I've got a friend whos a master tech/trainer with our state automotive body, and is HV certified etc for dealing with these cars. He's currently got a BYD Shark strewn across his workshop for an autopsy.
I have to say I'm super impressed with how heavy duty everything is. The control arms, subframes, etc all look good and don't fit the 'chinese car bad' narrative you always hear. The powertrain components all look to be extremely high quality.
I've poked around a few EV's with him now, and I do feel like the Chinese market cars are evolving to a really good standard faster than their Korean counterparts did back in the 80s/90s.
I have a Chinese EV too, an MG4 built by SAIC. It’s a really cheap car, significantly cheaper than its non-Chinese counterparts like the VW ID.3 or (roughly) a Hyundai Kona.
The factory rust protection was maybe a bit on the lighter side, but everything else on it looks completely normal. The drivetrain is simple (no heat exchange mechanism between battery coolant and motor coolant, a slightly whiny motor), but also genuinely competent and modern for a 2022 design (a mature skateboard RWD platform with a thin CTP battery with large cells and generous cell/coolant heat exchange). There are no obvious wtf solutions, nothing that would look too thin or too flimsy. The infotainment and the SW of the car does have the occasional funny moments, but all that is happening on what looks and feels like a solid piece of hardware.
In the last few years Chinese manufacturing has reached a very high-level. The reason most people still believe that Chinese-made stuff is poor quality is because they will do what they are told and they are usually told “make this as cheap as possible” by whoever is paying the bills.
While I reckon some other countries still have specialist manufacturing in key areas that surpasses China, most “common” parts can be made in China to a standard that meets or exceeds Western countries, if you’re willing to pay for it.
> The reason most people still believe that Chinese-made stuff is poor quality is because they will do what they are told and they are usually told “make this as cheap as possible” by whoever is paying the bills.
I’m reminded of all the dismissals people made about the skill levels of Indian software developers when the explanation was that the more skilled ones knew they could do better than the MBAs were offering to make the savings sound even more impressive.
My grandfather in the 1970s used to complain about crappy Japanese tools. By the 1980s they were world-class. Same is happening with Chinese manufacturing.
>The control arms, subframes, etc all look good and don't fit the 'chinese car bad' narrative you always hear.
While I think the "chinese quality bad" narrative still applies to many Chinese brands, this isn't as universal as it was in the past.
I think my eyes were first opened when I bought myself a Huawei phone(before the Google ban). My first few smartphones had been Samsung, I've always felt the term "planned obsolence" was the best way to describe these phones: After just a year, the phone felt considerably slower, and after two it was almost unusable.
Huawei flagship phones were similar in price to Samsung, but I felt they lasted way longer.
I have had a fairly good run with a lot of these Chinese phones. Huawei when we could still get them was great. Xiaomi is great build quality but they are rotting out their OS with too much bloat and up sell. Oppo has been brilliant in that they are built well, cheap and allow you strip out anything you don't want.
I'd rather own Chinese everything over American. Everything America makes is slop and corners are cut for profits so the owners of companies can own their third home and maybe a yacht. The truth is Chinese engineering quality exceeds the West in almost every domain at this point.
I'd move there given the opportunity, the business owners of America are willing to poison and put the lives of their fellow citizens at risk for literal pieces of paper. I'm ashamed to be American.
I agree with the quality of some of the stuff coming out of China but when it comes to poisons and risking the lives of citizens, I have some bad news for you. That is how they undercut so heavily by foregoing those standards.
Folded into the base is a mechanical backup key, a flat metal blade in a hinged housing. It reads warmer than everything else in the scan. It exists for the moment the battery dies or the RF link fails. Every BYD keyless entry system includes this fallback.
It's simple things like this which incumbent manufacturers need to avoid losing sight of.
This was stated about the key: "Folded into the base is a mechanical backup key, a flat metal blade in a hinged housing."
I own a BYD: this is not true. The key is not hinged; rather, the entire mechanical key pulls out when a small clip is unlatched near the top of the assembly (you can see it in the CT). I assume the circular hinge-looking mechanism in the CT is just a by product of the plastic/metal weld process.
