BYD Launches Hybrids with 1,300-Mile Driving Range
wsj.com
wsj.com
Sad to see how a country, which is so proud of their car industry, fails so spectacularly.
Volkswagen announced they want to produce a cheap model (20k€) it'll be there....2027. I guess by that time, people will already accept Chinese cars. I see them quite often here in a big German city.
> How big's your engine? 5.7 litre Buick and a 7 litre v8 motor!
> It's 160HP in the Buick
> It's 200HP in the 7.0l [other American car]
> How do [American car companies] get so few horsepower from these engines?
The issue is in getting the technology into the marketplace: between advertising, product positioning, dealerships, and consumer demand, that's where things fall apart.
I think that is actually a fair question, but it all comes down to what you optimize for. I think that the most efficient economic model could be some form of slave command economy.
That said, I think the bigger argument against central economic planning is that it further centralizes social and political power as well. This is prone to more drastic and oppressive failure modes.
Last, you talk about the speed of information, but that cuts both ways. Distributed systems can take advantage of this as well. Capitalist economies have booms and busts, but I would take them any day over great famines.
China’s support is an order of magnitude more and essentially allows their companies to be unprofitable and not worry about.
Similar to how American VCs enabled Uber to unprofitably wipe out many countries taxi industries in a way that those taxi companies couldn’t compete with.
Also doesn't this kind of thinking leads to an argument that says US govt does not want it's own companies to compete with Chinese ones with these grants by use of limitations?
And another question would be as USA is more of a private enterprise type of a country why wouldn't these VC's and car companies cooperate for this competition?
This is not at all the case in China's EV sector. The EV sector is China is extremely cut-throat. BYD is not living off of government subsidies. It's an extremely competitive company that has invested heavily in R&D and which has reduced costs through vertical integration.
Anyone who deals with manufacturing knows that China is dirt cheap and (nowadays) often better quality than domestic. Without the government propping up manufacturing, China could rug pull the US without even firing a shot.
They won't go down with the US on that.
https://www.bydeurope.com/article/303
https://insideevs.com/news/696789/toyota-byd-ev-partnership-...
Also, if Japan truly was a US puppet, would they be "allowed" to have a auto industry at all?
I certainly think it's better than having an morals-based view of geopolitics, and either
- believing in the moralistic post-hoc justifications for geopolitical actions like invading Iraq
- wanting to unilaterally cede resources or control to geopolitical adversaries or the global south
Btw I predict Japan will nuke up in the next decade.
I know a few people who lost their collective minds when a Japanese guy bought Pebble Beach. Turned out to be a terrible move on his part.
Japan was very much a threat to the US back then. Maybe more perceived than reality but a lot of the same rhetoric/narrative you see today about China, was Japan vs the US back then.
If the US closes it's borders to imports it'll retain a market only fit for domestic consumption. It's cars will not be competitive internationally.
The only real way out is for the US to find a way to remain competitive full stop. Isolationism or just allowing foreign imports to dominate should not be options either way.
I’m surprised that the trade wars didn’t happen sooner.
China was also the one who started decoupling first
Tech is actually one of the few sectors that is really blocked in China, and that's because of censorship, not protectionism.
> Let’s also not forget that the CCP also requires a domestic partner and a tech transfer.
Not any more. They used to, but that's been rolled back in sector after sector over the last 30 years or so. It was a transitional measure meant to protect Chinese domestic manufacturers as China began to open up to the world market.
> China was also the one who started decoupling first
This is just not at all in line with reality. China has been more tightly integrating itself into the global economy over time. The so-called "decoupling" began with Trump's trade war against China, though it's been remarkably ineffective at actually separating the US and Chinese economies.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/01/china-decoupling-derisk...
Besides automobiles, most companies are still blocked from entering China’s domestic market.
Companies still need domestic partners.
Even when there aren’t any formal tech transfer agreements, they’ll just steal the technology instead.
That's exactly the opposite of what China has been doing over the last 40 years. The history of China over the last few decades is one of massive economic opening to the outside world.
> Besides automobiles, most companies are still blocked from entering China’s domestic market.
You should just travel to China to see how wrong you are about this. Foreign companies are everywhere in China. Walk into any Chinese mall and then tell me, with a straight face, that foreign companies are banned.
> Companies still need domestic partners.
Not in most sectors.
Tesla really nailed EVs the first time around, but they never had much of a technological moat besides fantastic promises.
Imports of goods and services into China [0]:
* in 1990: 38.46 billion USD
* in 2022: 3.14 trillion USD
That comes to nearly 15% annual growth in imports every year for 32 years. That is not what an "isolated" market looks like.
0. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.IMP.GNFS.CD?location...
You mean if China produces vehicles that offer tremendous value and consumers love them? Lots of happy consumers who can spend money on other things they want.
