I've got a friend whos a master tech/trainer with our state automotive body, and is HV certified etc for dealing with these cars. He's currently got a BYD Shark strewn across his workshop for an autopsy.<p>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.<p>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.
In the last few years Chinese manufacturing has reached a very high-level. The reason most people still believe that Chinese-made stuff is poor quality is because they will do what they are told and they are usually told “make this as cheap as possible” by whoever is paying the bills.<p>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.
>they will do what they are told and they are usually told “make this as cheap as possible” by whoever is paying the bills<p>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.
"Quality fade".<p><a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quality_fade" rel="nofollow">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quality_fade</a>
People should realize China is huge and manufactures one third of world's goods.<p>You're going to have excellence and crap across such a gargantuan amount of production and companies, a high amount of variance.
High amount variance of quality is a daily reality and as any chinese consumer we are very used to that since the beginning of e-commerce. However there are multiple aspects to the quality feel. Production of high quality items is one thing (e.g one can do better QA etc), what I heard from some local car garages in China is that standardisation in the industry is still quite poor. E.g Parts to replace and bolts and nuts are not as standardised say as the German counter parts (purely from a mechanics point of view).<p>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.
A really good example of this is the luxury watch market. China manufactures a heap of shitty knockoffs. They also manufacture a heap of the high end legitimate brand watches. And they manufacture some nice and obscenely expensive high end luxury watches.
The most infamous example of this is hip implants made in China that had to be recalled due to being made wrong. This is also why Chinese structural steel is rarely used in North America and Europe.
I find that Chinese manufacturing offers the complete range of quality for every price point. At reasonable prices, the quality meets or exceeds that of other countries. But if you want something cheap and cheaply made, you can find that as well. And at the extreme, you still have counterfeit parts and products.
> While I reckon some other countries still have specialist manufacturing in key areas that surpasses China<p>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.<p>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.
Apple in China is a great book and shows how good China is on focusing on quality when that is the given objective.
> The reason most people still believe that Chinese-made stuff is poor quality is because they will do what they are told and they are usually told “make this as cheap as possible” by whoever is paying the bills.<p>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.
Also because of the appalling track record of QA/QC, and subsequent cover-ups, at every level of government and enterprise from regional to national.<p>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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal</a><p>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?
Unfortunately, the manager pushing the outsourcing pockets the money, outsourcing company pockets the money, and the local and indian teams get to be abused and latter gets extra blame for things outside their control.<p>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.<p>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.
Yes - I remember one time hearing someone from a big consulting company make the argument that even the top Indian graduates would work for peanuts (even by local standards) and asking them how likely it was that they’d be that smart but unable to determine their market value.<p>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.
BYD cars in China are not very good. But to export them they need to be higher quality to meet criteria. I would never buy one in China. Happily own one outside of China.
I wish China didn't have such a hostile government to the West. Because I'd love to buy a BYD car and see this for myself, or try the Xiaomi car that MKBHD was so keen on. But because of the hostility I kind of get why there are bans.
Vertical integration matters. If BYD controls much of the chain from the mine to the ship, they’re not paying everyone else’s margin along the way. That can translate into more car for the money.<p>I own a BYD Tang, so I’m biased, but the value for money has been hard to beat.<p>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.
Vertical integration is a double edged sword. When your car is a decade old or more, and stuff starts breaking, the only vendor that makes parts for it is BYD - and its up to them if they bother selling to you, at what price, provided they still make these parts at that time.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Additionally, vertically integrated companies don't get to tag along on innovations produced by upstream suppliers. Many EV companies will effortlessly have their range increase by a couple % each year, with battery costs falling, just because they can adopt the improvements of CATL/Panasonic/BYD etc.
<i>> Vertical integration matters. If BYD controls much of the chain from the mine to the ship, they’re not paying everyone else’s margin along the way. That can translate into more car for the money.</i><p>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?<p>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".
It does also just depend at what scale you operate at.<p>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.
VW, Mercedes and BMW also squeeze their suppliers very hard, and they operate with razor thin margins. So I agree and wouldn't say that doing everything in house is always going to be the cheaper way
Having an adversarial relationship with your suppliers is not necessarily the best arrangement. It means that suppliers will nickel-and-dime you for every change and ship minimum possible quality to you. The cost of loss of agility and quality will impact your bottom line.
My family operated a business on exactly these razor thin margins. You always live on the razors edge. You're unable to invest into the future, unable to improve your processes, and god forbid there is even a minor disruption. I don't think it's sustainable. We've since faltered, as have our many of our competitors and suppliers.
