BYD is launching its next-gen Blade EV battery – more range and even lower cost
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Unrelated but I’ve taken a very hard stance personally on buying anything Chinese and have just accepted that it may mean being stuck with inferior technology. Not only are they dumping their high tech goods on the international markets, but I believe money sent over there will come back as bullets for my children or grandchildren.
A touch screen plus software _is_ the cheap bare bones option, over having lots of physical dials and switches - The touch screen is commodity tablet hardware.
Even though physical switches have much better usability, which means safety. Source: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/03/carmakers-must-bring-ba...
The BYD seagull has all this from what I understand?
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izvdO-zdlKg
>I think it will be a good thing because then perhaps are home grown car manufacturers will see the writing and start offering affordable to the masses cars.
With Tesla supposedly canceling Model 2, it seems like the incumbents cannot possibly offer this car at this price because of their cost structure (overhead due to unions, expensive real estate, regulations etc.)
I'm sure those are factors, but I wonder, what about having to provide private health insurance to employees? My employer says our costs went up 9% this year. I also wonder how much owners and executives are paid in Chinese car makers vs US. The leader and largest shareholder of Tesla is the richest man in the world (or perhaps was; I'm not sure of the current ranking). I don't know the name of any Chinese automotive leaders (though it's certainly possible that that's just my bias as an American). But I wonder how much of the cost structure is going to shareholders?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/business/tesla-elon-musk-...
50 billion dollars of money that won't be invested in the company.
Yeah, "unions, real estate, regulation", that's what stopping them.
I don't think we much care about the future we create for children at this point, particularly if there's money to be made today.
smartphones are "assembled" and "packaged" in China. Most components, or over 90%, in Apple iPhones are sourced from non-Chinese sources; then imported into China for assembly and packaging; then exported out to the world.
The world's largest smartphone maker, Samsung, pulled out of China and closed the last factory in 2019 -- they are either made in Vietnam, India, or South Korea.
LFP is mostly for cheaper, low-range EVs or stationary energy storage systems (ESS). The rest of the world already have access to high-energy/nickel lithium batteries, namely NCM/NCA, for mid/high EVs. LFP is like old spindle drive HDD (LFP) vs SSD (NCM/A).
That being said I'm not opposed to LFP -- it makes sense if you could get a cheap EV or ESS based on LFP.
Are you against capitalism? You think some world government should determine what countries are allowed to sell on the international market?
Are companies like BYD incentivised at all to ensure their chemistries are robust enough to be reused after their lifespan in a vehicle?
Worried baked in planned obsolescence will start to influence chemistry decisions
Is there a decent marketplace for used Lithium packs yet?
I have sources for used packs but they are very much ad hoc
I can only see lithium power as sustainable if we genuinely try to make a circular economy at all levels of the supply chain
The lithium itself is recyclable. However what’s the process for it? Is it so labor intensive that it makes recycling not worth it?
Remember: we were sold on the infinite recyclability of plastics. Yet look how that’s turned out. Industry did their own studies (in the 70s…), found recycling to not be cost effective (sorting issue, different types of plastic not recyclable, limited lifetime of plastic such that it could only be recycled a couple of times before becoming useless). Yet these companies still pushed this junk on us and we continue to live with those repercussions today.
Also battery packs are often packed with copious amounts of glue/adhesive and other items that don’t appear to be recyclable. Does that make the recycling process more difficult? As a battery pack in general, what can be recovered? What goes to the landfill?
Really? I thought plastic won because it's cheap. I never heard about anyone recycling it.
Cost effective for who?
If you legislate that the producers of packaging have to pay for whatever system they choose to clean up after themselves then they tend to reduce how much plastic they use, and make what they do use easier to recycle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_producer_responsibili...
If you let them offload the costs as externalities, then they'll do whatever is cheapest for them, which is pretending to recycle.
I've yet to have an answer for what the repercussions in the developed world of non-recycling plastics actaully is. Once plastic is thrown away it can be put in landfill and my understanding is that landfills in the developed world are as a rule well sealed and the leakage is negligible. Landfilled plastic rather than recycled plastic means more oil gets turned into plastic rather than burnt for energy, increasing the price of oil and thus increasing investment in more carbon neutral energy sources.
