CT scans of BYD car parts
lumafield.com
lumafield.com
I have to say I'm super impressed with how heavy duty everything is. The control arms, subframes, etc all look good and don't fit the 'chinese car bad' narrative you always hear. The powertrain components all look to be extremely high quality.
I've poked around a few EV's with him now, and I do feel like the Chinese market cars are evolving to a really good standard faster than their Korean counterparts did back in the 80s/90s.
While I think the "chinese quality bad" narrative still applies to many Chinese brands, this isn't as universal as it was in the past.
I think my eyes were first opened when I bought myself a Huawei phone(before the Google ban). My first few smartphones had been Samsung, I've always felt the term "planned obsolence" was the best way to describe these phones: After just a year, the phone felt considerably slower, and after two it was almost unusable.
Huawei flagship phones were similar in price to Samsung, but I felt they lasted way longer.
>Xiaomi is great build quality but they are rotting out their OS with too much bloat and up sell.
I've tried Xiaomi phones in their stores a few times. I feel like they're trying to copy the look and feel of iOS in a way, and I generally don't like the iOS UX.
As an aside the best phone I ever had was a HTC One X, another brand that I sorely miss.
FYI, if you are looking for a post google huawei, check out honor phones.
Also have to mention their ads, built into the system, when every app opens, when you switch back, f*king everywhere. The funny thing is if you switch language to English or use it overseas, some of the ads will go away, ironic.
I'd move there given the opportunity, the business owners of America are willing to poison and put the lives of their fellow citizens at risk for literal pieces of paper. I'm ashamed to be American.
This happened in 2008 by the way.
While I reckon some other countries still have specialist manufacturing in key areas that surpasses China, most “common” parts can be made in China to a standard that meets or exceeds Western countries, if you’re willing to pay for it.
I’m reminded of all the dismissals people made about the skill levels of Indian software developers when the explanation was that the more skilled ones knew they could do better than the MBAs were offering to make the savings sound even more impressive.
I would say the problem is heavily structural and linked to few companies that very much pursue lowest possible effort, harming both employee and customer. We had a company that infamously pursued a somewhat similar (just with not as much leverage over employees) strategy in Poland - a common refrain was how other companies would get people jumping jobs from them who gave variants of "I needed some spending money while finishing my degree, escaped as soon as I could" story.
Unfortunately it seems a bit harder to do when some places apparently hire with only category appearing to be "according to census they speak english", then put them on project with minimal training and zero time or space to acquire more training.
This was unsurprising after my entire life hearing people complain about declining quality and imported junk while always picking the cheapest item on the shelf at the store, even when they had plenty of money for a better quality option. There’s just a certain mindset which can’t look past the lowest possible price.
The polish company I mentioned was infamous for using still in education students especially from an university where its founder was a professor, and for his motto of "you can replace any specialist with finite number of students, and the number is usually one". I met some of them later who worked there for first few years only to setup conditions to jump ship.
But along the line I heard how few big outsourcing/consulting companies dominated IT hiring in bunch of cities in Poland, with Warsaw being the odd one out because suddenly you had to fight for candidates with 100-150 person "minnows". I imagine without such minnows finding sensible work would be way harder
In the 2008 milk Scandal, for example, the offending company Sanlu were aware of infants becoming sick December 2007, but refused to test until June 2008. Shijiazhuang city governance failed to report the contamination to provincial and state authorities September 2008 and Sanlu subsequently asked the Shijiazhuang city government to assist them in controlling the media's reporting of the recall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
300,000 affected children were identified, among which 54,000 were hospitalized and 6 deaths were officially attributed to the adulteration and cover-up. If the government and industry were willing to collude to the detriment of their own populace so as not to sully the PR appeal of the Beijing Olympics, what level of care and consideration are we to attribute them in matters of low-consequence export to the West?
Every country seems willing to trade the lives or livelihood of citizens, much less people of other countries, to ensure their status quo. Some just pay more lip service to “rights” they will violate at the drop of a hat when push comes to shove.
This one-sentence message demonstrates a lot of the problems of Chinese manufacturing if you think about it for a minute.
I would also note that in the case of that melamine incident 2 decades ago, several of the business leaders involved got death sentences which seems relevant to the question of how much the larger country supports it. For example, I note that no member of the Sackler family has failed to die rich out of prison.
It's more complicated than this. Historically, Chinese manufacturing has been notorious for quietly undermining the quality of the product to improve their margins over time, in a way that the commissioning brand doesn't notice. If a Chinese manufacturer quotes you a price too good to be true, they're probably quoting you at-cost and will build in their margin later, once the orders start flowing in.
You're going to have excellence and crap across such a gargantuan amount of production and companies, a high amount of variance.
Having said that a lot of German car suppliers are in China, and the German car manufacturing industry evolved over a significantly longer period of time.
Chinese manufacturers can make quality stuff and can be rather honest to work with once you show certain knowledge of the field, they will even tell you which products are to avoid.
Famously Gemtek Technology (https://www.gemteks.com/en/about/about), Apples small obscure modem OEM at the time, when presented with contract to manufacture 1999 AirPort Wifi cards made first batch of complete duds because factory owner saw picofarad smd caps and decided it will be more profitable to for him to GLUE tiny plastic rectangles instead, after all picofarad is like nothing so nobody will tell the difference.
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273798...
I don't think this is true. Maybe super specialist things like chip manufacturing products, but it's guaranteed China is spending heavily on R&D to develop their own. When it comes to cars / car parts they will be on par with if not surpassing most countries.
Also keep in mind China's sudden onset had a big impact on European and US car manufacturing, with VW / VAG closing major factories in Germany. Mind you, that's also because VAG was the biggest car manufacturer in China, until suddenly BYD and co opened up their factories and dominated the market in a short amount of time.
In what way are they hostile? I am also part of "the west" and they never threatened us.
The west != just the USA.
Would you call that "hostility to the West"? Sounds like an attempt to protect their own interests.
And certainly hostile when you add currency manipulation onto it as well.
Ha, very rich criticism considering the US economy and stock market has been benefiting 1000x more from said "globalized market without freely competing in it", by printing money and exporting its inflation across the world with dampened consequences domestically, then using said printed money like liquid gold to buy valuable assets around the world (like real estate and innovative companies) thanks to its status as a reserve currency (something Charles De Gaulle complained about since the 1950s), a unique US cheat code enforced thought force via its massive military.
>And certainly hostile when you add currency manipulation onto it as well.
Again, very rich criticism considering the US's abusing its status as the reserve currency for its own benefit, see above.
there are tons of western cars on Chinese roads, tesla was given free land and close to interest free loan to build its factory in Shanghai. there are numerous apple shops in China. guess how many Chinese cars are driving on US roads, how many Huawei phones are being sold in the US.
if you are open to the idea of jumping out of your comfort zone of your favourite brainwashing media, some westerner actually went to China and counted every single car at an intersection for 30 minutes with all brands summarised. over 40% are western cars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZKbEj39gEw&t=1496s
again - it is not your fault, you are the victim. I just feel sad for you.