And also the simplicity of the products. You don't need to design a different engine for each car, you just vary the number of cells and change the motors. Your battery division can keep pumping out batteries, regardless of what models you make. If you design a new model, you can keep using the existing lines. It's perfect for mass production.
I have a Chinese EV too, an MG4 built by SAIC. It’s a really cheap car, significantly cheaper than its non-Chinese counterparts like the VW ID.3 or (roughly) a Hyundai Kona.<p>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.
> VW ID.3<p>VW ID.3 is designed by a Chinese team in China, built in Shanghai backed entirely by the Chinese ecosystem.<p>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.
Cars only show if they're well made after like a decade? These are not washing machines or something.<p>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.<p>First impression matters though.
>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.<p>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.<p>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 think it depends on the car. I've seen VW products fall apart in months after sale, we actually had a Mk5 golf that went back to the dealer three times in it's first year for fuel system faults.<p>There are a lot of low price bracket Chinese imports (MGs mainly) that seem to have severe rust issues that are present at delivery.<p>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.<p>I do agree in principle that <i>most</i> modern cars should be pretty good for their warranty period/first owner, but I've also seen some egregious edge cases!
> Cars only show if they're well made after like a decade?<p>Unless you have a wet belt in your Puretech engine that will blow up in 5-8 years...<p>Mechanics and enthusiasts around here (Spain) call this engines "pudretech" (rot-tech)...
Cars can still show that they're poorly made pretty quickly.
I’d be stoked if a washing machine lasted a decade.
How so, not last a decade?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
Be thankful you didn't buy Beko. I had a horrible uphill battle trying to get them to honour a 2 year warranty in Ireland after about a years usage.<p>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.<p>I'm now sworn off Beko, and will happily tell everyone I can about my terrible service :)
> How so, not last a decade?<p>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.<p>They do run at least once a day often more, but that’s not enough to explain it.
<a href="https://www.homedepot.com/p/Whirlpool-3-3-cu-ft-White-Commercial-Top-Load-Washing-Machine-CAE2795FQ/301845807" rel="nofollow">https://www.homedepot.com/p/Whirlpool-3-3-cu-ft-White-Commer...</a><p>This would probably last a couple I expect
I'd be disappointed if it didn't. My Bosch is running for about 13 years right now and just as well as when I bought it.
Maybe it helps I'm in the EU and there's a law stating you have right of compensation if it dies within a decade...
Genuinely?
>The control arms, subframes, etc all look good and don't fit the 'chinese car bad' narrative you always hear.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Huawei flagship phones were similar in price to Samsung, but I felt they lasted way longer.
I have had a fairly good run with a lot of these Chinese phones. Huawei when we could still get them was great. Xiaomi is great build quality but they are rotting out their OS with too much bloat and up sell. Oppo has been brilliant in that they are built well, cheap and allow you strip out anything you don't want.
Pre google ban huawei phones were incredible. 2-day batteries, great screens, fantastic cameras and an awesome price. I had a Samsung after my last huawei and it felt like a solid downgrade, even though the samsung was way more expensive.<p>FYI, if you are looking for a post google huawei, check out honor phones.
Oh man I miss my Huawei phones. I had an Oppo at one stage too.<p>As an aside the best phone I ever had was a HTC One X, another brand that I sorely miss.
BYD are genuinely decent cars. And they've skyrocketed in popularity across parts of the world.<p>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.<p>I'd take a BYD over something like a Tesla thats for sure - far better cars, it's not even a fair comparison anymore.<p>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.
And they have really good designs (after all, they are taking inspiration from the most succesful european cars. I saw the station wagon the other day, it's amazing. the octavia EV as it should be.)<p>The problem is always going to be: what's going to happen in 10 years, or whatever, after warranty expires?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.)<p>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.<p>Think apple. (and tesla. but tesla is shit quality)<p>Or john deere.
I think we're going to have to accept that the EV market and technology is moving fast enough that cars behave a lot more like smartphones, or buying a computer in the 90s: one that's ten years old is going to look ridiculously dated even if it's still working fine. It's not unreasonable to estimate than in 10 years the average range will be 50% more or even double current range.<p>I've got a leased one on order as a result. Let someone else eat the depreciation.
People talking about Chinese manufacturing all being junk are completely stuck in the past.
My grandfather in the 1970s used to complain about crappy Japanese tools. By the 1980s they were world-class. Same is happening with Chinese manufacturing.
There is a joke just about that in Back to the Future (1985)!
