I know we don't like Tesla at the moment, but lets not exaggerate, Tesla bought 250kw chargers and thats innovation at the time and BYD is still behind in terms of car quality compared to Teslas, BYD pricing is almost 40% cheaper - theres a reason, quality and service.
BYD is moving so quickly - the ones I’ve seen recently in NZ are surprisingly innovative, superb quality. Obviously not all markets are getting all vehicles, and the best are yet to leave China.
Check out the EV Shark and Denza D9.
Im NZ too. BYD Tang L is pretty impressive technically (coming soon).
I almost want even larger, more powerful vehicle than my Model Y. But can’t imagine dealing with its software and uncertain future. Also I’d rather support Musk than Chinese.
I drove Atto3, which is older vehicle now. UX is nowhere close to Tesla, but I’m keen to try newer ones.
Hyundai/Kia are overpriced here and had some major failures so they can't be trusted (tho I do like Kia EV9 a little bit). Germans are overpriced by solid 2-3x. Japanese EVs are a total joke. Am I missing out someone?
It's odd to think that Musk could have coasted doing a bit of innovation here and there and would have cemented himself as a great figure. Tesla really had a good stream of bold innovative moves along it's early path.
I don't know, Tesla's are notoriously low quality. At the end of the day these are American made cars, which is really the bottom of the barrel of vehicle quality.
I've never been in a BYD(hard to get in Switzerland), but I've been in all the Teslas. The Tesla build quality is atrocious when compared to BMW, Mercedes or Audi. Are you saying BYD is worse than that?
The joke/reputation of entry-level BYD in PRC a few years ago is that it's QA is almost as bad as Tesla from Shanghai, which has better QA than Tesla from other gigafactories. That was from when BYD was scaling up from 500k to 3million per year. High end BYD were always fine. Tesla's poor QA for premium brand is still running meme.
Can someone with knowledge comment if charging a battery this way will significantly decrease its longevity? I remember reading that charging with a low current is advisable to preserve battery health.
According to the article: Its latest refrigerant cooling system helps deliver a 35 percent gain in high-temperature lifespan, ensuring that megawatt charging won’t degrade the battery.
A good rule of thumbs with most battery chemistries is that they tend to not like both extremes. This is true for temperature, charge capacity, slightly less true for charging current as very low current tend not to degrade the battery.
Recharging is at some level an issue with current delivery, not just the chemistry. EV batteries are massive arrays of individual cells, so a lot of recharging problems is having the wiring to deliver the current to the batteries optimally.
Then, some chemistries/designs have better cycle endurance, some can probably recharge faster at given depletion levels. When charging an almost totally discharged battery, there's lots of "slots" for the incoming charge to fill, but as it fills up, it will inevitably take more time to locate a "slot" to occupy.
Solid state and semi-solid state may be at play here, since a solid state battery is theoretically more durable as well.
Or, to your point, it is a marketing stunt that doesn't care about cycle endurance. How would we tell? Battery reporting is still horrendous at delineating the tradeoffs/limitations per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025930 but hoping that mainstream media don't "gee whiz" science and technology reporting is simply not going to happen, especially in the clickbait era.
It only needs 1360 kilowatt per charging pole... won't happen at scale. It's like those LCD navigation systems in 80s cars - impressive futuristic tech, but not what it actually brought that change.
> Finally, there’s the BYD Megawatt chargeritself, whose maximum 1,360-kW output whips the 500 kW of Lucid’s new Charging Hub in New York City. The units feature built-in energy storage to reserve juice for when the grid can’t supply it, or for use in China’s rural areas.
Worth mentioning that the peak is pretty short duration. The article talks about power draw dipping to below 500kW. Which makes me think that having a buffer battery, even a small-ish one, could be super useful for load averaging, to knock off this peak load.
This might become moot if the push for 'community batteries' I see over here takes hold. Rather than giant battery arrays 200km away near a solar farm, smaller arrays in your postcode soaking up rooftop solar and offpeak grid. Maybe the business model for the modern service station is to install extra batteries and make money with the excess capacity doing energy arbitrage.
In the UK most are directly from the grid. A few like the InstaVolt charging hub in Winchester have batteries installed on site. These are filled at off peak times using cheap power so there’s less load on the grid and cheaper rates for customers.
That’s not typical currently though and I presume it’s similar elsewhere.
There are already some high-power charging stations with their own demand-side battery storage, here in California. But this assumes low duty cycle. The higher the load factor, the less relevant the battery.
Not really, especially not more efficient than hybrid diesel-electric cars. Why are there no diesel-electric hybrids on the market? There's diesel-electric trains and diesel-electric ships for a reason: diesel engines do really well in this type of constant-speed constant-load applications.
I'm not sure about that. I think an electric motor is more efficient than a diesel motor and a larger diesel motor is more efficient than a smaller one. Than charger multiple EVs from a single large diesel generator is more efficient than multiple individual diesel motors.
Single cylinder diesel engines meeting environmental standards don't seem to exist on the market. There are older designs but hard to source in the USA.
Why would a hybrid diesel be more efficient than an all electric car. The diesel motor would bring down the efficiency of the all electric.
I believe an electric motor converts about 60% of the power used into usable power. diesels are closer to 20%.
Where is this? I have only used charging stations in dense urban areas and they lack generators, or bushes. But the amount of pad-mounted equipment you need to interface a charging station with the grid is surprisingly large. I think the tons of copper etc should be charged to the embodied carbon of the cars.
Mount Laurel, NJ. for one. I also do a lot of driving in New England. New England's power infrastructure is pretty dated. The town I live one could dial just the last 4 digits of a phone number and get connected due to everyone being on a single telephone exchange until sometime in the 1980's(not electrical but exemplifies rural infrastructure.
This doesn't represent a groundbreaking advance despite the framing of the article. They're getting faster speed by pushing a huge amount of power to the battery (1MW!).
Supplying this kind of energy at scale is not possible currently. So they could deploy a few of these around but they simply can't be ubiquitous. Not to mention charging curves make a big difference as do real-world conditions. Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.
Oh, and finally, 5 minutes is still slower than filling up a car's tank.
Yeah if I could charge my car in 5 minutes, then it’s much more viable for me to just pull up to a station and then read something for 5 minutes on my phone while it charges. If there’s a decent charging network, then I’d actually find long road trips in an EV viable.
> Oh, and finally, 5 minutes is still slower than filling up a car's tank.
For most people charging speed only matters on long trips.
For normal day to day driving those who cannot do their charging at home will often use chargers at their destinations. For example 3 of the 4 grocery stores I shop at have chargers in their parking lots (2 have level 2 charges, and the other has 150 kW DC chargers). If I didn't have home charging I could charge while doing my grocery shopping, and so as long as it finishes by the time I've finished shopping the time doesn't matter.
Even if there are no destination chargers they can use, so charging does involve a special trip, at the rate that BYD demoed (262 miles added in 5 minutes) a typical driver in the US would need 5-15 minutes every week or so.
On long trips generally people want breaks every few hours for the restroom, to stretch, or get food and drinks. At the charging speed BYD demonstrated a large fraction of people on long trips could do all their charging during those breaks, with the charging taking place while they are using the restroom, stretching, or buying their food and drink.
Yes, but you should refrain from claims as "it is not ground breaking because X" if you haven't researched the topic. Not covered by the article doesn't prove anything. This kind of articles is supposed to be an introduction to the topic.
Having done a long road trip at the end of April, I can comfortably say that any time we stopped to get gas, the stop was longer than 5 minutes in general anyway.
> They're getting faster speed by pushing a huge amount of power to the battery (1MW!).
Valid concern given that's honestly scary from a battery life and safety perspective, especially when coupled with China's downplaying of the fire issues observed with some of their brands...
> Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.
You might not, but I will state that I've had many a gas station in the US where for whatever reason below freezing has definitely slowed down the pumps. Even if it was still less than 5 minutes, I'd rather the workflow of 'plug in the charger and then go back and sit in the car' than 'Wait at the pump because you've seen even attended pump kickbacks go wrong and it's state law anyway'...
