Details on Xiaomi EV
engadget.com
engadget.com
I visited one of their mall stores of theirs and literally the only product (out of many) not requiring an app was some sort of shaving machine. A goddamn pole fan requiring an app!
On the other hand, all modern cars seem to be pretty bad at this. Tesla cars appear to be a privacy nightmare.
Some notable takeaways:
- The car companies claim not only the owners' data, but the data of _any passengers_. I don't think people reasonably expect that sitting in a friend's car grants consent to collect data on them.
- Almost no brands allow people to request their data be deleted.
- Nissan claims the right to know their owner's sexual activity. Kia claims the right to know their owner's sex lives.
I'd be interested in reading more about this if you have a source?
I assume this has an implicit "in the USA"? Trying this in Europe would be an awfully bad idea -- GDPR has teeth, unlike most American consumer protection regulations.
PS: Or the vehicle goes into emergency mode and you can still drive but only with hazard lights on.
Driving patterns indicate risk profile.
Realistically, even iot wall sockets and switch controllers are now a well served market. Is there any electrical appliance that has no merit being externally controllable, and thus a potential data source?
We'd need Synology to gain way more market power than Apple and Google (and Xiaomi and every other global makers) to get a full user managed hub instead of the cloud first approach we have now.
Exactly. We'll hardly find one car, or for that matter any object with enough electronics on board which is both closed and connected, that doesn't use the technology to gather data on the user. Spying is a profitable business nobody in the industry can resist to.
I hope the industry moves both the fast chargers and the cars to 800V asap. (Naturally, fast chargers should retain 400V backward compatibility). When cars charge faster it is kind of like having more chargers.
I’ve used a 300 KW DC charging station once. The cable is very thick and heavy. There are practical limits.
800V lets them have all the HV conductors within the car half the thickness.
Back in 2015, it didn't make sense because EV's didn't charge that fast, and battery balancing tech was still expensive (and cost scales proportional to the voltage).
However, now battery balancing tech is mere cents per volt, and customers demanding fast charging means super thick (and expensive!) wires in the car and battery pack.
1000 volt MOSFETS have also become a lot cheaper (used in the motor inverters), whereas before car manufacturers were reusing 600 volt mosfets designed for other things.
The only downside of higher voltages are increased insulation requirements. However, PVC insulation allows 10kV per mm, so the insulation thickness required is still tiny (although clearly you cannot use outdoor air as an insulator in either case).
But those cables can easily be 10kg+ and $100+.
Is there increased risk to emergency responders who might have to cut into a vehicle to rescue occupants? Or is there a possibility that deformation from an accident could result in metal parts charged to 800V? I hope things are designed to prevent that. Perhaps the insulation you mention is armored for the high voltage paths.
EVs have a system that disconnects the battery mechanically when a high speed impact happens. I don’t think there have been any electrocution incidents so far?
I did a search and could find no reports of injury to first responders.
(First responders are still advised not to go near high voltage cables, just incase the airbags did not in fact deploy)
This suggests the base model is 400v, while the other models are 800v.
That in turn means that the onboard charger, DC/DC, motor inverters and AC compressor inverter must be different between the models, or that they have designed 400v/800v dual-mode hardware for all those things.
Having so many parts different between models drives up costs.
Having dual-mode hardware also drives up costs - typically the power electronics have cost ~proportional to max voltage * max current. If you need a fixed output power, you are only using half of either voltage or current if the hardware is dual-mode, so you are wasting half of the power electronics cost, which is huge.
(before someone points out that Tesla cybertruck has dual-mode 400v/800v since it can rewire the battery to charge at either voltage... Well it never drives along in the 400 volt mode. And even then, I'd bet the AC compressor is at dramatically reduced power output while on a 400v charger)
> According to Xiaomi, the SU7 is a pretty aerodynamic car with a drag coefficient of only 0.195 Cd, the lowest among production vehicles.