My great-grandfather used to complain about crappy German tools.<p>My great-great-grandfather used to complain about crappy Scottish tools.<p>He was English. I am not sure you can buy as much as a paperclip made in England now.<p>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.
I’ve seen people say stuff made in china is junk while holding their iPhone. People say the dumbest things.
>I have to say I'm super impressed with how heavy duty everything is.<p>But do you actually have a frame of reference though?<p>It's really easy to make stuff look good and then have it suck because someone in some other department nerfed it.<p>I'm not saying they're bad but HN is not a community I trust to make such assessments.
"chinese X bad" is really ignorant. One in 6 people on the planet lives in China, it's a gargantuan country that is the world leader in manufacturing. You're going to have a high variance of quality output for the mere fact that the overall output is massive.<p>People often equate low-value Chinese manufacturing that focuses on low cost with their manufacturing quality across all fields.
> all look good and don't fit the 'chinese car bad' narrative you always hear.<p>“No wonder this circuit failed, it says made in Japan”<p>“What do you mean doc, all the best stuff is made in Japan”
I'd rather own Chinese everything over American. Everything America makes is slop and corners are cut for profits so the owners of companies can own their third home and maybe a yacht. The truth is Chinese engineering quality exceeds the West in almost every domain at this point.<p>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.
I agree with the quality of some of the stuff coming out of China but when it comes to poisons and risking the lives of citizens, I have some bad news for you. That is how they undercut so heavily by foregoing those standards.
China has moved beyond being a "value" manufacturer and they've cleaned up a lot.
In China, they hang those that are responsible. In US, they get slap on their hand.
Not saying you are wrong about many US business owners but having travelled in China I can tell you that Chinese companies have no qualms about poisoning their neighbours for enhanced profits - my guide there said it was what he hated about his country. Money drives ethics pretty much everywhere I reckon.
Imagine glazing the country where a dozen companies were caught mixing melamine into baby formula, hospitalizing 50,000 and killing 6.<p>This happened in 2008 by the way.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal</a>
This was stated about the key: "Folded into the base is a mechanical backup key, a flat metal blade in a hinged housing."<p>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.<p>Nonetheless: very cool tech demo!
It was suspected in the past that Lumafield used AI to write the descriptions of previous scans. It is possible they are still doing so.
I wasn’t surprised by the backup key, but rather by how empty it was. I really wish key fobs were smaller. They are quite bulky in a pocket and bigger than all my actual keys combined.
The mechanical key has a hinge (to be able to operate it), but it’s not “hinged” to the fob.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/0aspbvdCXqs?si=9pcToYeg4EcoHfPJ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/0aspbvdCXqs?si=9pcToYeg4EcoHfPJ</a>
Having a mechanical key hidden in the electronic key fob is nothing new, it’s common on many cars.
I guess my intent was not to point out that it has a mechanical key, rather that the description of the key on the webpage was wrong (it is not hinged).<p>The mechanical key fallback pattern is standard across the industry for sure.
It's entirely possible that the BYD key they scanned and the BYD key you possess are of different designs.
This: different markets get different style keys.
Possible, but I doubt it.<p>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.<p>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.
Ah, I misread your earlier revision's enthusiasm at the end as being about the mechanical key, not the CT scan.
Before keyless became defacto standard, most keys were fixed on a hinge - you'd first unlock your car by pressing a button on the fob, then swing the key open and use it to start the car.<p>Nowadays the physical key is only a backup, safely stowed inside the fob. It is meant to be pulled out only in an emergency.
Mercedes changed to the IR key in maybe turn of the 90's. The plastic blob would be used to turn the ignition like before, but the locking part was electrical (optical). There was still a metal key that could be pulled out and used on the exterior locks if the central locking was out.<p>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.<p>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.
I remember playing with my parent's VW key fob as a fidget toy in the 00s. Little spring loaded switchblade style mechanical key.
And yet my Hyundai key fob, despite being the largest fob I've ever seen doesn't do this :/
Yes sadly the Hyundai and Kia key fobs of EVs (at least EV9) don’t have the mechanical backup key in the fob anymore. So you need to carry it on your keychain. Don’t leave it in your trunk. If the 12V battery does out you won’t be able to get into the car.
Anecdotally on my Hyundai ionic hybrid from 2018 it does have a mechanical key in the fob, but it is very non-obvious. It’s physically the same piece as the keyring section at the top of the fob. There is a small catch you release to remove the key from the plastic fob body and it slides out the top.<p>All this to say Hyundai certainly knows how to do this. If they didn’t do it, it is almost certainly a deliberate omission.
My 2015 Honda had that and my new car does as well.