5 minutes breaks the point from where charging time is something that has to be planned around to an inconvenience equivalent to hitting a red light after leaving a traditional gas station
On your last point, I would say it depends on how big your car is. I've seen some larger pickup trucks take a hot minute to fill up here in Europe. Granted, these are much less common so it's not a big deal if a farmer needs to come fill up since there are generally plenty of other pumps available.
5 minutes is hugely impressive for our current day and we need to remember these moments as the tech continues to get better. This is just the beginning of EV infrastructure!
To your point about charging speeds, a battery with a max charge rate of 1MW could pull 350kW (common enough in the USA) for 10-90% in nearly all conditions. Being able to add a 250 miles of range in 10 minutes in all conditions would definitely be close enough to a gas car for me. If I could buy this today in the USA it would be a game changer for road trips.
Aren't they just doing what some phones now do which is splitting the battery and charging smaller chunks in parallel? So instead of one giant battery you have 2 or more smaller ones each of which can be charged a lot faster than one large one. Of course it makes management more complicated.
That's not how batteries work. The charging time is measured in "C"s which is a weird unit where 1C means you can fully charge the battery of any size in 1 hour. 2C means half an hour.
But it's already independent of the size of the battery. You don't really get any increase on the max charging speed by dividing it up differently, any more than you can create cake by cutting a whole cake into pieces.
The way to improve it is with battery chemistry, and probably with more capable power electronics.
Supplying even current kinds of fast chargers is not possible done naively; local charging stations split whatever their capacity is between the cars that are plugged in, but allowing for the potential of one or two of those 200kW cars if no others are adjacent.
Roughly the same total amount of energy is needed within the same period of couple days either way, having the capacity to charge faster when possible should be a good thing.
>Do you get full speed if it's below freezing?
I live somewhere where it's reasonably regularly -30F and no electric car does well neither charging nor distance despite claims of battery pre-heating and such. You have to pick a car for the environment it's going to be used in.
This represents a huge advance. In functional useful societies, they will be able to develop adequate power infrastructure.
The article also mentions that the charger has its own battery reserves, which it can fill in between fill-ips, and then use to help provide those high peaks. Load averaging.
Then there's your list of gotchas. Oh will it work in the cold? Will it work in heat? Ok yeah maybe that will diminish charge rate maybe. But this habit of looking for problems, looking for reasons to discredit and ignore is a horrible perspective, risks ignoring so much possibility because of such a negative minded orientation.
5 minutes is more than good, imo. At. If you think about the steps before and after filling up, there's a couple minutes of pulling off the road, turning off the car, getting out, walking around, setting up payment, opening the fill up, selecting fuel grade, inserting the filler. You can absolutely speed race this down to 2-3 minutes, but but usually a gas station stop is 5-10 minutes of lost time for most people today. It feels like 5 minutes of waiting is really not a big deal. Is it slower? Yes. But is it significantly slower? Not really, not usually.
It's just so sad having such energy poured into negative mental energy, into convincing people against doing better things. The world deserves better than to be beholden to pestilences of the mind.
What current or future planned power source can deliver 1MW power to even the amount of fast chargers currently in existence?! Small modular reactors at every charging station?
The Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Station in my home state of Maryland outputs 1700MW on a typical day. This is enough to power a third of the homes in the state. According to some estimates I found, there are more than 1450 EV charging stations of all types in the state (not enough even for current EV adoption and many are L2 chargers). I can't find over what timescale each charger uses 1MW (per second?) but let's say it's 1MW of power for the 5 minute charge. Let's say each 1MW charger is used twice per day for a single charge each. If all 1450 chargers are used twice per day (2MW/day), you've now exceeded the output of Calvert Cliffs. This is the scale we're talking about.
It's not negative to point out these absurdities, it's vitally important because many jurisdictions are getting ready to ban the sales of new gas cars in 5 years. People depend on working cars for their livelihoods.
We do need to be planning for more energy capacity yes. Ideally our net charge capacity is growing.
But it's worth pointing out that if there's 1450 chargers today & many of them are L2, replacing them with 1MW chargers wouldn't actually change the energy demand at all. It would just be faster charging, not more net charging; people wouldn't be likely to be driving more all of a sudden (ok, ride-share drivers would be on the road a slight bit more).
But yes, we do need to be building more energy capacity (something that places other than the US are doing effectively).
still don't get the point of huge batteries. in USA average commute is about 20 miles one way. seems like a 75mile battery + gas is both more practical and requires less infra.
edit: it seems some are confused. I'm saying a PHEV is superior to BEV.
> seems like a 75mile battery + gas is both more practical and requires less infra
I think it's hard to economically hit that and give a car that folks are OK driving within limitations.
Mazda tried to do a range extender setup on the MX-30, however it didn't sell that well and my understanding is the range extender wasn't good for hills or highway cases.
Non Range Extender setups, actually typically work better if you're stuck in gas mode than a range extender, mostly because you can use the mechanical energy from the ICE more directly than the losses of something feeding energy directly into the drivetrain. However, once you hit that point anything after 2 or 3 KWh of battery is just dead weight on the car. I'm guessing that's why even the Prius prime is only around 40 miles of range.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the US addiction to huge vehicles (which need even bigger batteries...)
Edit:
Seeing the edit of what I'm replying to, I'll add that yes PHEVs are probably a 'better' option than BEVs for many people, but the cost of a PHEV can be as much or more than a BEV. Look at a Chevrolet Equinox EV vs a Rav4 Prime. The Rav4 Prime is 10K more expensive. Happy to consider a different comparison here but overall nobody has figured out how to make a PHEV that is cheaper than a similar EV.
let's look at a car that's available as all options: the kia Niro - and let's look at the 2022 since I found the info easily:
$28,790: MSRP of the 2022 Niro L HEV (hybrid)
$34,390: MSRP of the 2022 Niro EX PHEV (plug-in hybrid with an electric range of 51 kms.
$46,790: starting price of the 2022 Niro EX EV (all battery electric vehicle with a range of 386 kms)
it's just simple math. if you take a 400 mile road trip 4 times a year, and your electricity is totally free for the sake of example, gas is 5 bucks a gallon, how long does it take for the EV to pay itself off, assuming the regular commute is 40km daily otherwise? answer is almost 15 years. doesn't make any sense.
There is some market for a 2nd vehicle in a family which has more limitations. But the biggest market is for a do-everything vehicle. The question isn't what is the mean or median commute, its what is the 99.9th percentile journey. Sure it can get you to work and back, but can it get you to grandmother's house for Thanksgiving dinner?
I think targetting the 99.9th percentile trip is maybe even a bit low. A commuting American has at least two car trips per typical day, probably more like 5. So 1 trip in a thousand means something that comes up more than annually.
AFAIK the range benefits you'd get from a smaller electrical motor are minimal, and in the cost of a vehicle the bigger motor doesn't add a huge cost.
Also, a bigger motor can be more reliable, if you're not running it at full bore you've probably got better heat dissipation so it will last longer.
The other issue is people's addiction for large vehicles; bigger vehicle means bigger battery means more weight means more power needed to move everything. As an example a Blazer EV weighs 25-35% more than the ICE version. Take that with the comments about reliability, it counter-intuitively makes a lot of sense that the Blazer EV has a 500hp motor vs the 200-300HP in the ICE.
As far as 'acceleration' itself, Acceleration tends to be more of a factor of torque curve. Electric motors tend to give lots of torque very quick... I accidentally chirp the tires on my Ford Maverick in a year more times than I was ever able to do even trying in my WRX. [0]
[0] - Sure, the WRX is all wheel drive but it's also a good 450 pounds lighter than the Mav.
The i3 is rear wheel drive but it's also rear wheel motor. Bigger skateboard battery means lower center of gravity. But perhaps the biggest factor is RWD the drive wheels don't have to steer (I'd say at least 2/3 of my 'chirps' were starting a turn). I'd be willing to wager the BMW has a better TCS software too.
Also I don't run stock tires on my Maverick, I run DriveGuard Plus[1] which are probably less grippy than the standard tires.
[1] - FWIW The WRX has 'OG' DriveGuard tires, The Plus supposedly are a -little- more grippy... Only lost 1 or 2 MPG on the Maverick changing to them from stock.