No doubt this was helped by hiring James Qiu who had previously worked on Mercedes-Benz's Vision EQXX design, a concept car with a record setting 0.17 Cd.
[1] https://carnewschina.com/2023/12/28/xiaomi-officially-unveil...
The statement about the V6 is throwing me. Can anyone fill me in what they're using the V6 for? I thought the SU7 was full electric, not a hybrid.
Has anyone considered making an inexpensive, reliable, simple EV for commuters?
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/24/general-motors-chevrolet-bol...
They announced that they are going to redesign and relaunch the bolt at some undetermined future date, and have not announced where it will be built.
The Chevy volt was also ahead of its time and a shame they got rid of that so quickly.
He really likes it and would consider a new one when he's done with this one but they quit making them.
These have been around for awhile, they aren't really suited to the American market though; e.g.
Yeah, definitely not many American markets. Several highways around me have posted speed limits of 75MPH, traffic often flows even faster than that. Driving in a car that can barely reach 60mph would often result in a speed differential of like 15+mph with the rest of traffic. I'd feel extremely unsafe going almost 20mph slower than the surrounding traffic while in a subcompact car.
> Starts at $35k
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a43611570/average-new-car-...
You should not use mean for things like this, if 3 guys buy a Ford for 33k and 1 guy buys a Ferrari for 300k, average price is 100K
If 1 guy is dead from hypothermia and the other guy is on fire then on average they have a healthy body temperature
https://insideevs.com/news/601060/dongfeng-nano-box-ev-dacia...
It's a segment that doesn't sense to me but I hope it does well anyway!
In (some) cities it's a faster commuter than any two-seat convertible, as it can legally get away with straddling the line between a car and a bicycle.
It doesn't appeal to me personally, but I regularly see it used as a city commuter in Amsterdam.
The Canta is more common, but those are traditionally powered by petrol, although they've got electric options now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canta_(vehicle)
That being said, it's probably way safer among sleepy or frustrated drivers
Where does the rest of 20.000+ increase of car prices come from? ;)
Anyways, speed limit detection works with cameras, not with maps.
I saw Nio break the 1k range mark on a single battery charge the other day. That and their battery swapping stations. Now this.
Meanwhile BMW is still making a diesel X5 with colorful lights for about >100k in 2023 and also a diesel series 7. The exhaust on these stinks like the one in a VW from 2004. Their electric and hybrid offerings are also a joke.
Another player, Daimler, put a washing machine sized electric motor coupled onto the automatic gearbox into some of their hybrids, along with a underpowered 1.6L engine. The tumble dryer engine is powered by a 20kW battery, wasting juice as drag and heat in the gearbox. They had the gearboxes lying around from start/stop ICEs and found a use for them: dumping them onto an unsuspecting public. That is their idea of a hybrid. Of course it's underpowered and burns gas like there's no tomorrow the moment that you stop driving like grandma.
Renault is possibly the only brand with decent offerings. Everybody laughs while Dacia Spring, another Chinese built car, is leading the EV sales this year. Dacia is the budget brand in Renault's portofolio.
Even as a European I now think those morons need to fail.
So, what sells? Compact crossovers and sedans (C-segment) priced around €40k, with a much smaller market for compact more affordable EVs (B-segment) priced below €25k. What is Audi offering? Four beefed up SUVs (J-segment) and a sports model (S-segment). What is BMW, the top German automaker by 2023 sales offering? Three sedans (E and F-segment), a SUV (J-segment) and Minis (B-segment). Tesla and BYD are spot on, the others not so much. All the German automakers combined cannot even match Tesla volumes.
1. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/electric-vehicle-sales-by-model-2023/
2. https://www.statista.com/chart/30758/most-popular-plug-in-electric-car-brands/It's just that they have two wheels and no climate control.
Most of the previous comments take it to mean a small car that doesn't need to travel very fast or far, perhaps in a city where parking is scarce.
