BYD begins testing solid-state EV batteries in the Seal
electrek.co
electrek.co
If we're really so concerned about 'supply chain' issues we could build up a strategic reserve of batteries and solar panels. If china wants to continue subsidizing their industry below costs of manufacture I see no reason why we shouldn't exploit their generosity to meet our climate goals as quickly as possible.
One of the 'good news' stories re: the recent datacenter buildout is that grid storage is now being more widely deployed, and that compliments the roll out of renewable energy.
How we made it: will China be the first electrostate? - https://www.ft.com/content/e1a232c7-52a0-44dd-a13b-c4af54e74... | https://archive.today/OSFYo
Are they even doing that? A few billion dollars a year is meaningful but it's not dumping for an industry this big.
I consistently hear 2 main arguments against electric vehicles in the US. Range, and cost.
BYD & China is solving both. Range is important because we lack charging infrastructure still, and anyone who rents at an apartment complex, you are screwed and have to rely on public charging stations. Big batteries are important for these folks. People also still have range anxiety, so when a fuel efficient gas car will get ~400+ miles per full tank, only having more expensive cars with a ~250 mile range is a non starter for a lot of people in the US.
Cost is self explanatory. One of the better electric cars sold in the US, the Ioniq 6 STARTS at $38k, which is already more than a significant chunk of the population can afford - you're looking at close to an $800/month payment at current rates for entry level. BYD could sell in the US at around $20,000.
https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/23/electric-ve...
Key takeaways from the above:
> The number of EV charging stations has more than doubled since 2020. In December 2020, the Department of Energy reported that there were nearly 29,000 public charging stations nationwide. By February 2024, that number had increased to more than 61,000 stations. Over 95% of the American public now lives in a county that has at least one public EV charging station.
> EV charging stations are most accessible to residents of urban areas: 60% of urban residents live less than a mile from the nearest public EV charger, compared with 41% of those in the suburbs and just 17% of rural Americans.
Maps: https://supercharge.info/map | https://www.plugshare.com/ | https://afdc.energy.gov/stations#/find/nearest?country=US&fu...
https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q4-2024-ev-sales/
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/trends-in...
No but it only takes 3 minutes to dump 45 litres of fuel into my car and that lasts about 3 weeks of driving.
The demand isn't there. The group of people who buy EVs and don't have a home to charge at is too small. And that won't change until the economics of purchasing an EV fundamentally change.
The point I’m primarily trying to make, repeatedly: distance to a charger is not some universal rule that prevents uptake. The least likely thing to be true is that the market stays the same. If it remains the same in the US for a few years, China will crush this market.
Either a human needs to be employed overnight plugging in and unplugging these cars ($$) or else every single charger that supports this needs to have new fancy robotic arms and some agreed-upon protocol that cars can use to request a charge.
Considering that so far the story of EV chargers in America has looked like "download my app!" people struggling and failing to get credit card readers reliably working, I have no faith that this would happen in a few years.
The benefit is that you can power the cars when there is least demand on the grid, on the roads, on the need for the vehicles themselves, on the time of people who currently wait at chargers for their cars to charge. Fix one thing (and build upon the main innovation of cars driving themselves) and you unlock all this other waste. The charging location can even manage this by setting availability to align with staff, eg 5am to 11pm, or 24/7 if they want to hire up. You can even have roaming staff, eg wander between three locations and just switch the cars out.
The current state of affairs in the US is that having a L2 charger at home and paying $E for 100kwh of electricity is massively less expensive than paying $E*5 for the car to go charge itself via some third party. This will not be a cheap service. The places where people tend to buy electric vehicles, generally coincide with high electricity prices and high labor costs. Maybe the high electricity costs can be somewhat offset by using off-peak power, but that's also off-peak generation due to solar panels, so who knows.
This also relies on the innovation of "cars that can drive themselves to the charger", which has been 18 months away in Teslas for what, a decade now? And Teslas are now a tiny proportion of the EVs sold in the US. Something less expensive and better price-per-range like the Ioniq 5/6 or the Equinox EV don't even have the hardware to take advantage of a system like this if you could snap your fingers and make these overnight charging facilities exist.
I don't think the economics work in the 2020s. Someday, sure.
These arguments are kind of like horse and cart owners stating that gasoline powered vehicles will.need to be able to get fuel and that's impractical. Its infrastructure and innovation that is still being built out, the that build out is now 10-12 years along for most first world nations.
If this includes AC chargers, leaving your car for 8 hours 2 miles away is an absolute pain.
If it doesn't, the question becomes are the chargers occupied? Are they operational?
Waiting at a gas station takes a minute, waiting at a charger takes 30.
I've been driving an EV for more than 5 years and pretending that charging isn't a significant hindrance to EV ownership is disingenuous. It's actually gotten worse because more EVs are on the road and the chargers haven't kept pace with the rising demand.
I’m currently on a road trip and was leaving the car at a nearby charger which was walking distance from where I’m staying - I can’t imagine owning one where either this wasn’t available or there wasn’t a fast charger I could spend 10 minutes at.
The actual long distance drives were super easy thanks to Superchargers - 5-10 minute stops keep you driving for hours! It doesn’t feel disadvantaged compared to gas so long as the infrastructure is there.