The US also threatened to block tiktok unless China sold it to a local US oligarch(the Oracle guy). The US is no saint here. And good luck getting people to shed a tear for China blocking Facebook. Good riddance to both of them.
Tesla operates Giga Shanghai fully independently and competes freely.
>And not just American but any outside company.
So did Italy, Germany, Japan and Korea to build up domestic auto industries otherwise Detroit would have steemroled them.
Companies abided to ruthless Chinese rules because they were greedy and wanted to exploit the Chinese slave labor and also get access to Chinese market, but the CCP didn't put a gun to their head and forced them to come to China, they decided that themselves for the sake of the holy shareholder growth. And now, 2 decades after you've made your money, you're complaining over a consensual arrangement?
And trade is always gonna be asymmetric, with rules in foreign countries that don't exist in the US. That's why the EU fines US companies regularly. China isn't much different. You want to operate in China, then you gotta follow the CCP rules. You don't? Then just leave. Easy.
Internet services? Yes, you need a domestic partner, because you'll disseminate information to the public.
If you're in the automobile industry, you can import cars to China. China was Porsche's largest market until 2025, and all Porsches are imported. It used to be that a Chinese partner is needed to manufacture cars in China, but Tesla did not need one, and that policy was dropped. Anyway, it's nowhere close to the complete ban the US placed on Chinese cars.
In many other industries, you can create a foreign-owned company and operate in China.
You are mistaken to think I forgot that. The west is the one who is mistaken if they think all other countries and cultures forgot that. If they can, they would gladly enact revenge over Europeans and whip them. Which is why it's best to arm ourselves to the teeth and ensure they'll never be in a position do that. So no, i haven't forgotten, the west has.
>but make no mistake about how clear eyed their leadership is about competition with western hegemony.
Isn't hegemony what US leadership has been doing since WW2, increasingly more vigorously and more intensely today? Except China is doing without bombing other nations and kidnapping their leader. So in this game China is the righteous ones.
"the west" did the same. You can't play fairly if your opponents never did.
Whataboutism is the magic gotcha card invoked when people have no answers to the absolutely fair question "why is X allowed to do Y but Z is not allowed to do Y".
If there's no hypocritical double standards then you'd have an answer instead of calling whataboutism.
>From the many human rights violations over the years
Their problem, not ours. Just don't buy stuff made in china and write to your politicians to stop sending your manufacturing jobs there out of greed of stonks go up like they've been doing for 30 years, if you want to do anything about it.
>how they orchestrated the takeover of Hong Kong
The British gave it to them. US also took over several overseas territories. Where's the hubbub there?
>frequent border disputes that continue to happen and the continuous posturing of naval fleets
Again, their problem to deal with not ours. I don't want to police and get involved in centuries old conflicts on other side of the planet that have nothing to do with us. I only care what happens in my backyard. Feel free to go join the Indian military and help them fight China if you actually care that much about it.
>China is absolutely a threat to global peace.
Then US is an even bigger threat. And still I don't want to go to war with them.
I think most people just buy trash at WalMart and Amazon and it's 99% Chinese disposable junk. That doesn't mean that China is incapable of producing high quality goods, but just that the average interaction that people have with Chinese goods are low quality.
It's the manufacturing equivalent of "How could the government be efficient? Haven't you ever been to the DMV?" (set aside that fact that many DMVs seem to be quite efficient these days)
* PE, on the whole, has extracted wealth from quality. This is true at both the consumer level and B2B. E.g. its impossible to trust any aftermarket car part manufacturer, and some OEM brands have turned to dogshit too.
* "most people just buy trash at WalMart and Amazon" I'd rephrase that to: most people either can't or are unwilling to pay the premium for quality in an increasingly disposable world.
So, I'd say that similar to post war Japan, while Chinese manufacturing has an image problem, they're just producing what we asked for.
I'm a value shopper. I was happy with the McDouble when it was under $1, but not now that it is nearly $2. It isn't worth that, but the BK Double Cheeseburger IS worth it even for $1 more than the McDouble (at least in my location).
Same is true for almost everything I buy. A certain fabric I want in my button ups, or a stich type I want in my pants. I hyper inspect almost every item of clothing I'm even contemplating buying. Same with furniture, with tools, with appliances.
It is almost a compulsion. I cannot pay more for something than I think it is worth... unless I REAALLLLLY want it.
Then there's two signals that negatively inform my trust of a brand:
- company size: the larger the company, the lower they start on my trust ladder;
- advertising: when a brand is overly present in the public sphere, that to me signals that they're overcharging for their product.
For more niche stuff, Reddit groups like BIFL and seeing what niche hobby groups coalesce around is helpful for me. Which I suppose is the same reversion to word-of-mouth expertise when, as you said, brand and price are degraded signals.
It's that if you don't have a way to measure quality yourself (you're not an expert), or if you don't ask for exact specific features/qualities even if you offer a high budget and ask for high quality, manufacturers absolutely will cut corners, do stupid things, etc. to increase their own margin at the expense of quality and just hope you are none the wiser.
The US had the same culture in certain periods and certain industries, so I am not suggesting it's some innate Chinese characteristic. The meat factories exposed in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, where he documented unsanitary conditions, spoiled meat, rat infestations etc come to mind.
But one cannot just ignore that the China of today has had problems with fake baby formula, fake alcohol, fake medicine, fake everything and expect that that doesn't make its way into manufacturing of other classes of goods.
My great-great-grandfather used to complain about crappy Scottish tools.
He was English. I am not sure you can buy as much as a paperclip made in England now.
Has to be said that nobody on this side of the pond ever complained about the quality of American Snap On tools though, just so long as the boss was paying for them.
The UK has mostly moved up the value chain. We make satellites and turbines now.
The factory rust protection was maybe a bit on the lighter side, but everything else on it looks completely normal. The drivetrain is simple (no heat exchange mechanism between battery coolant and motor coolant, a slightly whiny motor), but also genuinely competent and modern for a 2022 design (a mature skateboard RWD platform with a thin CTP battery with large cells and generous cell/coolant heat exchange). There are no obvious wtf solutions, nothing that would look too thin or too flimsy. The infotainment and the SW of the car does have the occasional funny moments, but all that is happening on what looks and feels like a solid piece of hardware.
Sadly that's also why it's hard to buy a new car, you only know what's a quality car years down the line.
First impression matters though.
I had AEG Lavamat 1055 about 35 years (from 1982), worked well without hitch. It was quite small, top loading model etc. Fast spin-dry w/ variomatic (shaking also while spinning). Laundry out of it was quite dry already.
Then 2017 building plumbing had to be redone and gave reason to remake bathroom completely and replacing old equipment. I would have bought Miele model but it didn't fit reserved place and I ended up buying Electrolux instead.
