I take Elon at face value when he recently said “We kind of dug our own grave with the Cybertruck”
"We kind of dug our own grave with the Cybertruck. It is going to require immense work to reach volume production and be cash flow positive at a price that people can afford. It will take a year to 18 months before it is a significant cash flow contributor."
I remember EV's penetration is super high there.
Very cool link to see the imports!
I was questioning availability of the cars, because I think this is the key issue for BYD.
I wouldn't want to buy a car where you cannot get support.
In Estonia for example, Tesla's are not very popular for that reason, because for a long time, you couldn't even buy them from the official website (so you had to go through gray imports and drive to Finland for the routine maintenance), it's somewhat better now.
But BYD is simply unreasonably difficult to purchase, and if you do, then just doing a routine maintenance (or if you have an accident) sounds much more difficult than Tesla.
Once they solve that distribution problem (and don't get under political sanctions), I think they can be really great cars.
That's the problem, I believe BYD will be sanctioned to hell in Europe (not to mention USA). They will, however, easily dominate on BRICS and other places outside rich western countries.
We ended up with a Renault Megane e-Tech[1], very pleased with it so far. Our garage was built for 1970s cars and can't fit the new monsters, so choice was limited.
[1]: https://www.renault.co.uk/electric-vehicles/megane-electric....
Also, legendary hilux has solid reliability in brutal conditions (thats why every isis in desert has them, ideally with some gun or rockets mounted in the back). No way some early 1st generation of much more expensive electric car will match that. You want to have that safety of lugging around additional fuel tank or two in jerrycans and refuel in a minute, instead of doing additional mental gymnastic re chargers.
So a bad civilian car, and farmers are very price sensitive so not a great choice for them (now).
For instance, tesla went through several varieties of battery chemistry in the early days of the S before landing on the setup they ended up sticking with for the model 100 and later models.
The CT is a similar low volume prototype of the maxwell technology dry cell battery stuff, 48 volt and "drive by wire" architecture that is 100% novel. They're really better off just selling it to a smaller number of people until they get the bugs worked out. The stainless steel stuff is cute but not the hard part of the CT.
having said that, the lessons they learnt and technology they developed while building that white whale are massively valuable.
The gigapress alone is damned impressive.