It is curious that this is the case. If chargers were profitable a couple of years ago, you would expect more chargers and more profit today.
I haven’t noticed much growth in chargers where I live but I have noticed more EVs on the road.
You have to think a lot of the low hanging fruit locations are taken by now and, even if it's profitable, it doesn't make any profit while you're building it and I've seen a "coming soon" sign on top of what looked like a finished installation for more than a year at a mall near me.
My car gets ~500 miles/800 km per tank. My wife's car, which has a more efficient engine and transmission and is also smaller, but with the same huge tank, gets ~600 miles/960 km per tank. I will have to stop for a bathroom somewhere along a route that long, but only once or twice. I used to have to stop three times for a ~900 mile/1500 km trip that I did a few times.
This is a problem with EV proponents who try to argue that "you'll stop every couple of hours for half an hour or so anyway, so charging isn't an issue". No, I won't. I'll drive 1000 miles with less than 45 minutes of downtime on the whole trip. I don't stop every two hours. Maybe 15 minutes every 4 hours, of which 10 is fueling and going to the bathroom and 5 is getting off and back on the highway.
That's not a slam against EV's, but let's acknowledge their weak points honestly.
I'm American, so grew up in car culture, but I've never driven more than 200 - 300 miles in a day.
I guess if you’re trying to follow an ICE car on a road trip then yeah it might be a weak point. If you’re already stopping every 200 miles then it’s no matter. For us, we enjoy travel days more with the built in stretch/bathroom breaks.
Those are five long charging opportunities, which is two more than you need for a 1000 mile trip.
I get the concept, and I am not an EV hater. But let us not pretend that long-distance driving is an imaginary thing. I don’t stop - ever - for more than fifteen minutes, unless it’s to sleep.
I've also done the same trip in 3 days, and in 5 days. The longer trips were far more pleasant, and were not slowed down at all by charging.
My car (Mazda3 hatch) gets 24 mpg, which is actually typical for US mid-sized cars.
I have a 3-5 minute gas station fill up every 260 miles or so, basically once a week. The Chinese MG4 does 435 miles on a charge, 95% of which I could charge at home, the remaining 5% of my miles are my twice a year road trips @ ~400 mi (to LA) and ~800 mi (to Seattle).
The MG4 makes LA without a stop and Seattle with 1 stop.
That's a once a year stop for ~30 minute in the EV compared to 3-4 hours a year sitting at smelly gas stations for my Mazda ICE.
I would certainly trade never having to ever take my car into a gas station, ever again, for one brief stop once a year on my leisurely road trip if I had the cash to buy a great EV.
But to be fair, not every product has to perfectly fit every context. To be successful a product can fill a small niche, or it can appeal to a large market- it doesn't have to satisfy every use case.
So you're right - driving 1000 miles with no downtime is not an EV strength. But the percentage of the market doing that is tiny. Conversely the proportion of people who live in a house (home charging) and drive < 100 miles a day, is huge.
Even for those doing a "once a year road trip" - well, hire cars exist.
So I completely agree that an EV is not useful to you. I would suggest though that a product can be massively successful, while at the same time appealing to a subset of the market. And appealing to a subset does not limit validity or indeed profitability.
Lipstick seems to be a successful product, despite only appealing to something less than 50% of the market.
Yes, EVs do slow down long road trips a bit. But it’s really not much of a difference. I just did 3000 miles in 10 days in one.
I recently moved to an EV for my road-tripper vehicle. Yes, I need to stop and recharge every 4-5 hours for 20-40mn.
I find that I like it. A stretch, a coffee, snacks and replenishment. My favorite chargers are at a supermarket and a cafe' nearby.
I agree the pro-EV types try to whitewash this a lot, and I agree it is dishonest.
...but I find that I am okay with the cross-country EV reality anyway.
$0.02
Even among Americans, American cars aren't considered that good. There's a massive reliability premium you pay for Honda and Toyota. Even cars with 100k miles on them (frustratingly as a buyer) keep their value. And they're manufactured in the US, inasmuch as any car can be said to be manufactured in a single location.
I've been searching around and I can't even find data about other countries importing our cars which to me would be the biggest signal of strength.
I've only been in BYDs in Mexican Ubers and I would not buy one, it felt cheap and plasticky and creaked.
Oh I would for sure buy a BYD today if I were able. The ones I've ridden in have been really nice. I mean they are literally plastic but so is every car in the "economy" price range. I don't think their interiors were noticeably different than any other non-luxury car. I've been told that their higher end models don't have this problem.
They do have significant advantages on the software side of things. I’m not sure how that compares to Chinese companies however.
We've owned Hondas (Odyssey) and Toyotas (Camry, Prius, Corolla). They've been great. We also changed the oil whenever the car's display said to and did whatever other servicing our independent mechanic advised. I suspect that a lot of cars would also be reliable if they were maintained.
Toyota is recalling 100,000 Tundra trucks because debris was left in the engine. https://www.haleytoyota.com/blog/the-2022-2023-toyota-tundra... There's no perfect vehicle although I'd say EVs get a lot closer when you can refill at home and do basically no maintenance except tire rotations and cabin air filters.
However, the much higher prices these companies are selling their cars outside of China are still much lower than the prices American cars are available at.
Given our recent election results, it seems to me that we don't want to.