But some of my commutes have been very long, or very far, or very fast. If I'm going to spend three hours, or 100 miles, or average 80+ mph on it every single day, I'm not going to get a small econobox.
We all know commuting is an awful, awful experience; but when people spend a lot of time in their car, it's no surprise that they're spending more money to make that experience slightly less awful.
Someone with a bad back and other chronic pain issues does not just feel every bump, they tear up with pain at every bump.
Someone with those medical issues also can not squat down to get into a compact car or climb up into a truck.
For those people, large, American-made, V8, rear-wheel-drive cars are a blessing.
I do not have those issues, but I know several people who do.
Europeans have also not entirely abandoned the concept of vans, which although not as fun as a rear wheel drive hemi, are generally more comfortable, accessible, and efficient than SUVs.
Chevrolet Chevette equivalent
This seems incoherent to me? Metal stamping is a process, and die casting is a separate process, from what I understand. Is there any reason to die cast a chassis? Does the press strength around the casting molds matter? I’d assume chassis parts would be built out of stamped and bent sheet metal?
The mould must be held closed while metal is being injected. The "9100 tons" refers to the force keeping the mould closed. That force is approximately proportional to the surface area of the object being cast.
https://proleantech.com/xiaomis-super-large-die-casting-tech...
Despite decades of experience in the industry, until very recently Volkswagen weirdly thought the opposite was true. It's incredible it's taken them this long to U-turn on what's been a blindly obvious problem with their current interior designs. It got the point where every other manufacturer, that did the (old) sensible thing, was praised.
Interestingly, NVIDIA is making good moves in all the areas related to AI.
If you are dumping kW of power into electric motors and climate control, having an inefficient hot not-great 200W computer or two running in car entertainment might not be super noticeable.
The downsides of needing bigger VRMs to power the cores, and needing more cooling are both real costs, that diminsh the effectiveness of trying to save money on cores. But it is interesting to me that this feels like the one segment where people might not notice 100Ws of egregiously inefficient computing, because it's such a small fraction of the total power budget.
I think better modelling techniques and far cheaper and better CNC machining will more than make up for subpar materials.
After all, the blades inside a jet engine already have a melting point lower than that of the internal gas temperatures, and there is no limit to film cooling, as long as you can model it precisely enough.
If I had a few years of my life to spare, I wanted to make a demo gas turbine generator with all the moving parts made of chocolate to demonstrate that effect.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/5nm-NIO-Shenji-autonomous-driv...
We in Europe foolishly thought we are beyond that and here we are.
Thanks german industrialists.
Western companies are completely asleep at the wheel, pun not intended.
The U.S. is trying to do some good old fashioned protectionism to protect its industry but it’s either gonna fail, or it’s gonna reveal the massively lagging U.S. economic system which is incapable of building infrastructure and is increasingly incapable of encouraging R&D and new industries.
The only thing that could hold the Chinese back right now is the Chinese govt which has already managed to destroy 2-3 industries over the past few years (the extremely fast growing tech industry comes to mind) with arbitrary policy and decision making.
If I were a Chinese company right now, I would try and diversify my supply chain, R&D and even top talent into safer Western countries with auto making talent like Germany. However, fierce price competition in China may mean they don’t really have the luxury to do so.
I think now would be the time for the EU or individual European counties to sprinkle some light protectionism on their auto industry to give Chinese EV makers a reason to shift there without angering their Chinese govt overlords.
(BTW the tech industry is not destroyed by any means. Since the goal at that time was anti-monopoly...it did limit the market power of top players though hard to tell its net utility)
This is because in real politik vehicle manufacturing means the ability to make war machines and artillery. If we subsidize China more it is just asking for military losses.
They ordered new NLAWs to be produced, in peacetime, and the lead time on a small batch is like 3 years. I do not see any possibility of winning a prolonged war against any enemy that wears shoes more sophisticated than sandals.
