In China, It’s Already Cheaper to Buy EVs Than Gasoline Cars::undefined
They are far simpler with fewer parts. It is only a matter of scaling up manufacturing. The biggest cost is the battery.
BYD is closing in on Tesla as the largest EV manufacturer and most Americans have no idea they exist.
I was in China two months ago and the use of electric cars is honestly changing the feeling of big cities. Delivery motorcycles and service vehicles are all electric now, and with the number of electric cars on the road, streets are a lot quieter now barring the frequent honking. Less air pollution too.
What I love about Chinese electric car manufacturers is that they’ve fully embraced the cyberpunk aesthetic from the chassis design to the car sounds. Made me feel like I was walking around a cyberpunk movie set.
Cannot wait until EV replaces the noisy crotch rocket bikes .
There were already tons of ebikes on the streets when I was there in 2016. It was a bit of a problem as a pedestrian as they are super quiet and the practice is to drive those things pretty much without regard for any concept of pedestrian right of way. You learned to be ultra careful crossing any street.
Electric bikes should in theory be much, much faster. Energy density is a problem, tho. Can’t fit much battery in a small frame, so you sacrifice power for range.
Find me a 200hp electric bike that will do 400km on a charge and I’ll be the first in line.
My CBR1000rr would do like 150kms on a tank. Find me any bike that will do 400.
Maybe I got a bit excited on the range there. Find me a bike that does 150km and charges in 30 seconds 😏
In the US, e-bikes are speed limited and ranked Class 1, 2, and 3 with the fastest going just below 30 MPH.
That’s if you want to use bike trails. Get yourself a motorcycle license (not that difficult with MSF) and title a bike as one, and you can do some sketchy ass shit with frames and wheels not meant to go that fast.
Proper electric motorcycles are kinda crap right now. Expensive, and the range is limited. Battery tech doesn’t yet scale down well for that market. Pedal assisted e-bikes, though, are pretty good.
As a noisy crotch rocket bike rider, I agree completely.
I just got back from a business trip to China also. The high proportion of EVs, particularly in the southern cities like Guangzhou and Shenzhen really stood out to me, and many of them (particularly from BYD) looked really, really nice. They seemed less prominent in the more northern part of the country (e.g. Shenyang, Beijing), but even there I’d say they’re more common than in the UK.
It was a real eye opener
That was my experience as well. Very prevalent in Sichuan, but less so in Shanghai. Still, even in Shanghai, they were leagues ahead of Canada.
I mean, there’s only 35 million people in Canada, a country with a larger land mass than China. The charging infrastructure in Canada is pitiful.
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Do you have pictures? I would love to see.
I found this article from last year showing some interesting models. You’ll see the most popular EVs range from more classical designs to weird and retro-futuristic.
Some of them also make futuristic noises when they drive around… The noise isn’t needed at all because the motor is pretty much silent, so they’re added by manufacturers so you hear them coming. I swear they sound like something out of a '90s sci-fi flick.
Hope those are customizable. Can’t wait to load up the TIE Fighter engine sound.
That Wuling Hongguang Mini EV is so adorable and looks like some sort or VW bus/classic car hybrid. I would totally drive that thing.
Also those BYD cars look like ripoffs of (in order) Kia/Hyundai (Qin Plus), Honda (Han), BMW (Dolphin), and Chevrolet (Yuan Plus)
Would be interesting to see. The Chinese EVs being pushed on the market here (Europe) are the typical ugly huge American SUV style.
Yeah, American here. This isn’t a huge mystery. Electric cars here are expensive because people refuse to give up their giant vehicles. American culture is so gross…
Even small electric cars are expensive in America. The Kia ev6 and Hyundai Ioniq 5 and 6 are all quite “small” for American vehicles and they’re still 45k+
Shouldn’t it be the opposite? If demand is low, then prices should correspondingly be down until adoption increases.
Certainly the opposite is often used to just y increasing prices
No, what I’m saying is that American car makers aren’t producing small electric vehicles because Americans refuse to drive small cars, which makes the ridiculously large ones prohibitively expensive because the batteries have to be enormous.
There are definitely a lot of oversize vehicles in North America and trucks do have high sales, there’s still plenty of people driving decent sized Japanese vehicles (Toyota, Honda).
I do agree that the “F350 to drive to work and do grocery runs” crap is dumb as fuck though.
The batteries on some of these SUV EVs weigh as much as a car. It’s pretty silly.
What I love about Chinese electric car manufacturers is that they’ve fully embraced the cyberpunk aesthetic from the chassis design to the car sounds.
So, the Vaporwave color pallete?
Love this, thanks
I’d really like to see more of this. Do you know some of the names of these super cool manufacturers / designs?