The i3 has ridiculously narrow tires. I still memory burn my first experience of BMW TCS from the mid- eighties. My friends Dad got a BMW M5. That car made seemed to just seemed to accelerate.
You're in the left lane at 70 MPH passing a long line of cars. Some idiot comes up behind you at 90+ and rides your tail. Good thing you could accelerate quickly starting from 70 to finish passing the line then move over into the right lane.
Place right turn signal on. People to the right of you make a hole. You move over. You decide to stay there until traffic is empty to pass again without impeding others. You never leave your zen.
From the GP's description, "passing a long line of cars", unless that vehicle is flashing emergency lights you certainly don't need to move over to accommodate an aggressive driver to your rear (and doing so might force you to slow down to a halt). This situation is common when there's a backed-up highway exit for example.
But I don't think a powerful engine is needed in that scenario either. The only case where it's really needed is accelerating up a steep hill.
Depends on where you’re driving. On the Autobahn, or even in some US states, impeding a vehicle in the passing lane is a violation even if you’re going at or over the speed limit.
I'm skeptical. If you are moving at the same speed as (or slower than) traffic in the right lane, or if the right lane is clear, then sure, no doubt. Drive on the right, pass on the left. But in this scenario you are currently passing on the left. The traffic on the right may even be gridlocked. In which states must you clear the lane even when you yourself are presently passing on the left of slower traffic in the right lane?
I never run out of top-end acceleration even when the speed limit is 75. I find the 0-35 is the sweet spot for pulling out if the curve drops after that I don't really notice it. A few months back I rented an ICE car and I had to change my driving style. I would step on the gas and mostly got noise back.
If I'm in my WRX and I do need to go above 75 quickly, I can drop into 4th and get to 80 more quickly. But I've got a stick so I can do that. If I'm in something with a slushbox, I have to wait for the thing to decide that downshifting is needed before it will pick up. I'll admit the Toyota Hybrids hit a good 'in-between' for these (probably closer to an EV than either a Manual or a slushbox.) I'll get a bit of instant acceleration but anything after a half second to second is a bit slower.
I have the range extender option which is one-cylinder scooter motor(.733 CI) with a 2 gallon tank. If I need to travel over 70 on the REX I will lose out on HVAC.
Man, I will certainly change the bully's lifelong behavior by making him ride 12" off my rear bumper for 5 miles while incurring no personal danger when teaching him the error of his ways.
I can travel most of the time on a single charge. My overall range is just below 300 miles in ideal conditions to 180 miles in worst case scenario. In the USA I would like to be able to have that range between 500 miles and 300 miles. If the charge time is 5 minutes I would change my opinion on what is needed for range.
Many people drive places other (further) than work multiple times a year. "75 mile battery" wouldn't even be good enough for a one-way trip of this kind let alone there and back again.
It's surprising how common 1% event is. Local supermarket has parking lot that only sees 1/4th of it's capacity used daily, but events have it filled up to the brim at least a few times a year. A jitter happening "only" 1% of the time in a game can mean several hitches a _second_, on a webserver you can have several hundred bad customer experiences a second
I’m disappointed and confused as to why countries would impose things like 100% tariffs on vehicles, especially Chinese ones. Their labor force is massive and they can iterate and build much better machines than anyone else, so rather than a tariff helping the local economy, it’s going to cripple it in a relatively short amount of time due to lateral advancements in technology that facilitate every-day cars being built. Smaller countries don’t have the manpower to keep up. So what’s the point of this?
That's what we all thought about Walmart too and I think most people would agree that the west could have handled the transition to mass imports and overseas manufacturing without destroying local businesses overnight in a better way.
If 6% of your economy is directly tied to auto manufacturing (Germany) than by allowing ultra-cheap cars to flood the market will just piss off workers who inevitably get laid off in the chaos. Europe is starting to catch up on competing with price again (see Citroen for examples) but it takes time to build these factories and there is a lot more red tape wade through.
The US is trying to tackle the affordable car space through weird startups and longshots, but their production numbers will be so much less than demand for another decade if they even gain real traction in the market at all.
If a country wants to give up on their own automotive exports that's fine, but they need a plan for how to proceed when those jobs are gone and so far nobody has that plan figured out yet. Until then, they will continue to tariff the crap out of any competitors and keep kicking the can down the road.
> That's what we all thought about Walmart too and I think most people would agree that the west could have handled the transition to mass imports and overseas manufacturing without destroying local businesses overnight in a better way.
“Handled better”? this sounds like apologizing for corruption and nepotism that ruined the west and handed Chinese a massive advantage in just about every imaginable way. And we can say well yes and the Chinese are also corrupt, and they are, but at least their corruption is making them wealthy. Our corruption has made everyone poorer. The greed blinded the greedy.
It's quite different if it happens in 2-3 years time or spread across 10-20. You don't want a sizeable percentage of your workforce to lose jobs in a short span, there's no capacity for retraining so many people for them to be productive, governments gets higher dissatisfaction, and a diminished tax base.
The rest getting decent cheaper cars might not be worth the trade-off of also getting a more unstable society.
At some point, we just need to admit our auto industry has completely failed multiple times, has exhausted all forgiveness, and rip down the trade barriers.
For those worried about national self-sufficiency, the answer can be public transit, not cars.
Or the answer can be aggressive pentesting for foreign tech and mandating network kill switches. But that's too much work. Let's just trust that Ford can design a secure system and pay them 100x what we would have paid the pentesters.
It's really funny that China made non-trivial amount of strategic decisions on the assumption that US tech do have network kill switches [0], including using it solely to justify protectionism, while nobody on the earth are crazy enough to do this, we all just call them out, "just an excuse to justify protectionism", then all at a sudden here we are, trying to say "mandating network kill switches" could be a good idea.
[0] Use OpenAI Deep Research or rivals and investigate the word "自主可控".
Hi sorry I think I may have used the wrong terminology. I meant hardware switches to make sure a device stays offline when you tell it to, not switches to turn off the internet totally.
The odd thing is that if our industry has failed, so has Japan, Korea, and Europe, because they all make electrics, and we can buy them in the US.
I don't know the extent to which demand plays a role. Ford makes F150s because people buy F150s. They have to be forced to make smaller cars, and lose money on them.
I'm fairly certain that Ford has gotten to the point where, at least in the US they aren't losing money on their 'smaller' vehicles.
Certainly not making as much as they can make on an F150, (I think the estimate on a Maverick is somewhere around 500-600 a car to ford).
As far as overall 'demand', there is a bit of market distortion (depending on how you look at it) as far as dealers frequently trying to push people into bigger vehicles because they are inherently more expensive and they get more commission and profit too. [0]
[0] - I've had this happen more than once, even when I knew what car I wanted to buy.
Well first off, I think we need to implement basic accountability. American industries routinely fail in the long-term because they're allowed to. They know they're basically invincible and can absolutely run their companies into the ground and leadership will fly away with too much money than what they know to do with.
The American school of business is make short-term decisions now, over and over again, forever, until you eventually blow up. This is how basically every company is run. It's an almost debt-driven mindset. It's a greedy algorithm. Take on any amount of loan now, and say "fuck it" when it comes to interest. When the chicken comes home to roost, who cares, you can leave.
That's why American industries will be competitive for a couple decades and then quickly be so far behind it seems it's impossible for them to catch up. They get a tiny little taste of market success, and they immediately stop investing into their future and start cashing in right now. We're even seeing this with Tesla.
It's a difficult question, because there's both the labor cost difference as well as the environmental cost difference. Plenty of things aren't made in the US anymore simply because the cost of producing them without becoming a superfund site are too high vs a country that's willing to either just designate the whole thing as forever industrial wasteland (or decide that the long term societal damage of pollution is worth the gain at this time).
Pragmatically, the sanest thing we might be able to do is find a region of the country that is remote enough in every way and turn it into a free for all industrial park so long as workers aren't exposed to excessive danger.
1. China got here by using protectionism and stealing trade secrets. They subsidized their domestic producers and forced foreign entities to partner and train domestic nationals. They used protectionism to leapfrog us. We shouldn't just let them in and destroy our own capacity.
