Solar-powered Japanese tiny van 'PUZZLE' unveiled ahead of North American sales | Hacker News Reader

Solar-powered Japanese tiny van 'PUZZLE' unveiled ahead of North American sales

electrek.co

18 pointsashitlerferad16 comments

> As President of HW ELECTRO Hsiao Weicheng explained at the unveiling:

His name stood out to me. Growing up in Japan, I didn't come across names like that very often.

What makes it stand out?

To my English ears it sounds a little bit Chinese rather than Japanese names I see.

It's a Chinese name. Specifically a name romanized using a system typically used in Taiwan, I think (you tend to see "hs" in Taiwanese names whereas in the PRC "Hsiao" would be "Xiao"). Taiwan has close ties to Japan so that's not too surprising really.

As a matter of fact, vast majority of "japanese" "startups" are basically chinese companies trying to hijack on waning popularity of japanese quality.

If you look close enough, almost everything is made in China.

Made in China products by Japanese ventures is fine, just like iPhone made in China. We know China is great at cost effective manufacturing. It's annoying that some "ventures" just rebadging existing Chinese products with Japan flag and minor improvement. Recently I tend to find such products in mobility area like this.

Rebadging is exactly what it is when you talk about made by japanese ventures. Nothing is made in japan anymore, however it s a secret noone is allowed to talk about.

"Nothing" can't be true. This is most interesting venture product I've seen recently https://vixion.jp/en/vixion01/

You may be surprised how much of it is made not in Japan.

Thought we are grown up snd don’t understand things literally. Of course there are lots of things made in japan, but the point is, it’s way past its manufacturing times。

Manufactured in China is not a problem for non manufacturing oriented ventures, as I said it's like Apple. Though for EV, non manufacturing oriented EV car venture could be a nonsense.

It looks very interesting, but I'm wondering how much it will actually cost. I'm also wondering how they plan to overcome the regulatory barriers to vehicles of this type.

Could someone more experienced in manufacturing tell me why we design things like cars in such a complex way with things like complex curves etc? Why not flat panels and more lego like designs that would seem to be cheaper to make and assemble and repair? It can’t just be about aero?

Aero is pretty important. You're not hitting fuel efficiency standards without good aero. Even if it were legal to sell, a car that uses 20% more fuel than its competition would be dead in the water in many markets no matter how easy it is to repair.

Is that still the case on cars with a top speed of 50km/h?

Not really - drag is proportional to velocity squared. There's little penalty to driving a brick at 30.

You can feel the wind resistance on a bicycle at 30km/h, mind. The penalty is not zero. But we're discussing body styling for a given frontal area, so the possible improvements are more marginal than for a cyclist who adopts a racing tuck.

Not a material engineer but it seems some curves can also help on resistance to deformation. Those exterior metal sheets aren’t structural but the curves may help support themselves instead of additional under-structure.

I’d love to see a vehicle build with durability and cheap/easy reparability in mind. Marketing and after-sales usually have the last word.

Lines and curves in the panels add strength and rigidity to them. Making them complex is for styling.

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