This was a super cool article. Very well done. Thank you!
Back in the days the Chinese used to copy from the German automotive industry. Now it's about time the Germans start to learn from Chinese engineering.
> The last company to vertically integrate a car from raw material to finished product at this scale was Ford. Today BYD’s system runs all the way from the lithium mine to the port.<p>Both BYD and Tesla claim to produce around 75% of their components. Ford is at around 25%.<p>Tesla is indeed smaller in scale (cars/year):<p><pre><code> BYD 4.6M
Ford 4.4M
Tesla 1.6M</code></pre>
I assumed this was referring to the early days of the Ford assembly line
So BYD for cars and Samsung for phones and consumer electronics more generally (from fab upwards).<p>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.<p>What other high tech vertically integrated producers exist in this group?
They are "more" vertical, but they too have vital suppliers that they could not do without. The semiconductor supply chain is deep. Everybody knows ASML, but there are countless others that produce raw wafers, etching machines, special chemicals and so forth.
While I could have <i>sworn</i> RIM put out their own modems (which Qualcomm used to make life difficult for them, especially as the world transitioned from 3G to 4G), and did their own hardware and software, I can't currently find a source
IBM
"You wouldn't CT scan a car!"<p>Actually, yes, we would: <a href="https://www.kmoser.com/ctscan/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kmoser.com/ctscan/</a>
For those interested in EV drive-train tear-downs, Munroe Live has some wonderfully detailed videos: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LfDuyqmsts" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LfDuyqmsts</a> , <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeZzEg3GIcg&list=PLkiDlGyJnpre4-WM5f-m_0bCp7O9osTYs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeZzEg3GIcg&list=PLkiDlGyJnp...</a>
Genuinely impressed with the article. We need more such articles that re-invigorate our engineering curiosity. Kudos!
Oh, I love the 2 sides of HN...
Here everybody's ready to buy a BYD and even move to China, due to the sheer quality of the product (for the money) and the integrity of the people, totally forgetting about the 'social credit system' and the data that these cars might be sending or being exposed to having the car remotely disabled.
Not to mention the repairability...
Just a few days ago there was a popular post taking a modem out of the RAV4. Bet you can't do even that on a BYD without rendering the car non-functional.
That pot&kettle contest between the US and China is really heating up!<p>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.<p>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.
> totally forgetting about the 'social credit system' and the data that these cars might be sending or being exposed to having the car remotely disabled.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The free market isn't fun when you're not the ones making all the money and dominating countries you determine to be inferior?
I really don’t understand why this social credit concept has become so widespread. It does sort of exist but not in the big government breathing down your neck kind of way.<p>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.<p>This is a good thing, no???
Well it depends what legal protections are there to back it up. If you get threatened with blacklisting without recourse, that seems like a bad thing.
Feels like its the same poeple saying locked down OS stores are great because security and chrome engine in all browser is fantastic because then everything is standardized.<p>But worse because here we are talking deep human topics.<p>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.
Isn't the social credit system mostly a credit score, similar to the one implemented in the United States? As someone living in a European country without such a thing, I also find that one pretty dystopian.<p>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?<p>Do you base your last statement on anything, or is it just a hunch?
From what I read it's mostly a credit score and blacklist system. In the 2010s there was a project to use it to reward and punish people for some everyday stuff based on whether it did or didn't align with the party's morals, but it got scrapped. That's the part everyone thinks is going on over there.<p>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.
No, the social credit system can restrict your basic freedom, including the freedom of moving, without a judge being involved.<p>The fact you are casually talking about it is infuriating.<p>It's like taking about the yellow star and stay "isn't it like the pins in the US".
I see, thanks for the correction. Aren't people put in ICE detention centers and offshore prisons indefinitely with no charges and no judge involved, though? Or is that OK because they aren't citizens?
Nothing can restrict your basic freedom in the US though, right? lmao<p>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...<p>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:<p>> Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on"
It would be naive to think HN is not immune to influence operations. The people singing praises to China are not necessarily people.
lol, every single american repeating "ChInA bAd" on every single thread mentioning china like automatons, while not being able to locate it on a map or name three living Chinese people", and having the audacity to talk about being under "influence"... the irony<p>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.
Even more naive to think that the HN crowd is any more immune to propaganda than the non-HN folk.
They are probably people, paid for it. The comment are too well made.<p>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.<p>This is where the "history at schoolis useless" people show their true color.
