BYD unveils $230K supercar, $14K hatchback in same week | Hacker News Reader

BYD unveils $230K supercar, $14K hatchback in same week

fortune.com

34 pointsxbmcuser31 comments

I live in Germany and I've recently booked a cheap car with Hertz for a weekend trip. At the rental office, they offered me to upgrade to a premium EV for no additional cost, because most people rent a car for medium to long distance trips like I did, and the range, charging speed and charger availability makes driving an EV into too much of a hassle. We've had about 200 kilometers one way and a charger at the destination, so we went for it.

This made me think about the viability of EVs in places like Europe where inner-city driving is discouraged and there is a lot of public transit options. Among the people I know, if someone is thinking of buying a car, they plan to use it for leisure trips - public transport outside of major population centers tends to be unreliable and insufficient, and if you have kids, then it's straight out impossible to travel without a car. That's why convenience is king when people choose a car here - having to stop every 300-400 kilometers for an hour to charge your car is not something people would gladly plan for.

I guess that Americans might have different priorities, as everyone has a car that is being used within the metropolitan area most of the time, so this means more shorter trips with breaks that could be used for charging.

> having to stop every 300-400 kilometers for an hour

More like 20 minutes to charge that much in something like a model 3.

Indeed, that's not true that travelling long distance is too much of a hassle for most people, that's just fearmongging from the anti-EV crowd.

Sure, if you are the type with a superhuman bladder who can drive 1000 kilometers with no stop, then an EV will be slower.

But for most people, and especially if you are travelling with kids, the right EV (like the model 3 you suggest), will not make much of difference with a petrol cars. Sure you will be stopping between 20 to 30 minutes every 2 to 3 hours but you should probably do so regardless of the car engine type.

I did saw some unexpected drawbacks however:

- you have less options about where and when to stop

- Tesla chargers are often in malls and shopping centers, and I found those stops can actually become quite expensive when travelling with 2 shopping addicted teenage girls...

- stop often end up being longer than planned due to said teenagers not coming back in time once the car is ready...

What about queues in charging stations?

That 30 minute stop can easily become an unplanned hour stop.

In my own limited experience in Europe, yes, it indeed can happen occasionally, especially during the holiday rush if you are travelling a popular route. I haven't found it to be much an issue in practice. You can avoid the worse of it by planning ahead, shifting your departure time a bit and carefully choosing your route as the situation evolve in regard to charger capacity.

Still, even if that happen and each of your 3 stop adds extra half-hour wait, sure you waited an extra 1 and half hours but it's not like the ICE cars are as fast on those days either. There are traffic jams, 10 min queue at petrol station, 10 minutes queue for the restrooms, 20 minutes queue for your sandwich etc. Your stop in an ICE car will be longer too.

In the end, even on those high traffic days I found the experience of travelling with an EV more enjoyable than with an ICE car.

Can I just say, as an American who moved to Europe in 2022, the lines at gas stations are crazy to see! In the US, I had never had to wait for more than 1 or perhaps 2 cars to fill up, even right off the highway. Here, waiting seems to be common from what I've seen if you're traveling on a busy weekend. My experience driving has mostly been confined to the Benelux region, so perhaps it is different elsewhere on the continent.

I do like driving over the border to save 20% on fuel prices though!

There are possible solutions.

There was an early Israeli car company where, rather than charging, they'd swap the battery. Faster than filling a tank of gas.

I don't think cars are worth owning unless you drive nearly every day. A car costs a couple of grand a year to own. That makes for a fair number of Uber / taxi trips and car rentals, with much less hassle. You can also get the right car for what you're doing; a 400km family trip usually wants more trunk and interior space than a trip to the Kwik-E-Mart.

If I lived in a city like you described, I wouldn't even consider owning a car. For those trips, I'd use the local car rental.

Coincidentally, my experience in the EU is the opposite: Long-distance rail is awesome, and a lot better than a 300km drive. The time I've seen people do that drive is waaay off the beaten path, where rail doesn't run anywhere close. So I guess it depends on what country you're in.

Nio has 10 battery swap stations in Germany.

https://www.electrive.com/2023/01/03/nio-counts-10-battery-s...

I was a participant in their research project, which was run somewhat like a BBS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) says ""Better Place filed for bankruptcy in Israel in May 2013. The company's financial difficulties were caused by mismanagement, wasteful efforts to establish toeholds and run pilots in too many countries, the high investment required to develop the charging and swapping infrastructure, and a market penetration far lower than originally predicted by Shai Agassi."