> and the US players go out of business
US automakers have been bailed out several times now and have been insulated from competitive pressures. It is inevitable that several of them will go out of business. This is not a bad thing. The valuable bits will be snapped up by other firms. (pension obligations will be another story). [^1][^2]
> What happens if there’s a major war...
Healthy trade between the US and China dramatically reduces the chances of a major war. China is not run by an irrational child, its policy is influenced by wealthy business owners and its large capitalist class. Those people do not want to go to war with their best customers. [^3][^4]
(Warmongering over China is coming strictly from US hawks who are attracted to the narrative to distract attention from tough times at home.)
> You think a new crop of auto companies come up and then are able to compete against lower wage workers combined with gov financing?
The US auto industry has been significantly bailed out several times. US auto industry workers are heavily subsidized by US government policies. [^5][^6][^7]
---
[^1]: https://www.history.com/topics/21st-century/auto-bailout
[^2]: https://www.thebalance.com/auto-industry-bailout-gm-ford-chr...
[^3]: https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/tr...
[^4]: https://www.cfr.org/blog/how-trade-can-reduce-conflict
[^5]: https://hbr.org/2019/06/how-china-wins
[^6]: https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/chinas-capitalist-classes-th...
As China emerges as a superpower, of course it will have its own.
The brutal fact of the matter is if the US needs to blockade Chinese cars lest the US automotive industry completely collapses on itself, the US has already lost. There is nothing worth protecting at that point; an industry that can't make first rate products can't create instruments of war that can win.
If we wanted Pax Americana to last, shit needed to change at least a few decades ago. Anyone who was paying attention to EV development would have foreseen China dominating the field.
If you are implying that the Chinese can make cars that can satisfy the upmarket needs of US consumers, and do it significantly cheaper, then that implies the US automakers are gouging their customers or are simply incompetent. In both cases, protecting them amounts to putting shareholder interest before the interest of the common people.
To kill off American industries.
A lot of what China does makes sense when you consider that their goal is not to make a financial profit, at least not in the near-term. No, their real goal is to go in and replace the local industries with their own; choking them out with Chinese goods so cheap yet still good enough that competition is impossible. The end result is the locals end up relying on China for industrial production, research and development, at which point China just won a war without firing a single shot.
Look at what happened with solar panels, lithium batteries, and indeed EVs. Most if not all industrial bases outside China were destroyed and replaced thanks to a flooding of Chinese goods. The red ink is no doubt immense, but the payout in sheer geopolitical power far exceeds it.
The Rust Belt and the collapse of American steel manufacturing is another example. Cheap steel from China and elsewhere led to the collapse of American steel, and we're now looking at it getting bought out by foreign interests (fortunately Japan rather than China, but the damage to American ego is beyond critical mass) as the final nail in the coffin.
The battle is not between US and China, it's between US companies, who want large profit margins and US consumers who want cheap, well made stuff.
Just look at BYD's palette - their $10k EV, is a tiny car, and would probably not sell well in the US despite the price because US consumers don't buy cars this small, except maybe as a novelty. (Besides, tiny, cheap cars always face a stiff competition from barely used models available at the same price)
Moving up, you have the Dolphin, a mid 20k compact car, it's affordable and good. There was a mid 20k compact car made by an US company - the Bolt. It was also affordable and good. Guess what - GM discontinued it, citing low profit margins. And they won't make another one. It's next-gen EV platform is decidedly aimed at a higher segment with a bigger profit margin.
Higher still, you have the Seal, BYD's Model 3 competitor. First, it's no longer cheap, and that segment of EVs is the most crowded. Second, it's nice, but I don't think it comes together quite as well as a Tesla. What it does have on Tesla is build quality (which is Tesla's weak point), with most people expressing interest in it being the ones who are fed up with Tesla's shitty manufacturing and service.
Based on all this, I don't think China could take the US market to itself, even if free competition would be allowed. This whole thing is about political posturing and enabling continued shitty behavior from US manufacturers.
And if you'd accuse me of being some China shill, personally, I wouldn't buy a Chinese EV, not until they have a proven track record, and service network.
Retool what?
Just because GM was able to switch from cars to tanks for WW2 doesn't mean they could do it now if they had to.
The US is entering this territory of absurd protectionism that benefits the few at the expense of everyone else. We now have 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs and surely with the rate of innovation we are seeing, they will be 200% before long.
Tesla is bizarrely focused on gigapress and making the EV high-end when the economics of a vehicle with many fewer moving parts and a simpler design should be leading us toward sub-$10K cars and trucks.
As usual, Chinese firms seem to have better engineering chops and much better practical understanding of what the market wants.
Anyone could buy imported car, the only problem was lack of $$$ hard currency.