At least 40% of Americans do not give a crap about addressing climate change. Many Americans see EVs as a waste of time and a direct attack on the US.
Because the unfair advantage distorts the market leading to a potentially otherwise noncompetitive product destroying the competition at which point they can (and will) jack up prices, so not only do you get more expensive vehicles, but you've also destroyed an entire industry and several adjacent industries at the same time.
It's not like you can't just snap your fingers and re-establish a vehicle manufacturing supply chain once it disappears.
I get people just want cheap vehicles, but the short-term benefit simply isn't worth it.
Purchase discounts for EVs in the US, for instance, didn't discriminate based on manufacturer. You could buy a foreign made EV and you still get the discount.
Discriminatory subsidies, like for instance, funneling billions of dollars per year into Chinese-owned manufacturers of EVs, parts and even even shippers, is not ok.
The US has, of course, been accused of discriminatory subsidies as well and countries have retaliated, correctly, with increased tariffs to offset the unfair advantage.
Point your gun where it belongs which is the oil industry and its lobbyists.
They are indeed the enemy. They've managed to convince a large swath of the population to hate everything that is not fossil-fueled.
Example: God made the sun and the sky. That's where heaven is. Fossil fuels come from under the earth. Something else really bad is down there too. I don't want to spell it out, but it's the opposite of heaven.
Or for the "independent, lion-not-sheep" types: I don't depend on big companies. My energy comes from up above. You can't take the sky from me. etc.
Freedom to power your home without paying "the man" should be compelling to all who could use it. Texas is ironically a prime state for renewable energy and the dollars generated from it have convinced some, but many still reject it as "wokeness".
It boggles the mind.
When I'm in public conversation, say in a coffee shop, restaurant, or crowded park, and I know I'm in a place with a lot of "christians" around me, I'll say things very much like you describe:
"Don't you know? Oil comes up from hell! It's made by the devil!"
"Sunlight is falling down from heaven, it's a gift directly from god."
"But for some reason, so many christians are against solar power, and want to burn more oil."
Then I'll wrap up with a little apocalypse evangelism:
"The bible says that in the end times, most christians will start to follow false prophets, and they're all going to go to hell!"
I doubt it has much lasting effect, but I do see a few heads turn, with questioning, worried looks on their faces.
You're the first other person I've seen mention this as a means of "converting the sinners".
*all beliefs are the same*
Stellantis sells a good number of EVs in Europe, but almost entirely in form factors that won't sell in North America. Perhaps this expertise and experience will be useful.
I hope domestic manufacturers survive the "protection" Trump is giving them, but the protection may prove fatal.
heheh
The climate thing itself is a giant oligarchy influenced manipulative game play. This nation is built on capital. Capital by its nature looks to dominate humanity and freewill.
The treacherous twists to turn a noble pursuit into a way for developed nations to continue dominate developing nations is beyond the space of this comment, but you can see that clearly over the history: Caesar Hitler Mao Trump Xi etc.
We people have truly never been able to wield the power ourselves.
Anyone who mentions China's subsides without mentioning the US's $2.5B+ in EV subsidies is mostly likely ignorant and bluffing, or intentionally misleading you.
And don't even get me started on how it took $80B in AIFP subsidies to keep our auto industry from just dying completely ~16 years ago.
This "China subsidizes EVs" BS needs to end. Everyone subsidizes. The only meaningful questions are how much and to what end.
If anything you are proving the US doesn't understand research or science behind producing electric vehicles and simply funding EVs directly instead of associated organizations.
Given the current climate theres no way to explain it without sounding like a crazy person.
This fits well with the corporate donor driven political system where the government puts no pressure on the corporations on their production side allowing them to outsource their production to the rest of the world and instead focuses on growing the American market and consumer demand for them.
One of the largest recipients of Chinese EV subsidies is ... (drumroll) ... Tesla, an American company.
It's not just that China has reached some kind of quality parity with North America. There are now significant market segments that the US functionally cannot manufacture because we completely ceded the institutional knowledge and infrastructure in favor of financialization and outsourcing of the US economy.
My specific area of expertise is robotic / computer controlled manufacturing equipment and a lot of the components (high precision servos, sensors and other motion components) are functionally impossible to source domestically. There are still some boutique manufacturers making things in low efficiency / low volume in the USA but touring the manufacturing campuses of Chinese suppliers has been shocking in the last five years. The sheer scale of efficient, automated assembly they are capable of operating at makes a big-three automotive assembly line look like a dirt-floored shack with men knocking things together with rocks.
They are laser focused on lights-out manufacturing at extreme volume in ways I have never seen in the US. Entire production lines of high complexity electronics that are completely vertically integrated (everything from the injection molding for the plastic enclosure to the PCB manufactured on one campus) with human hands touching them for the first time as they leave the automated quality control line to be boxed up.
I don't think American people fully comprehend the brain and skill drain that has already taken place.
He also was a guest on the Search Engine podcast to discuss the same topic earlier this year [1]. I enjoyed this more than the video.
I think there’s some nuance and slight nationalism to take with a grain of salt, but the point is extremely well demonstrated.
[0] https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=2jaYQZEinXsJBk2L
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/search-engine/id161425...
Assume a generation to be about 21 years (birth to high school + trade training).