That's now month short of 9 years and I have no reason to believe it will not work well at least another 10 years to come. regardless advertised 10 years warranty.
This current one has more electronic parts, but now searching by its model found only fault codes all seem to be user errors, overfilling, water hose not open, draining filter clogged etc. All non issues whoever bothers knowing how to maintain and operate that thing over years. No complaints about issues with electronics problems.
These were first used by a couple and later single (me) needs which are usually once a week plus twice a month washing 4-5 uses single day. Which becomes bit over 100 washing in year.
That's just 1000 washings in 10 years and 3500 in 35 years. For a family washing every day once it would be 3563 uses in 10 years.
If washing machine isn't badly kept against instructions and it isn't cheapest knock off plastic rubish, why would be a surprise if it doesn't last at least that 10 years use washing family laundry. And last many decades with single or dink use?
After they finally engaged with the warranty, they had someone come out to 'fix' it once every couple weeks until I gave up and just bought a different brand washer/dryer.
I'm now sworn off Beko, and will happily tell everyone I can about my terrible service :)
And there are still parts too
All parts still available and when I bought new hose few years ago from service I asked if they still are willing to fix it if it went broke answer was. Sure absolutely, just bring it here and we make it work again. I've just bought once new floor nozzle that was worn out and that hose because it grew leaky from ends. Third party dust bags are available and very cheap.
It would be nice if the EU or someone introduced an energy star type system for reliability and repairability so that consumers could have some kind of idea what the quality is likely to be.
Maybe it’s me then. We just don’t get that long out of them. We have tried Fisher and Paykel and Samsung. Never had more than and year warranty either.
They do run at least once a day often more, but that’s not enough to explain it.
Gosh, but there are other ways to solve that issue like having bit more of fav clothes, so that you dont' have to wash same cloth every day but instead was a bunch of them end of week. Need white shirt every day at work, buy at least 10 of them, use one each day, wash & iron weekend, put on pile1 and use from pile2 next week rotating for even use and to have some redundancy, then pile1 week and so on. Get more trousers etc. whatever you need. This is what I did when had job where dress code told what to wear in office.
And kids, buy them more fav clothes too if it otherwise becomes fight what they want to wear daily.
But each to their own. Above is just my view and how I learned when I was kid looking my parents, and how I've done also.
They get permanently smelly if not washed promptly.
This would probably last a couple I expect
There are a lot of low price bracket Chinese imports (MGs mainly) that seem to have severe rust issues that are present at delivery.
And Toyotas a few years ago had a problem where certain colour cars would have their paint fall off in huge sheets as the primer was incorrect or something.
I do agree in principle that most modern cars should be pretty good for their warranty period/first owner, but I've also seen some egregious edge cases!
Unless you have a wet belt in your Puretech engine that will blow up in 5-8 years...
Mechanics and enthusiasts around here (Spain) call this engines "pudretech" (rot-tech)...
Not always. Sometimes the components are a lot older than the car and have earned a bit of a reputation. The powerplant in my car is like 20 years older than the model year. The underlying platform is nearly as old as well. All proven to be boringly reliable.
I guess this changes in the EV era with faster rate of iterations compared to the ICE era. More lessons still to learn with the EV cars I'm sure. Meanwhile a 4 cyl compact car is practically a commodity and aside from safety widgets like backup cameras, have been relatively unchanged for 15 or 20 years.
I have a friend who's a big Honda fan, amateur racer, a true "petrolhead" but with an intact brain. Runs his own shop. Naturally there was a barrage of jokes when I rolled up in my new Chinese EV, but then we put it up on a lift and there wasn't really much to joke about. The platform looks boring and mature. Things are where you'd expect them, they're the right size and shape, you can tell why they're there.
Obviously, the motor/reducer bearings in my car may fail in a few years (like in the Kona Electric or Škoda Enyaq) or the charging circuitry may fail (like the ICCU in the Ioniq 5) but then we're already comparing it against legacy manufacturers, and that's a pretty good position to be in.
European cars are incredibly expensive these days and have been for a while compared to imports.
About 7 years ago I was looking for a new car and had only owned and drove VW cars. Naturally, I looked at VW, the Golf in particular. With all the bells and whistles, it came to about 35k EUR. A Civic was about 11K cheaper. Guess what I bought?
There was nothing in the Golf that could justify the extra cost. Nowadays is the same.
I mean, seriously. I can buy a shitty Argentine-made base model used 5-year-old VW Amarok with 70K km on it for the same price as a brand new Chinese-made Changan Hunter (whether gas or REEV). The second one is also going to be far, far cheaper to fuel (if you choose the REEV), maintain and repair.
Let's not even talk EVs. Europeans exited the market before it even began. European brands only start to show up at around what, the 70-100K dollar bracket? Sure, the Porsche Taycan is cool and all, but I've never seen one. Meanwhile, BYDs, Deepals, MGs, and a million other random brands are only growing more and more common with each passing day.
The ID.3 starts at like 35k USD here in Europe. Škoda Elroq and Enyaq, both under 50k USD.
VW ID.3 is designed by a Chinese team in China, built in Shanghai backed entirely by the Chinese ecosystem.
You need to be totally blind to consider vw being able to design & produce such a car on its own. let's be straight - the software in the car is not something Germany can build on its own. That 20 years gap won't be filled overnight.
All the control modules for the German model at least are manufactured by Bosch and Valeo in France and Germany - where the software is also produced.
As an aside, Bosch produces control modules and the underlying software for just about every western car manufacturer. 80%+ cars sold worldwide use their traction control system for example so I'm not sure where this so-called gap is.
Chinese can't either. BYD is a joke. Zeekr is close, but still not quite there. Soon they'll be unstoppable tho.
ID.3 is a MEB car, its production started in Zwickau (Germany) in November 2019, two years before it even arrived to China, and one year before the SOP of ANY MEB car (ID.4 was the first one) in Anting (Shanghai).
It is made by SAIC using their factory and EV platform - it was just cheaper to outsource it and meet the deadlines and pricing.
Iv seen MG cars in Poland come pre rusted straight from the dealer.
I own a BYD Tang, so I’m biased, but the value for money has been hard to beat.
Scale probably helps too. When you sell millions of cars using many of the same parts, availability is better and parts are more likely to stay affordable than on low-volume models with lots of redesigns.
This is interesting. Wasn't the idea in Europe (and maybe elsewhere, too, no idea) that outsourcing components would lead to economies of scale? After all, a Mercedes or BMW or VW seat is still roughly a seat?
It's interesting to me that we seem to switch back and forth between the two models, each time saying the new approach is "better".
If you're already at a huge scale there isn't really a significant scale advantage by outsourcing to somebody who doesn't just sell to you.
The same is true in many industries. TSMC has dominated fabing chips because they scale wafers over many more customers, whereas intel mostly only focused on its own chips. The results was more expensive all around. (Intel also had to deal with bad western accounting attitudes to CAPEX spending, which IMHO is a huge reason so much manufacturing left North America, though lower costs also played a role).