They’ve done this in other, less consumer facing markets, like steel and magnets.
The more likely outcome is that the US government would seek ways to force the EU governments to remove Chinese brands from the EU market, or at least imposing a very heavy import tax, like 200%. This, of course, will deal a heavy blow to the EU car makers themselves too, but I believe the US does have enough strings to pull.
80%+ of EVs in Australia are Chinese made. Will the US/EU accept they just can't make competitive cars or will they force other countries to buy their cars? https://www.drive.com.au/news/china-builds-80-per-cent-of-ne...
After all, Five Eyes + EU + JK is pretty much THE non-China market out there. The others are not rich enough.
Australia experienced boom times after WW2. It has a strong manufacturing industry. It's not well remembered now, but back them agricultural machinery designed and made here was regarded as some of the best. But we aren't a big country, so economy of scale did not work in our favour.
We responded by raising tariffs. It saved the manufacturing base, but that's the only good thing that could be said for it. Every other economic indicator was going backwards. After a few decades of that a politician named Paul Keating famously (well, it was famous here anyway) said the policy was turning us into a banana republic [0]. We made him Treasurer, and later Prime Minister. During that time he tore down tariffs, and removed other non-tariffs barriers such as the one our bank system hid behind.
The policy had a rocky start, climaxing in the recession in 1991 Keating said we "had to have" and interest rates hitting 18%. Unlike the USA where fixed interest rates are common, in Australia that means everyone is paying 18%. I remember it well. The memory still hurts.
It's 33 years later now. We have not had another recession. 33 years of continuous growth. The free trade policy is pretty much set in stone now. We dismantled what was left of our car manufacturing industry a few years ago. Everything we do have to be world competitive, or it goes. Did you know Google maps is Australian? There were do satellite mapping companies at the time. Google bought one. The other one, Near Map, is still turning out better satellite maps than Google.
Anyway, the point is if someone pushed Australia to close it's economic borders they would get one mother of a push back.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Keating#Macroeconomic_ref...
But again it is interesting to observe what will happen in the next few years. I hope my prediction is wrong.
The average miles driven on a car per year is 13,500
The median range of a gasoline automobile is ~400 miles
Assuming most people don't drive to absolute empty figure that's something like 40 trips per year to the gas station
This BYD cuts that down to ~10 trips per annum
Or framed another way you go to the gas station once every five weeks vs once a week
(1) https://www.caranddriver.com/auto-loans/a32880477/average-mi...
(2) https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1221-janu...
I think driving range is an important metric for fully-electric vehicles since recharging isn't easy everywhere in the country.
Otherwise I think MPG is the right metric.
Not sure why driving range of a HYBRID would be a relevant metric, that would be a factor of a lot of things, like gas tank size, which doesn't pertain to efficiency/environmentalism.
The misleading, wasteful way we measure gas mileage, explained
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/350382/gas-mileage-fuel-e...
10MPG = 10 gallons of gas
12MPG = 8.33 gallons of gas
20mpg = 5 gallons of gas
30mpg = 3.33 gallons of gas
60mpg = 1.67 gallons of gas
1,000mpg = 0.1 gallons of gas
So moving from 10-12mpg saves 1.67 gallons per hundred miles. Moving from 20-30mpg saves the same. At 60mpg, you're only using 1.67 gallons of gas, so there's no improvement to MPG that will save more than that. Nearly all the gains to actual fuel consumed will come from increasing the worst offenders rather than e.g. trading in Corollas for Pruises.
Also a good demonstration why the CAFE standards and other government fleet minimums are actually pretty effective at lowering fuel demand.
That is 34.5km/L or 81.1MPG.
These numbers are incredible.
Sounds promising but would love to see an exact apples-to-apples comparison before I get too excited.
and that 250E battery is good for 60km range in summer, 40km in winter
Of course, this line of thinking is why I’d never buy a vehicle with this capability. I’d rather buy one with fewer features, a smaller gas tank, and/or a smaller battery.
I drive so little that I only fill up about monthly and I could fill up weekly to 1/3rd tank to save a little bit of weight penalty, but that would be silly and a waste of all that gas station time when the gas in the tank does just fine for a month (a year might be different.)
Also, it’s possible that during a given week you don’t go near a gas station (from where I live, if I hop on the freeway and head to the city, I don’t pass any). But it’s unlikely that if you drive for a month you’re not near a gas station at a convenient time to stop. So getting rid of the annoyance of weekly fill-ups is different from dealing with monthly fill-ups (which is not especially annoying).
Epa standards for MPG have had the same problem for many years. It definitely improved for most people when they stopped using a completely flat area and started having some grade changes, but it is still just a matter of where you fall on the averages for where you live and drive.
My maths is not what is used to be.