The Western military-industrial complex was dissing primitivity and backwardness of Russian army, and with 10x the budget, I thought they were right. I thought Ukraine would lose militarily, or politically, or lose morale, thank kind of thing.
I never imagined that western military complex is so proud of having it's few expensive and fancy toys that it has actually grown incapable of producing abundant supply of shells and bullets. South Korea supplied more artillery shells to Ukraine than US or EU. Looking at the state of affairs, i cannot help but thing corruption and fraud.
But how can this be? We are comparing to the two most corrupt countries on the plane, Russia and China.
All of western military leadership that is currently antagonising China must be barking mad, China has 10x industrial capacity of Russia.
All of Europe drives steel production out by taxing energy to crazy levels. Can’t eat a cookie and have a cookie. Environment or military security.
There is a big influx of these to Malaysia and Singapore. Pretty sure other countries too but these two stands out because they already have some local Chinese population; which makes the Chinese feel more at home. I am also reading that Chinese low-skill manufacturing is trying to find a foot in Africa; though not sure if that's going to work out.
Every time a new model with better battery chemistry, longer range, faster charging is released, it makes a bunch of older models with previous-gen batteries, shorter range, slower charging obsolete to the point of unsellability. Then they end up rotting in an overgrown lot somewhere. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/
Because of the fast release cadence, a model might become outmoded before it sold enough cars to recoup the development cost, but of course manufacturers can't just stop to save money while everyone else is putting out new models at breakneck speed and eating into their market share. So they're caught in a hamster wheel, burning cash while hoping that someone else will go bankrupt first. WM Motor looks like a candidate: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chines...
There's some techlore floating around https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2023/12/03/bri-notebook-the-... claiming that the overcrowded market is actually good for the industry as a whole because it makes it more competitive abroad, but that's cold comfort for investors who hoped to make their money back and then some.
Ironically Chinese government has quite a lot experience handling overcapacity, sometimes caused by them sometimes not :/
We were supposed / dearly wishing to have solved that by now, thanks to all the "battery breakthroughs" that made it to the front page of HN in the last decade.
Won't prevent us from waiting, though...
Sure, it's a worst case scenario.
How about "someone who's traveling on the exact same bank holiday as the rest of the country, and will not for the love of any deity wait for an hour on a packed highway station while every one is recharging ?"
My point is not that "it's what people actually need 99% of the time", but that "the worst case" is the bar to clear.
Ironically, it's kinda the same issue as electricity grids, except you can't buy range from your neighbors.
Oh, and it has to be cheap, too, by the way.
I honestly though it would be done by the 20s. It's getting harder and harder to argue for EVs every year that goes by without such a model - which also happens to be "every year that goes by without me being able to afford an EV".
I completely agree this is a giant waste of resource to do that with the current battery tech, and that it results in completely unaffordable, suboptimal cars that most people can neither afford nor agree to buy.
Which is also why we need better tech yesterdecade.
The situation really has to improve a lot before the end of the 20s arrive, otherwise we'll see civil unrest unlike anything you can imagine. Our next election cycles in Europe will be 50/50 immigration ("they're coming from your job") and transportation ("they're coming for you car !"). Guess who wins this game ?
Unless you're flying directly into your final destination, I would argue driving is probably faster for everything assuming you need to leave in 12 hours or less. Not to mention exponentially cheaper (ignoring depreciation).
In Europe, I would agree that flying could often be easier and/or cheaper. In the US, I can drive 500 miles (800~km) in 8 hours or less, passing through a few major cities with light/moderate traffic.
When you take into account airport travel, security time, the actual flight time, and leaving the airport, that is often 4+ hours for a 1 hour flight. Short haul flights also only tend to run once or twice a day unless you're traveling between busy cities, so you need to factor that waiting time in as well.
For a middle-age (+) person with friends and family that are starting to die of old age, being able to drop everything and drive overnight to say goodbye could be really important to them. This is something I had not really considered before when thinking about EV charging speeds. Until now, I had really only thought about vacations or business travel, which is not that time sensitive.