Time will tell how cheap and easy will they be to maintain, which affects residual value at the end of the lease, which affects payments.
Nobody pays sticker price for new cars as a lump sum. If BYDs (or whatever car) are impossible to maintain, that means nobody will want them used, and residual value will be low, which means BYDs will cost more to the end user to own than a more expensive car by a different manufacturer.
Which seems to be the case for now in places like Germany, but we will have to wait and see how the situation develops and the second hand market builds up.
People often equate low-value Chinese manufacturing that focuses on low cost with their manufacturing quality across all fields.
Things changed in 2012 when I bought a 'cheap-ish' Huawei phone, it was nothing of a flagship, no performance but it was really solid product. Very light and well built too. How ironic that was my first ever experience of buying a product exported to Europe.
“No wonder this circuit failed, it says made in Japan”
“What do you mean doc, all the best stuff is made in Japan”
The problem is always going to be: what's going to happen in 10 years, or whatever, after warranty expires?
The problem with vertical integration is for the customer, and it's repairs: traditional manufacturing is more expensive because you have a constellation of companies manufacturing pars with official and unofficial second sources. While this increases the overall cost of the vehichle, it decreases the final price of every component because the customer (independent mechanic) can choose to use a different source. The market working as intended.
BYD is currently the only EV i would consider, because it's the best value and the engineering quality is indeed high, but because i want to own, not rent, i'm preoccupied of what's going to happen in X years.
Yes, it's the same fear we had three-four decades ago when toyota/suzuki/kia entered the european market, that bet paid off but also because cost of repairs went down over time as they were also traditional manufacturers. (Yet for some exotic components you still must go to the OEM, and pay 2-3 times the equivalent sensor/component for an european car.)
However, with vertical integration you are always at mercy of the manufacturer. Better engineering, yes. Better integration, better efficiency, but you will suffer for repairs if you can't have second sources.
Think apple. (and tesla. but tesla is shit quality)
Or john deere.
I've got a leased one on order as a result. Let someone else eat the depreciation.
It would cost me considerably more to keep changing it with something i don't own and as a result always be unconfortable with (and also keep paying until the end of time).
But that's kind of beside the point: ex-lease are also being sold somewhere, nobody wants to lease an old car and nobody in their right mind will destroy a perfectly good car just because it's too old to be leased, so i think my point still stands.
But do you actually have a frame of reference though?
It's really easy to make stuff look good and then have it suck because someone in some other department nerfed it.
I'm not saying they're bad but HN is not a community I trust to make such assessments.
In the UK the major car dealers are franchises, and you tend to see for example a Ford garage next to a Toyota garage, and they are operated by the same company. Most of these places have closed one of the branded ones and turned it into a BYD franchise dealership. Theres so many of them across the country now.
I'd take a BYD over something like a Tesla thats for sure - far better cars, it's not even a fair comparison anymore.
I dare say they'll struggle a little more in the US with the whole "China bad" propaganda engrained into society, which is likely why BYD have gone for the agressive expansion in Europe instead.
I own a BYD: this is not true. The key is not hinged; rather, the entire mechanical key pulls out when a small clip is unlatched near the top of the assembly (you can see it in the CT). I assume the circular hinge-looking mechanism in the CT is just a by product of the plastic/metal weld process.
Nonetheless: very cool tech demo!
The mechanical key fallback pattern is standard across the industry for sure.
Article says key fobs are the same across all their cars and this looks the same as mine for a Sealion 5, there is no hinge for the key you just pull it out.
Likely the article authors just assumed from looking at the scan, if they’d actually tried to remove the key they would have realised their mistake.
Nowadays the physical key is only a backup, safely stowed inside the fob. It is meant to be pulled out only in an emergency.
When keyless start came, there was a dummy button that fit in the ignition lock that could be pushed to start. If there was a problem, you could pop it out and use the key as before.
IIRC, all that, so may have mistakes. Just crossed my mind that they went a few decades between no metal ignition key and keyless. MB being MB, I wouldn't be surprised if they still had models with that same "old" system and keyless as an option.
All this to say Hyundai certainly knows how to do this. If they didn’t do it, it is almost certainly a deliberate omission.
Made my keys much less bulky
I don’t have a 3D printer currently. I did help my cousin’s kid by one and they told me if I ever wanted to print something to let them know, but I have a feeling I’ll need to design my own with some trial and error.
I’ve hesitated buying one, because the idea of having a machine to melt plastic in my house seems like a bad idea when it comes to air quality.
If it’s something you worry about, the enclosed models frequently either come with, or can be fitted with a carbon filter, and if you are really worried, you can use dryer vent to get it outside.
With the most popular plastic (PLA) at printing temperatures, there isn’t any data showing toxic byproducts. When you get into things like ABS and resin you have to think more about fumes.
Look at Mr. Moneybags here with his car that has the AC add on and still functional!
> None of these components is particularly extraordinary in isolation
That said, I didn't perceive a problem either, and my self-diagnosis is that "none of the X" feels like it could be evoking a singular item that failed to be found.
Cambridge says...
> In formal styles, we use none of with a singular verb when it is the subject. However, in informal speaking, people often use plural verbs...
Collins says:
> Since none has the meanings “not one” and “not any,” some insist that it always be treated as a singular and be followed by a singular verb: The rescue party searched for survivors, but none was found. However, none has been used with both singular and plural verbs since the 9th century. When the sense is “not any persons or things” (as in the example above), the plural is more common: … none were found. Only when none is clearly intended to mean “not one” or “not any” is it followed by a singular verb: Of all my articles, none has received more acclaim than my latest one.
But it was "none of -these- X" which (to me, at least) is a secondary signal for plurality indicating that "are" is (doubly) preferable to "is".
(I don't find "none of these components is ..." to be egregiously wrong but it definitely gives a brain hiccup where the "... are ..." variant is much smoother.)
Both BYD and Tesla claim to produce around 75% of their components. Ford is at around 25%.
Tesla is indeed smaller in scale (cars/year):
BYD 4.6M
Ford 4.4M
Tesla 1.6MThe Highland Park plant was Ford's play to cut the Dodge Brothers out of the process by machining most of his own parts. The peak of vertical integration would be the River Rouge plant which, as you say, machined all its own parts from iron and steel made on-site from raw ore (but never made the Model T).
In fact, I believe Samsung is the only company on the planet that can design & build a state of the art smartphone from scratch - silicon/fabrication, SoC, battery, baseband, camera sensor, memory, and display.
What other high tech vertically integrated producers exist in this group?
Wouldn't be surprised if that finally gets sunset in the next few years.
But also some are just real people from HN that are the worst kind of dumb : uneducated but smart, so they think their opinion is valid.
This is where the "history at schoolis useless" people show their true color.