2. Manufacturing is necessary for a country that plans to go to war. America (and every nation!) needs a strong industrial plant to counter its enemies. Without the ability to switch to making warplanes, tanks, and drones, you'll be unable to fight a drawn out war.
3. We're really not that far behind and our industry will be fine. There's way too much panic here.
> For those worried about national self-sufficiency, the answer can be public transit, not cars.
This is highly opinionated r/fuckcars anti-"carbrain" (as they call it). This does not work in America. It's an opinion of city dwellers who have no exposure to the rest of the country.
Self-driving cars will transform public Transit in this country to be more automotive and less rail based. Not the other way around.
1. While China does engage in industrial espionage, they have also learned from being contract manufacturers. I’m very uncomfortable with the “how dare my unskilled labor learn from what I pay them to do and become skilled” part of this meme.
2. I don’t think anyone could seriously look at the US and worry that we might not be able to make enough military hardware. What country makes more weapons than the US?
3. The US auto industry is somewhere between dead and absorbed into the globalized auto industry. Their cost structure can’t compete and the US’ cratering international reputation means exports are falling and China has growth opportunities.
Where I do agree with you is that there’s no reason to panic. All of these things are just fine.
> How can a car factory easily pivot to making weapons or even armored vehicles?
It's probably a bit trickier now, but If sewing machine and typewriter companies used to make machine guns in wartime there's probably a way if there is will.
> This does not work in America. It's an opinion of city dwellers who have no exposure to the rest of the country.
It's worked in America longer than it hasn't worked. Car-centric infrastructure is actually pretty new, and we basically burned down a lot of rail infrastructure to build it.
The fundamental problem with automobiles is that they're orders of magnitude less efficient per person, so they can't scale. You hit a wall, and then you're just fucked and the only solution is to pivot away from automobiles. No amount of self-driving, or more lanes, or toll roads, will fix that - it's a fundamental problem with the technology itself and how it exists in the world.
I mean, try driving around in Houston today. It's shit, but more than that, it's completely unfixable. 14 lane highways don't magically resolve the problem of everyone having their own little box on wheels they control.
Also, on the topic of urban centers and city dwellers: most Americans live in major metropolitan areas and those areas also make up almost all of the economy in the US. Yes, rural areas are important, but nobody is "targeting" them, so to speak. Those areas are already heavily subsidized by denser areas because that's just how infrastructure how.
National self-sufficiency is about being able to do things like this, particularly in times of emergent crisis or war. And we can say we are able to do it only if we actually do it.
And no, the answer cannot be public transit. Public transit won't be a valid response to the next Pearl Harbor.
Does legacy auto serve the national interest in times of war anymore? How many tanks do we need? Electric vehicle manufacturers and their suppliers at least have all the ingredients for drones and general electronics. Aerospace tech seems pretty important too for missiles, jets and communications.
The public transit problem in the US isn't actually a "build public transit" problem, it's a "remove zoning rules that prohibit the housing density required for public transit to be viable" problem. But it would take decades to fix that even if we started now, and we haven't even started now because people are still trying to fix it by adding bus lanes to places where the density required for viable bus service continues to be prohibited.
Not everyone wants to live in a dense city. I would say about half the population doesn't. Removing zoning (and I think they should - let people build what they want), will not make cities more dense, and that's fine - people should be able to live how they want.
Nobody is forcing anybody to live anywhere. The problem right now is that you have areas where 90% of the land is zoned exclusively for single family homes and the areas that aren't have already been developed, so there is nowhere that new higher density development is allowed.
How about we make it so that only 50% of the residential land is zoned for single family homes and let people build whatever they want on the rest of it? The newly rezoned land will be worth more, so if you want to live in a single family home, sell yours at a profit and buy one in the area still zoned for it.
> Removing zoning (and I think they should - let people build what they want), will not make cities more dense
IMO yes it will, because it just makes sense. Denser cities are more efficient for everyone, normal people included. Transport price per unit drops, rent drops, all infrastructure costs per unit drop. I think most people will happily take a reduction in expenses in exchange for density.
You cannot win a war without a manufacturing base. That’s the thing that public transit won’t fix. It won’t give us a manufacturing base. Auto builders will.
There are probably plenty of ways to ensure a manufacturing base, but having a robust auto industry is one way that is pretty well understood.
I don’t like the amount of inefficiency caused by protectionism, though.
Public transit is the opposite of self sufficiency, public transit means dependence on others for your basic transportation.
It can work fine in normal situations, but any kind of stress, and anyone without a car is completely stuck. Bad weather, labor strike, high demand, evacuation, moving day, there's a politician in town and roads are closed, there's a celebrity/show in town and you want to go somewhere else, power outage, windstorm and some roads are closed.
Any kind of stress and public transit fails. Which makes it the opposite of self sufficiency.
Wow actual innovation instead of vaporware hype to pump the stock price...what a unusual way to run a tech company.
I know we don't like Tesla at the moment, but lets not exaggerate, Tesla bought 250kw chargers and thats innovation at the time and BYD is still behind in terms of car quality compared to Teslas, BYD pricing is almost 40% cheaper - theres a reason, quality and service.
Just curious, what exactly is worse in BYD cars comparing with tesla? (Comparing similar price range, like top to top model)
Some of Tesla vehicles are as innovative as ridiculous and illegal(in many countries).
BYD is moving so quickly - the ones I’ve seen recently in NZ are surprisingly innovative, superb quality. Obviously not all markets are getting all vehicles, and the best are yet to leave China. Check out the EV Shark and Denza D9.
Im NZ too. BYD Tang L is pretty impressive technically (coming soon).
I almost want even larger, more powerful vehicle than my Model Y. But can’t imagine dealing with its software and uncertain future. Also I’d rather support Musk than Chinese.
I drove Atto3, which is older vehicle now. UX is nowhere close to Tesla, but I’m keen to try newer ones.
> Also I’d rather support Musk than Chinese.
There are other EV makers out there, you know.
Hyundai/Kia are overpriced here and had some major failures so they can't be trusted (tho I do like Kia EV9 a little bit). Germans are overpriced by solid 2-3x. Japanese EVs are a total joke. Am I missing out someone?
The french? The italians? The other american ev makers like Ford, Rivian, Chevy and so on?
Neither French nor Italians have any serious EVs that I know of.
Ford had some good clearance discounts on Mach-E (same with Polestar) here, made it a reasonable deal.
Rivian seems expensive in US to start with, in NZ it's waaaay past most peoples buying power.
Dunno if Chevy is available here at all.
It's odd to think that Musk could have coasted doing a bit of innovation here and there and would have cemented himself as a great figure. Tesla really had a good stream of bold innovative moves along it's early path.
And instead of coasting for a year or two he apparently crashed and burned on a ketamine fueled binge.
He is truly a common man. Let's not pretend we wouldn't do the same given the same situation /s
I don't know, Tesla's are notoriously low quality. At the end of the day these are American made cars, which is really the bottom of the barrel of vehicle quality.
Tesla has garbage fit, finish and build. They are run by a cheap-out scammer who puts more energy into social media than his business endeavors.
250kw in 2020 vs 1000kw (4x) in 2025. When is Tesla coming out with a 1MW charger?
Sell your stock if you're still making that mistake.
Serious question:
I've never been in a BYD(hard to get in Switzerland), but I've been in all the Teslas. The Tesla build quality is atrocious when compared to BMW, Mercedes or Audi. Are you saying BYD is worse than that?
The joke/reputation of entry-level BYD in PRC a few years ago is that it's QA is almost as bad as Tesla from Shanghai, which has better QA than Tesla from other gigafactories. That was from when BYD was scaling up from 500k to 3million per year. High end BYD were always fine. Tesla's poor QA for premium brand is still running meme.
It’s far better in the Seal and Sea Lion.
Related:
Tesla rival BYD launches five-minute battery in $30k model (60 points, 2 months ago, 58 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43670271
BYD unveils battery system that charges EVs in five minutes (24 points, 3 months ago, 13 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43390262
BYD and CATL aim to launch new EV batteries with 6C charge rate (38 points, 11 months ago, 47 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40706337
Can someone with knowledge comment if charging a battery this way will significantly decrease its longevity? I remember reading that charging with a low current is advisable to preserve battery health.
