When will these cars have a breakthrough in terms of UI and privacy (let's ignore the cost for a moment).
I don't want to spend a shitload of money on an iPhone with wheels which doesn't even come with all the privacy promises apple makes and which is full of dark patterns, subscription models, and proprietary interfaces (talking about apple carplay, android auto, feature allowing you to use spotify, etc. The mere fact the car has these makes me not want to buy it, even though I would never use them. Paying money to have a hardcoded e.g. spotify client in my car is encouraging exactly the wrong design practices.).
This basically describes Tesla only. Drive a different brand and you get a very similar experience to a gas powered car. Unfortunately a terrible track record on privacy is par for the course in all vehicles in 2025.
Tesla, privacy...?! I remember years ago when Musk remotely disabled root access to someone's car because they were rummaging around in the software too much. Plus all the times Tesla publicly released play-by-play details of an Autopilot/FSD crash to the news. If anything, I'd categorize Tesla as the least privacy-focused car company out there, especially now that they'll face zero repercussions from the federal government for any violations.
Never. The government wants you to drive "an iPhone with wheels" because it comes with a convenient spying device. Means they don't need to put up a network of cameras to track you (some do anyway). It probably also bundles a remote kill switch just in case you offend some bureaucrat or just if you expend all your future energy ration. The suggestion to remove the antenna will probably make it fail a government "safety" inspection.
This is is not just problem for the owners but anyone else. All those cameras are privacy problem in general (sometimes used also with parked cars - like in case of Tesla).
Buy a cheap EV. Remove the antenna, privacy problem solved. Use your phone for satnav and streaming audio via bluetooth. Same as with a TV, you get it cheaper because they're expecting you to subscribe, so you don't and profit.
I looked into removing OnStar in a first gen Chevy Volt but from what I found its so deeply integrated into the entertainment system that many things just can't work without it.
Meanwhile, there is unidentified source of lithium pollution in Beijing, causing 20 times higher concentrations among pregnant women and newborns[0]. Guess everything has its cost, even for clean energy.
I wonder how the Lithium is entering the food chain? Given they've tested drinking water, food, and air.
Dust from processing? occupational exposure? unscrupulous recycling operations? but Lithium isn't a heavy metal so exposure would have to be ongoing.
Definitely need to test some additional cities and try and understand what's going on here. While concerning these blood levels are at 3% of the doses typically studied in psychiatric conditions. There's some potential public health benefits to low level lithium exposure actually [2] but at the same time you don't want to be unintentionally exposing pregnant folks.
Anywhere in the supply chain to a streetfood stall, or mom and pop restaurant or cornershop/bodega equivalent could have substitutions made that other people in the chain may not notice
It's xenophobia. Whenever Chinese anything is brought up someone has to bring up something unrelated to show how horrible china is.
Same thing happens with pollution per capita or any number of environmental metrics. People jump through insane mental hoops to paint China as far worse than the USA.
Given the current US administration I don't see any respect. America wants a shining beacon on their tech and offerings while my continent Europe and others has to be painted in a worse light.
It didn't appear from nowhere via by Monkey Magic, that much is certain.
The source, then, is either
* raw lithium rich brines,
* Spodumene ore,
* waste from brine processing, OR waste from spodumene processing, (to create industrial scale supplies of industry usable lithium)
* waste from using lithium in industry to create (say) batteries.
Working through that list, lithium rich brines are largely in Chile and in some parts of China that are not Beijing, spodumene ore comes largely from Australia and parts of China that are not Beijing.
I'm not aware of, but this doesn't rule it out, brine or spodumene processing in the immediate vicinity of Beijing (it's quite likely there is some spodumene processing in that area) .. there definitely is large scale industry use of end product lithium in Beijing specifically to produce batteries.
The majority of lithium usage is related to "clean energy" .. or even just common battery use for electronics, so it's easily the most probable source of lithium turning up in an urban area such as Beijing.
Addendum: As grumpy-de-sre correctly points out below, the end of use disposal of lithium batteries in Beijing also deserves attention as a source.
The exact 'how' is as yet unknown .. it'll likely be tracked down and dealt with given the papers being published.
This will be of great interest to Texas a decade or so from now, the critical materials act and other recent activities have seen ground broken on lithium and rare earth concentrate processing plants on US soil in Texas (and elsewhere), the recent relaxing of EPA guidelines and reduction in oversight will likely lead to similar health issues appearing in due course.
Do you have any suggestions for where else it might come from?
I’m admittedly really out of the loop on battery tech developments but I was hopeful the industry was slowly steering towards iron/sodium batteries to replace lithium for reasons of cost and pollution. Did that hit a roadblock or is it just still very early stage?
China supposedly made a breakthrough in battery technology, what does that have to do with lithium pollution in China? You sound bitter about China’s progress.
Sadly, all reports on this paper have been removed from every media in China in a single night. Academics are only allowed to be discussed among academics.
It's true that I can't find any reporting on Baidu Xinwen. I can definitely understand why, as there's a real risk of causing potentially unjustified panic (scientific reporting and literacy isn't great globally). More research is needed before action.
Fascinating that it's not a complete information blackout, but just disseminated on a need to know basis. It's kind of an interesting social contract really.
I'd prefer standardized, swappable batteries. Imagine driving up to a gas^Wbattery station, you place your car at a certain spot and your old battery drops out and a new one is inserted and off you go, not even having to leave the car. The old battery is charged slowly, cheaply and safely, while you're on the road again 5 minutes before that one guy still filling diesel.
Maybe, but that only really works if you have a battery leasing concept - like e.g. Renault Zoe. Otherwise, you're swapping something you "own" with something that may be of inferior quality.
Would you really feel happy having bought a brand new car to find the most expensive component had been replaced with an 8 year old battery just from "filling it up"? What if the previous "owner" had just grounded the car and smashed the battery back into a speed bump or a large stone?
Imagine a damaged battery pack caused a fire and destroyed your car... Who would be liable? You? The garage that you last swapped the battery at (and would you even remember where that was)? The previous renter who may had damaged it? The renter who damaged it 2 weeks ago leading to its failure now? The manufacturer for designing in the risk? Are we going to need to pay to staff 24/7 at every battery swap location to inspect the incoming batteries?
Then there are the safety risks of having a high voltage connector that has to undergo potentially 10,000 cycles during its lifetime. Any slight misalignment will start to cause arcing and contact degradation, increased resistance and higher risk of fires. I realise that this same argument can be made to high speed charging ports as well, but the connector on the car would have to withstand significantly more vibration.
Additionally, the battery is one of the heaviest parts of an EV, so there's a challenge of making something that's easy to remove whilst remaining firmly secure the rest of the time. Such a thing is best supported from underneath, but having top or side loaded batteries would likely cause significant issues with weight distribution. Finally, modern EVs also have contoured batteries to fill the available space in the car, whereas swappable batteries are likely to need to be designed to be interchangeable between models and manufacturers.
To me, I'd see it as having too many downsides. High current charging can be done safely if systems are designed well, as well as still retaining the ability to fall back to slow trickle overnight charging which will probably remain the preferred option for most. We already have a standardised plug that can support this, the increased current can be negotiated over the control lines just as is currently done.
Fill up an electric car with thousands of golf-ball-sized batteries, each holding maybe 10 watts. Small enough they are treated like almost like a fluid. They're dumped and recharged at a station, damaged ones disposed of. Too cheap individually to worry about damage, homogeneous enough that ownership of specific cells is not a concern.
I'll leave the technical details for the engineers. :)
Gogogo - very popular, and pretty extensive coverage [0]. The only problem is the scooters themselves are so quiet they sneak up behind you on the street.
There are guys who ride around swapping the batteries in public rental bikes too - they send an alert when the batteries are low and a guy just drives around swapping ones near his current location.
The batteries are small compared to what you'd need for a car - they're maybe slightly larger than a standard lead-acid battery.
Silence (https://www.silenceuk.com/) has scooters and "microcars" with swappable batteries. If I remember correctly, their batteries might have wheels as well so they're easier to move around, since they weight a bit.
All over mainland china as well, works great for small vehicles like mopeds etc (because the battery is light enough to be swapped by an individual person without tools). Probably helps reduce fire risk as well (because people aren't charging themselves indoors).
This concept makes even more sense for trucks than it does for cars. The batteries are larger, destinations are likely to have appropriate infrastructure, routes are more uniform.
Nio does this (only for their cars tho) - apparently takes 3m to do a battery swap. And apparently it's getting to the point where it's close to profitability.
Its already a thing with Nio. Whats more they also allow you to upgrade your battery to higher capacity for long trip ie your normal car battery is 60Kwh but you swap with a 105Kwh for a long trip.
That's for the whole assembly, obviously. If you were designing for swaps, the BMS and other active components would remain in place and only smaller packs of cells would be swapped. That also addresses the equally specious "don't want to swap out a critical component that's half my car's value" argument.
