric cars is that anything affordable has like a 50 mile range which means you can't actually use it in the real world. I'm not spending 40k on a car just so it has the range of a £2000 petrol car.

It looks too small for the US market but I think can dominate in most other markets. When you take into account how price of solar and batteries is still falling every year it will be interesting to see how the world changes when ice cars are incompettive in all categories.

Reality is coming for combustion engines very quickly. What's interesting to me is essentially I would think a lot of traditional makers are going to go bankrupt. GM and Volks make a huge percentage of their money from China and all of a sudden they aren't selling many cars there.

I think we are going to see a lot of car company bankruptcies. Interesting times.

The U.S. market isn’t a monolith: if you sold these to the 80% of people living in urban areas, that’s a large market - some people are going to insist on driving Canyoneros but there are a lot of smarter people who appreciate easier parking along with much lower costs.

What I’d worry more about are safety standards: some of the U.S. requirements add a lot of weight and cost because there aren’t easy ways to address impacts at highway speeds with 2-3 ton vehicles.

I loved my Spark EV with its measly 135km range, which was perfect for SF city driving and going around the Bay Area. BYD Seagull has 305km range (30kWh instead of 16kWh) and the dimensions are with cm of the Spark EV. I'd insta-buy this with cash if it was available in North America even if pricing was a bit higher due to safety certifications and importing.

Bolt EV is nice, but starts at 25K USD and is significantly longer and taller than Spark EV; this makes a difference since I've parked in so many SF street spaces where I literally fit with cm. (And I need four seats for two adults, baby, and dog so Smart car is out).

The Spark EV was one of the best vehicles I have every owned. Quiet, snappy, fun to drive, easy to park, and surprisingly roomy. I lost count of the number of times passengers were shocked by the rear doors. It did everything I needed it to do to exist in the bay area.

The Spark is also very good at rallycross :)

Can get within an inch of cones easily!

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