According to the article: Its latest refrigerant cooling system helps deliver a 35 percent gain in high-temperature lifespan, ensuring that megawatt charging won’t degrade the battery.
A good rule of thumbs with most battery chemistries is that they tend to not like both extremes. This is true for temperature, charge capacity, slightly less true for charging current as very low current tend not to degrade the battery.
Recharging is at some level an issue with current delivery, not just the chemistry. EV batteries are massive arrays of individual cells, so a lot of recharging problems is having the wiring to deliver the current to the batteries optimally.
Then, some chemistries/designs have better cycle endurance, some can probably recharge faster at given depletion levels. When charging an almost totally discharged battery, there's lots of "slots" for the incoming charge to fill, but as it fills up, it will inevitably take more time to locate a "slot" to occupy.
Solid state and semi-solid state may be at play here, since a solid state battery is theoretically more durable as well.
Or, to your point, it is a marketing stunt that doesn't care about cycle endurance. How would we tell? Battery reporting is still horrendous at delineating the tradeoffs/limitations per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025930 but hoping that mainstream media don't "gee whiz" science and technology reporting is simply not going to happen, especially in the clickbait era.
It only needs 1360 kilowatt per charging pole... won't happen at scale. It's like those LCD navigation systems in 80s cars - impressive futuristic tech, but not what it actually brought that change.
Do charging stations install buffer batteries or do they pull directly from the grid?
From the article:
> Finally, there’s the BYD Megawatt chargeritself, whose maximum 1,360-kW output whips the 500 kW of Lucid’s new Charging Hub in New York City. The units feature built-in energy storage to reserve juice for when the grid can’t supply it, or for use in China’s rural areas.
Worth mentioning that the peak is pretty short duration. The article talks about power draw dipping to below 500kW. Which makes me think that having a buffer battery, even a small-ish one, could be super useful for load averaging, to knock off this peak load.
Or just doing Tesla style oversubscription.
This might become moot if the push for 'community batteries' I see over here takes hold. Rather than giant battery arrays 200km away near a solar farm, smaller arrays in your postcode soaking up rooftop solar and offpeak grid. Maybe the business model for the modern service station is to install extra batteries and make money with the excess capacity doing energy arbitrage.
In the UK most are directly from the grid. A few like the InstaVolt charging hub in Winchester have batteries installed on site. These are filled at off peak times using cheap power so there’s less load on the grid and cheaper rates for customers.
That’s not typical currently though and I presume it’s similar elsewhere.
Big capacitors might help.
There are already some high-power charging stations with their own demand-side battery storage, here in California. But this assumes low duty cycle. The higher the load factor, the less relevant the battery.
Most of the DC fast chargers I use have big generators hidden behind bushes.
So diesel-electric cars.
More efficient than individual diesel cars.
Not really, especially not more efficient than hybrid diesel-electric cars. Why are there no diesel-electric hybrids on the market? There's diesel-electric trains and diesel-electric ships for a reason: diesel engines do really well in this type of constant-speed constant-load applications.
I'm not sure about that. I think an electric motor is more efficient than a diesel motor and a larger diesel motor is more efficient than a smaller one. Than charger multiple EVs from a single large diesel generator is more efficient than multiple individual diesel motors.
Single cylinder diesel engines meeting environmental standards don't seem to exist on the market. There are older designs but hard to source in the USA.
Why would a hybrid diesel be more efficient than an all electric car. The diesel motor would bring down the efficiency of the all electric.
I believe an electric motor converts about 60% of the power used into usable power. diesels are closer to 20%.
Where is this? I have only used charging stations in dense urban areas and they lack generators, or bushes. But the amount of pad-mounted equipment you need to interface a charging station with the grid is surprisingly large. I think the tons of copper etc should be charged to the embodied carbon of the cars.
Mount Laurel, NJ. for one. I also do a lot of driving in New England. New England's power infrastructure is pretty dated. The town I live one could dial just the last 4 digits of a phone number and get connected due to everyone being on a single telephone exchange until sometime in the 1980's(not electrical but exemplifies rural infrastructure.
This doesn't represent a groundbreaking advance despite the framing of the article. They're getting faster speed by pushing a huge amount of power to the battery (1MW!).
Supplying this kind of energy at scale is not possible currently. So they could deploy a few of these around but they simply can't be ubiquitous. Not to mention charging curves make a big difference as do real-world conditions. Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.
Oh, and finally, 5 minutes is still slower than filling up a car's tank.
> Oh, and finally, 5 minutes is still slower than filling up a car's tank.
This isn't really relevant. The question is if charging speed is sufficient and it's hard to see five minutes being a deal breaker in any scenario.
Meanwhile, gas cars are still a dead end pollution wise, unless you are pro-dead earth I guess. So there is that.
Yeah if I could charge my car in 5 minutes, then it’s much more viable for me to just pull up to a station and then read something for 5 minutes on my phone while it charges. If there’s a decent charging network, then I’d actually find long road trips in an EV viable.
Filling a car with gas usually takes 5 minutes
> Oh, and finally, 5 minutes is still slower than filling up a car's tank.
For most people charging speed only matters on long trips.
For normal day to day driving those who cannot do their charging at home will often use chargers at their destinations. For example 3 of the 4 grocery stores I shop at have chargers in their parking lots (2 have level 2 charges, and the other has 150 kW DC chargers). If I didn't have home charging I could charge while doing my grocery shopping, and so as long as it finishes by the time I've finished shopping the time doesn't matter.
Even if there are no destination chargers they can use, so charging does involve a special trip, at the rate that BYD demoed (262 miles added in 5 minutes) a typical driver in the US would need 5-15 minutes every week or so.
On long trips generally people want breaks every few hours for the restroom, to stretch, or get food and drinks. At the charging speed BYD demonstrated a large fraction of people on long trips could do all their charging during those breaks, with the charging taking place while they are using the restroom, stretching, or buying their food and drink.
> Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.
China also has extreme climates.
Good point - so those questions hold for China too. They weren't covered in the article.
Yes, but you should refrain from claims as "it is not ground breaking because X" if you haven't researched the topic. Not covered by the article doesn't prove anything. This kind of articles is supposed to be an introduction to the topic.
Sounds like you have so info that could correct my misunderstanding, please provide!
Beijing gets down to -20C in winter and I've experienced 40+ in Shanghai so it's not even out in the sticks either
5 minutes is reasonable.
Having done a long road trip at the end of April, I can comfortably say that any time we stopped to get gas, the stop was longer than 5 minutes in general anyway.
> They're getting faster speed by pushing a huge amount of power to the battery (1MW!).
Valid concern given that's honestly scary from a battery life and safety perspective, especially when coupled with China's downplaying of the fire issues observed with some of their brands...
> Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.
You might not, but I will state that I've had many a gas station in the US where for whatever reason below freezing has definitely slowed down the pumps. Even if it was still less than 5 minutes, I'd rather the workflow of 'plug in the charger and then go back and sit in the car' than 'Wait at the pump because you've seen even attended pump kickbacks go wrong and it's state law anyway'...
5 minutes breaks the point from where charging time is something that has to be planned around to an inconvenience equivalent to hitting a red light after leaving a traditional gas station
On your last point, I would say it depends on how big your car is. I've seen some larger pickup trucks take a hot minute to fill up here in Europe. Granted, these are much less common so it's not a big deal if a farmer needs to come fill up since there are generally plenty of other pumps available.
5 minutes is hugely impressive for our current day and we need to remember these moments as the tech continues to get better. This is just the beginning of EV infrastructure!
To your point about charging speeds, a battery with a max charge rate of 1MW could pull 350kW (common enough in the USA) for 10-90% in nearly all conditions. Being able to add a 250 miles of range in 10 minutes in all conditions would definitely be close enough to a gas car for me. If I could buy this today in the USA it would be a game changer for road trips.
Aren't they just doing what some phones now do which is splitting the battery and charging smaller chunks in parallel? So instead of one giant battery you have 2 or more smaller ones each of which can be charged a lot faster than one large one. Of course it makes management more complicated.