The "Two sides" you're spotting is US posters vs non US posters. It's not exactly a secret that the US has long had a propaganda process going against China with their own citizens. From the outside it's weird how 'cult like' some parts of the US education system come across with things like this. It's similar to the whole socialism = communism = bad fear embedded into US society.<p>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.
Well then we can unpack US and all the crap thats happening there. From an outsider, there ain't much difference China vs US, just different shades of brown. Comparing those 2, China is definitely more friendly to Europe, US gov publicly stated they want to break EU and make continent weaker FFS.<p>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.<p>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.
<i>Folded into the base is a mechanical backup key, a flat metal blade in a hinged housing. It reads warmer than everything else in the scan. It exists for the moment the battery dies or the RF link fails. Every BYD keyless entry system includes this fallback.</i><p>It's simple things like this which incumbent manufacturers need to avoid losing sight of.
Nearly every manufacturer does this though? It's often simply done in such a sleek way that customers don't even know it's there.
My 2019 Ford has this as well, this is not novel.
Huh? What keyless car doesn’t have this (except Tesla, but they’re an odd one, and I guess not an incumbent manufacturer…)
Nice.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.)<p>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.
GM has several EVs that are ground up designs. They look just like the ICE version but that is cosmetic, everything else is different.
> Tesla ought to be doing this, but they're into performance, not cost.<p>not as much anymore. model s/x discontinued.<p><a href="https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/01/tesla-kills-models-s-and-x-to-build-humanoid-robots-instead/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/01/tesla-kills-models-s-an...</a>
You have some false beliefs about Detroit’s product lines.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Stellantis is its own mess, and they suck at designing all cars regardless of energy source.
True, the Mach E mostly just shares the name. The E-Transit really is the same van with a different power train. It ought to be taking over fleet sales, but it only sells about 12K units/year, vs. 162K for the fuel powered version.
The Ford electric F-150 was overdesigned and overpriced.<p>Comments on the Bolt indicate it's being killed due to "changes in the political environment."
> Fords mustang mach e is unrelated to the gas one.<p>That is right! Some might even go as far as to call the electric Mustang an abomination, a disgrace of the Mustang name.
> BYD builds a unit with an integrated motor, differential, axle, and wheel hubs<p>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?<p>That must give it ridiculous unsprung weight.
it's not really like a 'live axle' from an older truck, it's more like a de-Dion style suspension (or <i>dead axle</i>).<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Dion_suspension" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Dion_suspension</a><p>you still see these in velocipede-style vehicles commonly.<p>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.
Ah, like on my old Volvo 340 ;-) They were fun, all that weight at the back (the diff and gearbox were bolted together under the rear floor) gave it excellent balance. Bit of a shame all that 50/50 weight distribution was only pushed along by a 1.4 Renault engine then, I guess.<p>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.
On the platforms I've worked with, the weight isn't the issue so much as the quantity of expensive and vibe sensitive parts that are unsprung.
Looks like they do in-hub motor for buses and in-differential(like everyone else) for passenger cars?
<i>>This simplifies vehicles considerably.</i><p>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.<p>Check out the articles published by EVclinic that cover such cases.<p>Aftermarket EV repairs are already big business due to how difficult and expensive the OEMs make it.
On the other hand: If the assembly is reliable-<i>enough</i>, then repair isn't normally something that needs to be pursued in the first place.<p>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.<p>Accordingly, junkyards are full of Honda engines that work fine.<p>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.<p>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.<p>---<p>So if it's reliable <i>enough</i>, and there's also critical mass, then it doesn't matter much if the BYD drivetrain unit has easily-repairable components.
> pedestrian cars.<p>That's an interesting turn of phrase ...
<i>>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.</i><p>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.<p>These new ultra compact EV units are like if the ECU, catalytic converters, and starter motor would be built inside the engine block.
The eternal conflict between "design for manufacture" and "design for maintenance".
I don't have so much knowledge about EV repairs, but I got burnt by this on ICE cars already - had a car fail a regular fitness test on suspension bushes, they weren't replaceable without replacing the whole arm(s). What should've been a $40 part was being quoted as more than the cars value.<p>(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)
FWIW, this has been my experience since 2003 when I had to get suspension work done. Doesn’t matter if it’s a BMW or Honda, dealership or indie repair shop, the story I have heard consistently is that the bushing is part of the arm for structural integrity, stability, <reason I can’t remember, truth or crock>. Bushings typically fail faster than the arm does, and this repair is expensive ($1000+ for performance cars, not that much cheaper for Civics).<p>The “Design for purported Safety vs. Design for Saving Dollars” principle at work.