BetterPlace had it. They sold around 700 cars and had some stations in Israel. The idea was a bit too early (2013) and the battery tech was in its infancy, maybe now it can suceeded?
It only works if you lease the battery. And if you lease the battery, you care much less about doing all the things that keep you from trashing it. So either you now have to also lease the car (with plenty of surveillance) or the company has to write off batteries at a high rate.
After reading the paper the effects of leaving it in a high charge state seems to be smallish. The insideevs.com article never says what the size of the effect is, which is a hint it might be a lot of clicky writing about a nothing burger.
In any case if you are the leasing company, you get to control the BMS. The BMS holds the keys to the kingdom. It can control how the battery can be used: charging rates, max charge, how long max charge will be maintained before it self discharges, min charge, allowed operating temperatures. It seems to me they could mostly eliminate the sort of abuse that seems to concern you.
Awesome to see BYD continue to innovate! I wish Tesla continued to push on powertrain improvements like this rather than making a triangle shaped truck.
The triangle shaped truck was used as a testbed for several innovations: 4 wheel drive (not just for parking gimmicks), size increase of gigapressed parts, first deployment of the 4680 dry process batteries, 48V for the non-traction electrical systems, Ethernet based networking for systems interconnect.
What are the reasons that truck shouldn't have entered production? I can think of a few myself (pedestrian safety, ugly, not bulletproof and shouldn't even ostensibly be, etc) but none of these reasons seem to be related to the actual technical innovations which are apparently in the truck. So where is the relevance?
> What are the reasons that truck shouldn't have entered production?
It’s selling like shit. And this was before the whole Tesla vibe shift. Instead of a leading-edge $25k EV we got a truck that can’t truck and robotaxi vapourware. Meanwhile, BYD is on its game.
>>> Tesla didn't innovate, they just made a triangle.
>> The triangle actually has several innovations, it's basically a concept car
> Concept cars usually don't enter production for a reason
Those reasons, in this case, being unrelated to the technological innovations, as far as I can tell. Correct me if I'm wrong. Tesla's problem isn't a failure to innovate, it's their leadership deciding to make stupid and impractical cars.
Musk said, on a 2023 earnings call, that he expected “the Tesla Cybertruck to sell between 250,000 and 500,000 units per year” [1]. It sold fewer than 40,000 in 2024 [2]. Tesla’s sales in 2024 weren’t 100+ P/E calibre, but they also didn’t yet reflect the sort of cratering we saw at the end of ‘24 in both Tesla sales and resale values [3].
Cybertruck flopped as a product before Tesla flopped as a brand. It’s why Tesla is throttling down their production [4].
Half of these don't really sound like innovations as much as they're firsts for Tesla themselves. 48 V systems and four-wheel steering (and drive) are not really innovative at this point.
Obvious safety concerns aside, I really worry that we are losing perspective on what the grid is capable of and the possibility that distributed technology won't get us to the ideal outcome fast enough.
The power plant nearest to me could only handle ~1000 instances of this kind of charging before it is completely saturated. The transmission (transformer) infrastructure is the biggest bottleneck. Even if Entergy built several additional gigawatts of capacity on their existing site, they'd have no way to deliver it. Tesla would have to install supercharging stations in their switch yard and figure out how to operate at much higher supply voltages.
Well, the chargers won't be pulling 1MW continuously, so you can smooth this out by installing batteries with the chargers. The grid demand becomes a more constant trickle into the batteries co-located with the charger
the idea would be to slowly charge the capacitor to its capacity in the breaks between the charger being used. That way when you arrive at the charger, the capacitor would be fairly full and able to quickly transfer that energy to your car. The charger would then replenish that capacitor more slowly (meaning that the charger wouldn't be able to be used for a bit).
This will have very little impact on the grid. If you can charge twice as fast you need half as many chargers for the same capacity, resulting in the same load at 100% utilization.
The batteries are the same size that they were previously, so the kWh pulled from the grid doesn't change.
I don't think we can look at it on an average basis when each vehicle is pulling a megawatt, regardless of how long they are doing it for.
Industrial users with electric arc furnaces and other massive loads need special, ongoing arrangements with the utility to operate safely on the grid. It would only take 200~300 of these high speed chargers to equate to the demand of the largest EAFs on earth.
Mostly agree with you on that case. My initial thought on the matter also.
This theoretical car draws 1 MW for 5 minutes, pulling 83 kWh. Your normal residential address in America only uses 20 kWh all day long. The hard limit in a lot of areas is 25-30 kW continuous. Sure, they're building special charging stations, yet this is like 40 residential addresses running at max line limit consumption suddenly.
Looking at this a different way, lighting the entire SoFi Stadium (3.5 Disneylands for another scale), takes 10 MW. [1][2] Ten (10) of these cars pulling on the grid is like lighting an entire NFL scale stadium on game day.
Looking at something like Electricity Maps [3], the entire state of Texas is producing 47,700 MW (11.6 GW Gas, 24.3 GW Wind, 6.7 GW Coal, 5 GW Nuclear, and they're only exchanging 25 MW across their borders with other utilities. 25 of these cars is Texas's border electricity exchange.
Enormous, multi-state electricity organizations. Have 1000 of these show up to gas stations in some place like Texas, and you're suddenly pulling a substation chunk of the entire Texas electric grid all at once.
most of these cars will be charging using L2 overnight charging. If you need to limit the fast charging, you can surge price it so maybe it costs $100 to charge fully instead of 25, etc. There are many possible solutions as long as they can solve for the surges as it spins up and down.
1 EAF is a very minor amount of infrastructure compared the gasoline infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of cars and the energy usage of hundreds of thousands of cars.
I think that this would work by having charging stations "buffer" energy by getting it from the grid more slowly and storing it on-site, ready to be pushed into EVs.
People in America and Canada where there is a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs don't appreciate what they are missing out on.
For ~$60k you can buy vehicles like the Li Auto L9 that are nicer than a brand new Rolls Royce. The value for price you get blows other manufacturers out of the water.
I'm sorry but you don't seem to understand what Rolls Royce is really about. I know China is capable of producing quality if the proper price is paid but I seriously doubt anything like this: https://youtu.be/ZcFrFjl-RQs?t=617
Ok, they are not handcrafting fiber optics into the shapes of a star. But what I'm seeing in this video is a lot of argument from authority, posturing, pomp and inefficient bespoke manufacturing processes. When you actually look at the feature set and comfort quality you're getting from the interior of a Hongqi E-HS9... it's actually competitive if not better than a Rolls Royce. In fact the designer of the Hongqi E-HS9 used to work for Rolls Royce.
Can a Rolls Royce turn its wheels 90 degrees to park sideways? Does it have advanced LIDAR self-driving?
Yes China is able to produce tacky designs and fill out a spec sheet just like it has done in tech for decades. Thats not why customers buy Rolls Royce. In fact based on your wording it seems like the point has gone completely over your head.
When I was in China last summer, every taxi I used was an electric car. By far, the worst of these was a Tesla Model 3. You can buy serious luxury vehicles for really very little money compared to western manufacturers. Not electric car specific, but for me, the most impressive thing is that the mapping apps are all synchronised with the traffic light systems.
And then once Australians revered Toyota as the choice of farm utes (Hilux) and bush bashers (Landcruiser, etc), we railed on the Korean brands. And now that the Korean brands have found their place, the Chinese brands cop it next.
That's the thing, back in the day Jaoanesd manufacturing was subject to the same silly narrative you mentioned - "yeah, it's low quality stuff, in a few years it will look like crap, etc".
It was bullshit then, and it is bullshit now. Ik fairness, I heard great reports from people that bought Chinese EVs in terms of overall quality.
Perhaps ironically, there were many reports of Teslas actually having issues with poor fit and finishing.
Sorry but this is cope. Why do you assume the build quality must be disastrously bad? In Australia where there is no tariff on Chinese EV's there are many Chinese vehicles on the road now -- this logically suggests an expansion of repair support will trickle into Australia also.
China is not just beating the U.S. on price, they are beating their manufacturers on quality and features. I'm not suggesting Toyota levels of reliability yet, but Tesla doesn't have a track record of reliability either. These Chinese EV's are easily as good as a Tesla, and better given advanced features like LIDAR that Elon cut from Tesla's.
'as quick as filling up a tank' is a bit exaggerated (5 min for 250 miles) but I guess it's impressive that it's getting to the same order of magnitude.
The comments here are more interesting than the article.
Often on HN that statement would mean that someone with relevant technical experience has commented, but not this time.
Instead the comments on a fairly mundane incremental improvement in technology are full of concern trolling, whataboutism, nitpicking and cope.
This suggests to me that people are starting to absorb the information that China is ahead in this area of tech and they are emotionally uncomfortable with that reality.