I guess my intent was not to point out that it has a mechanical key, rather that the description of the key on the webpage was wrong (it is not hinged).
The mechanical key fallback pattern is standard across the industry for sure.
Anecdotally on my Hyundai ionic hybrid from 2018 it does have a mechanical key in the fob, but it is very non-obvious. It’s physically the same piece as the keyring section at the top of the fob. There is a small catch you release to remove the key from the plastic fob body and it slides out the top.
All this to say Hyundai certainly knows how to do this. If they didn’t do it, it is almost certainly a deliberate omission.
I wasn’t surprised by the backup key, but rather by how empty it was. I really wish key fobs were smaller. They are quite bulky in a pocket and bigger than all my actual keys combined.
Now that’s an idea… I found one for my car, but kind of hate it.
I don’t have a 3D printer currently. I did help my cousin’s kid by one and they told me if I ever wanted to print something to let them know, but I have a feeling I’ll need to design my own with some trial and error.
I’ve hesitated buying one, because the idea of having a machine to melt plastic in my house seems like a bad idea when it comes to air quality.
Depends on the plastic, but even the most benign ones put out very minor amounts of fumes if YouTube testers are to be believed. Note that fumes in this case just means that they are seeing changes in AQI meters, which is something that can happen with too many people sitting in a room.
If it’s something you worry about, the enclosed models frequently either come with, or can be fitted with a carbon filter, and if you are really worried, you can use dryer vent to get it outside.
With the most popular plastic (PLA) at printing temperatures, there isn’t any data showing toxic byproducts. When you get into things like ABS and resin you have to think more about fumes.
> The last company to vertically integrate a car from raw material to finished product at this scale was Ford. Today BYD’s system runs all the way from the lithium mine to the port.
Both BYD and Tesla claim to produce around 75% of their components. Ford is at around 25%.
Yes, Ford claimed up to 90% in the 1930s when they were producing up to 1.4M cars and trucks per year. (Down to less than 400K in the worst of the depression.)
I suppose it makes sense, back then you wouldn't think there would be an existing supply chain of companies like Mopar just waiting for a car manufacturer to spin up and start buying their stuff
The original Model T plant (the Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit proper) was not vertically integrated, and in fact most of the "running gear" (all the complicated stuff, basically everything but the coachwork) was purchased as parts from the Dodge brothers (who owned a plant at what is now Detroit/Hammtramck Assembly -- formerly Dodge Main and then GM Poletown -- a GM plant making EVs like the Sierra and Hummer EVs) and merely assembled by Ford employees (albeit in an admittedly revolutionary assembly line process that changed capitalism forever).
The Highland Park plant was Ford's play to cut the Dodge Brothers out of the process by machining most of his own parts. The peak of vertical integration would be the River Rouge plant which, as you say, machined all its own parts from iron and steel made on-site from raw ore (but never made the Model T).
So BYD for cars and Samsung for phones and consumer electronics more generally (from fab upwards).
In fact, I believe Samsung is the only company on the planet that can design & build a state of the art smartphone from scratch - silicon/fabrication, SoC, battery, baseband, camera sensor, memory, and display.
What other high tech vertically integrated producers exist in this group?
While I could have sworn RIM put out their own modems (which Qualcomm used to make life difficult for them, especially as the world transitioned from 3G to 4G), and did their own hardware and software, I can't currently find a source
IBM no longer has fabs (spun off as Globalfoundries and later sold), and no longer manufactures PCs (sold to Lenovo?), but it does make mainframes I guess?
I am still amazed that IBM is pushing their POWER processors forwards for things like their System Z Mainframes. From what I have heard they are still really fast with I/O and general shifting of data but I'm not sure how much better than is than the alternatives.
Wouldn't be surprised if that finally gets sunset in the next few years.
> This prismatic cell is NOT a Blade, but it does share the same chemistry.
Kind of surprised that the part that is perhaps the most "BYD" of the entire car, isn't actually the same cell that the BYD Blade batteries use, which was what I was most excited about seeing :(
LFP prismatics are dirt cheap, I actually thought that was cooler -- it's rare to see a car part for a specific brand that is so close to a COTS equivalent.