Not the OP, but I live in China.
Check out for example the Xpeng (Xiao Peng) G6 and P7, the Qiantu K50, Zeekr 009, Lynk & Co. 03, Aiways U5 and the Dongfeng Mengshi M-Hero 917 (now if that’s not HALO inspired, I don’t know…).
Ah these are really cool, but I misread car and thought OP meant bikes. Americans will never be able to buy these sweet chinese cars.
I read in an article that chinese people who own these cars often sit in the back and have a driver. Is that true?
Ah, what he mentioned were e-bikes, but those are not really on the fancy side. Search for 饿了么 scooter or 美团 scooter. They do food and grocery deliveries mostly. For private use, Niu scooters are the most popular in terms of design, but a ton of cheap stuff exists. Couldn’t tell you about the brands, they are all very generic.
Electric motorbikes exist, but require a special license and are banned in most downtown areas, so they aren’t really common. One brand I’m aware of is called Dayi Motors, they recently got certified for the European market, so chances are that those would become available elsewhere as well.
Anyone know if there are any E motorcycles that can be imported to the US yet?
Oh sorry forgot to mention the drivers. In my experience this is not true at all. People who have drivers are usually senior executives, and they’d have company cars. Typically some top of the line Mercedes or BMW, sometimes a Porsche SUV. Electric cars (even the fancier ones) are rather affordable, and people here are very focused on their external impression.
What I love about Chinese electric car manufacturers is that they’ve fully embraced the cyberpunk aesthetic from the chassis design
I actually think Chinese EVs are quite ugly.
[Comment content deleted by author because apparently I was spouting lies!]
This brake dust problem is not true. Just another in a line of deceiving , sounds right but isn’t, attacks on EVs from the fossil fuel industry and their allies. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmorris/2022/02/05/electric-cars-are-as-green-as-you-think-and-dont-produce-more-polluting-particles/?sh=528dfb522811
There is the tire problem, but 🤷♂️ That’s more of a “Americans want to buy giant things” problem, and the battery designs that are seemingly just around the corner are lighter
https://news.yahoo.com/nasa-incredible-solid-state-battery-130000645.html
I mean… I drive my electric car like I stole it, which I wouldn’t really do with anything except a sports car. So the tire wear is definitely greater than if I did that in an ICE vehicle.
TIL!! I was snookered. Thanks so much for sharing this.
We all get snookered sometimes.
Electric cars use their brakes tremendously less than ICE ones.
I imagine electric cars would generate less brake dust due to their use of regenerative braking.
BYD has chosen not to approach the US market until at least 2030.
They’re building buses in California. I drive by this plant on occasion.
I personally like myself a Yutong E series… especially with the (fake) wood floor option and dark grey interior.
Why can’t all public transport interiors be designed so nicely 😭
I visited the BYD factory years ago. I have no idea how big it is compared to others but it absolutely blew my mind. I was up on like 5th floor and when they sounded the lunch bell it looked like ants out the window. I think they said it was about 600k employees in that building.
600k seems a bit too much. That’s a fairly large city.
It being huge is an understatement. They have dorms where people live on-site and it’s they are massive. Multiple soccer complexes and tons of restaurants all on campus.
I don’t know how many workers BYD have, but Foxconn flagship factory is Longhua Science & Technology Park and it is a small city with hundreds of thousands people working there. Check the Google Maps satellite view, it’s crazy.
It’s only a matter of getting manufacturers to give the extra margin they’ve been creaming
Is BYD a China state run company?
Once your company became big, it is mandatory to have a state appointed party secretary on board.
So yes, in a sense BYD is state run.
Are the US and EU late, or is it a deliberate business decision from EV car manufacturers to aim for bigger and luxury cars because they make more profit?
More than 80 percent of new cars sold in Norway now are EVs.
Which also means that all the talk in the US about EVs not being reliable in cold-weather states is just pure crap from politicians trying to protect oil and the gasoline car industry.
Yup. Car and Driver Debunks Cold Weather EV Myts at most you get a 20% decrease in the efficiency of your charge. And EVs are actually better at staying warm while idle/off.
20% is huge on cheaper (i.e not horribly expensive) EV 's when you’ll already be on the edge of your range for daily use. Luckily though, most people don’t live in northern latitudes.
They’re reliable. They just expend more energy in winter time so you get worse range.
And over 90% if you count PHEVs too. Norway demonstrates electric vehicles are completely viable.
Who are the manufacturers building these cars? I’m curious how many are the very same manufacturers we have in the US and where the disparity occurs.
9/10 of the top EVs are also sold in the United States. The only outlier is the Skoda which is basically a Volkswagen.