Or something like that.
This is the kind of fucking around that eventually leads to finding out. There is a reason Professional drivers aren't allowed to drive for more than 11 hours in a day, and have to take regular brakes.
Is this kind of highway fantasy or just US car culture?
In Europe I do not know a single person that has ever driven 1,000 km in one day. Let alone without stopping to refuel.
You don’t know any Eastern European who drives from the UK to their home country twice a year? London to Warsaw is 1000+ miles and can be done with the ferry in under 24 hours. Here, an estimate from Google maps: 18 hr 19 min (1.015,6 mi) via A2 and A2.
There are thousands of those people on European roads every year before Christmas and after NYE, and in holiday season. I did it myself a couple of times years ago.
> There is a reason Professional drivers aren't allowed to drive for more than 11 hours in a day
Yes, 7 to 40 tonnes of reasons and legal rest breaks required between work shifts. Professional drivers do a job, not just driving.
Or when a server the car uses gets shut down, and suddenly basic operations like opening the doors can't be done because it turns out the car's OS pings that server before letting any door open.
In Europe it feels a bit that way.
Sure, I'm confident the lobbied EU leaders will put speedbumps in place for the Chinese Auto makers in the EU market, but that will do more harm than good as the local brands won't be under enough pressure to innovate, knowing the governments have their back regardless.
Was the EU ever really in the race to begin with? They really wanted to be, but you can't actually centrally plan a working software or hardware economy.
> EU leaders will put speedbumps in place
That's the only tool they understand how to use. It's sad that this makes them feel they have to constantly use it.
> knowing the governments have their back regardless.
Yea.. you almost get the feeling these policies are _designed_ to create monopolies and have nothing at all to do with fostering competition.
Hydrogen would be great and at the moment it is developing where batteries are not convenient.
And of course, repairability. How much do I have to pay for battery replacement after a decade of usage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmWL1hZQmD0
You can buy the battery outright (in which case you don't use the swap stations) or you can use a battery subscription to swap to a new battery as needed.
Nio has three battery sizes: 75 kWh, 100 kWh, and soon a 150 kWh option. All in the same physical dimensions:
https://carnewschina.com/2023/12/17/nio-et7-with-150-kwh-sem...
Xiaomi, more Chinese than Chinese, has released one of the most beautiful, nostril-less, vehicles in years.
Is every automaker stupid?
New VW passat came out, I saw it from up close and all subtle front and side curves are there, at same spots, done in >98% same way.
These automakers are mega corporations now, not some passionate geeks working out of garages. They follow trends, curb any unique excellence in order to have uniform brand design. Chinese, they take western brands with just copy&paste, I havent seen much more. Everybosy should see Taycan in that design.
But in this case, I kind of feel it leans a bit towards the latter.
This isn’t the first instance Chinese automakers have copied designs. There have been outright shameless egregious clones of various BMWs, Porsches, etc. I don’t know what the legalities are, but those were never intended for sale outside of China IIRC.
I’ve seen a lot more experimentation and unique designs in Chinese cars recently than European or American cars. Followed by the Koreans.
"We've engineered the SU7 to offer a level of driving performance that stands among the best in its class, including the Porsche Taycan Turbo."
You would think that "savy" HN visitors who know about A/B testing, market data driven decisions, etc. would know that if something looks ugly it's usually designed that way for a reason. But keep being smug while you ruin your website/app's color schemes and layout based on the same data driven corporate design strategies.
It of course depends in personal taste but Chinese car makers seem to all be targeting global expansion and are all conscious of good design because they do make efforts in this area and none of their models is ugly.
So even if we assume that their true range is only 75% of their claimed 800km, it will be in the top 3 longest range consumer EVs.