Battery charging/discharging speed is limited not by capacity but by current relative to capacity. Li-ion batteries can generally be recharged in constant current mode without significant degrading up to "4C" - 4x its mAh rating, above a low threshold below which it's not yet safe to charge at full speed, and below ~80% where it's no longer safe to charge with constant current but charging has to switch to low current constant voltage mode.
Cutting down charging time to below 1/4th standard Earth hours require material science breakthroughs(hard). While this system might be useful for charging a 4MWh train packs, or a 1MWh semi pack with a not insignificant degradation penalty, this does not accelerate charging for most EV users even if this was to be deployed widely.
I think you jumped to the wrong conclusion. Another news source suggests proper groundbreaking 10C charging:for a standard EV
> the BYD’s pile supports the 10C charging. It can charge 400 km in 5 minutes. It is two kilometers in one second! During the live test, this station reached the 1 MW level of power in 10 seconds (while charging Han L EV and Tang L EV). The car’s charging time from 7% to 50% was just 4.5 minutes.
That's the thing, the manufacturer can rate the cells at any C they want. The real question isn't whether these are "rated" for 10C, but how much degregation these will show after 1000 cycles at 10C. Cooling systems will also play into this: If we assume 5% charging losses that's 50kW that will need to be dissipated while charging for the cells not to heat up - no small feat even if the losses are lower.
It's designed for China by China, the western EU limitations are not applicable. As to who will deliver this in the next decades at scale? I can only speculate: China.
Even 350kw (by far the newest batch) is a fraction of what would be needed here.
Regardless, those station numbers are also misleading. As I wrote such chargers are most often in islands of 10-20 poles so you can divide that number. Plus 350kw is almost always shared per two stations - meaning you get half if both sides of the charger is occupied.
My guess is that charging stations will buffer the power in high discharge capacity battery banks rather than pulling it directly from the grid in real time.
Don’t many Tesla supercharger sites already do that?
On batteries, my understanding is that we’ve been able to charge at these rates for quite a while now, but doing so results in a lot of heat which reduces cycle life.
The article does not really say anything about the system, but I wonder how this differ from MCS [0] which allows up 3.75MW theoretically and should (fingers crossed) begin to slowly roll out in Europe for trucks this year.
I live in Germany, which has its automobile industry being shredded into pieces by China, and it's for a good reason though.
China is so ahead of the west in EVs, their battery tech, supply chain and also expertise is so amazing.
In China, you can buy even a car with swappable batteries. They are also extremely cheap in comparison to the West.
For people that live in the best Chinese cities and work in a white collar job, it's very cheap as well. Cheaper than it is in America or Europe as the purchase parity there is much higher.
The West needs to drop the "free markets economics" and heavily invest and subsidize EVs, they are the future.
We can't afford to wait 10 years and lag behind so much, China will end up producing all cars in the world and that's millions of well-paid jobs.
Go to Brazil and you'll see how many BYDs are everywhere. China will unfortunately eat the entire third-world car market, which has long been a good line of profit to US/EU car manufacturers.
The car industry in Germany is being Nokia'd. The iPhone didn't win because the US had central planning.
I'm not convinced at all free market economics are holding us back. Rather other parts of the world are leapfrogging us despite not adopting it.
It was always obvious EVs would be the future. I remember being at a friend's party in Germany more than a decade ago, talking to some guests who worked in the auto industry. Told them about this new upcoming car company called Tesla and how it would transform the entire transportation sector and eat their lunch. The entire group laughed me out of the room and talked about the amazing research they were doing on "clean diesel" or something, I kid you not.
It's simply a combination of innovator's dilemma, complacency and no appetite for risk taking.
You are both wrong, it's the other way around - the free market economics are outside the EU. Here is the EUSSR. Just try producing something in "green" Europe, have a look at the amount of carbon tax you have to pay, then you will see.
I live in Germany, and have heard the same story for years - only with Tesla instead of "Chinese cars". And look, who is dying now? Meanwhile, my ID.7 is just an excellent car.
Totgesagte leben länger, and such. The problems for German car makers were never that they could not deliver BEV, but that people would not buy them in numbers which would justify complete transition. Manufacturers like BMW, who were driving a more cautious, dual BEV/Hybrid approach for the same model did much better, and it is not like an BMW i4 is not a very good BEV.
Because of low human rights advantage, their products are much cheaper. They also send all used batteries back to China, leaving no pollution to your country. But such thing won't last forever.
Other than what the other person said I don't think it's just wages.
I'd say decades of having western manufacturing exported there in large part because of those wages, stability, etc leads to a country that's now just simply good at manufacturing. With diversified supply options, plenty of experienced human capital, automation skills and companies.
A different place like India or some place in africa can have those low wages and plenty of people but lack the supply chains, automation experience and infrastructure, etc
You are absolutely correct that just low wages by themselves are not enough to attract manufacturing on a global scale.
There are a lot of prerequisites (power/transport infrastructure, capable workers, political stability, organizational know-how) plus also network effects and advantages from local demand, and Chinese government did a really good job at providing all this over the last half-century.
But the majority of those would already be met in a lot of western economies, and wage IS the number one factor to build factories in China instead of, say, Italy.
I also really wanted to stress this because people love to gloss over this wage-gap, and pretend that US manufacturing would get an immediate resurgence if we only abolished environmental regulations, or gave industry juicy tax-breaks/incentives, or invested heavily into relevant education programs-- but IMO those arguments are mostly a sham, and the core problem is that US workers are neither willing to work for $5/h nor are consumer willing to pay the difference.
>But the majority of those would already be met in a lot of western economies, and wage IS the number one factor to build factories in China instead of, say, Italy.
It may be the biggest but at this point i think the combined corpus of other factor outweighs it insofar that it would take a long time for things to slowly come back.
At least for factories that aren't sweatshop work or primarily manual conveyor belt work.
Even in those later ones (I did automation for one in the food industry that literally can't move far abroad) it's insane how much of the endless amount of components that keep it all running came from china.
I think your best bet other than just wage is both education adjustments and gov incentive that works primarily from the bottom up rather than from the top down like countries in general in the west tend to try.
After all if i get a tax credit or grant or what have you for locally produced....idk keyboards...the cheapest way for me is still to get every component from china and to assemble here using a PnP machine manufactured in...you guessed it.
> Because of low human rights advantage, their products are much cheaper.
Honestly, this is strongly misleading.
Chinese goods are not primarily cheap because they are subsidised by communists, or because of lax environmental regulations, or because of prisoner labor-- the primary reason (and its not even close) are low wage levels. Chinese manufacturing pays an average $25k/year ($15k without adjusting for purchasing parity!!) for a 49h week. No western industrialized country even wants to compete with that.
You are very correct that this is not gonna last forever though, because wages are rising in China, too, which will probably lead to a bunch of manufacturing moving to another low-wage country (maybe India, or even Africa in the future).
> You are very correct that this is not gonna last forever though, because wages are rising in China, too, which will probably lead to a bunch of manufacturing moving to another low-wage country (maybe India, or even Africa in the future).
Already happening. Was in China recently - the driver of the rideshare I took said he was driving now because his electronics company outsourced manufacturing to Indonesia.
> I live in Germany, which has its automobile industry being shredded into pieces by China, and it's for a good reason though.
This is wrong. In the past German car makers made a great profit from selling cars in China and had a really good time. Now the Chinese have learned to build their own cars, which lead to a significant loss of market share for German and other foreign car makers.
But German car makers are still quite profitable. For example BMW just announced a profit of 7.68B Euros, and are still the largest exporter of cars in the USA (yes, exporter). The race is still on, and despite strong competition from Chinese car manufacturers, German car makers are everything but "shredded into pieces".
Plus the above example of the culture of finger pointing, hence avoiding accountability for the lack of vision.
Getting into the game too late and wasting a ton of cash on cars that miss actual target-user’s needs and wallets.
Unfortunately, this is a pattern having emerged in Germany since quite a while - it’s either the pandemic, putin, the government, china or whatever is en vogue to put blame on.
German engineering prowess is dying a slow death caused by their own ignorance of their arrogance.
They are still selling cars for the badge but people are slowly realizing that things have changed.
And don't get me started on the quality of their automotive software. I just bought an Audi so the pain is still fresh but after two weeks I'm still not able to properly login to my car - actually, it's 4 (four! yes!) different logins, and one of them is stuck to Italian. To call Audi software "garbage" is an understatement, and if there's anyone working there in here, yes I stand by my statement.
The cable is cooled by a mix of water and glycol, which runs through the cable and also cools the connector pins. Tesla use this in their supercharger cables, as without it the cable would be too heavy.
The values posted above cannot be far from the real values.
Perhaps they use something like 700 A at 1400 V.
It is unlikely that they use a voltage over 1500 V, because the semiconductor switches used in the converter become much more expensive at higher voltages. A current of 700 A or even 1000 A can be easily handled by a single IGBT module. There are much bigger semiconductor switches that can handle several thousand ampere currents.