No one says they are unreliable. Thier range is just reduced in extreme temperatures. That’s a much bigger problem foe the US than it is foe Norway.
China did to EVs what the US did to semiconductors.
The US and EU markets lack competition.
We’re late. Our competition sucks (almost certainly on purpose). BYD is taking the slow approach to the US market - early next decade? Reuters: BYD Global EV Push
The US car manufacturers are going to take a protectionist approach to a shrinking market. They’ve already won this decade - everybone has a massive truck/SUV, no transit, all cars including EVs are an unaffordable luxury to Americans now after “inflation.”
What are you going on about?
The US car makers (specifically GM and Ford) have been heavily pro-active on the switch to EVs. GM’s Volt and Bolt were the first real entries into going electric-hybrid and then full EVs at a lower-cost mass-produced vehicles. Now GM’s Ultium platform is easily one of the most advanced systems out there and will be the basis for future GM’s full EV cars and trucks for the next few years. It is advanced enough where Honda/Acura are using it for their first real EVs (not counting the 1/2 hearted E which was so overpriced and limited in capabilities that it wasn’t even brought to the US). Honda is so far behind, they had to have someone else design and build their upcoming EV Prolog and ZDX vehicles.
The Japanese carmakers are the ones dragging their feet.
I thought they were talking about manufacturing, not brand HQ.
Honda might as well be more American than GM. They produce and sell more vehicles domestically than GM.
The US has protectionist rules about EV grants - car must be assembled in the US to receive tax credits. It’s why Teslas sold in the US are assembled in the US whereas Teslas sold in Canada are made in China. There are some comments that the Chinese manufactured cars are actually better quality. It probably also explains why Chinese brands like BYD are focussing more on other markets like Europe.
It’s also because, despite subsidies, shipping costs for materials for EVs (and the necessary factory upgrades) are expensive domestically, but this infrastructure already exists, alongside a very willing market that does not have a political identity tied to ICE engines.
A little bit of Bud Light phobia, a little bit of logistics and retooling costs, and a little bit of government subsidies (of both fuel and ICE engines themselves at all steps of production) all comes together to prolong the life of the ICE in the US.
China is subsidizing EV companies crazy hard. They brought musk in with Tesla to steal all his tech and train their workers to do it too. So bonus points for exploiting Elons hubris and ego. He was going to be first American company to be a leader in the Chinese market without them stealing all his tech. Crazy it didn’t work out.
The timeline doesn’t add up. Chinese EV makers, including BYD, were building crazy momentum long before Musk set up shop in Shanghai (which was in 2018). It’s only come to the attention of the outside world in the last couple of years when their EVs started to get exported at scale, but before they’ve been brewing this industry for a long time. BYD shipped its first compact EV domestically in 2009.
Yes, because there’s no way 5 years is enough time to steal technology and manufacturing techniques and distribute them throughout an industry with a web of government industrial spies. They never do this type of thing so it would take 20 years. I’m sure BYD is making cars exactly like they were 5 years ago. Technology moves so slowly.
Oh, a quick search shows of BYD cars shows me their cars up until around that time looked like a cheap kia from the early 2000s and now the new models look weirdly like a Tesla. I’m sure that’s complete coincidence though. China with it’s super strict IP laws and parents should never steal anything.
China has many more competent engineers then… any other country. They often steal ideas (everybody does), and even whole designs (less of everybody does). But i doubt they stole anything for ev-s. Making the “car” part is harder then the “electric part”, especially for china.
China has many more competent engineers then… any other country.
LOL
Funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time.
Tell me you know fuck-all about engineering and manufacturing without telling me you know fuck-all about engineering and manufacturing.
The frog in a well knows nothing of the sea.
Imagine thinking a “theft” of the idea of a trash can looking like a futuristic car dreamed of by kids in the 90s is something to cry over.
They were very far ahead in many technical areas until recently. Revisionist history is silly.
Tell me you know nothing about Chinese EVs without telling me you know nothing about Chinese EVs. BYD’s best sellers are actually plug-in hybrids, which is in no way “stolen” from Tesla.
Whatever happened to hybrids? Why did we all the sudden decide we need to push for 100% electric nationwide?
Hybrids were an necessity when large batteries weren’t feasable (in the first Leaf, for example, the 24kw battery was about 80% of the cost, it’s amazing they could sell it at a profit at all).
Falling prices and increased capacity means that isn’t really the case any more, and it’s not really worth the complexity of a hybrid.
Hybrids have all the issues of both combustion and electric cars and none of the benefits. Well, except for fast refueling.
Hybrids were a great transition technology that never got as widespread as it should have, but now pure EVs are practical, and approach legacy car prices. They’re still a little high but it’s in the ballpark enough that the low operating cost make it worthwhile
Meanwhile where I am in Canada, with massive amounts hydroelectric power: “bUt tHe gRiD!”
