BYD cuts price by 20K across the board | Hacker News Reader

BYD cuts price by 20K across the board

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13 pointsrjzzleep13 comments

Tesla has got to be sweating buckets. In theory, electric cars should be less expensive than gas cars. There's less materials and effort put into them.

Competition between manufacturers will bring the cost down in time. We are starting to see that. Eventually, the profit will be very small. Even Tesla will have trouble unless they find a different profit source other than the profit from selling cars.

Battery demand is climbing and Tesla is in the pipeline with a new spodumene | lithium concentrate processing facility underway in Texas.

That opens the way to get their own batteries cheaper and to supply batteries for power walls and third party cars.

It also takes the pressure away from Malaysia having to store quite so much low level radioactive waste and acid pools at the Lynas' rare earths refinery.

Swings, roundabouts.

Battery production is a big advantage. Their moat will be size. The bigger they are, the less likely they will face competition due to economies of scale. Good for them.

like (in the US) operating their supercharger network, selling solar panels, home sized batteries, grid sized batteries, a humanoid robot and probably something else I'm forgetting.

I wonder how profitable the supercharger network will be. Have they broken out the profit on the network? Solar panels are commodities, and Chinese producers have the advantage in cost especially since the Chinese government is subsidizing them. Batteries seem like a good profit center if they can get so big that few can afford to compete with them. Humanoids are in the distant future plus they have to make a market for them. Few people will want them and be able to afford them. Even large companies will have to see some real advantages to buy them. I've read about their AI efforts, especially the chips used for self-driving. They could be a great profit center if they can figure out how to modify them so others can use them and produce them in large enough quantities.

The real problem is that few companies can be good at multiple products so they need to pick the best and go full throttle on it.

Also, BYD launches $15,000 Qin Plus EV Honor Edition kicking off price war with gas cars: https://electrek.co/2024/02/19/byd-launches-15k-qin-plus-ev-...

The days of Japanese, European and American cars in China are over: https://archive.is/TC7ut

"The new edition is 15 per cent cheaper than the entry-level Lavida and nearly 40 per cent less than the basic Corolla. It also undercuts other hybrid models like Toyota’s Prius, which sells for 179,800 yuan in its base edition, more than double the price of the Glory Edition."

20k renminbi. Converts to $2780.

The big deal is that they are already cheap producers. Yet, they are lowering costs. Still, $2780 is a big deal on the lower end of the market.

… Across the board? Surely not for the 14k car? :)

The units are in 万元, which is 10,000 yuan. So a 20k cut to a 140k car.

Aha, that makes more sense.

Chinese EV cars graveyard

https://youtu.be/1SEfwoqKRU8

Mostly a few thousand old fleet cars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD8qqEx4G18

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