A thousand miles with gasoline and 300 miles on battery = 1,300 miles
either that or you have to tow a small trailer with extra batteries
On a lighter note
Even Tiger Woods cant drive 1,300 miles so the Chinese have no chance
Nonetheless, if they are able to keep the cost down and gain a 30% efficiency- that’s still pretty good.
Even during my childless-with-gas-car days, the most we'd drive without stopping was maybe 3 hours. I would think even professional truckers would stop once every few hours for bathroom breaks and such.
Maybe it helps people that don't live near a charger, so they'd have to charge less often?
But even then, charging a battery up to 1,300 miles would take FOREVER even on the fastest chargers.
For a weeklong trip to a location where there are no chargers, you can have the confidence of making it there, tooling around for the week, and making it back to a place with a charger. You might not need this in your region, but I am familiar with regions in the US where this would come in handy.
But we also haven't been to any place in the US yet where we were hundreds of miles away from a supercharger.
it's a PHEV, not a BEV
....?
Limit is a 30 minute break every 8 in a work period. I believe it's 11 hours driving time per 24 hour period in the US. 13 hours in southern Canada and 15 hours in the northern Canada. Then another limit being 70 hours every 7 or 8 days.
IIRC it was set after studies showed that the probability of crashing increased after 11 hours of continuous driving or so, but don't quote me on that.
The reality is that there are more than a dozen serious Chinese EV brands and they are in a cutthroat competition even for their own domestic market and most of their production goes to domestic customers. I don't think subsidies in this context should be a considered a weapon of international trade.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40510617
Considering that in many places there are not superchargers nearby, having additional capacity/range is a major benefit.
You are assuming that people like stopping to charge and waiting 45 minutes at a supercharger station (currently the best possible situation with a Tesla)
It's not terrible, but it is currently the only option. Consider how much more money the long range Teslas cost compared with the base model. This is because extra range is very very nice to have and ads a LOT of value
Once again, its a plug-in hybrid car.
It runs off petrol.
> It's not terrible, but it is currently the only option.
It isn't the only other option. I've never waited 45 minutes at a public charger even on road trips. I don't even normally stop at public chargers other than the ones at my office or the mall if a spot is free. There are also other plug-in hybrid cars out there. Once again, its a plug-in hybrid car. Not a 1,300mi BEV.
Did I mention it runs off petrol? And thus not like a Tesla?
You re-energize this while out and about by going to gas stations, not to DCFCs. Because it is a hybrid, not a BEV.
Your point seems to me to be about a small detail that isn’t really relevant. Drivers focused on range don’t necessarily care whether it’s hybrid or pure electric, etc.
You directly stated waiting to charge for 45 minutes at a supercharger "...is currently the only option." But it is not. Hybrids, and plug-in hybrids like this, have been an option for a long time. The idea that one can quickly "recharge" on the go at a gas station is not a new concept. Gas cars have existed for a long time. This is a type of gas car. It takes gasoline and burns it in an internal combustion engine to get that range figure. Nothing about this technology is really new, just that it has better MPG than some of the other competitors and has a large enough gas tank to make that range figure really high. And it largely gets that high MPG by pairing it with a much lower power motor than what many US consumers would like (99hp vs 160hp in the Prius Prime).
Charging at home is also pretty irrelevant here, save for the fact it is a plug-in hybrid. Then I'd wonder why bother buying the plug-in hybrid with a larger and more expensive battery if you're not planning on actually keeping that battery charged often. The pure-battery range of this is still pretty tiny compared to an EV, so if you didn't have the ability to charge at home this is just a normal hybrid car like the Prius, albeit with better MPG due to being much more anemic.
But then the main benefit isn't that it has such immense range, the main benefit is that it supposedly has a pretty high MPG compared to most hybrids on the market today. So why not lead with that in the article instead of sharing some odd range statistic. A Jeep with a few jerry cans strapped to the back can also have a pretty large amount of range. Pickup trucks with massive gas tanks can also have pretty high range as well.
So practically every point about charging time, charging at home, and comparison to Tesla is immensely irrelevant. Tesla doesn't make hybrids. The comparison is to pretty much every car maker that makes hybrids. This is because, once again, this is a hybrid and not an EV.
The point of "this isn't an EV, so concerns about home charging and charging wait time" aren't mere details. It is a key part of the car and directly addresses your main points of why you imagine 1,300mi of range would be important and valuable to the consumer. I do agree, 1,300mi of range on a BEV with the current state of charging would be useful. This isn't a BEV, its a hybrid. The state of charging networks doesn't really apply. Practically nobody takes 45 minutes pumping gas.
Maximizing the interval between these refueling stops, where I have to pay to keep my car running, is a net win to me.
It's more impressive than BYD did it with a 50L tank.