A Model 3 has a battery no larger than 83kWh. A BMW i4 has a battery no larger than 84kWh. This car has a 101kWh battery. Considering the cars appear roughly approximately equally aerodynamic, it seems reasonable to expect the car with the 20% larger battery to be able to go about 20% further.
Is there a "dumb" test that just fill up the battery, put the car on a bench, goes up to 130km/h (or whatever a sensible value for "highway speed" is), and waits for the battery to be empty ?
If it's a completely stupid idea, why ?
Without it, you're not testing anything useful in the real world.
The driving cycles have a number of issues but they purposefully try and capture more of the range of dynamics to help consumers better understand what they should actually expect from vehicles.
It is like comparing CPUs only on their ability to multiply quickly vs a suite of software benchmarks.
Still, it seems like you're saying "the number would be unrealistic", but I'm not sure people want a realistic number, just a "worst case scenario"...
I understand that standard tests try to measure something "realistic", but they end up giving a value that is not what people are waiting for - which is, again, and I can't stress it enough because it's 100% of the conversation i still have about EVs with every single person I talk to - "insurance that I will be able to visit my mum on a single charge at the other end of the country".
I understand it's a bad question to ask and people don't really need _that_ range, but apparently they need _that_ info :/
Truth is I think some people just don’t want them and they look for a “logical” out since that conflicts with their desire to be less impactful to the environment.
A 75kwh battery pack has the same energy as ~8.5 liters of gasoline. While the conversion of that energy to movement is far more efficient than a gasoline engine, that’s still a small amount of energy comparatively, so the variance is going to be very, very high.
The battery can store NN kWh and the car weights XX Kg. How many Km can it travel?
It ignores wind resistance, road incline, use of air con, external temperature, number of passengers etc.
So it would even more meaningless than the somewhat synthetic tests already being done.
E.g., one would have to model and output the relevant solar spectrum to heat the vehicle and see how it responds to the IR heat load in maintaining human and battery operating temperature. Same with cold cycles, and the details get complicated when you try to average out the experienced conditions.
One of Tesla's mileage advantages comes from using the most advanced multilayer mirrors in their glass to minimize the effect of radiant heating/heat loss.
Fun aside: An interesting side effect of the technology is the appearance of red droplets when rain or dew is on the glass with the proper sunlight conditions:
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/9ustsa/ref...
https://www.caranddriver.com/shopping-advice/a32603216/ev-ra...
What you're skipping over is that the reason the US asked for their destruction is that having a NATO ally with weapons that violated the INF treaty with Russia wouldn't have been good idea.
You're too high on your own supply if you really believe this to be the case... The reason Europe has proper healthcare is because the US has a huge army? Give me a break...
Please, start provide some actual backing by numbers of what you're saying if you're gonna try to spread propaganda around here.
It’s simple. You have finite resources and you have to choose where to spend those resources. The EU has chosen healthcare and pensions which leaves almost nothing for defense. Guess who has to make up for the shortfall?
No, socialized healthcare works in Europe because its cheaper than the US system, massively so. The US just chooses to waste extra money to assure that large segements of its population lack access to quality healthcare.
No, you don’t have to but you choose to because it’s good for your business.
As for occupation, I wonder what Germany did in the 20th century to merit it?
The custom roms were not an option since i needed google's safety net feature but i got a different phone eventually
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/android-sends-20x-mo...
> When idle, Android sends roughly 1MB of data to Google every 12 hours, compared with iOS sending Apple about 52KB over the same period. In the US alone, Android collectively gathers about 1.3TB of data every 12 hours. During the same period, iOS collects about 5.8GB.
If you can trust the US to defend you from Putin, you can trust the US to handle your data. China doesn't have that relationship with Germany as far as i'm aware
Social media makes me want to withdraw behind our oceans. Let them hate us for free, at a distance - no reason we should subsidize them if they don’t even like us
What do you mean by this?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Army_ins...
There are tons of interviews with regular people in China directly saying they are preparing for the war with West. So yeah no difference