I should have been clearer, I did a web search and found other articles, which based on marketing information from the company, say it's 1000A and 1000V.
1 MW charging. Impressive if the battery can handle that on the long run. Though I guess for a lot of users it will not be used often, only on long vacation trips or similar.
KB is a JEDEC thing where they invented a new shorthand prefix but re-used the Si prefix names of (kilo, mega, giga) while changing their meanings. They used capital K for kilo meaning 1024.
It's certainly one of the dumbest standards in existence and the fact Microsoft went with it and extended it is frustrating too.
I wonder myself, if countries are already having infrastructure problems, especially in summer, where also Air conditioning systems are active at full blast (I speak now from an EU perspective), how can these MW Chargers be able to handle the load?
During winter, without using carbon fossil generated energy, it's pretty unrealistic, isn't?
Summer is more or less a solved problem - we cover southern Europe with solar panels, then add transmission lines to shunt the excess north.
Every car park, every commercial building... they've even started installing them to shade the highway medians. Plenty of barren desert to build out solar too. And if that's not enough, we can juice North African economies by building connectors down to the Sahara
If you think from the angle that BYD’s first target customers are Chinese people, and how China has been adding an incredibly amount of infrastructure YoY, it makes a bit more sense. Completely different playing field.
Under the assumption that electric cars will drive the same amount and the efficiency is the same and any car charges at a random time and there is a big enough numbers of car, then charging faster will not increase the load on the net. In reality this will drastically decrease the number of charging station needed, as they will be freed faster.
I'm not sure why this is downvoted - this is actually a valid point. If your average charging station handles 24 cars an hour, it does not matter from a power consumption perspective if it does so by having 12 chargers and everyone waiting half an hour or 2 charges with everyone waiting 5 minutes (but the UX will be drastically improved).
The only effect will probably be increased EV adoption, but that's something we generally want and need to prepare for anyway.
I believe in China EV batteries are commonly on some kind of subscription system, replaced at service intervals or when their total capacity runs low, so from a consumer point of view it doesn't matter so much if it shortens the battery life. If you’re buying the pack outright it matters more.
China does have some car brands that support battery swapping, with NIO being a notable example that markets this feature. However, their market share isn’t particularly high. It can be said that battery swapping is a common practice in China, but it isn’t the primary method for electric vehicle energy replenishment. Incidentally, NIO vehicles don’t support particularly high charging speeds. High-speed charging can impact battery lifespan, so manufacturers like NIO also prefer to avoid promoting fast charging from their perspective.
Yeah, I think the goal of these systems is not that everyone has a MW charger in their home. You still (relatively) slow-charge the car at night, and only use the MW chargers for infrequent highway top-ups
It's mandatory for gas stations to install at least one EV charger in a lot of EU countries. Spain recently started requiring one EV charger per 20 spaces in every parking structure. The electric transition may not be fast, but it's happening.
I'm not sure whether this negativity is justified. It seems like a genuine breakthrough that could alleviate the range anxiety of many people who are interested in EVs but not fully convinced.
yes, there is a lot of work going into battery technology at present. There is news most days.
It is true that most of the announcements relate to things that are one or more of: an incremental gain, not going to make it to production at all, or not production-ready this year. That's the nature of research. However, a percentage of them are actual.
"Five minute charging" is an actual milestone. As in, it is feature parity with ICE vehicles. Once you get to that charging speed, another increase in speed gives steeply diminishing returns, and other aspects of the experience become more important.
When will these cars have a breakthrough in terms of UI and privacy (let's ignore the cost for a moment).
I don't want to spend a shitload of money on an iPhone with wheels which doesn't even come with all the privacy promises apple makes and which is full of dark patterns, subscription models, and proprietary interfaces (talking about apple carplay, android auto, feature allowing you to use spotify, etc. The mere fact the car has these makes me not want to buy it, even though I would never use them. Paying money to have a hardcoded e.g. spotify client in my car is encouraging exactly the wrong design practices.).
This basically describes Tesla only. Drive a different brand and you get a very similar experience to a gas powered car. Unfortunately a terrible track record on privacy is par for the course in all vehicles in 2025.
Tesla, privacy...?! I remember years ago when Musk remotely disabled root access to someone's car because they were rummaging around in the software too much. Plus all the times Tesla publicly released play-by-play details of an Autopilot/FSD crash to the news. If anything, I'd categorize Tesla as the least privacy-focused car company out there, especially now that they'll face zero repercussions from the federal government for any violations.
Never. The government wants you to drive "an iPhone with wheels" because it comes with a convenient spying device. Means they don't need to put up a network of cameras to track you (some do anyway). It probably also bundles a remote kill switch just in case you offend some bureaucrat or just if you expend all your future energy ration. The suggestion to remove the antenna will probably make it fail a government "safety" inspection.
This is is not just problem for the owners but anyone else. All those cameras are privacy problem in general (sometimes used also with parked cars - like in case of Tesla).
Buy a cheap EV. Remove the antenna, privacy problem solved. Use your phone for satnav and streaming audio via bluetooth. Same as with a TV, you get it cheaper because they're expecting you to subscribe, so you don't and profit.
Is that feasible?
I looked into removing OnStar in a first gen Chevy Volt but from what I found its so deeply integrated into the entertainment system that many things just can't work without it.
Do you know of someone who has successfully done this?
Meanwhile, there is unidentified source of lithium pollution in Beijing, causing 20 times higher concentrations among pregnant women and newborns[0]. Guess everything has its cost, even for clean energy.
[0]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3301053/unus...
Man, that's fascinating, full study here [1].
I wonder how the Lithium is entering the food chain? Given they've tested drinking water, food, and air.
Dust from processing? occupational exposure? unscrupulous recycling operations? but Lithium isn't a heavy metal so exposure would have to be ongoing.
Definitely need to test some additional cities and try and understand what's going on here. While concerning these blood levels are at 3% of the doses typically studied in psychiatric conditions. There's some potential public health benefits to low level lithium exposure actually [2] but at the same time you don't want to be unintentionally exposing pregnant folks.
1. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c12959
2. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2020.128
Cheap and recycled cookware or cooking oil would be up there on the list of interesting things to check imho
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cml2kr9wkdzo
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-024-00686-7
Anywhere in the supply chain to a streetfood stall, or mom and pop restaurant or cornershop/bodega equivalent could have substitutions made that other people in the chain may not notice
Do wonder if it could be unintentionally being alloyed into recycled aluminium etc. Though I'm not sure if that's more likely than upstream routes.
Good old scientific mystery.
I entirely fail to see how a government related pollution problem is related to a potential EV charging breakthrough by a private company.
It's xenophobia. Whenever Chinese anything is brought up someone has to bring up something unrelated to show how horrible china is.
Same thing happens with pollution per capita or any number of environmental metrics. People jump through insane mental hoops to paint China as far worse than the USA.
I think holding China to a greater standard than USA shows respect rather than disrespect for China.
Given the current US administration I don't see any respect. America wants a shining beacon on their tech and offerings while my continent Europe and others has to be painted in a worse light.
yeah, there are a crap ton of lithium based devices made in china... my biggest suspect for that is the vape market.
its already a blackmarket industry.. i bet they dont care much about where how the batteries are made.
What data do you base that on?
Has nothing to do with it but the US is learning...
"Trump administration moves to dismantle EPA’s science office" - https://www.ehn.org/trump-administration-moves-to-dismantle-...
How is that related to this news? In Europe we have many potential lithium mines and in the US mines are currently being developed.
Where’s the evidence that the cause is “clean energy”?
It didn't appear from nowhere via by Monkey Magic, that much is certain.
The source, then, is either
* raw lithium rich brines,
* Spodumene ore,
* waste from brine processing, OR waste from spodumene processing, (to create industrial scale supplies of industry usable lithium)
* waste from using lithium in industry to create (say) batteries.
Working through that list, lithium rich brines are largely in Chile and in some parts of China that are not Beijing, spodumene ore comes largely from Australia and parts of China that are not Beijing.
I'm not aware of, but this doesn't rule it out, brine or spodumene processing in the immediate vicinity of Beijing (it's quite likely there is some spodumene processing in that area) .. there definitely is large scale industry use of end product lithium in Beijing specifically to produce batteries.
The majority of lithium usage is related to "clean energy" .. or even just common battery use for electronics, so it's easily the most probable source of lithium turning up in an urban area such as Beijing.
Addendum: As grumpy-de-sre correctly points out below, the end of use disposal of lithium batteries in Beijing also deserves attention as a source.
The exact 'how' is as yet unknown .. it'll likely be tracked down and dealt with given the papers being published.