That's not how batteries work. The charging time is measured in "C"s which is a weird unit where 1C means you can fully charge the battery of any size in 1 hour. 2C means half an hour.
But it's already independent of the size of the battery. You don't really get any increase on the max charging speed by dividing it up differently, any more than you can create cake by cutting a whole cake into pieces.
The way to improve it is with battery chemistry, and probably with more capable power electronics.
Supplying even current kinds of fast chargers is not possible done naively; local charging stations split whatever their capacity is between the cars that are plugged in, but allowing for the potential of one or two of those 200kW cars if no others are adjacent.
Roughly the same total amount of energy is needed within the same period of couple days either way, having the capacity to charge faster when possible should be a good thing.
>Do you get full speed if it's below freezing?
I live somewhere where it's reasonably regularly -30F and no electric car does well neither charging nor distance despite claims of battery pre-heating and such. You have to pick a car for the environment it's going to be used in.
> Do you get full speed if it's below freezing?
If you've got a 1-megawatt power supply, there are things you can do about that.
This represents a huge advance. In functional useful societies, they will be able to develop adequate power infrastructure.
The article also mentions that the charger has its own battery reserves, which it can fill in between fill-ips, and then use to help provide those high peaks. Load averaging.
Then there's your list of gotchas. Oh will it work in the cold? Will it work in heat? Ok yeah maybe that will diminish charge rate maybe. But this habit of looking for problems, looking for reasons to discredit and ignore is a horrible perspective, risks ignoring so much possibility because of such a negative minded orientation.
5 minutes is more than good, imo. At. If you think about the steps before and after filling up, there's a couple minutes of pulling off the road, turning off the car, getting out, walking around, setting up payment, opening the fill up, selecting fuel grade, inserting the filler. You can absolutely speed race this down to 2-3 minutes, but but usually a gas station stop is 5-10 minutes of lost time for most people today. It feels like 5 minutes of waiting is really not a big deal. Is it slower? Yes. But is it significantly slower? Not really, not usually.
It's just so sad having such energy poured into negative mental energy, into convincing people against doing better things. The world deserves better than to be beholden to pestilences of the mind.
What current or future planned power source can deliver 1MW power to even the amount of fast chargers currently in existence?! Small modular reactors at every charging station?
The Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Station in my home state of Maryland outputs 1700MW on a typical day. This is enough to power a third of the homes in the state. According to some estimates I found, there are more than 1450 EV charging stations of all types in the state (not enough even for current EV adoption and many are L2 chargers). I can't find over what timescale each charger uses 1MW (per second?) but let's say it's 1MW of power for the 5 minute charge. Let's say each 1MW charger is used twice per day for a single charge each. If all 1450 chargers are used twice per day (2MW/day), you've now exceeded the output of Calvert Cliffs. This is the scale we're talking about.
It's not negative to point out these absurdities, it's vitally important because many jurisdictions are getting ready to ban the sales of new gas cars in 5 years. People depend on working cars for their livelihoods.
We do need to be planning for more energy capacity yes. Ideally our net charge capacity is growing.
But it's worth pointing out that if there's 1450 chargers today & many of them are L2, replacing them with 1MW chargers wouldn't actually change the energy demand at all. It would just be faster charging, not more net charging; people wouldn't be likely to be driving more all of a sudden (ok, ride-share drivers would be on the road a slight bit more).
But yes, we do need to be building more energy capacity (something that places other than the US are doing effectively).
still don't get the point of huge batteries. in USA average commute is about 20 miles one way. seems like a 75mile battery + gas is both more practical and requires less infra.
edit: it seems some are confused. I'm saying a PHEV is superior to BEV.
> seems like a 75mile battery + gas is both more practical and requires less infra
I think it's hard to economically hit that and give a car that folks are OK driving within limitations.
Mazda tried to do a range extender setup on the MX-30, however it didn't sell that well and my understanding is the range extender wasn't good for hills or highway cases.
Non Range Extender setups, actually typically work better if you're stuck in gas mode than a range extender, mostly because you can use the mechanical energy from the ICE more directly than the losses of something feeding energy directly into the drivetrain. However, once you hit that point anything after 2 or 3 KWh of battery is just dead weight on the car. I'm guessing that's why even the Prius prime is only around 40 miles of range.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the US addiction to huge vehicles (which need even bigger batteries...)
Edit:
Seeing the edit of what I'm replying to, I'll add that yes PHEVs are probably a 'better' option than BEVs for many people, but the cost of a PHEV can be as much or more than a BEV. Look at a Chevrolet Equinox EV vs a Rav4 Prime. The Rav4 Prime is 10K more expensive. Happy to consider a different comparison here but overall nobody has figured out how to make a PHEV that is cheaper than a similar EV.
let's look at a car that's available as all options: the kia Niro - and let's look at the 2022 since I found the info easily:
$28,790: MSRP of the 2022 Niro L HEV (hybrid)
$34,390: MSRP of the 2022 Niro EX PHEV (plug-in hybrid with an electric range of 51 kms.
$46,790: starting price of the 2022 Niro EX EV (all battery electric vehicle with a range of 386 kms)
it's just simple math. if you take a 400 mile road trip 4 times a year, and your electricity is totally free for the sake of example, gas is 5 bucks a gallon, how long does it take for the EV to pay itself off, assuming the regular commute is 40km daily otherwise? answer is almost 15 years. doesn't make any sense.
There is some market for a 2nd vehicle in a family which has more limitations. But the biggest market is for a do-everything vehicle. The question isn't what is the mean or median commute, its what is the 99.9th percentile journey. Sure it can get you to work and back, but can it get you to grandmother's house for Thanksgiving dinner?
I think targetting the 99.9th percentile trip is maybe even a bit low. A commuting American has at least two car trips per typical day, probably more like 5. So 1 trip in a thousand means something that comes up more than annually.
my comment is saying that you would have both gas and electric capabilities, so yes.
It's called precautionary consumption.
We tend to act with a scarcity and "what if" mindset.
It doesn't matter if you never drive 400 miles, or rarely, you're spending money, significant one in case of a car, thus range becomes an issue.
Is there really anyone who never drives 400 miles during the lifespan of a car purchase? Certainly I can’t believe it’s a majority of people.
I've known a few. But they are certainly not the majority.
I've known far more people who have to do a 400-600 mile drive at least once a month.
I don't think I have driven my car 400 miles in a single leg.
400 miles is the range where I
1. Seriously consider flying
2. Plan it in such a way that I can have lunch as a long break between driving sessions.
3. Rent a car and carpool with other people if it's a road-trip type thing.
It just so happens that my friends are either all within 150 miles of me, or so far away that driving isn't a real option.
I also don’t understand 700+ HP motors and <3 sec 0-60mph times. Who needs that?
This is very true. I would give up acceleration for higher range. I think high acceleration is only needed to about 35 miles an hour.
AFAIK the range benefits you'd get from a smaller electrical motor are minimal, and in the cost of a vehicle the bigger motor doesn't add a huge cost.
Also, a bigger motor can be more reliable, if you're not running it at full bore you've probably got better heat dissipation so it will last longer.
The other issue is people's addiction for large vehicles; bigger vehicle means bigger battery means more weight means more power needed to move everything. As an example a Blazer EV weighs 25-35% more than the ICE version. Take that with the comments about reliability, it counter-intuitively makes a lot of sense that the Blazer EV has a 500hp motor vs the 200-300HP in the ICE.
As far as 'acceleration' itself, Acceleration tends to be more of a factor of torque curve. Electric motors tend to give lots of torque very quick... I accidentally chirp the tires on my Ford Maverick in a year more times than I was ever able to do even trying in my WRX. [0]
[0] - Sure, the WRX is all wheel drive but it's also a good 450 pounds lighter than the Mav.
The BMW i3 was the fastest BMW from 0-35 for a while and I don't recall ever chirping the tires. This model was rear wheel drive...
Probably a few factors...
The i3 is rear wheel drive but it's also rear wheel motor. Bigger skateboard battery means lower center of gravity. But perhaps the biggest factor is RWD the drive wheels don't have to steer (I'd say at least 2/3 of my 'chirps' were starting a turn). I'd be willing to wager the BMW has a better TCS software too.