China's living rent free in your collective mind for 50+ years while they just chug along and slowly catches and surpasses you in most aspects.
About the data sending, wasn't there a quite recent incident where an American car manufacturer was leaking the real-time position of all their clients' vehicles? Aren't US telecoms selling position data of their clients? Isn't the US filled with surveillance cameras managed by a private company keeping track of every car?
Do you base your last statement on anything, or is it just a hunch?
The fact you are casually talking about it is infuriating.
It's like taking about the yellow star and stay "isn't it like the pins in the US".
We were discussing cancer, and instead of talking about it, you tried to avoid saying bad things about it and answered "isn't diabetes bad as well?".
I assume now you are a China propaganda account and will stop answering to you.
American believing in the most base propaganda regurgitated by their government for the last 50 years is the funniest shit ever. You're implementing the same thing at home right now, not even secretly, and there is not a single protest, nothing...
If americans were 25% as critical with themselves as they are with China... Flock cameras, Palantir, 48 hours ago, one of trump's best friend:
> Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on"
Which is an answer to guy saying people idealize china these days, thanks to effective propaganda from the regime.
Want to criticize the US? Go for it. That's just not the topic.
And until you can wear a Tiananmen Square t-shirt in a public street in Beijin, any good thing China is doing is moot for its population. It's still in a dictatorship.
I agree it's dystopian, but I live in Germany and we have a similar thing called "Schufa". For most people it mostly means that if they default on a credit, they'll be less likely to find an apartment. It differs from the US one in the sense that banks don't require you to get into debt before they trust you, that whole "build your credit score" nonsense.
You might be thinking about GM:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...
https://www.oikeuspalveluvirasto.fi/en/financial-and-debt-co...
Banking credit score only affect your ability to get a loan. You sleep with a banker sister, and... they can't do shit because there is no money trail and you can apply for a loan elsewhere. You will only be rejected for a loan if fail to pay some of your existing loans. Reasonable.
Here’s an example - you can rent e-bikes and power banks at low cost, they are everywhere. If you don’t return an e-bike or power bank after using it, not only will that company charge you, but you’ll likely get blacklisted from renting more, even at other companies.
This is a good thing, no???
But worse because here we are talking deep human topics.
Such long period of peace made people forget about how the world work. And clearly studing history in school ks not working. I guess in the US they are getting a new shot right now to remember.
You might want to switch from "social credit" (which was a failed local project from over a decade ago) to "blacklist", or just criticize the overall surveillance system, which is pretty invasive.
I'm getting a bit tired of people posting on social media websites and then pretending they are not a part of them. "Reddit" did this, "HN" did that... let's just admit that we're all chronically online people who get irritated whenever we stumble out of our bubble and more than one person dares to disagree with us.
Nobody is moving to China just because they make good cars now, I have never seen anybody stating that so no idea why the hyperbole. But good (enough) cars they do make and various other products, ignoring facts ain't a smart move in any case.
Removing modem may kill new BMW as well as new Chevrolet and so on, so that argument is... weird. Expect more integration and dependence on online, like it or not. Repairability goes against primary incentives of all car manufacturers, they get significant revenue from official repair shops, often more than from sales themselves. Definitely true for that BMW, have a friend quite high in their sales team in Munich and he stated that few times.
The US obviously isn't the only one guilty of this kind of thing, it just happens to have been one of the most effective.
No problem with building the same surveillance state at home though right? At least China's on the way up while the US is slowly declining on virtually every aspects.
American companies have been harvesting my data for 20 years, why wouldn't I give some to China? I interact with 0 chinese software in my day to day but dozens of american companies are harvesting and targeting me every single day since I started using internet.
The free market isn't fun when you're not the ones making all the money and dominating countries you determine to be inferior?
Actually, yes, we would: https://www.kmoser.com/ctscan/
Those are small parts, though. The interesting part is the E-axle. BYD builds a unit with an integrated motor, differential, axle, and wheel hubs. That, plus an electronics box and battery, is the power train. This simplifies vehicles considerably.
There are E-axle teardown videos. There's no big secret about how to do this. Copying this is hard for Detroit, because they have a huge investment in "engine plants". With this design, BYD doesn't need standalone engine plants.
Tesla ought to be doing this, but they're into performance, not cost. They want to put two or four motors in a car. BYD does make supercars, to show off, but their volume products are reasonably good cars with E-axles and lithium iron phosphate batteries, which work fine. (It's not clear that Tesla is even into car design at all any more, but that's another issue.)
Detroit ought to be doing this, but they insist on making electric cars that are modified gasoline cars. Ford has an electric Mustang, an electric F-150, and an electric Transit. Chrysler doesn't even make cars any more, just one minivan. GM has a good Bolt now, which they are killing to appease Trump.
On the contrary, this much integration makes repairs nearly impossible, meaning you might have to swap the whole unit(for a lot of $$$) when something small inside it inevitably breaks.
Check out the articles published by EVclinic that cover such cases.
Aftermarket EV repairs are already big business due to how difficult and expensive the OEMs make it.
Edit: I agree with you and upvoted your comment which I feel was unfairly downvoted. But economics are going to win here, only a tiny fraction of the user base of cars (or phones) tinkers with them.
This is doing a lot of work but I'm going to go with a charitable interpretation. I seriously doubt that we'll ever hit a state where replacing a 2 ton vehicle is cheaper than repairing it. And if we do, I'll have to re-evaluate my charitable interpretation, because something shady is likely going on.
The crazy thing is people don't even repair things that are cheaper to repair than replace. Our countertop icemaker broke and my wife wanted to throw it out. I fixed it with 20 minutes of time and a $15 motor from Amazon.
I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive. People in large part have no idea how to repair anything they own. This mass ignorance is leading to some pretty poor market incentives.
I don't think this is true. If this is the trend you're seeing it's probably because you're sampling through people with relatively high disposable income(or who don't mind endless credit card debt), who can just afford to throw away broken things when it's just a rounding error of their income.
But if you look at lower income people(with sane spending habits and financial literacy) you'll see how they first ask around if something can be repaired before they claw money from their checking account to buy something new.
My local facebook group is full of students asking if someone can fix their macbooks for cheap as they can't afford a new one or what Apple is quoting them, which is close in cost to buying a new one.
My minimum wage gf still had her barely functional Windows 7 notebook up until a year ago because she didn't feel like spending money to buy a new one if I could just keep fixing it.
Some broke people try not to buy new things if they can, but some are broke because they can't stop buying new things.
Learned helplessness (according to Wikipedia) is about being convinced by your environment that you are incompetent. Part of the feedback loop of the culture is not just the helpless and their helplessnes but the factors that teach them that they are.
Which is why I'm so baffled how and why the EU has spent so much time and effort regulating batteries and charging ports for phones, but still ignores this massive issue of ease of repairability and right to repair of personal vehicles that has been plaguing car owners since the ICE days and is now only getting worse with EVs, that's costing us a lot more money than what's costing users to pay Apple to replace your cracked display and dead battery.