This will be of great interest to Texas a decade or so from now, the critical materials act and other recent activities have seen ground broken on lithium and rare earth concentrate processing plants on US soil in Texas (and elsewhere), the recent relaxing of EPA guidelines and reduction in oversight will likely lead to similar health issues appearing in due course.
Do you have any suggestions for where else it might come from?
Improper disposal of used batteries (eg. burning them) is another potential exposure route.
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I’m admittedly really out of the loop on battery tech developments but I was hopeful the industry was slowly steering towards iron/sodium batteries to replace lithium for reasons of cost and pollution. Did that hit a roadblock or is it just still very early stage?
China supposedly made a breakthrough in battery technology, what does that have to do with lithium pollution in China? You sound bitter about China’s progress.
We used to poison people with lead. Stopping lithium spreading seems like an easy task.
If China pays extra cost to deal with pollution, their ev won't be that cheap.
Half the authors on that paper are employed by the Chinese academy of sciences. Doesn't look like brushing it under the rug to me.
More than likely it'll turn out to be something that can be easily and relatively inexpensively mitigated.
Sadly, all reports on this paper have been removed from every media in China in a single night. Academics are only allowed to be discussed among academics.
It's true that I can't find any reporting on Baidu Xinwen. I can definitely understand why, as there's a real risk of causing potentially unjustified panic (scientific reporting and literacy isn't great globally). More research is needed before action.
Fascinating that it's not a complete information blackout, but just disseminated on a need to know basis. It's kind of an interesting social contract really.
I'd prefer standardized, swappable batteries. Imagine driving up to a gas^Wbattery station, you place your car at a certain spot and your old battery drops out and a new one is inserted and off you go, not even having to leave the car. The old battery is charged slowly, cheaply and safely, while you're on the road again 5 minutes before that one guy still filling diesel.
Maybe, but that only really works if you have a battery leasing concept - like e.g. Renault Zoe. Otherwise, you're swapping something you "own" with something that may be of inferior quality.
Would you really feel happy having bought a brand new car to find the most expensive component had been replaced with an 8 year old battery just from "filling it up"? What if the previous "owner" had just grounded the car and smashed the battery back into a speed bump or a large stone?
Imagine a damaged battery pack caused a fire and destroyed your car... Who would be liable? You? The garage that you last swapped the battery at (and would you even remember where that was)? The previous renter who may had damaged it? The renter who damaged it 2 weeks ago leading to its failure now? The manufacturer for designing in the risk? Are we going to need to pay to staff 24/7 at every battery swap location to inspect the incoming batteries?
Then there are the safety risks of having a high voltage connector that has to undergo potentially 10,000 cycles during its lifetime. Any slight misalignment will start to cause arcing and contact degradation, increased resistance and higher risk of fires. I realise that this same argument can be made to high speed charging ports as well, but the connector on the car would have to withstand significantly more vibration.
Additionally, the battery is one of the heaviest parts of an EV, so there's a challenge of making something that's easy to remove whilst remaining firmly secure the rest of the time. Such a thing is best supported from underneath, but having top or side loaded batteries would likely cause significant issues with weight distribution. Finally, modern EVs also have contoured batteries to fill the available space in the car, whereas swappable batteries are likely to need to be designed to be interchangeable between models and manufacturers.
To me, I'd see it as having too many downsides. High current charging can be done safely if systems are designed well, as well as still retaining the ability to fall back to slow trickle overnight charging which will probably remain the preferred option for most. We already have a standardised plug that can support this, the increased current can be negotiated over the control lines just as is currently done.
Fill up an electric car with thousands of golf-ball-sized batteries, each holding maybe 10 watts. Small enough they are treated like almost like a fluid. They're dumped and recharged at a station, damaged ones disposed of. Too cheap individually to worry about damage, homogeneous enough that ownership of specific cells is not a concern.
I'll leave the technical details for the engineers. :)
I think Taiwan is like this, but with ev scooters. There are big battery walls, and you take and swap. I think it's fantastic for a town.
Gogogo - very popular, and pretty extensive coverage [0]. The only problem is the scooters themselves are so quiet they sneak up behind you on the street.
[0] www.gogoro.com/gogoro-network
There are guys who ride around swapping the batteries in public rental bikes too - they send an alert when the batteries are low and a guy just drives around swapping ones near his current location.
The batteries are small compared to what you'd need for a car - they're maybe slightly larger than a standard lead-acid battery.
Silence (https://www.silenceuk.com/) has scooters and "microcars" with swappable batteries. If I remember correctly, their batteries might have wheels as well so they're easier to move around, since they weight a bit.
All over mainland china as well, works great for small vehicles like mopeds etc (because the battery is light enough to be swapped by an individual person without tools). Probably helps reduce fire risk as well (because people aren't charging themselves indoors).
Wow, I've just googled it and seen a video about it - pretty amazing !
Isn't that very common with NIO cars etc? They are also very popular with many other brands, especially for rideshare cars.
https://cnevpost.com/2025/03/04/nio-97800-daily-battery-swap...
This concept makes even more sense for trucks than it does for cars. The batteries are larger, destinations are likely to have appropriate infrastructure, routes are more uniform.
https://www.januselectric.com.au/
Nio does this (only for their cars tho) - apparently takes 3m to do a battery swap. And apparently it's getting to the point where it's close to profitability.
https://www.nio.com/nio-power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w
They are out there, of course, the standardization part isn't there.
Its already a thing with Nio. Whats more they also allow you to upgrade your battery to higher capacity for long trip ie your normal car battery is 60Kwh but you swap with a 105Kwh for a long trip.
>The old battery is charged slowly, cheaply and safely..
May be you can be sure of that. But can you be sure of the new battery that you just got, will discharge safely..?
Sure I'd like to swap out a critical part of my car that is also like 60% of it's value to some random part I get in exchange at a highway station!
Google claims "On average, EV batteries weigh around 454 kg" ... pretty heavy stuff to carry around.
If we can do it with scooters today, I bet you we can do it with cars, just need some stronger mechanical arms and whatnot.
With scooters you handle the battery by yourself.
Unless you plan to scale human strength in the next years, it won’t be the same solution.
That's for the whole assembly, obviously. If you were designing for swaps, the BMS and other active components would remain in place and only smaller packs of cells would be swapped. That also addresses the equally specious "don't want to swap out a critical component that's half my car's value" argument.
BetterPlace had it. They sold around 700 cars and had some stations in Israel. The idea was a bit too early (2013) and the battery tech was in its infancy, maybe now it can suceeded?
It only works if you lease the battery. And if you lease the battery, you care much less about doing all the things that keep you from trashing it. So either you now have to also lease the car (with plenty of surveillance) or the company has to write off batteries at a high rate.
Isn't the main thing that trashes the battery fast-charging, which is eliminated by this scheme?
> Isn't the main thing that trashes the battery fast-charging
For LFP it’s actually leaving the battery in a high state of charge [1][2], though specifics come down to battery chemistry.
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ad6cbd/...
[2] https://insideevs.com/news/731210/lfp-battery-health-degrade...
After reading the paper the effects of leaving it in a high charge state seems to be smallish. The insideevs.com article never says what the size of the effect is, which is a hint it might be a lot of clicky writing about a nothing burger.
In any case if you are the leasing company, you get to control the BMS. The BMS holds the keys to the kingdom. It can control how the battery can be used: charging rates, max charge, how long max charge will be maintained before it self discharges, min charge, allowed operating temperatures. It seems to me they could mostly eliminate the sort of abuse that seems to concern you.
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Awesome to see BYD continue to innovate! I wish Tesla continued to push on powertrain improvements like this rather than making a triangle shaped truck.
The triangle shaped truck was used as a testbed for several innovations: 4 wheel drive (not just for parking gimmicks), size increase of gigapressed parts, first deployment of the 4680 dry process batteries, 48V for the non-traction electrical systems, Ethernet based networking for systems interconnect.
It’s literally a concept car in production…
There's a reason most concept cars don't make it to production.
What are the reasons that truck shouldn't have entered production? I can think of a few myself (pedestrian safety, ugly, not bulletproof and shouldn't even ostensibly be, etc) but none of these reasons seem to be related to the actual technical innovations which are apparently in the truck. So where is the relevance?
> What are the reasons that truck shouldn't have entered production?
It’s selling like shit. And this was before the whole Tesla vibe shift. Instead of a leading-edge $25k EV we got a truck that can’t truck and robotaxi vapourware. Meanwhile, BYD is on its game.
Sure, but that doesn't seem obviously relevant to the question of whether the truck features innovation or just a triangular shape.
> that doesn't seem obviously relevant to the question of whether the truck features innovation or just a triangular shape
The car not selling isn’t relevant to why it “shouldn't have entered production?”
It's answering a question I never asked.
To recap:
>>> Tesla didn't innovate, they just made a triangle.