Our business leaders since the 1980s failed to quantify the cost of a possible revamp, and I wonder what the true cost will end up being.
I’ve seen some of the Great Lake cities and towns that are in sad shape; but I was too young (and being immigrants, also too poor) to tour those areas in any depth in the Reagan/Carter days so I can only imagine what they were like back then.
Because your own industrial base atrophies is one reason:
> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.
> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now
That's (partly) what did-in Japan and Germany in during WW2: they couldn't produce enough to actually run a war. Even the just the UK was out-producing Germany in many measures (e.g., aircraft).
The Big 3 completely retooled for war in very short order. If things go hot again you want factory capacity available for retooling to be possible.
A society just has to be willing to pay for that capacity instead of deciding that they want the cheapest widget made somewhere else.
Given the use of drones in Russia-Ukraine, what is the drone-making capacity of the US versus some other countries?
In the long run, I really don't think we can tariff our way around technical innovation.
900 miles of range in 12 mins of charging... Charge for 20 mins and have enough range for 2 full days of travel driving!
And this is only when driving long distances. Anyone with a driveway can eassily charge overnight for typical daily driving.
The whole package: many types of energy source providing electricity, never having to go to a gas station for typical daily driving, path to complete elimination of petro combustion byproducts, massive simplification of the overall vehicle mechanism, significant performance enhancements, etc.
All technical evaluation come out in favor of EVs...
The thing is, the average American is also very sensitive to any kind of change to their daily life. And taking advice from anyone how “it is better for you” is against the whole individual thought idea. So, good luck.
> BYD’s solid-state EV batteries set a record by gaining 1,500 km (932 miles) range in just 12 minutes of charging.
> The test charged the battery to just 80%, meaning total EV range could reach upwards of 1,875 km (1,165 miles). Keep in mind, that is CLTC range. On the EPA scale, it would be closer to 1,300 km (808 miles)
Is this true? How quickly will other companies be making these types of batteries?
Is there some reason why solid state batteries seem to be being deployed in cars sooner than in phones?
When price comes down and production comes up (assuming those things happen), then I would expect them to start appearing in phones as well.
I personally thought that the more interesting part of the article was where they claimed to be able to add 800 miles of range in 12 minutes. At those kinds of charge rates, my ideal EV would probably have a 300ish mile range that I could charge from 10-80 in <10 minutes (although I believe that part of the way they get those charge rates is with large battery packs, so a smaller pack would probably not charge as fast).
Additionally, while the specs for EV sedans are currently fine, batteries are only barely good enough for larger, less efficient vehicles. Maybe the killer app here isn't a sedan that goes 1000 miles, but a truck or SUV that can go 500.
The point is, whatever your and my opinions on the adequacy of current EV charging, the market seems to value improved battery specs more highly in the EV space than it does in the phone space (or maybe it doesn't and BYD is making a mistake by keeping their batteries for their cars instead of selling them to phone manufacturers).
My car, which like I said has a 260 mile range, I only charge to 80% unless I'm going on a long road trip. So for 90%+ of the time, it's never charged more than 80% (and I very rarely discharge it to less than 15%). For most people, a 300 mile range like I describe would be plenty to be able to not need 100% charge except on rare occasions. But even if it's not for you, or for some people, I very specifically said "my ideal EV". A 600 mile range that I almost never use is just extra weight that I'm carrying around and decreasing efficiency, and isn't actually providing much real battery protection. I am absolutely not someone who drives 360 miles a day (which is what you could do if you were doing an 80% to 20% discharge on a 600 mile battery every day. I'm pretty confident that stats suggest that very few people drive that much on a regular basis. The 150 miles I get from the the 80% to 20% range on my current battery is already more than enough.
Doesn’t work with a car.
Really easy to work around Apple’s utterly crap battery life. If it were better that would be nice to have.
Going a certain distance so can’t take an ev at all. It’d be nice if you could, if your usage is mostly very urban, sure that’s just nice. Gotta visit Dad on the farm a dozen times a year or whatever? That’s not your life so you don’t see it as essential even if the rest of the driving is much shorter range.
The comparison I’m making is an external phone battery is $10. Replacing an ev battery is, hell i dunno, $10.000?
Not needing an external phone battery would be nice.
Needing external ev batteries is far more likely to be cost prohibitive. Adjacent to this thread people have raised size and weight issues as well. I didn’t even bother going that far because the straight up price puts it in a different ball park to an external phone battery.
Hope we’re all on the same page again!
Then the GP had a counterargument to EV batteries being expensive, by suggesting you could rent one for your three day trip for a pretty small amount of money.
And not only would that charge be quite small compared to everything else going on with your car, the further you drive with the extended battery the more you save by electricity being cheaper than gasoline. And that includes having to pay for depreciation.
So in the scale between $10 and $10000, it would be like renting a big piece of road equipment, not buying one.
To be clear the middle paragraph of my post was explaining why I think they said that, and the last paragraph was me adding my own commentary. I wasn't suggesting they were implying the part about gas savings, that was all me.
Go on then, show us your estimate for the cost of renting a fully charged towable battery for 2-3 days.
I'm struggling to see it being much cheaper than renting an ev for 2-3 days if such a thing were wished into existence.