A certain amount passes through anyway, but how much water has to be let through a dam to charge a car?
The dam electricity has to charge the damn car but the damn grid is inadequate ….
I can believe it. Massachusetts has been try to buy some of that sweet dam Canadian hydro - apparently there is plenty but no damn transmission lines to get it here. And the damn nimbies in Maine and New Hampshirite have no incentive to let us build Dam power lines
The grid still has to get the electricity from the dam to the end user.
Yes and the electric company is handsomely rewarded for providing that service.
You can have infinity watts at the power dam but the grid to and in your town can still have capacity issues.
This should not be hard to understand.
Nor should it be hard to understand that power companies are not stupid and already have a roadmap for renewables (solar, hydro, wind etc.), energy storage, EV charging facilities and other 21st century concerns. They are not blindsided by this change and are looking forward to it.
It’s as if you haven’t read the original comment this thread is about but just want to argue for the sake of arguing.
Actually I have and I’m also aware that electric companies including in Canada have roadmaps out until 2050 to accommodate not just EVs, but the transition to heat pumps, renewables and all the rest.
See, you just need to argue more, then the grid will have capacity by the time you’re done arguing.
And?
You can have infinity watts at the power dam but the grid to and in your town can still have capacity issues.
And fend off all the frivolous lawsuits from the fish huggers. In the US we have been dismantling hydro dams for years instead of building more.
Yes, long inactive hydro dams are being taken down. These are the kind that incorporate none of the modern ecological improvements (fish ladders, aeration, etc), where the reservoir is not used for drinking water. Usually the reservoir water is chock full of excess nitrogen and other pollutants. These are usually defunct small-scale hydro plants that were formerly associated with an old-school river-side factory - the kind that now stand vacant or are converted into high end condos nationwide. Or are you talking about hydro dams getting taken down because the water usage was too great to sustain the reservoir because we’ve decided that the desert is a great place for agriculture?
But that’s right, fuck the fish and aquatic life, we should invest massive capital on restarting decades dead microhydro plants.
While I’m all about killing the southern California agriculture industry, I’m more talking about demoing dams in historically great places for dams instead of replacing them, or upgrading them. There’s hundreds alone on the west coast.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Since Tesla Inc. and Mitsubishi Motors Corp. started developing the first mass-market electric cars in the late 2000s, battery vehicles have struggled with a higher cost structure that even subsidies and manufacturer losses haven’t been sufficient to surmount.
That’s come on the back of a price war, instigated by Tesla, so savage that the government last month induced automakers to sign a pact pledging to compete fairly and refrain from “abnormal pricing.” (The latter commitment was retracted two days later.)
Tesla’s Model 3, which previously retailed at twice the price of comparable premium mid-sized sedans such as the BMW AG 3 Series, is now the more affordable option.
BYD’s Dolphin, likewise, comes in about 5,000 yuan ($693) cheaper than a comparable compact sedan such as Volkswagen AG’s local Jetta variant, the 125,000-yuan Sagitar.
Just three years ago, Deloitte — in a report that was generally extremely bullish about the prospects for EVs — predicted this level wouldn’t be hit until the end of the decade.
Closing that gap has depended on falling costs for batteries, a process that’s been delayed as the commodity price inflation of the past few years pushed up expenditure on raw materials.
The original article contains 873 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
How is their infrastructure for charging?
Complicated, within the city limits is quite good, many malls have charger in their parkings and many solar charger parkings are appearing, however long distance driving is still not ideal (either no charging stations or charging stations are broken), people mainly purchase EVs as backup car.
so it’s good except for Long distance?
Yup, it is quite ideal for inner-city traffic.
What I question the most is how would you charge it if you live in the city. Most people, at least here, don’t have a garage or a spot in an indoor parking, and just leave the car on the street or somewhere inside the blocks.
That for sure has nothing to do with state subsidies for EV manufacturers.
Is this sarcasm? The US loves to subsidize oil etc
Yes, it’s sarcasm. What does US appetite to subsidize oil industry has to do with anything in the China EV market?
China EV market is heavily subsidize at every level not only at OEM level or purchasing taxes extempts.
What does US energy have to do with Chinese EVs? The article and your comment show we can choose the future we want.
Oh no, capitalism does actually work and makes life better! Even in China!
I wonder how this will be spun negatively against China in western media.
I’m from a country that has salty relations with China and I think it’s good they’re embracing EVs. It will push my own country harder to catch up and as long as it’s adopted more sustainability than ICE it’s good for the planet as a whole.
Lol you do not really wonder.