It feels like they just keep going for the lowest hanging fruits to score easy wins that don't impact local industry, while ignoring the entire forest behind them.
Jarvis, pull up on the central HUD how much the EU car industry spent on lobbying in the EU over the last 15 years.
The mobile phone industry turns product into landfill on a yearly or more frequent basis.
People might do a yearly model swap on a car, but the car itself stays on the road for 10-20 years.
Changing how it's built needs to be done cautiously, but also has a much longer payback period.
This is about so much more than cost. Agency, autonomy, environment, efficiency, geopolitics even.
I refuse to buy drm'ed gear. The exception is second hand where I can reliably avoid the drm with little effort. At its simplest, that means never using specific drm'ed functionality. At its most complicated, that means mitm'ing an encrypted can bus.
Given that so far in my 20 years of driving I've only racked up around 80k miles, that 200k "wear part" will out last the rest of my time on earth.
I do remember the visceral joy of trying to keep a supercharged Camaro on the track, but those memories are overwhelmed by the terror of “what is that noise”. Now I drive a Tesla that accelerates faster than that Camaro, handles better, and hasn’t been to the shop once.
If I win the lottery I will buy another Camaro and a Corvette and I’ll work on them for fun, and kids will look at me the way I looked at old men who take care of antique steam engines and traction engines and take them to fairs. That sure is a lot of noise and smoke and doohickeys for very little speed and power!
No, they're faulty coolant seals of the electric motor, wrecking the power unit.
>but those memories are overwhelmed by the terror of “what is that noise”.
I just turned up the music till the noise went away. Problem solved.
>Now I drive a Tesla that accelerates faster than that Camaro, handles better, and hasn’t been to the shop once.
Good for you, but do you know there's a whole lotta other EV brands out there? And many are not as well and reliably designed as your Tesla.
>I do remember the visceral joy of trying to keep a supercharged Camaro [...] If I win the lottery I will buy another Camaro and a Corvette and I’ll work on them for fun
Nice story, but what does all this have to do with the parent you're replying to? Did he mention ICEs anywhere?
I viscerally hate people who do or seriously suggest this. First, ignoring any strange noise in a car almost always leads to more expensive and stressful repairs down the road. Second, how the hell do people hear a noise and are simply okay with not knowing the source? Not understanding the situation and not being able to make any kind of informed decision?
It was a joke mate, chill.
In the past year, the heater failed (PTC Heater had to be replaced), and the lateral link ball joint ball joint had to be replaced. That is about CAD5000$ worth of work. There is also an issue with a wire in the rear center seatbelt that broke (but after a check, it doesn't really have any safety concerns wrt airbags so it is OK to leave as is), and the top roof glass cracked. (I also had to replace the front windshield, but that's normal in Calgary and I don't hold it against the car)
I'm not "rough handling", I have a Toyota Sienna without any of these problems. On the bright side, the battery has no problems and no imbalances so fixing it will keep the car running for years (hopefully).
I bring this up because I find it very annoying that people were painting hagiographies of these cars when they have real issues. None of the issues above should be happening. Moreover, there are no 3rd parties providing parts (supposedly because of patents).
In the end, I'll never buy another gas car again but my cute tiny car has a bigger turn radius than my Sienna. It's lost more value than my Sienna. I agree with the poster who said that it isn't even clear if Tesla is interested in cars anymore.
If BYD is also creating cars that are expensive to maintain, then hard pass. I'm ok with having legislation to fix this.
From what I see online, Teslas, especially MS/MX, are actually quite like an EV-swapped Toyota than anything futuristic. A lot about their cars(exception being CT and Semi) are ICE-mass-market-car coded. They're car equivalents of ARM PCs in ATX form factor like NVIDIA's DGX Station, opposite to the likes of trashcan Mac Pro.
I think model 3/y were more clean slate designs.
(I'm not sure if there was a way around this, there may well have been but I had other things going on and sold for scrap)
The “Design for purported Safety vs. Design for Saving Dollars” principle at work.
I can almost guarantee the lion's share of this is shop labor, not parts, and pressing a bushing out and back in would be more expensive after accounting for that labor than just swapping the suspension arms. This is often the piece that gets missed in these discussions of "why am I replacing this huge assembly for a tiny part", if the whole assembly is coming out to deal with that tiny part anyways and shop labor is $200/hour it's cheaper to swap the assembly a lot of the time.
Try getting any repair beyond routine maintenance done on a car in the US for under $1000 these days. Car maintenance is one of the things I'm happy to DIY in most cases because the delta on costs is massive and as someone that works on computers all day it's vaguely enjoyable to get angry at a mechanical object for a change.
Really? It's literally a few minutes (a few dozen $ at $200/hr, or $3.33/min) for any shop with a press. Removing the assembly from the rest of the car is going to take much longer.
https://www.rockauto.com/en/catalog/jeep,2012,grand+cherokee...
I've heard of people (who own a press) simply pressing out the existing bushing and pressing in a new one.
The trick is to get a new one - typically you'd have to press out the existing one, then run around town to find a match.
The worst practices with cars is when they make it too tight or engineered to work on. Ford was kind of notorious for this - some dealers would do cab lifts for routine-ish work to save labor hours. I had a 90s Cadillac that required un-mounting and tipping the engine to change the rear spark plugs, unless you bought a really expensive tool.
And once they give out, you can just replace the whole unit for maybe $2000.
Only if someone makes and sells those power electronics to you along with the appropriate DRM tools required for calibration and pairing with the other electronics of the car. Otherwise you're shit outta luck.
>Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades.
Simple != decades of reliability, when the design and manufacturing quality are piss poor in the race to the bottom for cost cutting and shareholder returns. Timing chains were also supposed to last a lifetime but plenty have been recalled due to know timing chain issues from manufacturing quality.
VW and Kia/Hyundai EVs were found to use custom dimensions motor bearings that can't be bought on the open market from anywhere, so only the OEM and their dealers can get them via their supply chain.
Power electronics will need to fit into the footprint of the e-axle. Or maybe you'll need to manufacture a new housing. Both are easily doable for small companies.
> VW and Kia/Hyundai EVs were found to use custom dimensions motor bearings that can't be bought on the open market from anywhere, so only the OEM and their dealers can get them via their supply chain.
Again, an independent manufacturer can easily make them.
As cheap as the mass produced ones with the economies of scale? I seriously doubt it. You're talking about a car ECU. Go see how much ECUs cost that don't deal with power electronics.
>Again, an independent manufacturer can easily make them.
Yeah but again, for how much? You can make anything if money is no option. But if cost is too high people will just scrap the car and buy a new one.
Of course not. This has _never_ been the case. You get spare parts from manufacturers initially, usually at a higher price (buying new bikes and parting them has been a thing for decades). When manufacturers stop producing spare parts, you can cannibalize existing cars that are taken off the road for other reasons (crashes, severe cosmetic damage, etc.).