> repair is expensive ($1000+ for performance cars, not that much cheaper for Civics)<p>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 <i>more</i> 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.<p>Try getting <i>any</i> 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.
I’ve moved in to doing my own plumbing, electric, HVAC. Tend to keep new enough cars that they don’t need much, knock on wood. But it’s not uncommon in “making” $500 an hour or more doing electric or HVAC.
<i>and pressing a bushing out and back in would be more expensive after accounting for that labor than just swapping the suspension arms</i><p>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.
> (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)<p>I've heard of people (who own a press) simply pressing out the existing bushing and pressing in a new one.<p>The trick is to <i>get</i> a new one - typically you'd have to press out the existing one, then run around town to find a match.
Instead of $40 part it is $150 part. Very easy to replace. Less than 1 hour labor for both sides.<p><a href="https://www.rockauto.com/en/catalog/jeep,2012,grand+cherokee,3.6l+v6,3015273,suspension,control+arm,10401" rel="nofollow">https://www.rockauto.com/en/catalog/jeep,2012,grand+cherokee...</a>
that's the reason why BYD provides lifelong warrant for their batteries, motors
Why would it be less repairable? Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable. Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades.<p>And once they give out, you can just replace the whole unit for maybe $2000.
EU added "cybersecurity" requirements in response to Comma.ai that means that a lot of ECUs going forward use signed messages AND often crypto key pairing against an onboard security auth box. The pairing process often require something like a scuffed up manufacturer rental Panasonic Toughbook with weird half baked apps and passwords. The car would refuse to drive or whatever if the owner wouldn't play along with that game.
> Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable.<p>Depends. These parts are custom designed, physically, and difficult to find off-the-shelf replacements for.<p>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.<p>While I <i>could</i> 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.<p>(I may have chosen the first option if this happened in the winter, but in summer the heater is never used anyway).
<i>>Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable.</i><p>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.<p><i>>Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades.</i><p>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.<p>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.
There is nothing terribly complicated there. It's just an AC motor ("brushless DC") with a classic 3-phase inverter and a resolver. There are plenty of companies that make controllers for this kind of setup. Granted, they are typically not powerful enough for SOTA drivetrains, but it's a question of time.<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>Again, an independent manufacturer can easily make them.
<i>>Both are easily doable for small companies.</i><p>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.<p><i>>Again, an independent manufacturer can easily make them.</i><p>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.
Most of those stories are 1/ crashes and 2/ hybrids. Again, with rare exception, manufacturers are just making gas cars with EV power trains. Tesla and BYD are making next gen transport. Are you old enough to remember when TVs broke so often that TV Repairman was a job? One day we will look back on car mechanics the same way.<p>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.<p>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!
I own a Model 3 and I like driving it, but I scratch my head at everyone who claims there are no mechanical problems. I'm glad you didn't have any, but there are some repairs that are almost obscenely common.<p>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)<p>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).<p>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).<p>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.<p>If BYD is also creating cars that are expensive to maintain, then hard pass. I'm ok with having legislation to fix this.
> manufacturers are just making gas cars with EV power trains. Tesla and BYD are making next gen transport.<p>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>>Most of those stories are 1/ crashes and 2/ hybrids. </i><p>No, they're faulty coolant seals of the electric motor, wrecking the power unit.<p><i>>but those memories are overwhelmed by the terror of “what is that noise”.</i><p>I just turned up the music till the noise went away. Problem solved.<p><i>>Now I drive a Tesla that accelerates faster than that Camaro, handles better, and hasn’t been to the shop once.</i><p>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.<p><i>>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</i><p>Nice story, but what does all this have to do with the parent you're replying to? Did he mention ICEs anywhere?
> turned up the music till the noise went away<p>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?
There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.<p>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.
People don’t want cars they can tinker with, they want cars they can get repaired instead of replaced when something breaks….
People actually want a convenient and cheap service for getting around. All other considerations can be derived from this. If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it. Currently this is almost never the case of course, but if it happens in future, watch people switch behaviour instantly.
> If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive. People in large part have <i>no idea</i> how to repair <i>anything</i> they own. This mass ignorance is leading to some pretty poor market incentives.
A lot of it does come down to a cost / benefit analysis where time preference is extremely overweighted due to an abundance of seemingly free credit and, shall we say, a tragic dustbowl famine of available cognitive resources.
<i>>I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive.</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Some broke people try not to buy new things if they can, but some are broke because they can't stop buying new things.
well, people want to have enough money to do what they need to do, of course, so they will choose things that they can in order to minimize cost and time spent, and increase convenience. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to own things that can be repaired. Owning repairable things is also valuable. I don’t think anyone actually wants to “own nothing and be happy”. But they might be able to be coerced into it, sure.