Even if it was the same price, lots of people don't want to rent a car, and many of the reasons they have for that don't apply to renting a battery pack.
But I'd be surprised if it wasn't a lot cheaper. If I think about a non-towed battery, it costs 1/5 as much as a car, needs 1/10 as much storage space on shelves, and can be kept in service for hundreds of thousands of miles. Towed units would be harder to store and have a bit more wear but should still be a lot smaller and cheaper than cars. A small trailer that could carry a battery is only a thousand bucks retail. You'd probably want some cooling, in the end maybe it's 1/4 the cost of a car and takes up 1/6 of a parking space? Still sounds like a cheap rental.
And as for the price of "fully charged", they can have the same price per kWh as a supercharger and have massive profit margins. So that's an amount you'd have to pay anyway and not a downside to renting.
Want an extra 100 miles of range? That's 600lbs of cargo. A person can't place that in a trunk, and a trailer would probably barely extend range due to the extra drag and efficiency loss.
But is it multiple thousands of times more valuable? I don't think so.
We know that "if" isn't true. That's the problem with the argument for only making EV batteries. A car battery is five thousand times as big as a phone battery and it's only hundreds of times as expensive.
Just look at rumored iphone air
Ie, I agree totally with your sentiment
Not quite energy density, but the energy density, cost, complexity when combined with the discharge profile generates a very "interesting" phase space.
There's a few promising technologies which have very, very good efficiencies but only like very slow predictable discharge cycles. These are excellent for say building giant GW batteries in the desert, but not so great for even car batteries.
Phones and tech have bursty power needs based on use, the cost of taking other tech down to the size of a phone is extremely high (especially if you're first to market unless you know you will sell millions of units). Not to mention the reliability of batteries typically decreasing as the size drops.
Cars tend to be in the middle with their discharge profiles being relatively smooth compared to say a laptop, but yes you still have economies of scale, complexity, reliability and supply chain and patents to contend with ;)
Anyways- isn't a normal cell in an EV battery is like a AA size? Is this still true for solid state?
No. Some companies use tons of cylindrical cells that are larger AAs (like 18mmx65mm, 21mmx80mm, or 46mmx80mm). But even then at 46mm in diameter it's a good bit bigger than a AA.
But lots of manufacturers use prismatic or pouch like batteries. They're large and rectangular. Like these batteries on this BYD, they're called "blades". Most other major manufacturers use prismatic cells.
Other phones targeting the Chinese market have reached 8000.
But companies like Apple and Samsung like to just sit on their laurels and sell the same thing again.
But yes Apple and Samsung has been very slow in adoption to new Battery Tech, even when it is somewhat market tested by Chinese phone markers.
That is on the assumption they will use the battery....
And considering Samsung showed Galaxy Edge with the new battery...
Oh, that's easy. I already knew the answer, which probably means just about every AI could tell you. Phone batteries use Li Polymer (which is solid state BTW), because they can be any shape, including flat, wide and very thin. Other chemistry's can't be thin.
If so, can this be beneficial to use cases outside auto industry? Eg. Power walls. If so, I am more excited for that. I am tired of electricity bills.
Also, what happens when an EV taxi runs out of battery power in China? They actually have stations setup all over that you simply drive into and it replaces the entire battery pack... in minutes.
Imo that's stepping beyond the risk profile of filling a tank with a known high explosive that can evaporate and suffocate and catch fire in the sun ... But risk profiles are inherently personal
I thought the big issue with solid-state (besides dendrites) was a lower energy density than Li-ion? What happened?
Given it's still lithium based I'd still think twice before chucking a bucket of water on one that's fizzing :p
As for how this battery is better I'm not an expert, but good to read if true.
Maybe you are comparing the density of research batteries that weren't worth commercializing to highly developed lithium ion batteries?
https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Line/All-time-by-Q...
Swasticars don't sell well. Musk needs to leave the company to give Tesla a chance to recover.
How so? A full battery can run your seat heaters for about a month. That's a lot better than the hours of heat you'd get out of a full tank of gasoline.
Not to mention that you'll never get carbon monoxide poisoning from a gasoline engine with a tailpipe blocked with snow.
None of the ‘answers’ address the range issues with batteries in the cold. Or how you can be totally fucked if your pack drops below a certain temp, and you don’t have enough charge to heat the pack and get home.
Probably even more fucked than if your diesel tank gelled. At least you can heat it up directly if you really need to.
If I let my electric car sit overnight with at least 20% charge, I know it will start in the morning, even if it was -45 overnight. You can't say that with a gasoline vehicle. It'll take almost all of that 20% to get up to temperature, but once it's up it maintains it well.
And anyplace cold has ubiquitous block heater plugs. At really cold temperatures it'll barely charge on a block heater plug because it'll use all the energy keeping the battery warm, but it means you start with a warm battery and a warm car, so the range drop is massively reduced.
EV’s at these temps are very problematic and much more likely to get you actually killed if something goes wrong, because of how they work. That’s just the truth.
Thinking that somehow it isn’t is the delusional part.
With enough care can you potentially avoid getting into a situation where you’ll actually get in deep trouble? I guess. But the margins are way thinner, and it requires a lot of range reduction, and your worst case scenarios are much more likely to happen.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00039929.htm https://www.rearviewsafety.com/safety/news/news-release-dead...