In Germany there's a good coverage of Ionity and Fastned, which have 300kW chargers. In Hyundai/Kia that supports these speeds recharging takes 20 minutes.

I've road tripped across Germany and France twice now, and it was easy.

It's really not as much of a problem as people make it out to be, at least on the US west coast where there is good supercharging infrastructure. A charging stop takes 15-20 minutes, which is the same as a gas/pee/snacks stop in a non electric car, and gets you ~200 miles of range. So you have to stop every 3-4 hours on average, which is again very normal.

In the UK and it is similar here if you live in a big city. A car is not worth the hassle, except when you have young kids (but people with kids tend to live in suburbs). I used to rent for trips.

I now live in a town, rather than a city of any size, and (apart from shopping) need a car mostly for trips between towns within the same county and a bit beyond which are fairly short but there is a lack of good public transport.

I think this is a situation that tends to get forgotten about by policy makers living in big cities - we cannot reduce car usage without either being unable to do a lot of things easily or without a huge improvement in public transport.

https://archive.ph/xAuTB

The iOS reader mode seems to yield what seems like the full text of this article as of 00:50 Pacific time Monday, February 26, 2024.

> But BYD, backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, is more versatile than many might realize.

I assume “backed” here means that Berkshire Hathaway has an investment in BYD, which is news to me.

He invested way back due to their battery technology , before they started making EV's.

It was Charlie Munger led investment who till his death few months back was of the opinion it was his single greatest investment for Berkshire Hathaway.

Charlie had to convince Warren - he was off the opinion BYD > Tesla.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwhDh9mTLa4

My linkedin says I am early and seed investor in 100 tech companies. I own $2.75 of a Nasdaq ETF from a while back.

First thing which comes to my mind are spare parts and repair manuals. Are they going to be available or is it going to be 14k USD one use car?

Will either be available for sale in USA?

> The vehicle—priced at 1.68 million yuan ($233,450)—can reach 100 km/h (62 mph) in 2.36 seconds and reach a top speed of 309.19 km/h, the company said. It can also spin in place and enter dance mode, as videos posted on social media showed.

> The car will be available only in China for now, though traders taking advantage of a loophole have been selling luxury Chinese EVs to overseas customers who view them as status symbols—even in markets where they’re not yet officially available.

The luxury one is only officially available in China. The cheaper one ‘s paragraph made no mention of where it would be on sale.

A small EV, even capped at 25MPH to reach regulatory threshold of not being a car, with a range of <100km, with four seats (and optionally, no trunk, or a front trunk so you don't need all the mechanicals) would sell like hotcakes in some cities. Requirements:

- Easy to park

- Goes far enough to get kids to school and back

- Adequate for occasional trip for groceries

Exactly. I've come to the belief that we need to attack the regulatory environment to allow this to happen. Those oldsters driving golf karts all over the Florida retirement communities have it right! But it is basically illegal everywhere without dedicated lanes and regulatory permission.

That’s because it’s dangerous to mix those types of vehicles with full size cars and trucks on the same street. Think about how much drivers hate bikes, and they take up almost no space at all.

Important caveat: It's not dangerous at all if streets are designed for it.

My city's roads are a dumpster fire due to one-wheel idiot-devices, electric scooters, and other micromobility.

With the exception of one-wheel idiot-devices, I've seen all the same stuff work in other cities beautifully, which had adapted infrastructure to them. I love micromobility done right, and I hate it done locally.

Excellent point! I’m not against non-car transportation at all, and generally am of the belief that if a policy decision is bad for cars it’s probably good for everyone. But in my city, at least, the other pieces of transportation are an afterthought and it can be really dangerous.

You're describing Citroen Ami.

Only two seats though?

Edit: Not that I think that this is a big problem.

There are quite a few of these in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities. I don't know if I've ever seen one with more than 2 seats however (but they probably exist). Limited to 45kmph and enough trunk space for some groceries. Keeps the rain off you and they are easy to maneuver in the tight canal lined city streets.

They are planning to build factories in Mexico from what I have read so once those factories are up and running. I expect not before that as direct chinese imports have many tariffs. With the noise starting to come out of US politicians about chinese spying using its electric cars it looks like US car makers and politicians are slowly waking up to the fact that by trying to follow and copy tesla they have been blindsided by cheap chinese ev car manufacturers

They'd have to do a lot more than assembly in Mexico to get around tariffs...

Newer rules require vehicles to have a certain amount of content from US/CA/MX to get around the tariffs. That's a big part of why a bunch of smaller vehicles (e.x. Honda Fit, Mazda 2) left the US market, they were assembled in Mexico but did not have enough local content to keep avoiding duties.

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