Also I don't run stock tires on my Maverick, I run DriveGuard Plus[1] which are probably less grippy than the standard tires.
[1] - FWIW The WRX has 'OG' DriveGuard tires, The Plus supposedly are a -little- more grippy... Only lost 1 or 2 MPG on the Maverick changing to them from stock.
The i3 has ridiculously narrow tires. I still memory burn my first experience of BMW TCS from the mid- eighties. My friends Dad got a BMW M5. That car made seemed to just seemed to accelerate.
That is also my understanding. I believe the faster one can charge the battery the faster the battery can run the motor.
You're in the left lane at 70 MPH passing a long line of cars. Some idiot comes up behind you at 90+ and rides your tail. Good thing you could accelerate quickly starting from 70 to finish passing the line then move over into the right lane.
Place right turn signal on. People to the right of you make a hole. You move over. You decide to stay there until traffic is empty to pass again without impeding others. You never leave your zen.
From the GP's description, "passing a long line of cars", unless that vehicle is flashing emergency lights you certainly don't need to move over to accommodate an aggressive driver to your rear (and doing so might force you to slow down to a halt). This situation is common when there's a backed-up highway exit for example.
But I don't think a powerful engine is needed in that scenario either. The only case where it's really needed is accelerating up a steep hill.
Depends on where you’re driving. On the Autobahn, or even in some US states, impeding a vehicle in the passing lane is a violation even if you’re going at or over the speed limit.
I'm skeptical. If you are moving at the same speed as (or slower than) traffic in the right lane, or if the right lane is clear, then sure, no doubt. Drive on the right, pass on the left. But in this scenario you are currently passing on the left. The traffic on the right may even be gridlocked. In which states must you clear the lane even when you yourself are presently passing on the left of slower traffic in the right lane?
> People to the right of you make a hole.
Sometimes, but not so common not in my experience.
Assuming 70MPH is already 5 miles over the limit in this case and the vehicle behind you is not an emergency responder...
All you're doing is letting a dickhead bully win and letting bad people get away with bad behavior.
I never run out of top-end acceleration even when the speed limit is 75. I find the 0-35 is the sweet spot for pulling out if the curve drops after that I don't really notice it. A few months back I rented an ICE car and I had to change my driving style. I would step on the gas and mostly got noise back.
It depends a lot on the ICE and setup.
If I'm in my WRX and I do need to go above 75 quickly, I can drop into 4th and get to 80 more quickly. But I've got a stick so I can do that. If I'm in something with a slushbox, I have to wait for the thing to decide that downshifting is needed before it will pick up. I'll admit the Toyota Hybrids hit a good 'in-between' for these (probably closer to an EV than either a Manual or a slushbox.) I'll get a bit of instant acceleration but anything after a half second to second is a bit slower.
I have the range extender option which is one-cylinder scooter motor(.733 CI) with a 2 gallon tank. If I need to travel over 70 on the REX I will lose out on HVAC.
Man, I will certainly change the bully's lifelong behavior by making him ride 12" off my rear bumper for 5 miles while incurring no personal danger when teaching him the error of his ways.
people want to use the same car for road trips or just the ability to run a bunch of errands in one day without worrying about range.
There is also the occasional whoops something has come up and I don't have the range I need.
Hurricane evacuation routes come to mind.
I can travel most of the time on a single charge. My overall range is just below 300 miles in ideal conditions to 180 miles in worst case scenario. In the USA I would like to be able to have that range between 500 miles and 300 miles. If the charge time is 5 minutes I would change my opinion on what is needed for range.
Many people drive places other (further) than work multiple times a year. "75 mile battery" wouldn't even be good enough for a one-way trip of this kind let alone there and back again.
It's surprising how common 1% event is. Local supermarket has parking lot that only sees 1/4th of it's capacity used daily, but events have it filled up to the brim at least a few times a year. A jitter happening "only" 1% of the time in a game can mean several hitches a _second_, on a webserver you can have several hundred bad customer experiences a second
I’m disappointed and confused as to why countries would impose things like 100% tariffs on vehicles, especially Chinese ones. Their labor force is massive and they can iterate and build much better machines than anyone else, so rather than a tariff helping the local economy, it’s going to cripple it in a relatively short amount of time due to lateral advancements in technology that facilitate every-day cars being built. Smaller countries don’t have the manpower to keep up. So what’s the point of this?
Not talking about US in this case.
Mass unemployment of former car workers is an existential threat to governments.
Or they should do what the chinese government does and subsize the hell out of the economy, rather than the military.
China seems to spend a lot on its military as well as its industry.
A Chinese village is larger than most countries.
See, the thing is, that will happen anyway. The rest of us might as well get some decent, cheap cars out of it.
That's what we all thought about Walmart too and I think most people would agree that the west could have handled the transition to mass imports and overseas manufacturing without destroying local businesses overnight in a better way.
If 6% of your economy is directly tied to auto manufacturing (Germany) than by allowing ultra-cheap cars to flood the market will just piss off workers who inevitably get laid off in the chaos. Europe is starting to catch up on competing with price again (see Citroen for examples) but it takes time to build these factories and there is a lot more red tape wade through.
The US is trying to tackle the affordable car space through weird startups and longshots, but their production numbers will be so much less than demand for another decade if they even gain real traction in the market at all.
If a country wants to give up on their own automotive exports that's fine, but they need a plan for how to proceed when those jobs are gone and so far nobody has that plan figured out yet. Until then, they will continue to tariff the crap out of any competitors and keep kicking the can down the road.
> That's what we all thought about Walmart too and I think most people would agree that the west could have handled the transition to mass imports and overseas manufacturing without destroying local businesses overnight in a better way.
“Handled better”? this sounds like apologizing for corruption and nepotism that ruined the west and handed Chinese a massive advantage in just about every imaginable way. And we can say well yes and the Chinese are also corrupt, and they are, but at least their corruption is making them wealthy. Our corruption has made everyone poorer. The greed blinded the greedy.
It's quite different if it happens in 2-3 years time or spread across 10-20. You don't want a sizeable percentage of your workforce to lose jobs in a short span, there's no capacity for retraining so many people for them to be productive, governments gets higher dissatisfaction, and a diminished tax base.
The rest getting decent cheaper cars might not be worth the trade-off of also getting a more unstable society.
> it’s going to cripple it in a relatively short amount of time due to lateral advancements in technology that facilitate every-day cars being built
Isn't China free to build a car factory here, with their technology?
Nope some Govt like India would veto that.
At some point, we just need to admit our auto industry has completely failed multiple times, has exhausted all forgiveness, and rip down the trade barriers.
For those worried about national self-sufficiency, the answer can be public transit, not cars.
Or the answer can be aggressive pentesting for foreign tech and mandating network kill switches. But that's too much work. Let's just trust that Ford can design a secure system and pay them 100x what we would have paid the pentesters.
> mandating network kill switches
It's really funny that China made non-trivial amount of strategic decisions on the assumption that US tech do have network kill switches [0], including using it solely to justify protectionism, while nobody on the earth are crazy enough to do this, we all just call them out, "just an excuse to justify protectionism", then all at a sudden here we are, trying to say "mandating network kill switches" could be a good idea.
[0] Use OpenAI Deep Research or rivals and investigate the word "自主可控".
Hi sorry I think I may have used the wrong terminology. I meant hardware switches to make sure a device stays offline when you tell it to, not switches to turn off the internet totally.
The odd thing is that if our industry has failed, so has Japan, Korea, and Europe, because they all make electrics, and we can buy them in the US.
I don't know the extent to which demand plays a role. Ford makes F150s because people buy F150s. They have to be forced to make smaller cars, and lose money on them.
I'm fairly certain that Ford has gotten to the point where, at least in the US they aren't losing money on their 'smaller' vehicles.
Certainly not making as much as they can make on an F150, (I think the estimate on a Maverick is somewhere around 500-600 a car to ford).
As far as overall 'demand', there is a bit of market distortion (depending on how you look at it) as far as dealers frequently trying to push people into bigger vehicles because they are inherently more expensive and they get more commission and profit too. [0]
[0] - I've had this happen more than once, even when I knew what car I wanted to buy.