<i>>There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.</i><p>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.<p>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.<p><i>Jarvis, pull up on the central HUD how much the EU car industry spent on lobbying in the EU over the last 15 years.</i>
The EU is beholden to the Germans, ease of repair would wreck the profit margins of VAG, BMW and Daimler both because of reduced after-sales profits and due to cost increases to manufacturing and engineering.
Any electric gear with the battery as its main wear part. Ebikes. Sit-on mowers. Cars.<p>This is about so much more than cost. Agency, autonomy, environment, efficiency, geopolitics even.<p>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.
Even older chemistry EV batteries last over 200k miles.<p>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.
There are lots of parts on a car that will likely wear out faster than the battery on a modern liquid cooled large NMC or LFP lithium battery. You should be able to get over 200,000 miles on the battery. You probably won't get near that much from the suspension, etc.
Absolute BS. Wear parts are the parts that move and EV batteries are notoriously long lived unless they're Broken As Designed (Nissan Leaf).
The EU has scored wins there though.<p>The mobile phone industry turns product into landfill on a yearly or more frequent basis.<p>People might do a yearly model swap on a car, but the car itself stays on the road for 10-20 years.<p>Changing how it's built needs to be done cautiously, but also has a much longer payback period.
I’m very confused as to why this is downvoted but I tossed you an upvote since I do my best to work against the constant brigading I always see on this forum.
> This prismatic cell is NOT a Blade, but it does share the same chemistry.<p>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 :(
LFP prismatics are dirt cheap, I actually thought that was cooler -- it's rare to see a car part for a specific brand that is so close to a COTS equivalent.
I wonder if they simply couldn't fit it inside the scanner?<p>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.
> I wonder if they simply couldn't fit it inside the scanner?<p>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...
BYD biggest innovation may be organizational more than technological
My take: China is now producing cars of such good quality that companies are putting CT-scans of their cars online ..<p>Been driving Tesla the last 9 years .. entirely possible that my next car will be a BYD.
I wonder why window switch panel uses 14 pins socket. Wouldn't it be simpler to use 3-4 pins with serial protocol?
All you need to know is that BYD cars are good enough that the US had to effectively ban them.
I don’t think BYD would be a hit in the US as they are in Europe. It’s an entirely different market. They may be relatively successful just not to the point of taking an important market share, they would probably be like Mazda. Many of the subsides for Chinese EV ended this year too, and they are now realizing price alone is not a differentiator. So even if BYD eventually makes it to the US, they will be priced close to other brands like KIA and Tesla, but without the advantage of the brand and strong local presence. So no, there’s no concerns with BYD and we may see them sooner than later in the US.
BYD only entered the Australian car market in 2022.<p>They are now the 2nd biggest seller after Toyota (<a href="https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/insight/byd-overtakes-rivals-to-claim-second-in-australian-car-sales/gm-GMF367298F?gemSnapshotKey=GMF367298F-snapshot-3" rel="nofollow">https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/insight/byd-overtakes-rivals-...</a>).<p>They are also priced much lower than KIA and Tesla.<p>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.<p>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.
In Australia, the cheapest BYD EV is cheaper than the cheapest Toyota.
US manufacturers' niche is half-ton and above trucks. Even mighty Toyota's offering is playing distant #4 in that market with Nissan capitulating after 20 years of trying.
Fun fact: Australia's most popular vehicle has always been utes (aka pickup trucks)<p>Last year it was the Ford Ranger.
The BYD Shark 6 is already a hit, and the upcoming Shark 8 is aimed squarely at the ginormous US-style truck crowd.<p><a href="https://bydautomotive.com.au/shark-6" rel="nofollow">https://bydautomotive.com.au/shark-6</a><p><a href="https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/byd-shark-8-coming-148780/" rel="nofollow">https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/byd-shark-8-co...</a>
They're selling well just 5 miles from El Paso with reportedly much interest from US customers.<p><i>The U.S. Wants to Ban China's High-Tech Cars but They're Already Here in El Paso</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48363751">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48363751</a><p>* WSJ: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/chinese-cars-byd-geely-u-s-mexico-be0dea28?st=hDnhEW&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/chinese-cars-byd-geely-u-...</a>
> It’s an entirely different market<p>One without cheap cars or EV's, even though that's what people want and need now.