This is enough to last you at least 2 decades. And after that time, maintaining a car makes sense only for sentimental reasons. If there's demand, there'll be supply. There are companies that are _still_ making new parts for Trabants!
> You're talking about a car ECU. Go see how much ECUs cost that don't deal with power electronics.
You don't have any idea what you're talking about, do you? ECUs on EVs do NOT deal with high voltage directly. They are just regular computers that run off 12V and output control signals over CAN lines, just like on regular gas cars.
The drivetrain on EVs is now integrated, with the power inverter sitting next to the motor to minimize transmission losses. It usually exposes a simple CAN-based control interface with a bunch of diagnostic data and YUGE high-voltage power leads.
As a result, you can buy EV conversion kits that reuse Tesla motors and power electronics. E.g.: https://kaizenmotoring.com/complete-tesla-swap-guide/
If anything, EVs will make it easier to repair stuff once the technology slows down a bit.
And what do you do whan that is locked out via DRM?
Depends. These parts are custom designed, physically, and difficult to find off-the-shelf replacements for.
The heater fan-controller on my wife's SUV died. This is simply a current-limiting device: receives (I assume) CAN signals from the dashboard rotary encoder and determines what current to send the fan.
While I could have dragged my 'scope to the car, determine what signals it's getting from the dash system (all integrated, btw), it was easier to find one in China and wait six weeks.
(I may have chosen the first option if this happened in the winter, but in summer the heater is never used anyway).
HN doesn't like like opinions that don't paint EVs in the best light possible. It's like a religious cult in some regards.
Like Honda engines on their myriad pedestrian cars. I'm sure there's exceptions, but the engines tend to be ridiculously reliable. The rest of the car often fails (due to age and/or rot and/or deferred maintenance and/or crash) and leaves a very good engine behind.
Accordingly, junkyards are full of Honda engines that work fine.
Thus, there's very few people rebuilding them. They certainly can be rebuilt, but it usually just doesn't make financial sense to strip it all down and freshen everything up.
So when an engine does fail on an otherwise-working Honda daily-driver that is actually worth repairing, then the usual move is to swap in a used motor.
---
So if it's reliable enough, and there's also critical mass, then it doesn't matter much if the BYD drivetrain unit has easily-repairable components.
That's an interesting turn of phrase ...
True, but swapping ICE engines was such an easy fix because of the modularity of powertrains that detached the messy hot rotating vibrating part(engine block) from the electronics and the rest.
These new ultra compact EV units are like if the ECU, catalytic converters, and starter motor would be built inside the engine block.
In very broad strokes: It's just a BLDC motor, some driver components for those spinny-bits, plus some water cooling passages and gears. A surprising number of these parts are identified as having been provided by Borg Warner.
That's nothing like what you describe at all.
That's something you're supposed to do for any and every car. I had to do it on my Japanese cars to keep the warranty.
Also, the last people I want to hear complaining about being ripped off by dealership service intervals are Germans. At least for Chinese cars, you do it for the warranty. For German cars, you have to bring it in for the services at the specified interval (or, in many cases, even shorter intervals!) or else it will blow up in new and exciting ways and basically total the damn thing.
Oh, and the services for German cars start at around 1500 euros. Hope you're rich!
So wait, the whole axle is solid then? Like a 1960s pickup truck but with all the weight of the motor and gearbox hanging off it too?
That must give it ridiculous unsprung weight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Dion_suspension
you still see these in velocipede-style vehicles commonly.
and to your point : a dead axle is an effort to reduce unsprung weight compared to a live axle; it also lets you actually use alignment as a remediation for asymmetry issues rather than just pre-delivery straightening.
Have you ever seen the Jaguar IRS setup? It's more like a twin-wishbone suspension *but the driveshaft is the upper link!* It's in compression and stops the hub tilting out, and the rear brakes are inboard to reduce weight even further.
not as much anymore. model s/x discontinued.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/01/tesla-kills-models-s-an...
Fords mustang mach e is unrelated to the gas one. Totally different platform. It was designed from the ground up as an electric platform. The electric F-150 was a shrewd bet that didn’t pay off, but a pretty defensible decision to try to electrify the most popular vehicle in North America without changing the outside look too much. Under the sheet metal it doesn’t share a lot of drivetrain parts with the gas truck.
Chevy makes full size electric trucks on an all electric platform with three truck/SUV models across three brands. The bolt was cancelled in 2022 with the last one produced in December 2023. They have restarted production of the Bolt for the 2026 model year. The Bolt is also built on a platform designed as electric only. The factory building the Bolt is being tentatively retooled next year to build higher margin cars as a result of Trumps tariffs. I don’t see how any of that has anything to do with appeasing Trump.
Stellantis is its own mess, and they suck at designing all cars regardless of energy source.
That is right! Some might even go as far as to call the electric Mustang an abomination, a disgrace of the Mustang name.
Comments on the Bolt indicate it's being killed due to "changes in the political environment."
Kind of surprised that the part that is perhaps the most "BYD" of the entire car, isn't actually the same cell that the BYD Blade batteries use, which was what I was most excited about seeing :(
From what I can find online, the biggest blade-cell dimension is 9.6cm, but I'm having a harder time finding the size limitations for the scanners.
As far as I know, the cells they use for the Blade does look more or less to what they actually scanned, I'm guessing it's the same size as the actual cell they used. Makes sense they couldn't fit the entire Blade assembly, as it's lots of cells put together, but I don't understand why they couldn't use the real thing instead of something else...
Also worth noting that they are very advanced in applying robotics and automation in their factories. Anyone assuming that this is all underpaid Chinese workers doing things manually would be mistaken. And that also means they are very good at maintaining the same level of quality through their production process. So, this is not surprising.
Also in general, the Chinese car market is insanely competitive right now. There's just very little room for manufacturers that deliver low quality products with lots of warranty issues.
It's simple things like this which incumbent manufacturers need to avoid losing sight of.
1. Huge scale subsidies like this are effectively a manufacturing attack. This is mean at the level of international politics and yet the world recently seems to be waking up to the idea they were handing over every practice of manufacture to China.
2. On the other hand, while the Chinese car companies are finding their footing they have not yet perfected the bullshit tiered marketing approaches that see relatively cheap to manufacture features gated to "high-equipment level" cars.
For example, now even the cheapest cars can have 360 degree parking cameras. Of course, the Chinese engineering level remains to be seen but many would argue this is competition in the market.
They are now the 2nd biggest seller after Toyota (https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/insight/byd-overtakes-rivals-...).
They are also priced much lower than KIA and Tesla.
FWIW I now own a GWM Cannon Αlpha PHEV pickup. Have also owned a Jeep Wrangler - the tech, build quality and reliability is not even on the same planet.