So I struggle to see the benefits of cost-inefficient plastic recycling, particularly compared to all the other things that could be done with those man hours.
Furthermore, I don't get the link between increased plastics, price of oil and investment in carbon neutral energy. Price of oil is a delicate balance by OPEC to extract as much money as possible - they have drastically more capacity than they're currently pumping and exporting, and it's carefully managed, on purpose.
Reducing oil use is paramount to limit the damage to the planet; reducing plastic waste is too. Waiting for a potential cycle of "lots of plastic waste" -> "maybe prices of oil will go higher if OPEC stops existing" -> "maybe this will incentivise more investments in alternative energy sources" -> "maybe this will diminish plastic use" (how? according to market theories, the price of oil should go down if use goes down, so there will be even more incentive for plastic production; but as we discussed previously, oil is a very special market) is... not a good option.
(As an aside: I find it odd you seem to have plastic reduction as a similar priority to oil use reduction given the effects of climate change seem far more severe than even third world plastic disposal)
Wasteful consumption of oil for a single use. And your local landfill isn't set in stone, a natural disaster or neglect can release the trash in it in nature.
> (As an aside: I find it odd you seem to have plastic reduction as a similar priority to oil use reduction given the effects of climate change seem far more severe than even third world plastic disposal)
But we don't really know what the impact of all the plastic everywhere is, like we didn't (widely) know what the impact of lots of carbon emissions is. And when we started realising it, it was still drastically underestimate (see: every month is breaking temperature records at an unexpected pace). Reducing oil consumption by reducing plastic consumption, and also reducing the amount of plastic in nature, are both important. Both will prevent potential ecosystem collapses.
Most of the recycling is post-industrial. After a battery is made, it's tested, and if it fails testing, it is recycled.
There hasn't been a large amount of post-consumer car battery recycling because there aren't many 20 year old car batteries out there. The reuse market for old batteries is higher than expected, and people reusing batteries pay more than recyclers. But the post-industrial plants are humming along, and will expand to accept post-consumer batteries once the supply arrives.
Everybody brings up the plastic-recycling bugbear. There are a bunch of reasons why plastic recycling is hard, most of which don't apply to batteries.
A better example is lead-acid battery recycling. The US has a >99% lead acid battery recycling rate. Lithium batteries are much larger and have a much higher content of valuable materials, so will be much more fruitful to recycle than lead acid batteries.
The main materials recovered out of batteries are nickel, copper and manganese, which are quite valuable. Lithium is secondary -- lithium batteries don't actually contain a lot of lithium, and lithium is cheap and common. New plants are set up to recover lithium because the price of lithium has increased, but old plants don't.
Like I said I am sure its a high number but I very much doubt 99% and noone really has any incentive to try and find out what that real number is - its a waste of resources.
It also passes the smoke test. Who the heck is going to illegally discard a lead acid battery core, potentially risking hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines, when the alternative is collecting $20 from a recycler?
I bet the precious metals in catalytic converters are also >99% recycled.
The core charge when you buy a new battery is a deposit returned to whomever returns the battery. Putting a $20 bounty on an item is a great incentive to have someone recycle them.
(as an aside I don't really understand that as cans and plastic bottles are easily separated from regular waste, but it's probably also down to reducing street waste, increasing consumer awareness, raising prices to consumers so they consume less disposable packaging, aaand get more money.)
Collecting bottles like this allowed the plastic to be used for food-grade recycled plastic, which is not the case for general household waste.
Glas beer and soda bottles are washed and refused.
It's not difficult to believe that increasing the deposit 150x would correspondingly increase return rates.
You mean car lithium batteries. In general, lithium batteries recycling isn't as successful in general because most of them are so small (e.g. cell phone and laptop batteries).
The price of lithium has collapsed by as much as 85% since 2022 Nov peak and is expected to drop further all the way through 2030. Other valuable raw materials in the cathodes have declined quite a bit past year.
I wonder how that's going to affect the future of battery recycling.
It's cheaper to pull Lithium from an old battery than it is to refine it from raw.
Even post-crash packs often get reused rather than recycled.
Tesla has set this up, but hasn't recycled many batteries yet since they mostly get second lives in at home "power walls" (which I guess, is why the started up that business?). We have another 5-10 years before those batteries start needing to be recycled.
