Australian woman used her BYD electric car to power her son's dialysis machine | Hacker News Reader

Australian woman used her BYD electric car to power her son's dialysis machine

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25 pointsthunderbong28 comments

Australia is a pretty awesome case for EVs. It's a huge country and very sparsely populated. Which also means fuel stations are sparsely distributed. People have farms there that rival the size of some countries.

That means the logistics of getting fuel where it is needed are non trivial. Fuel has to be imported and then transported over huge distances. This is costly. For example, a lot of the mining industry happens in some of the most remote corners of the country. It depends on huge amounts of diesel being trucked over very large distances just so they can keep digging and transporting iron ore, coal, and other things they mine.

Battery electric alternatives have been creeping into this space and are a huge cost saving because the electricity can be produced locally with cheap solar energy. And there's plenty of innovation around that in Australia. There are 200 tonne road trains that run on pallet batteries that can be swapped in a few minutes and are charged using (typically) solar energy. These are not fancy new Tesla semis but converted old diesel trucks where they just junked the diesel internals and put a new drive train + battery in. Super pragmatic and it works.

Some electrical trucks there run downhill with huge loads and are net energy producers: they generate more via regenerative braking than they require to go back up hill empty. Insane when you start thinking about that. This is not breaking any thermodynamic laws. You just mine iron ore or whatever at a certain altitude and then transport it to sea level. The altitude difference is potential energy. And with many tonnes of useful load, that's a lot of energy. The truck arrives with a full battery and then drives back uphill.

Despite years of conservative pushback on EVs and solar, they are switching the country over to clean energy regardless. EVs are now rapidly getting more popular there. There is no domestic car industry to protect. A lot of the popular cars come from Japan, Korea, or China. So, unlike the US, Australia has a lot of BYD models on the road already; and probably a few other Chinese manufacturers are active there. Tesla is popular of course. And I suspect Kia is doing some nice business as well there. Japan is a bit problematic with Toyota still pretending this isn't happening right now.

Are there any/many large mines with only road access?

I'd expect most bulk supplies to be delivered by rail, on the same line used to export the ore.

Most mines have roads that are installed and maintained by the mine owner. Same with rails, power lines, water pipes, etc. Mines are mostly not conveniently located close to infrastructure but instead located in the middle of nowhere. Any infrastructure around them is there only because there is a mine. Rail is nice when you have it. But it's expensive to install; especially in rough terrain.

North West Australia is pretty empty. The Australian rail network is pretty much non existent there. Most of the mines there are thousands of miles away from the nearest station. Distances are huge.

My question was whether fuel was delivered by road train, or railway train, as I was surprised you chose supplying mines as your example. Public railways and stations are irrelevant, North West Australia has plenty of private tracks [1], and I've found this site [2] which says some of the mines own rail tankers for fuel.

So for at least those mines, acquiring liquid or gaseous fuel is easy (safe + cheap).

[1] https://www.openrailwaymap.org/

[2] https://www.pilbararailways.com.au/roy/roy.php, https://www.pilbararailways.com.au/bhp/waggons.php

Western Australias Pilbara region exports close to a billion tonne of iron ore per year - inland mine sites are supplied by road train (prime mover trucks + trailers), and move iron ore by rail via some of the longest, heaviest trains in the world (video search pilbara iron ore trains).

Some mine sites have associated towns, others have full FiFo (fly in | fly out) work forces who roster multiple days on (and sleep on site) multiple days off.

All the large mines have rail access as the tonnages dwarf what 100 tonne haulpaks can carry for 100+ km from inland to the ports.

Rio Tinto + Fortescue Metals (and others) are all transitioning to electric | hydrogen truck fleets, trialling hydrogen trains, etc.

Using a forklift to do a battery swap on a class 8 truck is genius, IMO. There are a bunch of reasons why charging beat swapping for consumer vehicles, but most of those reasons don't apply to trucks on commercial routes. And pretty much every destination for a truck has a forklift. No need to build fancy robots.

https://www.januselectric.com.au/

Whenever there is a new technology, people get caught up on how the new thing doesn't work exactly like the old thing and get hung up on small differences. With online shopping, it was "it will never work if I can't try on clothes". With iPhones, it was "it will never work without a keyboard." But in the end, the new thing does new things which creates a new market.

Electric cars have all sorts of awesome features that ICE cars don't have. You don't have the same quick refueling but you have lots of other advantages. They can act as a giant battery for your house. You can keep them charged at home with no effort and never go to a gas station again. If there's a gas shortage, you can still power them easily without waiting in lines. If you live in a 220v country, you can literally just plug them into a wall anywhere if you run out of power or want to charge overnight. Most electric cars let you turn them on and heat them up remotely with no need to leave the engine running and with no fear of generating fumes in an enclosed space.