Those are small parts, though. The interesting part is the E-axle. BYD builds a unit with an integrated motor, differential, axle, and wheel hubs. That, plus an electronics box and battery, is the power train. This simplifies vehicles considerably.
There are E-axle teardown videos. There's no big secret about how to do this. Copying this is hard for Detroit, because they have a huge investment in "engine plants".
With this design, BYD doesn't need standalone engine plants.
Tesla ought to be doing this, but they're into performance, not cost. They want to put two or four motors in a car. BYD does make supercars, to show off, but their volume products are reasonably good cars with E-axles and lithium iron phosphate batteries, which work fine. (It's not clear that Tesla is even into car design at all any more, but that's another issue.)
Detroit ought to be doing this, but they insist on making electric cars that are modified gasoline cars. Ford has an electric Mustang, an electric F-150, and an electric Transit. Chrysler doesn't even make cars any more, just one minivan. GM has a good Bolt now, which they are killing to appease Trump.
you still see these in velocipede-style vehicles commonly.
and to your point : a dead axle is an effort to reduce unsprung weight compared to a live axle; it also lets you actually use alignment as a remediation for asymmetry issues rather than just pre-delivery straightening.
On the contrary, this much integration makes repairs nearly impossible, meaning you might have to swap the whole unit(for a lot of $$$) when something small inside it inevitably breaks.
Check out the articles published by EVclinic that cover such cases.
Aftermarket EV repairs are already big business due to how difficult and expensive the OEMs make it.
On the other hand: If the assembly is reliable-enough, then repair isn't normally something that needs to be pursued in the first place.
Like Honda engines on their myriad pedestrian cars. I'm sure there's exceptions, but the engines tend to be ridiculously reliable. The rest of the car often fails (due to age and/or rot and/or deferred maintenance and/or crash) and leaves a very good engine behind.
Accordingly, junkyards are full of Honda engines that work fine.
Thus, there's very few people rebuilding them. They certainly can be rebuilt, but it usually just doesn't make financial sense to strip it all down and freshen everything up.
So when an engine does fail on an otherwise-working Honda daily-driver that is actually worth repairing, then the usual move is to swap in a used motor.
---
So if it's reliable enough, and there's also critical mass, then it doesn't matter much if the BYD drivetrain unit has easily-repairable components.
Thanks. As the owner of a 14-year-old Honda that is equipped in the most lavish of trim options, I found great pleasure in selecting that particular subperlative.
I don't have so much knowledge about EV repairs, but I got burnt by this on ICE cars already - had a car fail a regular fitness test on suspension bushes, they weren't replaceable without replacing the whole arm(s). What should've been a $40 part was being quoted as more than the cars value.
(I'm not sure if there was a way around this, there may well have been but I had other things going on and sold for scrap)
FWIW, this has been my experience since 2003 when I had to get suspension work done. Doesn’t matter if it’s a BMW or Honda, dealership or indie repair shop, the story I have heard consistently is that the bushing is part of the arm for structural integrity, stability, <reason I can’t remember, truth or crock>. Bushings typically fail faster than the arm does, and this repair is expensive ($1000+ for performance cars, not that much cheaper for Civics).
The “Design for purported Safety vs. Design for Saving Dollars” principle at work.
> repair is expensive ($1000+ for performance cars, not that much cheaper for Civics)
I can almost guarantee the lion's share of this is shop labor, not parts, and pressing a bushing out and back in would be more expensive after accounting for that labor than just swapping the suspension arms. This is often the piece that gets missed in these discussions of "why am I replacing this huge assembly for a tiny part", if the whole assembly is coming out to deal with that tiny part anyways and shop labor is $200/hour it's cheaper to swap the assembly a lot of the time.
Try getting any repair beyond routine maintenance done on a car in the US for under $1000 these days. Car maintenance is one of the things I'm happy to DIY in most cases because the delta on costs is massive and as someone that works on computers all day it's vaguely enjoyable to get angry at a mechanical object for a change.