>> The triangle actually has several innovations, it's basically a concept car
> Concept cars usually don't enter production for a reason
Those reasons, in this case, being unrelated to the technological innovations, as far as I can tell. Correct me if I'm wrong. Tesla's problem isn't a failure to innovate, it's their leadership deciding to make stupid and impractical cars.
> >>> Tesla didn't innovate, they just made a triangle
Don't recap with fake quotes.
What do you mean it’s before ”vibe shift”, that’s not true?
Musk said, on a 2023 earnings call, that he expected “the Tesla Cybertruck to sell between 250,000 and 500,000 units per year” [1]. It sold fewer than 40,000 in 2024 [2]. Tesla’s sales in 2024 weren’t 100+ P/E calibre, but they also didn’t yet reflect the sort of cratering we saw at the end of ‘24 in both Tesla sales and resale values [3].
Cybertruck flopped as a product before Tesla flopped as a brand. It’s why Tesla is throttling down their production [4].
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/667723/musk-estimates-tesla-could...
[2] https://insideevs.com/news/747195/tesla-cybertruck-sales-dem...
[3] https://www.cargurus.com/research/price-trends/Tesla-m112?en...
[4] https://electrek.co/2025/01/16/tesla-throttles-down-cybertru...
Half of these don't really sound like innovations as much as they're firsts for Tesla themselves. 48 V systems and four-wheel steering (and drive) are not really innovative at this point.
the triangle truck supports 500 kw charging
With a much larger battery. Double the battery and voilà you can charge it at twice the speed.
People love to hate on the Cybertruck for political reasons but it's literally one of the most innovative vehicles of our time.
Perhaps if it innovates in how shitty a car can be. Sort of an example that innovation for innovation's sake is not always desirable.
Things were wildly overpromised. The innovation that was delivered (e.g. steer by wire) gives little advantage for customers.
Steer by wire is a huge advantage and the nimble handling is one of the most beloved things about the vehicle among owners.
Comparing to the promised 500 miles of range or 39k USD starting price?
People did not go crazy with the reservations because CT was going to have steer by wire.
Genuinely, what innovations did the Cybertruck bring?
Since you claim an extraordinary thing without evidence...
No. It's not.
> peak charging speeds of 1,000 kilowatts (kW)
Obvious safety concerns aside, I really worry that we are losing perspective on what the grid is capable of and the possibility that distributed technology won't get us to the ideal outcome fast enough.
The power plant nearest to me could only handle ~1000 instances of this kind of charging before it is completely saturated. The transmission (transformer) infrastructure is the biggest bottleneck. Even if Entergy built several additional gigawatts of capacity on their existing site, they'd have no way to deliver it. Tesla would have to install supercharging stations in their switch yard and figure out how to operate at much higher supply voltages.
Well, the chargers won't be pulling 1MW continuously, so you can smooth this out by installing batteries with the chargers. The grid demand becomes a more constant trickle into the batteries co-located with the charger
No need for batteries when supercapacitors will do.
Which supercapacitors are sold and have car-scale energy?
So you might have to wait an hour for your 5 minute charging time? Doesn't sound like a killer feature.
the idea would be to slowly charge the capacitor to its capacity in the breaks between the charger being used. That way when you arrive at the charger, the capacitor would be fairly full and able to quickly transfer that energy to your car. The charger would then replenish that capacitor more slowly (meaning that the charger wouldn't be able to be used for a bit).
This will have very little impact on the grid. If you can charge twice as fast you need half as many chargers for the same capacity, resulting in the same load at 100% utilization.
The batteries are the same size that they were previously, so the kWh pulled from the grid doesn't change.
I don't think we can look at it on an average basis when each vehicle is pulling a megawatt, regardless of how long they are doing it for.
Industrial users with electric arc furnaces and other massive loads need special, ongoing arrangements with the utility to operate safely on the grid. It would only take 200~300 of these high speed chargers to equate to the demand of the largest EAFs on earth.
Mostly agree with you on that case. My initial thought on the matter also.
This theoretical car draws 1 MW for 5 minutes, pulling 83 kWh. Your normal residential address in America only uses 20 kWh all day long. The hard limit in a lot of areas is 25-30 kW continuous. Sure, they're building special charging stations, yet this is like 40 residential addresses running at max line limit consumption suddenly.
Looking at this a different way, lighting the entire SoFi Stadium (3.5 Disneylands for another scale), takes 10 MW. [1][2] Ten (10) of these cars pulling on the grid is like lighting an entire NFL scale stadium on game day.
[1] https://brilliantsourceenergy.com/the-power-of-the-super-bow...
[2] https://time.com/3926325/nfl-super-bowl-energy-usage/
Looking at something like Electricity Maps [3], the entire state of Texas is producing 47,700 MW (11.6 GW Gas, 24.3 GW Wind, 6.7 GW Coal, 5 GW Nuclear, and they're only exchanging 25 MW across their borders with other utilities. 25 of these cars is Texas's border electricity exchange.
Enormous, multi-state electricity organizations. Have 1000 of these show up to gas stations in some place like Texas, and you're suddenly pulling a substation chunk of the entire Texas electric grid all at once.
[3] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-TEX-ERCO/72h/hourly
most of these cars will be charging using L2 overnight charging. If you need to limit the fast charging, you can surge price it so maybe it costs $100 to charge fully instead of 25, etc. There are many possible solutions as long as they can solve for the surges as it spins up and down.
That's enough to support hundreds of thousands of cars.
And how many cars do we need to be able to support in order to cover all of MISO, ERCOT, etc?
1 EAF is a very minor amount of infrastructure compared the gasoline infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of cars and the energy usage of hundreds of thousands of cars.
If this works, you can use the same tech for distributed grid ballancing batteries.
I think that this would work by having charging stations "buffer" energy by getting it from the grid more slowly and storing it on-site, ready to be pushed into EVs.
People in America and Canada where there is a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs don't appreciate what they are missing out on.
For ~$60k you can buy vehicles like the Li Auto L9 that are nicer than a brand new Rolls Royce. The value for price you get blows other manufacturers out of the water.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tjnq2usV51c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwO-OcNUzyg
It’s a nice car but it’s nowhere near as nice as Rolls Royce. You’re not doing your argument any favors by exaggerating this much.
However, I agree that Chinese EVs are a serious competition to other EVs.
Fair, a more apt comparison is the Hongqi E-HS9: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4d_-W23mgc
But on a driver experience feature-by-feature comparison the Li-L9 actually competes with a Rolls Royce:
- flat vertical reclinable seats
- 9 point massage chairs
- Heads up display
- advanced self-driving with LIDAR
- chamber to heat and cool food
- OLED back passenger screens with gesture control
- voice control of the vehicle
- quiet closing doors
This is maybe comparable to BMW series 7 or MB s class.
RR is about building each car for the given customer. There’s almost no limit to what you can wish.
I'm sorry but you don't seem to understand what Rolls Royce is really about. I know China is capable of producing quality if the proper price is paid but I seriously doubt anything like this: https://youtu.be/ZcFrFjl-RQs?t=617
Ok, they are not handcrafting fiber optics into the shapes of a star. But what I'm seeing in this video is a lot of argument from authority, posturing, pomp and inefficient bespoke manufacturing processes. When you actually look at the feature set and comfort quality you're getting from the interior of a Hongqi E-HS9... it's actually competitive if not better than a Rolls Royce. In fact the designer of the Hongqi E-HS9 used to work for Rolls Royce.
Can a Rolls Royce turn its wheels 90 degrees to park sideways? Does it have advanced LIDAR self-driving?
Yes China is able to produce tacky designs and fill out a spec sheet just like it has done in tech for decades. Thats not why customers buy Rolls Royce. In fact based on your wording it seems like the point has gone completely over your head.
I don't think anything in life is better than sitting in a Rolls Royce, apart from say having a kid (but even that's debatable lol)
When I was in China last summer, every taxi I used was an electric car. By far, the worst of these was a Tesla Model 3. You can buy serious luxury vehicles for really very little money compared to western manufacturers. Not electric car specific, but for me, the most impressive thing is that the mapping apps are all synchronised with the traffic light systems.
There are zero buttons on the center console. That car would never be considered as an option for me.
And will probably look like trash in 5 years due to the headliner drooping, fabric fraying, electronics crapping out, etc.
Also good luck getting any replacement parts down the road wherever you live.
You sound like Americans talking about Japanese cars 30 years ago.
And then once Australians revered Toyota as the choice of farm utes (Hilux) and bush bashers (Landcruiser, etc), we railed on the Korean brands. And now that the Korean brands have found their place, the Chinese brands cop it next.
Japan makes nice things though. Also the corolla is 60 years old and still a fantastic car.
That's the thing, back in the day Jaoanesd manufacturing was subject to the same silly narrative you mentioned - "yeah, it's low quality stuff, in a few years it will look like crap, etc".
It was bullshit then, and it is bullshit now. Ik fairness, I heard great reports from people that bought Chinese EVs in terms of overall quality.
