It's the world's hottest car company. You can't buy one in America | Hacker News Reader

It's the world's hottest car company. You can't buy one in America

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12 pointszfg11 comments

BYD simply shows that Tesla is overvalued. they have battery expertise - making battteries for everyone else. can produce more cars, more cheapily than tesla and everyone else.

so why should tesla be valued more than the other car companies ?

> why should tesla be valued more than the other car companies ?

Honest answer? It's a meme stock. There is excess capital in the economy. Some buy watches and cars. Some give to their church. Some buy Bitcoin or Tesla.

There is, of course, intrinsic value to the company. It consists of a car company, an energy company and options on a robotics and a self-driving car company. The car company is worth some tens of billions of dollars. Given the competition and fact that BYD is giving it away for free, the self-driving piece seems more like future table stakes for the car company than a revenue driver it once could have been. The energy business is solid, but suffers from the same weaknesses (strong competitors, lack of differentiation and international prospects trashed by Musk) as the car company--possibly another tens of billions of value.

So I guess if you need a rational explanation for the valuation, it's tremendous option value being placed on Tesla's prospects (a) as a robotics business and (b) to shed the shadow cast over it by Musk's politics.

Tesla themselves have been saying they aren't a car company for a while now.

They're an AI and Robot company apparently. Despite the CEO having a different, separate AI company that he'll redirect chips to when it suits him.

They have a decent energy storage business but since that is basically batteries, I don't see that they have much moat there.

I checked out a half dozen “long term” reviews from Australia and Asia about these cars and find some curious quirks not well reported yet in the US. The first is the range claims are utter horse shit. They don’t get nearly the distance or efficiency advertised. The battery charging is really slow even at max juice input. They often have mechanical bugs that reflect poor engineering development attention to detail: crap reverse camera (worse than a Ring), interior materials the same color but different and mismatched shades, wiper and signal indicator stalks on opposite sides from the expected (as in different than every other car on the market), ridiculously cheap stock tires, and one developed a “concerning” steering return-to-center friction needing service attention.

Most of these reviews were in the 15,000 to 20,000 km range. That’s right - km, not miles! Personally I’m anti-hype on BYD because while I am also anti-Tesla, I find mass market engineering from China to consistently underwhelm. For comparison, I loved my Volkswagen Golf GTI 1.8T 5 speed from 2003. How many millions of those well engineered, reasonably priced VW Golfs of that generation were manufactured and sold worldwide? I’m really interested in the new MB CLA. Prius 2.0 looks sexy as hell.

To be frank, until I see somebody like Jeremy Clarkson review a BYD, or Tavarish, or Lewis Black, I’m reluctant to feel like I’m missing out here in the US. There’s already enough image-over-substance crap in this country. Can one of these actually make it 30,000 miles in everyday use in the DFW Metroplex without shaking themselves to pieces or becoming insufferably tedious?!

Best selling EV manufacturer in Brazil, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Entire Southeast Asia, and we're supposed to believe the zero-source provided claims of some random HN poster. European car manufacturers should really invest more in their "Trash Chinese Competitors' Online Reputation" department.

BYD is not a very experienced company. According to [0], they produced 455,073 vehicles in 2019 and 4,304,073 in 2024. This growth rate is quite unheard of in the automotive industry and I would expect serious quality compromises to achieve that.

[0] https://tridenstechnology.com/byd-sales-statistics/

> not a very experienced company

BYD's auto division was founded in the same year (2003) as Tesla and produced it's first car 3 years before Tesla did (2005 vs 2008). They've been making batteries since 1995. I'd say that gives them as much claim to experience specifically related to electric cars as any nearly any other car company in the world.

The thing is, battery manufacturing and general automotive manufacturing skills are orthogonal to each other. There is very little skill overlap. I guess they have been doing it longer than tesla, tesla even outsourced the general automotive parts to lotus initially, but tesla isn't known for quality either

Which company do you think has the most experience at high volume electric cars? And does this translate to a higher quality/price ratio than Tesla or BYD?

FWIW I do think you're right that we should treat a new entrant to the (mainstream) market with at the very least some "optimistic skepticism".

Personally I'd like to see some stronger competition in the market and wish them well, but I'd also like to see how the dust settles and some build-up of evidence for reliability etc when properly assessed against other makers.

I rode in a handful of BYD vehicles recently. They’re fantastic. It is early days yet so we won’t know how their quality and reliability stack up over time, but electric cars require 1/3rd the maintenance so it might turn out not to even matter as much as it does on an ICE car.

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