Considering I need to pay someone just to have them maybe think about taking used lithium batteries off my hands?
Nope.
I would love to see this change. With lead-acid batteries for example, they pay me to bring my used one in when I need/want a new one.
I don't know about that, but there are multiple ventures ongoing (I thought it was only one and googled based on memory, "lithium battery recycling factory Scandinavia", and there's at least two only in Sweden - Northvolt and Stena) to establish facilities to recycle lithium batteries at scale.
I feel that BYD has taken steps to enable this. The replaceable battery and swap system they developed makes it orders of magnitude easier to get the battery pack out of the car.
Polestar in theory can have the battery pulled, but I believe it involves pulling cutting the car apart. This raises the cost making recycling less attractive.
By buying BYD, you are supporting Chinese government's deep subsidization of BYD and its heavy loss per vehicle, to dump on and destroy US/Europe/Japan auto industries and its labor forces
[1]https://www.dw.com/en/china-and-russia-agree-to-boost-ties-i...
The whataboutism works two ways.
The better way to “fight” China is to lobby your government to actually compete and build its own manufacturing base.
1. Wages in the US are still way higher than China.
2. Cost of manufacturing something is much more than just raw workers' wages. There's environmental regulations and protections as well, insurances, taxes, pension contributions, etc all being significantly less in China than the US or the west.
Especially the environmental part. Also work accidents. If a worker in China looses a thumb, it's no biggie, If a worker in the US does, he'll sue and win a 6 figure payout.
All these make manufacturing in the US much more expensive even if wages were to be the same.
> Less they've forgotten, Australia was engaged with trade war with China earlier
Oh, we haven't forgotten. The war was triggered by madness from both sides. Madness from someone taking violent exception to a nickname like Pooh is to be expected. Whatever your private opinions on that, it's understood here one must be pragmatic in your public positions when dealing with such people when they are your biggest trading partner. Even innocent mistakes could cost you billions. Our prime minister fanning conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID wasn't an innocent mistake, it was fiscal insanity. He was ousted in a landslide at the next election. And despite China being being our biggest trading partner, we won that war. It hurt China far more than it hurt us. It turned out Australia is far better and faster at rejigging its international trade than China.
> Australia wanting to investigate the origin of covid that killed thousands of Australians.
Australian's see it differently. What hurt us was the refusal of OECD countries to honour agreements to ship vaccines we had bought and paid for. With no vaccines (the one we did produce ourselves, AstraZeneca, got unapproved after we had produced huge quantities of it) we had to shut down internal borders, trade and large parts of our economies to prevent the spread, until we could get the vaccines. It was a difficult time. Yet despite those challenges, Australian emerged from COVID sooner, and with less economic damage that most other countries.
But you are right in thinking Australian's in general are anxious about what is happening in China. It's constantly in the news. I'd be stunned if Australian citizens weren't better informed on China is doing in the South China Sea, of it's real estate crash, and premier Xi's actions than USA citizens. But you know what? We watch what Trump is doing in the USA equally closely, and it causes us just as much anxiety. Trump closing the USA off from the rest of the world would likely have far worse consequences for us than a trade war with China that we won. When it comes to damage inflicted on it's citizens, nothing beats a countries own incompetent management. Trust me, we know. Or if you don't trust me ask someone from Türkiye, or Venezuela. On the up side, I do have a lot of faith in the USA's political institutions. They've survived a lot worse than Trump.
That said, the BYD airliner-inspired interior looks great too. I am probably buying a BYD after I'm done with my Tesla, though not because of the car itself. The Tesla car is terrific, but the Tesla service is horrible.
How is LiFePO₄ "next-gen"?
> The company’s latest Blade batteries have an energy density of up to 150Wh/kg. BYD’s next-gen EV battery is expected to reach upwards of 190Wh/kg.
> This could enable fully electric models to exceed 621 miles (1,000 km) CLTC range, which would be the highest among LFP batteries. The report claims BYD will release the new battery as soon as August 2024.
Anyone know if this is right? Or what I’m missing?
