BYD achieves 1,300-mile driving range with latest PHEVs | Hacker News Reader

BYD achieves 1,300-mile driving range with latest PHEVs

technode.com

41 pointsbelter21 comments

Nice. And it's not even about the battery. BYD uses mostly lithium-iron phosphate batteries, which are cheap and safe but heavier than lithium-ion.

On the all-electric front, CATL has announced a battery with a 10 minute charge time for 600km.[1] It's an incremental improvement on lithium-iron phosphate batteries, not a new battery technology. CATL is the world's largest EV battery maker. They're from Ningde, close to the necessary minerals. So this is probably for real.

[1] https://www.catl.com/en/news/6239.html

> Both models have five variants respectively, providing an all-electric driving range between 80 km and 120 km

All gas cars can get big range numbers like the headline with a bigger tank. It is 81mpg with an empty battery though which is the more impressive stat.

My first car had a 300-400 mile range, because it had a factory option 33 gallon (US) tank and up to 12 mpg. If there was room for a 33 gallon tank on my C-MAX PHEV, I'd have range in line with this announcement; cannonball run in maybe one gas stop here we come; although I don't think the efficiency holds up at cannonball run speeds which are awful close to the c-max maximum speed and recent runs have used 65+ gallon tanks.

IMHO, in reality, anything between 300-600 miles of reliable range is fine for a car that uses readily available liquid fuel. That seems to be where the US market seems to have optimized for in the past few decades.

81mpg is extremely impressive. The best MPG cars available in North America top out at the high 40s and low 50s. 81mpg is +30 over the Prius.

Suspiciously impressive, you could say.

The last time I had to commute to downtown Los Angeles (about a 50-mile drive), my Prius got 72 MPG.

My car is nearly 10 years old, so either I somehow managed to obtain the world's best Prius (with no loss of hybrid battery capacity over time), or you're underestimating the capabilities of today's hybrid gas-electric vehicles.

Well, my TDI got 60 mpg+ on the highway, which was better than the EPA estimate, but then everybody got mad at VW.

Because they were utter charlatans, and for such egregious behavior, an example must be set. And now they have to go all-electric, so everybody wins - including them.

Tangential, is there an all electric range value where we can define a PHEV as green? For example people don't bother to charge low range PHEV cars.

How irrelevant. Range was never really a concern for gasoline cars, as "recharging" is something which takes minutes.

Making a car with a large tank is trivial. If you are buying a PHEV, you are either expecting lots of short distance drives with occasional long distance trips, or buying the wrong car.

Efficiency of a gasoline car is obviously interesting, but that is a totally different topic than range.

range and efficiency go hand in hand, so those numbers are really interesting, and not having to stop, at all, for 1300 miles is a win in my book.

The article claims 40% thermal efficiency. That’s either amazing or a lie.

Assuming that's at the engine and not the wheels, Toyota gets 41% and Nissan announced 50% (in a fixed point operation):

https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/INNOVATION/TECHNOLOGY/ARCHI...

[dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40510617

Any reason to suspect this is

A) Even true

B) Not just them putting a huge gas tank in it

I mean there are no specs in this document at all

Indeed there are no specs here but they did released some.

They claim it does 2.9L\100Km [1] or 34.5km\l, that would mean it need a 61l tank to be able to reach 2100km.

[1]https://www.chinapev.com/byd/byd-releases-its-5th-gen-dm-tec...

Plus what I value in new gen phevs is a 50+ all electric range.

Bragging about maximum range on a phav is stupid at least for the next 10 years because there's going to be plenty of gas stations

Some 20 years ago VW did a comercial in Europe about the Golf being able to do over 1,000 km. Everybody though it has no merit, and assumed a larger tank instead of a technological hit.

The range claimed by chinese car companies is usually accurate (every article I’ve seen where a driver is interviewed includes a reported range that matches the manufacturer claims) maybe it’s something about not wanting to run afoul of a government that will kill you for abusive capitalistic behavior. No value judgment either way is implied.

Assuming ads directed at foreign markets receive same scrutiny as domestic market:

> A toothpaste television advertisement was hit with a record fine .. US$0.96 million for violating the Advertising Law in China... The advertisement showed a well- known Taiwanese celebrity showing off her teeth... The AIC found that the alleged visual "whitening" effect in the advertisement was a result of computer editing, as opposed to the actual effect of using the product.

https://www.hoganlovells.com/-/media/hogan-lovells/pdf/publi...

>The range claimed by chinese car companies is usually accurate

Like other regions they have a standardized range test, similar to the WLTP.

>maybe it’s something about not wanting to run afoul of a government that will kill you for abusive capitalistic behavior.

No. It is just too easy to get caught lying. Lying about range is like lying about motor power, once a single person tests your claim the deceit is revealed and your brand suffers significant damage.

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