BYD is not just zippy little city cars. The BYD Sealion 7 SUV (EV) and Shark full-size truck (PHEV) are incredibly popular in Australia, which is a very similar market to the US, and I'm sure they would sell like hotcakes if allowed into the US.<p><a href="https://bydautomotive.com.au/sealion-7" rel="nofollow">https://bydautomotive.com.au/sealion-7</a><p><a href="https://bydautomotive.com.au/shark-6" rel="nofollow">https://bydautomotive.com.au/shark-6</a>
It's worse than that. Trump's tariffs have knee-capped North American auto companies right when they needed to be upping their game. The auto sector is tightly integrated across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. Or was... Now there's tariff's on every part and frame that crosses a border. The American plan seems to be to put up a wall and force Americans to buy domestic while nobody else in the world buys American cars.
Potentially predicated on anti-dumping rules.
I am torn on this. Anti-dumping is one thing, and yet disruption was an overused keyword for a long time in Silicon valley.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> <i>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.</i><p>Pack that shit full of silicone dielectric grease, check it every year or two, and it should be good for decades.
This sounds like copy written by someone who hasn't actually spent a lot of time with the automotive world and in trying to sound like they have.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I think the point is that all those "dumb" switches, terminals or cables that get worn out can be replaced relatively easily (ie you need a multimeter and some patience to find the bad one). But if something in the integrated module fails, well good luck repairing <i>that</i>. These things are probably designed to be replaced as a whole, which is fine if you can get a new one. But as the cars get older, this is going to be a problem.<p>Strong old-man-yells-at-cloud vibe, I know. ;)
Yes but specifically, in this article, the passage is written about a harness connector on a door window switch module as follows:<p><pre><code> >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.
</code></pre>
This just reads weird to me.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Thermal cycling? It is inside a door panel... not near a hot exhaust or inside an engine. It sees normal interior temperature cycles.<p>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..<p>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)".<p>(I'm a former automotive engineer.)
In addition I'll give one more criticism:<p>Above that reads this bit:<p><pre><code> >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.
</code></pre>
Integrated door switch modules have been more common than not on cars for easily the last 15 years now, and I don't think this in any way exemplifies BYD's "Vertical Integration" or "favoring fewer subassemblies" (these two things actually don't even necessarily imply each other!!). There are plenty of cars that use such assemblies and the companies outsource to tier 2's for the actual manufacturing - Mercedes and Valeo, for example. Because they don't actually take apart the module and look for, say, a logo on the silkscreen of the PCB, I don't think the author actually confirmed if BYD 'designs' (let alone manufactures) the complete switch unit in-house. They could. I'm not saying they can't. But...<p>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.
Time to start learning Mandarin
I want to buy a Chinese car and I am annoyed that my protectionist government won’t let me. Lowering transportation cost would be the most impactful thing to my budget.<p>All that serves to do is ensure the American car industry falls far behind by being coddled into a lack of competition.<p>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.<p>The model where every part is contracted out to parts manufacturers is proving to be antiquated.
CT scans of BYD car components. BYD is fully vertically integrated at a level unseen since early 20th-century Ford.
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Previous lumafield blog posts have been full of amazing graphics and knowledge.<p>But this one seems to be "state the obvious" and "recant political talking points with no new evidence".
This looks like a stealth advertisement for their CT scanning business. There is nothing educational of value for the general public here.<p>The only reason you would do this is for competitive analysis and I assure you the other car companies have already analyzed these parts.
Yes, that’s exactly what it is. On the other side of it though, so what, we get to look inside stuff with a cool scan. They’ve been doing these posts for several years now, and they’re all interesting.
The part where they highlight the rippling in the lithium battery was interesting. They mention it can accelerate degradation over time. It's unclear if this specific example is within tolerances, but I have seen in other CT scans how dramatic the lithium rippling can become.<p>But overall, yeah, this is mostly an advertisement. They have other videos on their YouTube where they scan random items.
It's called content marketing, and there's nothing stealthy about it in particular.
I would say that there’s quite substantial value perhaps not to the general public but to the general HN user from their reports. I was very excited to see them have a public scan of an LFP battery because the previous scans they did of batteries were very informative on which brands to trust and the level of inconsistency that can exist. Their analysis of BYD’s battery design is very useful to someone who is looking to understand LFP and the levels of quality control necessary to have safe batteries. The reports are a bit of a “How it’s Made” but written for the target audience of engineers and has similar utility.
There actually is a company who does this. full tear downs, of cars top to bottom. Interesting stuff<p><a href="https://www.jalopnik.com/the-fascinating-company-that-tears-cars-apart-to-find-o-1787205420/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jalopnik.com/the-fascinating-company-that-tears-...</a>