I’ve moved in to doing my own plumbing, electric, HVAC. Tend to keep new enough cars that they don’t need much, knock on wood. But it’s not uncommon in “making” $500 an hour or more doing electric or HVAC.
In my area, no tradesman is willing to even get out of bed for less than $1000. They have more high dollar work than they know what to do with and some of them don’t even pick up the phone anymore. You have to be made of money or learn how to DIY everything.
and pressing a bushing out and back in would be more expensive after accounting for that labor than just swapping the suspension arms
Really? It's literally a few minutes (a few dozen $ at $200/hr, or $3.33/min) for any shop with a press. Removing the assembly from the rest of the car is going to take much longer.
Why would it be less repairable? Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable. Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades.
And once they give out, you can just replace the whole unit for maybe $2000.
EU added "cybersecurity" requirements in response to Comma.ai that means that a lot of ECUs going forward use signed messages AND often crypto key pairing against an onboard security auth box. The pairing process often require something like a scuffed up manufacturer rental Panasonic Toughbook with weird half baked apps and passwords. The car would refuse to drive or whatever if the owner wouldn't play along with that game.
>Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable.
Only if someone makes and sells those power electronics to you along with the appropriate DRM tools required for calibration and pairing with the other electronics of the car. Otherwise you're shit outta luck.
>Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades.
Simple != decades of reliability, when the design and manufacturing quality are piss poor in the race to the bottom for cost cutting and shareholder returns. Timing chains were also supposed to last a lifetime but plenty have been recalled due to know timing chain issues from manufacturing quality.
VW and Kia/Hyundai EVs were found to use custom dimensions motor bearings that can't be bought on the open market from anywhere, so only the OEM and their dealers can get them via their supply chain.
There is nothing terribly complicated there. It's just an AC motor ("brushless DC") with a classic 3-phase inverter and a resolver. There are plenty of companies that make controllers for this kind of setup. Granted, they are typically not powerful enough for SOTA drivetrains, but it's a question of time.
Power electronics will need to fit into the footprint of the e-axle. Or maybe you'll need to manufacture a new housing. Both are easily doable for small companies.
> VW and Kia/Hyundai EVs were found to use custom dimensions motor bearings that can't be bought on the open market from anywhere, so only the OEM and their dealers can get them via their supply chain.
Again, an independent manufacturer can easily make them.
Most of those stories are 1/ crashes and 2/ hybrids. Again, with rare exception, manufacturers are just making gas cars with EV power trains. Tesla and BYD are making next gen transport. Are you old enough to remember when TVs broke so often that TV Repairman was a job? One day we will look back on car mechanics the same way.
I do remember the visceral joy of trying to keep a supercharged Camaro on the track, but those memories are overwhelmed by the terror of “what is that noise”. Now I drive a Tesla that accelerates faster than that Camaro, handles better, and hasn’t been to the shop once.
If I win the lottery I will buy another Camaro and a Corvette and I’ll work on them for fun, and kids will look at me the way I looked at old men who take care of antique steam engines and traction engines and take them to fairs. That sure is a lot of noise and smoke and doohickeys for very little speed and power!
I own a Model 3 and I like driving it, but I scratch my head at everyone who claims there are no mechanical problems. I'm glad you didn't have any, but there are some repairs that are almost obscenely common.
In the past year, the heater failed (PTC Heater had to be replaced), and the lateral link ball joint ball joint had to be replaced. That is about CAD5000$ worth of work. There is also an issue with a wire in the rear center seatbelt that broke (but after a check, it doesn't really have any safety concerns wrt airbags so it is OK to leave as is), and the top roof glass cracked. (I also had to replace the front windshield, but that's normal in Calgary and I don't hold it against the car)
I'm not "rough handling", I have a Toyota Sienna without any of these problems. On the bright side, the battery has no problems and no imbalances so fixing it will keep the car running for years (hopefully).
I bring this up because I find it very annoying that people were painting hagiographies of these cars when they have real issues. None of the issues above should be happening. Moreover, there are no 3rd parties providing parts (supposedly because of patents).