I can't imagine how the US manufacturers would compete with the Chinese ones on a level playing field. Not from the US, but it's hard to see how any administration would allow that. Would be the end of the local industry.
https://bydautomotive.com.au/shark-6
https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/byd-shark-8-co...
Last year it was the Ford Ranger.
One without cheap cars or EV's, even though that's what people want and need now.
The U.S. Wants to Ban China's High-Tech Cars but They're Already Here in El Paso - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48363751
* WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/chinese-cars-byd-geely-u-...
All that serves to do is ensure the American car industry falls far behind by being coddled into a lack of competition.
Toyota showed the world the Toyota Production System. What Tesla, Kia/Hyundai, and Chinese EVs have shown American automakers is how much vertical integration can be an asset, especially with the lower part counts of electric vehicles.
The model where every part is contracted out to parts manufacturers is proving to be antiquated.
The timeline goes like this:
1. Government gets pressured by industry to protect domestic industry from outside competition
2. Domestic industry stagnates as it has no reason to make competitive products
3. Time passes, quality/value gulf becomes so large that it becomes impossible to catch up to competition. It becomes impossible to export your goods and even domestic customers look elsewhere.
If the USA dropped tariffs and bans against Chinese car companies, American car companies would need to improve rapidly to survive. Instead, they’re selling us $50,000 decade old dinosaur designs like the Chrysler Pacifica.
This literally already happened to them with Japanese cars. And let me tell you, you don’t want to drive a Chevrolet from before Honda and Toyota sold cars in the United States.
Not protectionism related, but look at the MacBook Neo competitors shown off by Dell and HP at Computex. Competition drives innovation and cost reduction for consumers. Apple forced HP and Dell to make an affordable aluminum chassis computer for the masses and consumers are the winner in the situation.
Since the closure of Jeffboat in 2018 (among others), there's no non-military ship manufacturers in the US for anything even resembling cruise ship size (and even before that manufacturers like Jeffboat were mostly only making cargo barges) and the US military contractors have basically shrunk to a duopoly. Probably not the 100+ years later expectations of the Jones Act authors.
and it's not just the end product, it's the process. China has built almost entirely automated car factories. They're already 10+ years ahead of what's happening in the US/Europe.
The best thing that could happen to the US auto industry is if the US government allowed China into the US.
Correct, protectionism still saved the industry for years, it did its job perfectly.
Look at the car makers in Europe, they had decades to produce affordable electric cars, even lawmakers pushed their own population to buy electric cars with timelines and incentives, and they still failed miserably. How?
Tariffs are a last-ditch effort to buy more time. If you fail to use this time effectively, you will close shop. If you don't have tariffs, you close shop today.
Europe sells gasoline shitboxes for €30K when China could easily sell EVs for €20K, Europe (and the US) already lost.
This is under an assumption that the alternative would have been eradication of the industry, as in, “if we don’t protect the industry it will go out of business.” In reality, leading an industry to be more competitive is a lot better than protecting them from outside competition in the long term.
What was the economic value of protecting US steel for half a lifetime and then letting it turn into a dead industry? Wouldn’t it have been better for that protectionism to be more in the form of encouraging competition so that US steel companies were still thriving today? If the end result is going to be a dead industry why invest in protectionism at all?
It’s funny that you’re talking a bunch of smack about European electric cars without looking up sales numbers. The Volkswagen group EVs outsell Tesla in Europe. The top selling EV in Europe is a Skoda. VW and BMW are the top two EV companies globally besides Tesla and 4 Chinese brands.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/06/01/europe-ev-sales-report-...
https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-brand-sold...
Been driving Tesla the last 9 years .. entirely possible that my next car will be a BYD.
Pack that shit full of silicone dielectric grease, check it every year or two, and it should be good for decades.
Electrical connectors on automotive harnesses are far, far more reliable now on modern cars than they ever have been in the past, even with the increase in number of such connectors.
Companies like Delphi and Amphenol put immense engineering effort into the way modern connectors are designed, with weather sealing and contact plating that is way better than anything pre 1990's-ish was. Plastics really got way better after the turn of the Millenium compared to what they were before- I remember working on 1980s cars in the early 2000s (so, 20 year old cars) where connectors would ofter crumble in your hands when disconnecting them, or have completely corroded terminals, terrible sockets that yield and wouldn't keep continuity, etc. Compared that to all the cars I've worked on in the last 20 years where connectors have just not really been a worry (among the brands I've work on, at least). The electronics / sensors / modules themselves are much more likely to fail than the connectors they attach with, in my current experience. The only time connectors seem to fail is when cycled roughly/wrongly by people doing service incorrectly. Failure in place? Rare.
Anyone who thinks automotive electronics were more reliable in the past, live a bit with the electrical systems of a car from the 1970's thru the mid 1990's and report back to me on how that goes. Bonus points if it's Italian or British.
Strong old-man-yells-at-cloud vibe, I know. ;)
>Fourteen pins in two parallel rows carry every signal this panel produces to the rest of the vehicle. Automotive connectors are among the most common failure points in modern cars: corrosion, fretting, and thermal cycling work on these joints over years of use. One connector failure on a module this integrated takes out mirrors, windows, locks, and child safety all at once.
Corrosion on an interior module connector is not as much of a concern these days unless the car is in a flood or the door card sealing is broken due to something like a poor repair job.
Fretting? What would cause fretting on pins of a connector that never gets touched by a human after it leaves the factory. It is a static connection, it doesn't get plugged and unplugged.
Thermal cycling? It is inside a door panel... not near a hot exhaust or inside an engine. It sees normal interior temperature cycles.
An actual Closures Engineer would more likely call out vibration shock during door slam in a closures FMEA as a potential electrical window switch fault hazard resulting from the connector loosening if the chosen connector lacks sufficient mechanical fastening moreso than anything..
Saying that connectors themselves are "among the most common failure points in modern cars".... just sets of flags to me as overly flatulent, generated puff writing. "Oh I need to list three things about connectors (thinking).... Corrosion -Fretting- Thermal Cycling-!! and this makes connectors among the most common failures in modern cars (no sources cited)".
(I'm a former automotive engineer.)
Above that reads this bit:
>Its driver door panel consolidates mirror adjustment, mirror fold, door locks, all four window controls, and child locks into a single networked module. That consolidation exemplifies BYD's vertical integration favoring fewer subassemblies, each designed in-house and dropped into place, with firmware determining how any of it behaves.
But this whole article is written from a weird authoritative viewpoint when really I think it should back down a bit and just describe what the damn CT scans show.
Mandarin has been on the curriculum at my son's school for the past few years. Prescient planning imho.
But this one seems to be "state the obvious" and "recant political talking points with no new evidence".
The only reason you would do this is for competitive analysis and I assure you the other car companies have already analyzed these parts.
But overall, yeah, this is mostly an advertisement. They have other videos on their YouTube where they scan random items.
https://www.jalopnik.com/the-fascinating-company-that-tears-...