Perhaps ironically, there were many reports of Teslas actually having issues with poor fit and finishing.
Sorry but this is cope. Why do you assume the build quality must be disastrously bad? In Australia where there is no tariff on Chinese EV's there are many Chinese vehicles on the road now -- this logically suggests an expansion of repair support will trickle into Australia also.
China is not just beating the U.S. on price, they are beating their manufacturers on quality and features. I'm not suggesting Toyota levels of reliability yet, but Tesla doesn't have a track record of reliability either. These Chinese EV's are easily as good as a Tesla, and better given advanced features like LIDAR that Elon cut from Tesla's.
You're living on another planet if you think you can maintain one of these for more than 5 years. Sure, you can buy the rubber but that's about it.
BYD offers great warranties that are 6-10 years where I’m at. And lifetime for some battery details.
Cool, my made in china wrench comes with a lifetime warranty too! I feel safe knowing it's the last i'll ever need!
What? You literally just go to the dealership and they make the changes for you.
[citation needed] You're making extraordinary claims.
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1MW charging? wow, that's a lot. I hope they have a suitable explosion containment pie dish in case something shorts
Fortescue has 6MW fast charging for their mining trucks...
With a 1900kwh battery, that is not even 4C.
Ok Edison, we get it!
'as quick as filling up a tank' is a bit exaggerated (5 min for 250 miles) but I guess it's impressive that it's getting to the same order of magnitude.
The comments here are more interesting than the article.
Often on HN that statement would mean that someone with relevant technical experience has commented, but not this time.
Instead the comments on a fairly mundane incremental improvement in technology are full of concern trolling, whataboutism, nitpicking and cope.
This suggests to me that people are starting to absorb the information that China is ahead in this area of tech and they are emotionally uncomfortable with that reality.
5 min charging would be a game changer as it reduces the need for larger batteries which lowers cost and weight again impacting cost.
Battery charging/discharging speed is limited not by capacity but by current relative to capacity. Li-ion batteries can generally be recharged in constant current mode without significant degrading up to "4C" - 4x its mAh rating, above a low threshold below which it's not yet safe to charge at full speed, and below ~80% where it's no longer safe to charge with constant current but charging has to switch to low current constant voltage mode.
Cutting down charging time to below 1/4th standard Earth hours require material science breakthroughs(hard). While this system might be useful for charging a 4MWh train packs, or a 1MWh semi pack with a not insignificant degradation penalty, this does not accelerate charging for most EV users even if this was to be deployed widely.
I think you jumped to the wrong conclusion. Another news source suggests proper groundbreaking 10C charging:for a standard EV
> the BYD’s pile supports the 10C charging. It can charge 400 km in 5 minutes. It is two kilometers in one second! During the live test, this station reached the 1 MW level of power in 10 seconds (while charging Han L EV and Tang L EV). The car’s charging time from 7% to 50% was just 4.5 minutes.
A nitpick on the math you cite: 400km in 5 min (300 sec) is not 2 km per sec.
The bigger open question is what is the degradation penalty for 10C charging. This doesn't matter for a demonstrator but is critical for consumer use.
Forget 4C, these have new 10C lithium iron phosphate batteries.
That's the thing, the manufacturer can rate the cells at any C they want. The real question isn't whether these are "rated" for 10C, but how much degregation these will show after 1000 cycles at 10C. Cooling systems will also play into this: If we assume 5% charging losses that's 50kW that will need to be dissipated while charging for the cells not to heat up - no small feat even if the losses are lower.
Pipe dreams, charging with extreme wattage is not where the research should be concentrated at.
> peak charging speeds of 1,000 kilowatts (kW)
Who will deliver this in the next decades at scale? In western EU you find 150W poles at most, and that's like 10 stations/120km.
It's designed for China by China, the western EU limitations are not applicable. As to who will deliver this in the next decades at scale? I can only speculate: China.
According to chargefinder there are hundreds, if not thousands of chargers all over Western EU with 350kW charing at least!
Even 350kw (by far the newest batch) is a fraction of what would be needed here.
Regardless, those station numbers are also misleading. As I wrote such chargers are most often in islands of 10-20 poles so you can divide that number. Plus 350kw is almost always shared per two stations - meaning you get half if both sides of the charger is occupied.
My guess is that charging stations will buffer the power in high discharge capacity battery banks rather than pulling it directly from the grid in real time.
Don’t many Tesla supercharger sites already do that?
On batteries, my understanding is that we’ve been able to charge at these rates for quite a while now, but doing so results in a lot of heat which reduces cycle life.
Have BYD solved that limiting issue?
The article does not really say anything about the system, but I wonder how this differ from MCS [0] which allows up 3.75MW theoretically and should (fingers crossed) begin to slowly roll out in Europe for trucks this year.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megawatt_Charging_System
I live in Germany, which has its automobile industry being shredded into pieces by China, and it's for a good reason though.
China is so ahead of the west in EVs, their battery tech, supply chain and also expertise is so amazing.
In China, you can buy even a car with swappable batteries. They are also extremely cheap in comparison to the West.
For people that live in the best Chinese cities and work in a white collar job, it's very cheap as well. Cheaper than it is in America or Europe as the purchase parity there is much higher.
The West needs to drop the "free markets economics" and heavily invest and subsidize EVs, they are the future.
We can't afford to wait 10 years and lag behind so much, China will end up producing all cars in the world and that's millions of well-paid jobs.
Go to Brazil and you'll see how many BYDs are everywhere. China will unfortunately eat the entire third-world car market, which has long been a good line of profit to US/EU car manufacturers.
The car industry in Germany is being Nokia'd. The iPhone didn't win because the US had central planning.
I'm not convinced at all free market economics are holding us back. Rather other parts of the world are leapfrogging us despite not adopting it.
It was always obvious EVs would be the future. I remember being at a friend's party in Germany more than a decade ago, talking to some guests who worked in the auto industry. Told them about this new upcoming car company called Tesla and how it would transform the entire transportation sector and eat their lunch. The entire group laughed me out of the room and talked about the amazing research they were doing on "clean diesel" or something, I kid you not.
It's simply a combination of innovator's dilemma, complacency and no appetite for risk taking.
Yes, I often wonder if China's main advantage here is the lack of an incumbent ICE industry holding things back.
Apparently the Japanese manufacturers downfall. Tens of thousands of almost impossible to fire ice car engineers and factory workers.
You are both wrong, it's the other way around - the free market economics are outside the EU. Here is the EUSSR. Just try producing something in "green" Europe, have a look at the amount of carbon tax you have to pay, then you will see.
I live in Germany, and have heard the same story for years - only with Tesla instead of "Chinese cars". And look, who is dying now? Meanwhile, my ID.7 is just an excellent car. Totgesagte leben länger, and such. The problems for German car makers were never that they could not deliver BEV, but that people would not buy them in numbers which would justify complete transition. Manufacturers like BMW, who were driving a more cautious, dual BEV/Hybrid approach for the same model did much better, and it is not like an BMW i4 is not a very good BEV.
Because of low human rights advantage, their products are much cheaper. They also send all used batteries back to China, leaving no pollution to your country. But such thing won't last forever.
Other than what the other person said I don't think it's just wages. I'd say decades of having western manufacturing exported there in large part because of those wages, stability, etc leads to a country that's now just simply good at manufacturing. With diversified supply options, plenty of experienced human capital, automation skills and companies. A different place like India or some place in africa can have those low wages and plenty of people but lack the supply chains, automation experience and infrastructure, etc
You are absolutely correct that just low wages by themselves are not enough to attract manufacturing on a global scale.
There are a lot of prerequisites (power/transport infrastructure, capable workers, political stability, organizational know-how) plus also network effects and advantages from local demand, and Chinese government did a really good job at providing all this over the last half-century.
But the majority of those would already be met in a lot of western economies, and wage IS the number one factor to build factories in China instead of, say, Italy.
I also really wanted to stress this because people love to gloss over this wage-gap, and pretend that US manufacturing would get an immediate resurgence if we only abolished environmental regulations, or gave industry juicy tax-breaks/incentives, or invested heavily into relevant education programs-- but IMO those arguments are mostly a sham, and the core problem is that US workers are neither willing to work for $5/h nor are consumer willing to pay the difference.
>But the majority of those would already be met in a lot of western economies, and wage IS the number one factor to build factories in China instead of, say, Italy.
It may be the biggest but at this point i think the combined corpus of other factor outweighs it insofar that it would take a long time for things to slowly come back. At least for factories that aren't sweatshop work or primarily manual conveyor belt work.
Even in those later ones (I did automation for one in the food industry that literally can't move far abroad) it's insane how much of the endless amount of components that keep it all running came from china.