In the end, I'll never buy another gas car again but my cute tiny car has a bigger turn radius than my Sienna. It's lost more value than my Sienna. I agree with the poster who said that it isn't even clear if Tesla is interested in cars anymore.
If BYD is also creating cars that are expensive to maintain, then hard pass. I'm ok with having legislation to fix this.
My Model Y headlight failed. Bought the ballast for like $125 on eBay. Had to take my dang front of the car apart, but Tesla had a really nice manual online. So it has pros and cons for sure!
> manufacturers are just making gas cars with EV power trains. Tesla and BYD are making next gen transport.
From what I see online, Teslas, especially MS/MX, are actually quite like an EV-swapped Toyota than anything futuristic. A lot about their cars(exception being CT and Semi) are ICE-mass-market-car coded. They're car equivalents of ARM PCs in ATX form factor like NVIDIA's DGX Station, opposite to the likes of trashcan Mac Pro.
>Most of those stories are 1/ crashes and 2/ hybrids.
No, they're faulty coolant seals of the electric motor, wrecking the power unit.
>but those memories are overwhelmed by the terror of “what is that noise”.
I just turned up the music till the noise went away. Problem solved.
>Now I drive a Tesla that accelerates faster than that Camaro, handles better, and hasn’t been to the shop once.
Good for you, but do you know there's a whole lotta other EV brands out there? And many are not as well and reliably designed as your Tesla.
>I do remember the visceral joy of trying to keep a supercharged Camaro [...] If I win the lottery I will buy another Camaro and a Corvette and I’ll work on them for fun
Nice story, but what does all this have to do with the parent you're replying to? Did he mention ICEs anywhere?
I viscerally hate people who do or seriously suggest this. First, ignoring any strange noise in a car almost always leads to more expensive and stressful repairs down the road. Second, how the hell do people hear a noise and are simply okay with not knowing the source? Not understanding the situation and not being able to make any kind of informed decision?
There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.
Edit: I agree with you and upvoted your comment which I feel was unfairly downvoted. But economics are going to win here, only a tiny fraction of the user base of cars (or phones) tinkers with them.
People actually want a convenient and cheap service for getting around. All other considerations can be derived from this. If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it. Currently this is almost never the case of course, but if it happens in future, watch people switch behaviour instantly.
> If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it.
This is doing a lot of work but I'm going to go with a charitable interpretation. I seriously doubt that we'll ever hit a state where replacing a 2 ton vehicle is cheaper than repairing it. And if we do, I'll have to re-evaluate my charitable interpretation, because something shady is likely going on.
The crazy thing is people don't even repair things that are cheaper to repair than replace. Our countertop icemaker broke and my wife wanted to throw it out. I fixed it with 20 minutes of time and a $15 motor from Amazon.
I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive. People in large part have no idea how to repair anything they own. This mass ignorance is leading to some pretty poor market incentives.
A lot of it does come down to a cost / benefit analysis where time preference is extremely overweighted due to an abundance of seemingly free credit and, shall we say, a tragic dustbowl famine of available cognitive resources.
>I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive.
I don't think this is true. If this is the trend you're seeing it's probably because you're sampling through people with relatively high disposable income(or who don't mind endless credit card debt), who can just afford to throw away broken things when it's just a rounding error of their income.
But if you look at lower income people(with sane spending habits and financial literacy) you'll see how they first ask around if something can be repaired before they claw money from their checking account to buy something new.
My local facebook group is full of students asking if someone can fix their macbooks for cheap as they can't afford a new one or what Apple is quoting them, which is close in cost to buying a new one.
My minimum wage gf still had her barely functional Windows 7 notebook up until a year ago because she didn't feel like spending money to buy a new one if I could just keep fixing it.
Some broke people try not to buy new things if they can, but some are broke because they can't stop buying new things.
well, people want to have enough money to do what they need to do, of course, so they will choose things that they can in order to minimize cost and time spent, and increase convenience. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to own things that can be repaired. Owning repairable things is also valuable. I don’t think anyone actually wants to “own nothing and be happy”. But they might be able to be coerced into it, sure.