Completely agree that our industries have failed, but not quite ready to give up and become entirely dependent on foreign tech.
How can we fix American industry?
> How can we fix American industry?
Well first off, I think we need to implement basic accountability. American industries routinely fail in the long-term because they're allowed to. They know they're basically invincible and can absolutely run their companies into the ground and leadership will fly away with too much money than what they know to do with.
The American school of business is make short-term decisions now, over and over again, forever, until you eventually blow up. This is how basically every company is run. It's an almost debt-driven mindset. It's a greedy algorithm. Take on any amount of loan now, and say "fuck it" when it comes to interest. When the chicken comes home to roost, who cares, you can leave.
That's why American industries will be competitive for a couple decades and then quickly be so far behind it seems it's impossible for them to catch up. They get a tiny little taste of market success, and they immediately stop investing into their future and start cashing in right now. We're even seeing this with Tesla.
Industrial policy. Every prosperous country has an industrial policy that includes generous support for basic research, and reasonable immigration.
And it's not all that bad. We're something like the number-two industrial country in the world.
It's a difficult question, because there's both the labor cost difference as well as the environmental cost difference. Plenty of things aren't made in the US anymore simply because the cost of producing them without becoming a superfund site are too high vs a country that's willing to either just designate the whole thing as forever industrial wasteland (or decide that the long term societal damage of pollution is worth the gain at this time).
Pragmatically, the sanest thing we might be able to do is find a region of the country that is remote enough in every way and turn it into a free for all industrial park so long as workers aren't exposed to excessive danger.
No.
1. China got here by using protectionism and stealing trade secrets. They subsidized their domestic producers and forced foreign entities to partner and train domestic nationals. They used protectionism to leapfrog us. We shouldn't just let them in and destroy our own capacity.
2. Manufacturing is necessary for a country that plans to go to war. America (and every nation!) needs a strong industrial plant to counter its enemies. Without the ability to switch to making warplanes, tanks, and drones, you'll be unable to fight a drawn out war.
3. We're really not that far behind and our industry will be fine. There's way too much panic here.
> For those worried about national self-sufficiency, the answer can be public transit, not cars.
This is highly opinionated r/fuckcars anti-"carbrain" (as they call it). This does not work in America. It's an opinion of city dwellers who have no exposure to the rest of the country.
Self-driving cars will transform public Transit in this country to be more automotive and less rail based. Not the other way around.
1. While China does engage in industrial espionage, they have also learned from being contract manufacturers. I’m very uncomfortable with the “how dare my unskilled labor learn from what I pay them to do and become skilled” part of this meme.
2. I don’t think anyone could seriously look at the US and worry that we might not be able to make enough military hardware. What country makes more weapons than the US?
3. The US auto industry is somewhere between dead and absorbed into the globalized auto industry. Their cost structure can’t compete and the US’ cratering international reputation means exports are falling and China has growth opportunities.
Where I do agree with you is that there’s no reason to panic. All of these things are just fine.
How can a car factory easily pivot to making weapons or even armored vehicles? I don't think that is a realistic approach to DIB readiness.
Armored vehicles can be somewhat useful in some war scenarios, but even Abrams tanks weren't enough to turn the tide in Ukraine.
> How can a car factory easily pivot to making weapons or even armored vehicles?
It's probably a bit trickier now, but If sewing machine and typewriter companies used to make machine guns in wartime there's probably a way if there is will.
> This does not work in America. It's an opinion of city dwellers who have no exposure to the rest of the country.
It's worked in America longer than it hasn't worked. Car-centric infrastructure is actually pretty new, and we basically burned down a lot of rail infrastructure to build it.
The fundamental problem with automobiles is that they're orders of magnitude less efficient per person, so they can't scale. You hit a wall, and then you're just fucked and the only solution is to pivot away from automobiles. No amount of self-driving, or more lanes, or toll roads, will fix that - it's a fundamental problem with the technology itself and how it exists in the world.
I mean, try driving around in Houston today. It's shit, but more than that, it's completely unfixable. 14 lane highways don't magically resolve the problem of everyone having their own little box on wheels they control.
Also, on the topic of urban centers and city dwellers: most Americans live in major metropolitan areas and those areas also make up almost all of the economy in the US. Yes, rural areas are important, but nobody is "targeting" them, so to speak. Those areas are already heavily subsidized by denser areas because that's just how infrastructure how.
> China got here by using protectionism and stealing trade secrets
and uyghur forced labor!
Check these:
> Human Rights Watch warns carmakers over China forced labour risk
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/human-...
> Carmakers may be using aluminium made by Uyghur forced labour, NGO investigation finds
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/feb/01/car-manufacturer...
> China: Carmakers Implicated in Uyghur Forced Labor
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/01/china-carmakers-implicat...
National self-sufficiency is about being able to do things like this, particularly in times of emergent crisis or war. And we can say we are able to do it only if we actually do it.
And no, the answer cannot be public transit. Public transit won't be a valid response to the next Pearl Harbor.
Does legacy auto serve the national interest in times of war anymore? How many tanks do we need? Electric vehicle manufacturers and their suppliers at least have all the ingredients for drones and general electronics. Aerospace tech seems pretty important too for missiles, jets and communications.
If they actually wanted it they can subsidize it instead of just making it hard to participate at every level of industry.
Answer or not, you should have done public transit long time ago.
The public transit problem in the US isn't actually a "build public transit" problem, it's a "remove zoning rules that prohibit the housing density required for public transit to be viable" problem. But it would take decades to fix that even if we started now, and we haven't even started now because people are still trying to fix it by adding bus lanes to places where the density required for viable bus service continues to be prohibited.
Not everyone wants to live in a dense city. I would say about half the population doesn't. Removing zoning (and I think they should - let people build what they want), will not make cities more dense, and that's fine - people should be able to live how they want.
Nobody is forcing anybody to live anywhere. The problem right now is that you have areas where 90% of the land is zoned exclusively for single family homes and the areas that aren't have already been developed, so there is nowhere that new higher density development is allowed.
How about we make it so that only 50% of the residential land is zoned for single family homes and let people build whatever they want on the rest of it? The newly rezoned land will be worth more, so if you want to live in a single family home, sell yours at a profit and buy one in the area still zoned for it.
> Removing zoning (and I think they should - let people build what they want), will not make cities more dense
IMO yes it will, because it just makes sense. Denser cities are more efficient for everyone, normal people included. Transport price per unit drops, rent drops, all infrastructure costs per unit drop. I think most people will happily take a reduction in expenses in exchange for density.
Well, they won't shoot you for trying to break into Kowloon...
Evey place where public transit works (i.e. really big cities) already has it.
And some places have more space and cars work fine there.
You have some areas that are kind of a middle between the two, those have some trouble.
Pearl Harbor? Really?
bro was talking about public transit & Chinese cars, my guy.
You cannot win a war without a manufacturing base. That’s the thing that public transit won’t fix. It won’t give us a manufacturing base. Auto builders will.
There are probably plenty of ways to ensure a manufacturing base, but having a robust auto industry is one way that is pretty well understood.
I don’t like the amount of inefficiency caused by protectionism, though.
It's ridiculous to bring up a war scenario when it's about EVs.
Go reshore the military. Yes, the Americans and Western Europe lost in EVs. Though, I only ever see Americans turn this event into losing a war.
Public transit is the opposite of self sufficiency, public transit means dependence on others for your basic transportation.
It can work fine in normal situations, but any kind of stress, and anyone without a car is completely stuck. Bad weather, labor strike, high demand, evacuation, moving day, there's a politician in town and roads are closed, there's a celebrity/show in town and you want to go somewhere else, power outage, windstorm and some roads are closed.
Any kind of stress and public transit fails. Which makes it the opposite of self sufficiency.
Automobiles do not make for individual self sufficiency. That's propaganda "in the zombie apocalypse the gas stations still work" nonsense.
But even if that were true, it also has nothing to do with what I said, which is national self-sufficiency.
Lots of those scenarios you listed show how car based transit fails, too.
https://www.tampabay.com/hurricane/2024/10/07/tampa-bay-traf...
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