I think your best bet other than just wage is both education adjustments and gov incentive that works primarily from the bottom up rather than from the top down like countries in general in the west tend to try. After all if i get a tax credit or grant or what have you for locally produced....idk keyboards...the cheapest way for me is still to get every component from china and to assemble here using a PnP machine manufactured in...you guessed it.
> Because of low human rights advantage, their products are much cheaper.
Honestly, this is strongly misleading.
Chinese goods are not primarily cheap because they are subsidised by communists, or because of lax environmental regulations, or because of prisoner labor-- the primary reason (and its not even close) are low wage levels. Chinese manufacturing pays an average $25k/year ($15k without adjusting for purchasing parity!!) for a 49h week. No western industrialized country even wants to compete with that.
You are very correct that this is not gonna last forever though, because wages are rising in China, too, which will probably lead to a bunch of manufacturing moving to another low-wage country (maybe India, or even Africa in the future).
> You are very correct that this is not gonna last forever though, because wages are rising in China, too, which will probably lead to a bunch of manufacturing moving to another low-wage country (maybe India, or even Africa in the future).
Already happening. Was in China recently - the driver of the rideshare I took said he was driving now because his electronics company outsourced manufacturing to Indonesia.
> I live in Germany, which has its automobile industry being shredded into pieces by China, and it's for a good reason though.
This is wrong. In the past German car makers made a great profit from selling cars in China and had a really good time. Now the Chinese have learned to build their own cars, which lead to a significant loss of market share for German and other foreign car makers.
But German car makers are still quite profitable. For example BMW just announced a profit of 7.68B Euros, and are still the largest exporter of cars in the USA (yes, exporter). The race is still on, and despite strong competition from Chinese car manufacturers, German car makers are everything but "shredded into pieces".
Plus the above example of the culture of finger pointing, hence avoiding accountability for the lack of vision.
Getting into the game too late and wasting a ton of cash on cars that miss actual target-user’s needs and wallets.
Unfortunately, this is a pattern having emerged in Germany since quite a while - it’s either the pandemic, putin, the government, china or whatever is en vogue to put blame on.
German engineering prowess is dying a slow death caused by their own ignorance of their arrogance.
They are still selling cars for the badge but people are slowly realizing that things have changed.
And don't get me started on the quality of their automotive software. I just bought an Audi so the pain is still fresh but after two weeks I'm still not able to properly login to my car - actually, it's 4 (four! yes!) different logins, and one of them is stuck to Italian. To call Audi software "garbage" is an understatement, and if there's anyone working there in here, yes I stand by my statement.
That's 1000 amps at 1000 volts.
What kind of wires do you need to handle that power?
Reminds me of this picture:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/CERN-cab...
The cable is cooled by a mix of water and glycol, which runs through the cable and also cools the connector pins. Tesla use this in their supercharger cables, as without it the cable would be too heavy.
https://www.cpcworldwide.com/Liquid-Cooling/Electric-Vehicle...
At 1000V, 1000A require 0.13cm wire diameter[0] over 2 Meter with 5V voltage drop, just 15 AWG.
[0] https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/amp-to-wire-size
A 5V drop at 1000 Amps also means 5000 Watts of heat generated, you probably want something with less of a drop.
There will be free hot showers, electrically heated Brazilian-style.
Yeah that turns the cable into a 5kW space heater.
Or 1300 horsepower
That's just a rough conversion for 1 megawatt. I was curious about the actual voltage and current they were using, since the article didn't say much.
The values posted above cannot be far from the real values.
Perhaps they use something like 700 A at 1400 V.
It is unlikely that they use a voltage over 1500 V, because the semiconductor switches used in the converter become much more expensive at higher voltages. A current of 700 A or even 1000 A can be easily handled by a single IGBT module. There are much bigger semiconductor switches that can handle several thousand ampere currents.
I should have been clearer, I did a web search and found other articles, which based on marketing information from the company, say it's 1000A and 1000V.
https://electrek.co/2025/03/17/byd-confirms-1000v-super-e-pl...
Won't too much fast charging deteriorate the battery health faster?
There was an article around here about how battery life actually improves if you ultra-fast charge the battery when you make it.
Maybe it will deteriorate it, but it seems that the effect that different charge types have on batteries may not be complete yet.
Solid-state batteries, which BYD is also working on, mitigate this problem.
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-insights/latest-marke...
Part of the research is probably making this effect less pronounced?
I don't know that "fast deterioration of battery health" is an actual widespread problem in EVs made in the last couple of years.
In fact, it might be the opposite:
"EV Batteries Last Way Longer Than Expected " https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life
https://www.wired.com/story/electric-cars-could-last-much-lo...
1 MW charging. Impressive if the battery can handle that on the long run. Though I guess for a lot of users it will not be used often, only on long vacation trips or similar.
In SI unit m means mili and M means mega.
In SI prefixes M=mega/m=milli, sure. In SI units m|M=metre.
Not to mention KB means kelvinbytes.
KB is a JEDEC thing where they invented a new shorthand prefix but re-used the Si prefix names of (kilo, mega, giga) while changing their meanings. They used capital K for kilo meaning 1024.
It's certainly one of the dumbest standards in existence and the fact Microsoft went with it and extended it is frustrating too.
Thanks, fixed it.
I thought maybe “m” means “metric mega” as usual in US, so.
This is the first time I hear about "metric mega", and I hang out a lot here, where Americans use their units without explanation.
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I wonder myself, if countries are already having infrastructure problems, especially in summer, where also Air conditioning systems are active at full blast (I speak now from an EU perspective), how can these MW Chargers be able to handle the load?
During winter, without using carbon fossil generated energy, it's pretty unrealistic, isn't?
Summer is more or less a solved problem - we cover southern Europe with solar panels, then add transmission lines to shunt the excess north.
Every car park, every commercial building... they've even started installing them to shade the highway medians. Plenty of barren desert to build out solar too. And if that's not enough, we can juice North African economies by building connectors down to the Sahara
If you think from the angle that BYD’s first target customers are Chinese people, and how China has been adding an incredibly amount of infrastructure YoY, it makes a bit more sense. Completely different playing field.
Does not really matter, if you charge 10 cars at 100kw or 1 car at 1MW. The amount of miles you add to your transportation system is the same.
I don't believe it's the same. What about charging multiple cars at 1MW though?
Under the assumption that electric cars will drive the same amount and the efficiency is the same and any car charges at a random time and there is a big enough numbers of car, then charging faster will not increase the load on the net. In reality this will drastically decrease the number of charging station needed, as they will be freed faster.
I'm not sure why this is downvoted - this is actually a valid point. If your average charging station handles 24 cars an hour, it does not matter from a power consumption perspective if it does so by having 12 chargers and everyone waiting half an hour or 2 charges with everyone waiting 5 minutes (but the UX will be drastically improved).
The only effect will probably be increased EV adoption, but that's something we generally want and need to prepare for anyway.
I believe in China EV batteries are commonly on some kind of subscription system, replaced at service intervals or when their total capacity runs low, so from a consumer point of view it doesn't matter so much if it shortens the battery life. If you’re buying the pack outright it matters more.
China does have some car brands that support battery swapping, with NIO being a notable example that markets this feature. However, their market share isn’t particularly high. It can be said that battery swapping is a common practice in China, but it isn’t the primary method for electric vehicle energy replenishment. Incidentally, NIO vehicles don’t support particularly high charging speeds. High-speed charging can impact battery lifespan, so manufacturers like NIO also prefer to avoid promoting fast charging from their perspective.
I wasn't referring to battery swapping, but I can see how my post could be interpreted that way so I've edited it.
Yeah, I think the goal of these systems is not that everyone has a MW charger in their home. You still (relatively) slow-charge the car at night, and only use the MW chargers for infrequent highway top-ups
Most likely gas stations will have to buy these systems to keep their business running.
It's mandatory for gas stations to install at least one EV charger in a lot of EU countries. Spain recently started requiring one EV charger per 20 spaces in every parking structure. The electric transition may not be fast, but it's happening.
I wonder is switching to cell in parallel/series would speed up charging
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Oh look, a new battery breakthrough. Must be a day that ends in y
It's not your typical "battery breakthrough" news though -- the technology is being commercialized as we speak:
>The new charging architecture will be initially available in two new EVs – Han L sedan and Tang L SUV priced from 270,000 yuan ($37,330)
I'm not sure whether this negativity is justified. It seems like a genuine breakthrough that could alleviate the range anxiety of many people who are interested in EVs but not fully convinced.
You can take several things from this.
yes, there is a lot of work going into battery technology at present. There is news most days.
It is true that most of the announcements relate to things that are one or more of: an incremental gain, not going to make it to production at all, or not production-ready this year. That's the nature of research. However, a percentage of them are actual.
"Five minute charging" is an actual milestone. As in, it is feature parity with ICE vehicles. Once you get to that charging speed, another increase in speed gives steeply diminishing returns, and other aspects of the experience become more important.