>There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.
Which is why I'm so baffled how and why the EU has spent so much time and effort regulating batteries and charging ports for phones, but still ignores this massive issue of ease of repairability and right to repair of personal vehicles that has been plaguing car owners since the ICE days and is now only getting worse with EVs, that's costing us a lot more money than what's costing users to pay Apple to replace your cracked display and dead battery.
It feels like they just keep going for the lowest hanging fruits to score easy wins that don't impact local industry, while ignoring the entire forest behind them.
Jarvis, pull up on the central HUD how much the EU car industry spent on lobbying in the EU over the last 15 years.
The EU is beholden to the Germans, ease of repair would wreck the profit margins of VAG, BMW and Daimler both because of reduced after-sales profits and due to cost increases to manufacturing and engineering.
Any electric gear with the battery as its main wear part. Ebikes. Sit-on mowers. Cars.
This is about so much more than cost. Agency, autonomy, environment, efficiency, geopolitics even.
I refuse to buy drm'ed gear. The exception is second hand where I can reliably avoid the drm with little effort. At its simplest, that means never using specific drm'ed functionality. At its most complicated, that means mitm'ing an encrypted can bus.
There are lots of parts on a car that will likely wear out faster than the battery on a modern liquid cooled large NMC or LFP lithium battery. You should be able to get over 200,000 miles on the battery. You probably won't get near that much from the suspension, etc.
I’m very confused as to why this is downvoted but I tossed you an upvote since I do my best to work against the constant brigading I always see on this forum.
> Fourteen pins in two parallel rows carry every signal this panel produces to the rest of the vehicle. Automotive connectors are among the most common failure points in modern cars: corrosion, fretting, and thermal cycling work on these joints over years of use. One connector failure on a module this integrated takes out mirrors, windows, locks, and child safety all at once.
Pack that shit full of silicone dielectric grease, check it every year or two, and it should be good for decades.
This sounds like copy written by someone who hasn't actually spent a lot of time with the automotive world and in trying to sound like they have.
Electrical connectors on automotive harnesses are far, far more reliable now on modern cars than they ever have been in the past, even with the increase in number of such connectors.
Companies like Delphi and Amphenol put immense engineering effort into the way modern connectors are designed, with weather sealing and contact plating that is way better than anything pre 1990's-ish was. Plastics really got way better after the turn of the Millenium compared to what they were before- I remember working on 1980s cars in the early 2000s (so, 20 year old cars) where connectors would ofter crumble in your hands when disconnecting them, or have completely corroded terminals, terrible sockets that yield and wouldn't keep continuity, etc. Compared that to all the cars I've worked on in the last 20 years where connectors have just not really been a worry (among the brands I've work on, at least). The electronics / sensors / modules themselves are much more likely to fail than the connectors they attach with, in my current experience. The only time connectors seem to fail is when cycled roughly/wrongly by people doing service incorrectly. Failure in place? Rare.
Anyone who thinks automotive electronics were more reliable in the past, live a bit with the electrical systems of a car from the 1970's thru the mid 1990's and report back to me on how that goes. Bonus points if it's Italian or British.
I want to buy a Chinese car and I am annoyed that my protectionist government won’t let me. Lowering transportation cost would be the most impactful thing to my budget.
All that serves to do is ensure the American car industry falls far behind by being coddled into a lack of competition.
Toyota showed the world the Toyota Production System. What Tesla, Kia/Hyundai, and Chinese EVs have shown American automakers is how much vertical integration can be an asset, especially with the lower part counts of electric vehicles.
The model where every part is contracted out to parts manufacturers is proving to be antiquated.
I don’t think BYD would be a hit in the US as they are in Europe. It’s an entirely different market. They may be relatively successful just not to the point of taking an important market share, they would probably be like Mazda. Many of the subsides for Chinese EV ended this year too, and they are now realizing price alone is not a differentiator. So even if BYD eventually makes it to the US, they will be priced close to other brands like KIA and Tesla, but without the advantage of the brand and strong local presence. So no, there’s no concerns with BYD and we may see them sooner than later in the US.