Off topic rant. This is a fine example of the patent system hurting rather than helping a country. It's not the idea of rewarding the person taking a risk getting a reward for it that's the problem, it's more than a single term (20 years) works for all areas. It's probably fine for pharmacy. But that moves at a snails pace, and generally patents don't overlap. Batteries don't move much faster than pharmacy, but nonetheless the USA has almost no hope of overtaking China in LFP now and the USA in invented the technology. In fast moving industries like computers the current patent system the current patent is a disaster.
So they're good enough for some uses, but energy density was a stat they trailed current battery tech on. Any improvement in that stat just expands the area where the trade off makes sense.
This article claims a quarter of Model Y in Germany use the LFP battery from BYD, and covers the pros and cons:
https://www.electrive.com/2024/02/01/what-can-the-tesla-mode...
i haven’t checked any of the numbers nor have i seen 3rd party analyses, but it definitely follows the trend: prismatics keep getting better and they might ultimately win the race once we get to solid state and thermal management “solves itself”
As you mentioned, NCM has much higher power density, and allows charge/discharge at higher rates than LFP. But LFP technology is much better in terms of safety, stability, low degradation over time and much longer overall lifetime with high number of charge-discharge cycles.
Most mid/high end EVs with longer range or power needs use high-nicke/energy NCM/NCA. de facto standard such as NCM811 has over ~270Wh/kg while the cutting edge ones, NCM9, from SK On ~300Wh/kg and already deployed in Ford F-150, Hyundai Ioniq and Kia EV9.
Hyundai Ioniq 5 2024 Refresh just received the chemistry upgrade from NCM811 to NCM9 (or in this particular instance 88% Nickel) which in turn increased the capacity by 10%.
As for Tesla's 4860, it seems like they are still struggling with low production output. Tesla had promised much better efficiency figures years ago, but doesn't seem to live up. LG is however rumored to have finished developing their 4860 and will produce them later this year (alledgedly for Tesla).
The current electric cars are all overengineered luxury cars in order to hit a profit margin and are extremely expensive to repair many normally minor faults. It's fine if you're the original owner under a warranty but a second hand buyer beware.
Theoretically electric cars should be super simple and reliable and have very cheap repairs, but those cars aren't being made by anyone today (maybe the Nissan Leaf?)
The range of an electric Fiat Panda will be complete shit compared to it's ICE equivalent.
Source: An owner of a cheap used Panda I use to travel across Europe every summer.
The main thint driving EV depreciation right now, and this will likely continue for some time, is how quickly the technology is improving.
Second, there is an influx starting of secondhand electric cars as the first adopters of electric lease cars have their contracts expiring / getting a new car, leading the lease car companies to sell the cars on.
It's a gradual process but it's happening.
So unless battery technology significantly improves the cost per performance ratio usable used EVs won't fall below a certain price point.
China is making EVs for ridiculous low prices, which is mainly due to the dramatic race to bankrupt the competition, before you yourself go bankrupt, that is happening on the Chinese domestic market.
I'm not sure what purpose the hyperbole serves here.
https://electrek.co/2024/03/06/byd-launches-cheaper-seagull-...
Hmm. Not sure I agree with you there. American cars aren’t particularly known for being high quality.
American cars are much nicer (tesla?), or have better reputation then a recent foreign company with no accountability if they decide to pack up and leave customers stranded... Or if China decides to invade taiwan and get embargoed.
Given it's selling in NL it will meet EU safety standards, but granted, that's a far cry from €10K and still very far removed from affordable / budget.
[1] https://www.beev.co/en/electric-cars/marques/byd/byd-dolphin... [2] https://ev-database.org/nl/auto/2038/Ford-Mustang-Mach-E-GT
You can gey hyundai kona starting from 37k with 65kwh battery as opposed to byd 44kwh for 30k. So more value for money.
Apples to Apples is Dacia Spring Extreme 44kwh for 23.5K with tax for same battery and features... much lower price then BYD
The glorious free market of the US’ protectionism has nothing to do with humanitarian issues.
I cant take that seriously with a wide open border.
Also there are a lot of guys standing in processing centers waiting for their asylum claims to be processed who would take umbrage with your definition of "wide open border", but that's another discussion.
Sure, some shareholders might - and they're the same ones who also benefit from screwing migrant laborers - but you're not one of these captains of industry who can jet off to their bunker in New Zealand when shit hits the fan.
Becoming? Like that isn't already the case?
This is a special purpose carve out to reward a voting block. The rest of us get globalism.