But it sounds like it's hard to get a handle on how common it is. It feels like it's more on the level of "a handful a year in North America/freak occurrance", rather than "common way to die".
I was recently stuck in a 3 hour backup in sub-freezing temps in moderate snowfall, and it was nice to be able to leave the engine running for heat. In the winter, we have a contingency where it's possible to be stuck in your vehicle overnight in heavy snowfall, and my plan was always to wake up every couple of hours to ensure the snow was clear of the car.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/local/3-young-women-found-dead-in...
What kills in the winter is unpredictability. Range is predictable and easy to mitigate.
It's the winter. You've slid off the road. You're probably in the ditch. You've probably taken some damage to the vehicle. Whether or not you've taken damage, you're now stuck. Something is preventing you from safely walking for help. At -30 or worse after an accident that's more likely than not.
The above is not an uncommon scenario in the winter. So you wait in the vehicle for help to arrive, hoping you don't freeze to death before it does.
You're safer in an electric vehicle.
- If you've plowed into a snow covered ditch, your car may be partially or fully entombed, and you're at risk of a carbon monoxide poisoning.
- there are stories of such vehicles not being found for days. Having heat for days might save your life
Yes I learned to drive in Canada. In a snowy region (3-10 metres of snow yearly depending on elevation). And I ski 50-100+ days per year. And will drive extra for powder snow.
Amount of times I've got stuck in snow? Zero. If you learn to drive in the snow, have winter tires, you just don't get stuck. Especially when you're putting in thousands (tens?) of kms and hundreds of days on snow covered roads.
Did YOU learn to drive here? Guessing no if you get stuck in the snow or slide off the road...
Edit - should add, around here (Alberta Rockies to the BC interior) there's as much as hundreds of KMs between towns/cities. Bad place to ever get stuck. Which is why you simply don't. Also why I'm not trusting an electric car in -40 when there's no cell service for ~200 km spans.
But every single time I go out in the winter I have a plan for what I'll do if it does happen. Because it happens to people, good drivers and bad, snow tires or not.
> Also why I'm not trusting an electric car in -40 when there's no cell service for ~200 km spans.
You shouldn't be trusting any vehicle. Both an electric car and a gasoline car might let you down when you need it. The gasoline car is more likely to let you down, though. I presume you have a proper winter kit in your vehicle so you don't have to trust your vehicle.
Is it road-accessible? What kinds of vehicles can get there?
The cars in the article have twice as much range as a gas car or more, even in the cold. And it's easier to charge them at remote locations than to get fuel deliveries to those same remote locations.
I'm sure a scenario could be contrived where any type of car wins, but on average I expect a long range battery car to do quite well.
Newer models have heat pumps that greatly improve efficiency in cold weather. They also have better battery chemistries that store more energy in the same form factor. Unless you live in a very remote, very cold location (eg: rural Alaska), an EV is a fine choice.
I am strongly pro-EV, and think they're broadly fine in every part of the US, and having just gotten back from Norway they're 100% on the right track, but they're nowhere near comparable to even my hometown of Minneapolis (8.8 degrees F lowest mean minimum).
Turns out there's more to climate than just latitude. Lots of the US is colder than Western Europe on average despite mostly being far further South. NYC is colder than London in the winter even though it's coastal and a much lower latitude.
A massive chunk of the US population wouldn't have any cold related struggles to EV adoption. Nobody is really losing a massive amount of range in Phoenix or Houston or Dallas or Atlanta or San Francisco or LA or Raleigh or Austin or Oklahoma City or Kansas City or Nashville or Tallahassee or San Antonio or Asheville or Richmond or...
EVs are fine for massive chunk of residential car owners. Not everyone, sure, but a massive percentage. Most suburban households could easily make their next car an EV without a hassle.
It’s simply not a concern. Only a range reduction. A non-issue.
montana is very spread out
If you developed a hyper-efficient ICE engine that didn’t generate a pile of waste heat, you’d have to actively make it less efficient in the cold, or install heating hardware and burn extra gas to power that hardware - but nobody would criticize that hyper-efficient engine for being “worse in the cold”.
If you lowered the efficiency of an EV by turning half of its energy output into heat all the time, you’d greatly narrow the gap between warm-weather and cold-weather performance.
I drive a gas-powered Subaru because the Volvo dealership in Montana was being insufferable when I wanted a C40. My neighbour can easily go 200+ miles in the winter. (Apparently pre-conditioning is a thing.) Works fine for road trips to Missoula and Salt Lake City, for them, from Jackson.
If it’s less than like 100 miles (161km) I think that the vast majority of EV batteries are going to get you where you want to go, even with 25% reductions due to cold weather. FWIW, the American average is around 36 miles/day.
There is a semi famous YouTuber named Hank Green that lives in Montana and daily drives an EV. He occasionally makes videos about his experience.
we typically have at least five 1000+ mile trips in a summer
the gas/diesel infrastructure and refill times make it the most viable option for now, but i'm hoping that changes w/solid state technology
It sounds like you're thinking of competition at the corporate scale.
It sounds like the commenter immediately previous is thinking of competition at the nation state scale.
Both (and more) are happening at the same time, and valid to optimize for.
> US auto industry ownership unilaterally sent US auto manufacturing to China!