> With online shopping, it was "it will never work if I can't try on clothes". But in the end, the new thing does new things which creates a new market.

At what cost, though? The effort of online fashion retailers and postal services to deal with returns is insane, and by far not all clothing can be shipped to customers as new, so it has to be re-sold as secondhand or destroyed. Yes, it's all priced in, but it's still insane from a holistic view on society.

Eh, hard disagree.

When I was in high school in a US suburb, if you wanted a pair of jeans, you had to take an hour out of your day, get in your polluting car, drive to the mall, go to Old Navy or someplace staffed by real human beings at all times (and there were thousands of these places stores selling the same live cookie-cutter experience staffed by live people).

Now, the postal service does more work and more clothes get destroyed but how many person-hours does it take for society to bring you a pair of jeans? How many pollution-units? Surely less than it took when everyone had to drive to central place and do a transaction with a person?

It seems to valid but US usburb is the outlier in the world.

You mean they didn't have go to stores staffed by real people in London or Delhi or Hong Kong?

They don't need long drive to go store

> Electric cars have all sorts of awesome features ... They can act as a giant battery for your house.

Things may be different in Australia or the US but where I live it would make as much economic sense as use of your jewelry for openning cans. Or driving nails with your gold bars. Surely, you can do that but at what price and why when there are much more affordable and sensible alternatives.

Rooftop solar is fairly prolific in Aus. Plenty of households can charge their car during the day for “free” (assuming sunshine and the car not being at a workplace car park ofc)

It's not that you would replace a normal solar battery system with your car. It's that a car you already have would be able to automatically help with power balancing in emergencies or automatically reduce your power bill when they are plugged in anyway without you doing anything.

https://octopusev.com/ev-hub/what-is-v2g

For example, if there's an excess in wind energy at a given moment, the system can automatically funnel that energy into cars attached to the grid instead of turning off turbines, saving everyone money.

In an emergency situation, using jewellery to open cans to save the life of your son would be very reasonable. Even if the jewellery was somehow completely worthless afterwards.

Though in this case, the damage to the car is so minimal it is hardly measurable.

>With online shopping, it was "it will never work if I can't try on clothes".

I never buy clothing online. I've tried Zappos a few times, but it's always a failure unless I've already tried on the same brand of shoes somewhere else.

>With iPhones, it was "it will never work without a keyboard."

I still hate smartphones to this day, and this is one of the primary reasons. When I'm trying to get my friends to use Signal, it's primarily so that our conversations aren't happening on a smartphone, but on a desktop client.

I agree with your larger point about EVs, but if I had a time machine I might stop smart phones first.

We have frequent daily power cuts here lasting 2 hours - this feature would be a killer for folks here but sadly EV's except for a few niche luxury models are not sold here.

Golden marketing opportunity for BYD which is not well known in the west.

BYD is fairly well known in Europe? They sold 50% more cars than Tesla last year, so they’re not exactly a small startup.

But they are trash cars.

We have lots of Chinese cars on our road due to the pricing - Haval SUV's and they do not look too bad i.r.o build quality.

My BIL farmer bought a Chinese pickup truck (GWM) after coming from a Toyota Hilux.

Not a bad word from him about it - anecdotal but it seems they are not a disaster to own.

So they're just like tesla then :D

I suspect the measure for notoriety in the tiktok economy we live in is; 1) Do people know who the CEO is and how much do they shitpost the libs, 2) Can I "trade" the companies stonk options at extreme leverage.

> In 2023, BYD's international market presence surged remarkably, with exports growing by 334.2% to 242,765 units and its reach across over 70 countries on six continents.

> December saw sales of 341,043 units, a 45% increase, culminating in a total of 3,024,417 vehicles sold throughout the year, a substantial 61.9% surge from the previous year.

https://www.byd.com/us/news-list/BYD-Concludes-2023-with-Rec...

Less than 10% of the sold units were sold on a market outside China. Their move to sell outside China is relatively recent (2021) so it makes sense for them to not be well known yet.

I don't think there's a lot of overlap between places that experience power cuts and places with a sizable population that can afford electric cars.

Excepting South Africa, but probably not for much longer.

What is "BYD" supposed to mean?

Build Your Dreams

It's a company name: https://www.byd.com

with an automotive subcompany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Auto

2024 BYD Seal Performance review: https://www.drive.com.au/reviews/2024-byd-seal-performance-r...

As for the company name:

    The "BYD" name is the pinyin initials of the company's Chinese name Biyadi, which itself was created from company's original trademark Yadi Electronics (亚迪电子, named after the Yadi Road in Dapeng New District, where the company was once based) and the character Bi was just conveniently added to give the company an alphabetical advantage in trade shows.

    The company later back-formed a slogan, "Build Your Dream", or more commonly "Build Your Dreams"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Company#Name

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