What German companies will probably do in Europe is import Chinese EV designs from their partners, and rebadge them locally the same way Renault does with the Dacia Spring.
Yes, but this is just the nature of competition. If they think they couldn't compete, either in China or Europe, they would beg for Tarifs.
>What German companies will probably do in Europe is import Chinese EV designs from their partners, and rebadge them locally the same way Renault does with the Dacia Spring.
I assume you mean cars not designs of cars? That seems like the thing least useful to import.
Yes, if they want/need low costs for their cars they will build and import the budget models from China. If you have seen Chinese EV prices you would know why, they are insanely cheap, even if they are more or less equivalent to European cars of the same brand. But they don't need to rebadge, they just build the actual badges cars and ship them to Europe.
I think the one important question is how long china can compete in the race to the bottom. The lower prices are due to many factors, labor cost among those. Surely that will not be sustainable indefinitely.
Haha, China can compete in the manufacturing race to the bottom far longer than Western companies/nations can stay solvent in that race with all their unions, high wages, pensions, and worker's rights pushing their costs up.
To whit, all my mates still working in the EU automotive scene with transferable skills are trying to side hop into other industries since the wage prospects in automotive for the same jobs are getting grim now.
EU can't compete with the US on SW innovation and can't compete with China on HW cheapness and manufacturing at scale. It's being squeeze in a pincer movement at both ends and I fear we'll see more years of economic stagnation to come.
> I fear we'll see more years of economic stagnation to come.
There will never be economic stagnation in a country like Germany.
Without the massive economic benefits of large and highly productive industry, the massive social security system can not be kept afloat. At the same time any government trying to dismantle that system is commiting political suicide and in turn will inevitably destabilize the economy.
I'm not sure if you're sarcastic or not.
>There will never be economic stagnation in a country like Germany.
Why not? People were saying the same about Japan? Or you're sarcastic again?
>Without the massive economic benefits of large and highly productive industry, the massive social security system can not be kept afloat.
The social security system has seen massive cutbacks in Germany, Sweden, France, Finland, Italy, Spain, etc in the last 20 years or so precisely because the costs have gone up due to ageing population and mass immigration, while the economic output needed to fund the welfare system has relatively stagnated.
That was sarcasm.
>Why not? People were saying the same about Japan? Or you're sarcastic again?
I don't know what people have been saying about Japan. Except they are prognosticating it's decline due to an aging population for a long time. I do believe that this a problem which can be solved by some economic pain and cut backs.
>The social security system has seen massive cutbacks in Germany, Sweden, France, Finland, Italy, Spain, etc in the last 20 years or so precisely because the costs have gone up due to ageing population and mass immigration
In Germany, as a percentage of GDP, it did somewhat rise though. Absolute welfare spending has doubled over the last 20 years. The only reason it could do this is because the same is true for absolute GDP.
The GDP of Germany did massively rise over the last 20 years, clearly it isn't stagnant. If ever it stops growing, then the social security costs will rapidly outpace GDP growth, but that hasn't happened yet. At least, looking at the numbers, I see no evidence. Well, except for a very worrisome 2023.
Yes, they sell at loss in China and recoup the loss on the European market, truly amazing
That’s fucking huge. Bye bye range anxiety.
Drive across TX (El Paso to Texarkana) and more without bothering to recharge or turning off creature comforts (ie, AC).
Let’s just hope this Chinese company is not over promising
Where are you seeing that? I can't find 'hybrid' in TFA at all.
Admittedly it's a bit confusing that Americans stick with miles, and are also the only culture on the planet to call the (very much a liquid) petrol 'gas', but the reference in TFA was pretty unambiguous:
"This could enable fully electric models to exceed 621 miles (1,000 km) CLTC range."
I wish people were rational and didn't "need" a 2000km range car to not develop "anxiety" when they do like 40km per day on average
BYD batteries, actually.
Which are used in cars made by BYD, and some of the vehicles made by several other brands, including Hyundai, Toyota, Kia, Lincoln and Tesla.
Source: https://carnewschina.com/2023/09/08/mercedes-benz-to-use-byd...
https://electrek.co/2024/02/15/byd-signs-deal-ford-gm-suppli...
BYD was a battery maker before they were a car maker.