While the US auto industry did move manufacturing out of the US, this statement is factually incorrect in multiple ways. First, the auto manufacturers largely moved their operations to Mexico and Canada, not China. And second, this happened after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agre... an international trade agreement negotiated at the federal government level which made doing so possible and profitable. Doubtless industry lobbyists were involved, however the action was not unilateral in any sense.
Similarly, federal and international policy is capable of making it economically sensible to bring that manufacturing back onto US shores.
> China's already making most of what we consume here, and they're making world leading innovation in the EV market. So why aren't we just importing the EVs from there like we import everything else?
You rail against regulatory protectionism for US heavy industry but seem unaware that all nations with heavy industry engage in same. China imposes tariffs on importing US autos, as does most of Europe, Japan, S. Korea, and anywhere else seeking to maintain some form of local heavy manufacturing, which is seen as a national asset, particularly during war time and other emergencies like pandemics.
> The answer of course, is nowhere. There is no such thing in modern US big industry capitalism. It's a big f_cking lie!
Last I checked, 75% of Teslas components are US made.
> The only thing modern US capitalism is focused on innovating is how to f_ck the consumer, the worker, and the vendor, a little more completely, in favor of shareholders. I'm sure we all needed more financialization of everything.
This can be fairly directly traced to the Harvard Business School in the '80s. I think there's a legitimate axe to grind with them and vulture capitalists they trained. But it seems you're ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater over it. The US needs manufacturing to continue to prosper. Some amount of protectionism toward manufacturing is practiced worldwide, even by China, and can be acceptable here too. And while it seems you're very worried about addressing climate change, and I am too, I think we can work toward that as a nation without abdicating our agency.
Rather than a quote by quote response, I'm going to try to make a general statement.
I am aware that pretty much all industrial countries do implement some kind of protectionist import policies. As in the original comment, I'm not an absolutist, I'm not arguing that we should completely eliminate tariffs, or implement them against everything. In the real world, the best answer is almost always somewhere in between.
Here, we're specifically discussing the 1200 mile range of the new BYD battery just put out for field trials. While tesla did build an EV company mostly with onshore production, this was via a practice that is regularly being called a foul in criticism of the Chinese EV development model: government subsidies. Tesla received massive subsidies from the US federal government, and the California state government to establish it's factory in the east bay.
But this factory was to build cars, not new battery tech. This innovation aspect is seriously lacking in the US. With the current administration eliminating funding on much of the research that was in progress.
This industry resistance is primarily centered around protecting the revenue from what's ever more frequently being called "legacy tech", the petro industry. There are a lot of useful applications for petroleum, we don't need to burn it 8-/ It's not like they'll stop drilling because we use it for other products.
But instead of innovation, we're seeing "corporations are people" and "our bribery is our free speech" arguments propping up a resistance to disruptive, but broadly beneficial new technology.
This gets to my general point, which you mention in the Harvard Business School mentality: there is a sort of meme, "Capitalists hate capitalism". Without correct regulation, every major industry will seek to be a rent taking monopoly. Why wouldn't they. They get more this way.
But this isn't the promise of the benefits of the magical market forces. This is why I call it a lie. Telsa got government subsidies to build an EV, in the US, but this still didn't really do anything to push the US ahead in overcoming the shortcomings of EVs (namely the cost and capacity of batteries).
There are efforts trying catch up now, but as mentioned, a lot of that is now threatened.
So why shouldn't we, at least in the near term, accept the Chinese government's generous subsidies, and import their products now at low prices?
We don't have to stop our own R and D because of this, but in business logic, apparently that's the consequence. Again, capitalism (as it's currently running wild in the US) fails to solve the problem.
I was amazed at how many ongoing comments this article continues to get on HN. One thing that distressing, is how many center on the argument that "most Americans don't care about climate change".
This comes to my last point: most Americans have become lost in their "culture war identities". Remote rural residents could be some of the biggest beneficiaries of broad electrification. The propaganda of what I call, the "petro mafia", focuses on aligning with a demographic identity. This is why I say the wing-nuts and the woke-nuts are two sides of the same coin. Putting their identity group membership ahead of rational analysis of each individual issue.
Environmental destruction by the ongoing industrial revolution is producing real and mounting consequences. Anyone thinking this a some libtard deep-state brain-implant population control, has just lost their shit completely. Sadly, this is a lot of the current US population. Obviously the c-suite at major petro mafia corps know this is real, and catastrophic. They just know they'll die before the worst of the consequences come to bear, and they don't give a shit about future generations.
I digress, and the topic spirals out indefinitely. Thanks again for engaging conversation.
Friend, I've lived in Michigan, in an area of The Rust Belt known as Automation Alley, my entire life. I'm the 4th generation of my family to live here working in and around the big 3 auto manufacturers. I can tell you that every major manufacturer receives massive subsidies in the form of tax breaks, government investment, land, infrastructure, etc. Even the Chinese manufacturers. Always have.
> But this factory was to build cars, not new battery tech.
It seems they built the world's 4th largest battery factory in terms of production capacity in Nevada: https://electronsx.com/battery-gigafactories.php
> This industry resistance
The US has 6 of the world's 10 largest battery factories according to that link.
> But instead of innovation, we're seeing "corporations are people" and "our bribery is our free speech" arguments propping up a resistance to disruptive, but broadly beneficial new technology.
You sound frustrated with politics. I think it's designed to do that.
> But this isn't the promise of the benefits of the magical market forces. This is why I call it a lie. Telsa got government subsidies to build an EV, in the US, but this still didn't really do anything to push the US ahead in overcoming the shortcomings of EVs (namely the cost and capacity of batteries).
Your characterization of building the world's 4th largest battery factory, and the nation's largest charging network as "didn't really do anything" challenges your credibility.
> This comes to my last point: most Americans have become lost in their "culture war identities".
Much of your comment certainly seems this way to me. Lots of politically charged opinion which seems to contradict the numbers. Who profits from it?
If the big 3 US auto makers can't keep up with technical innovation, they should go bankrupt, displaced by more innovative competitors.
If the tri-opoly can't be displaced by domestic competition, it should be displaced by foreign competition.
Thankfully, there are folks in decision making positions who consider things like national security to be as important as the latest feature or lowest price.
I want the Big 3 to die horrible flaming death, but they need to get replaced by something else domestic. Letting anybody (let alone BYD) simply wipe out all our domestic manufacturing capacity is mega-bad.
Now, the But: But, it's very important to acknowledge who's responsible for the decline in US manufacturing. BYD isn't "wiping out", the US auto industry. China didn't sneak into the US and steal the factories, the government didn't edict that things be made in China, and tree-hugging hippy libtards didn't give everything away to commonism.
US auto industry ownership unilaterally sent US auto manufacturing to China!
And has thus reaped many many billions in increased profits, over decades, as a result of throwing American workers, American consumers, and the US's strategic competitiveness under the bus, for the purpose of their own personal profit.
Now, somehow, it's China's fault! for being the world's preeminent manufacturing center. And now somehow, US taxpayers (that's us, the idiot herd, not ownership) need to make big payments to Make Manufacturing Great Again.
This is just another example of the typical policy of socialist welfare for ownership, and neoliberal austerity for the idiot herd.
This is like how the taxpayers pay to build a nuclear power plant, then a private utility operates it for decades while money pours out of it, then, when it's time to clean up the super-fund site scale of radioactive pollution, that's again the responsibility of socialism.
Why should US auto industry innovate?
China's already making most of what we consume here, and they're making world leading innovation in the EV market. So why aren't we just importing the EVs from there like we import everything else?
It's not like this is all some big surprise. The problems with continuing to burn petro, the massive simplification of vehicular mechanisms and the improvements in lifespan and reliability resulting from electrification have all been known for decades. Where's all this capitalist competition driving technical innovation?
The answer of course, is nowhere. There is no such thing in modern US big industry capitalism. It's a big f_cking lie!
The only thing modern US capitalism is focused on innovating is how to f_ck the consumer, the worker, and the vendor, a little more completely, in favor of shareholders. I'm sure we all needed more financialization of everything.
I'm not an absolutist. I think capitalism is basically the only system that's ever been in place in human civilization, and the most straightforward way to prosperity is via that system. But (again with the But) it needs to operate more in line with what is preached: competitive markets leading to innovation that benefits everyone, not just shareholders.
Another large portion of the blame lies on the uneducated, irrational US consumer population. Denial of the realities of the consequences of continuing to burn petro, denial of the benefits of electrification across the board. While people talk about their need for "pride" and "faith". This sounds like a bunch of emo bullsh1t to me. Where's the objective, rational analysis? It's no wonder the US consumer gets shafted by industry, it's pretty much begged for.
So, while you're general assertions are true. The widely ignored realities of how we got into this mess, and who should be making changes to get us out of this mess, are almost never mentioned out load.
Oh, it's much, much worse than this. And don't blame "uneducated" or "irrational". These people know exactly what they are doing: trashing anybody who has the temerity to do even slightly better than them. "I'm miserable, so you should be, too" is the rule of the day to them.
So many people cheer any and every anti-union effort in spite of the fact that the unions were the only thing holding the tide at bay. Gee, maybe the fact that the powers that be hate unions so bad should give you some hint as to what is effective at opposing them?
It's only with AI finally threatening programming jobs that tech folks seem to be finding religion and discovering that everybody will cheer at their demise, too.
Um, welcome to the reality of the steelworker and autoworker from the 1980s, folks. Sorry you had to join us.
Now, can those of us who have been fighting this battle for four decades finally get some help?
https://electrek.co/2024/05/22/byds-10000-seagull-ev-worryin...
https://electrek.co/2025/04/08/byds-low-cost-seagull-ev-now-...
In Mexico it's called the Dolphin and costs $20k+. I'm sure some of that is tariffs, but I don't think it's an $8k+ vehicle unless it's being discounted/subsidized by BYD.
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/03/01/byd-dolphin-mini-rollin...
Why are we at that with gas cars?
Electric cars will carry a thousand pounds of battery to get that much range, while a typical gas car will only be equipped to carry a hundred pounds of fuel, using less than a third as much space. It's not even 5% of the car's weight.
On the other hand, we have to assume the average fuel tank load is <50%, so a larger tank truly DOES end up resulting in a heavier vehicle and lower fuel economy on average. We'd all get better mileage if we ran tiny fuel tanks and fueled our cars every day.