They are also priced much lower than KIA and Tesla.
FWIW I now own a GWM Cannon Αlpha PHEV pickup. Have also owned a Jeep Wrangler - the tech, build quality and reliability is not even on the same planet.
I can't imagine how the US manufacturers would compete with the Chinese ones on a level playing field. Not from the US, but it's hard to see how any administration would allow that. Would be the end of the local industry.
US manufacturers' niche is half-ton and above trucks. Even mighty Toyota's offering is playing distant #4 in that market with Nissan capitulating after 20 years of trying.
BYD is not just zippy little city cars. The BYD Sealion 7 SUV (EV) and Shark full-size truck (PHEV) are incredibly popular in Australia, which is a very similar market to the US, and I'm sure they would sell like hotcakes if allowed into the US.
It's worse than that. Trump's tariffs have knee-capped North American auto companies right when they needed to be upping their game. The auto sector is tightly integrated across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. Or was... Now there's tariff's on every part and frame that crosses a border. The American plan seems to be to put up a wall and force Americans to buy domestic while nobody else in the world buys American cars.
I am torn on this. Anti-dumping is one thing, and yet disruption was an overused keyword for a long time in Silicon valley.
1. Huge scale subsidies like this are effectively a manufacturing attack. This is mean at the level of international politics and yet the world recently seems to be waking up to the idea they were handing over every practice of manufacture to China.
2. On the other hand, while the Chinese car companies are finding their footing they have not yet perfected the bullshit tiered marketing approaches that see relatively cheap to manufacture features gated to "high-equipment level" cars.
For example, now even the cheapest cars can have 360 degree parking cameras. Of course, the Chinese engineering level remains to be seen but many would argue this is competition in the market.
Yes, that’s exactly what it is. On the other side of it though, so what, we get to look inside stuff with a cool scan. They’ve been doing these posts for several years now, and they’re all interesting.
I would say that there’s quite substantial value perhaps not to the general public but to the general HN user from their reports. I was very excited to see them have a public scan of an LFP battery because the previous scans they did of batteries were very informative on which brands to trust and the level of inconsistency that can exist. Their analysis of BYD’s battery design is very useful to someone who is looking to understand LFP and the levels of quality control necessary to have safe batteries. The reports are a bit of a “How it’s Made” but written for the target audience of engineers and has similar utility.
The part where they highlight the rippling in the lithium battery was interesting. They mention it can accelerate degradation over time. It's unclear if this specific example is within tolerances, but I have seen in other CT scans how dramatic the lithium rippling can become.
But overall, yeah, this is mostly an advertisement. They have other videos on their YouTube where they scan random items.
I've got a friend whos a master tech/trainer with our state automotive body, and is HV certified etc for dealing with these cars. He's currently got a BYD Shark strewn across his workshop for an autopsy.
I have to say I'm super impressed with how heavy duty everything is. The control arms, subframes, etc all look good and don't fit the 'chinese car bad' narrative you always hear. The powertrain components all look to be extremely high quality.
I've poked around a few EV's with him now, and I do feel like the Chinese market cars are evolving to a really good standard faster than their Korean counterparts did back in the 80s/90s.
I have a Chinese EV too, an MG4 built by SAIC. It’s a really cheap car, significantly cheaper than its non-Chinese counterparts like the VW ID.3 or (roughly) a Hyundai Kona.
The factory rust protection was maybe a bit on the lighter side, but everything else on it looks completely normal. The drivetrain is simple (no heat exchange mechanism between battery coolant and motor coolant, a slightly whiny motor), but also genuinely competent and modern for a 2022 design (a mature skateboard RWD platform with a thin CTP battery with large cells and generous cell/coolant heat exchange). There are no obvious wtf solutions, nothing that would look too thin or too flimsy. The infotainment and the SW of the car does have the occasional funny moments, but all that is happening on what looks and feels like a solid piece of hardware.
In the last few years Chinese manufacturing has reached a very high-level. The reason most people still believe that Chinese-made stuff is poor quality is because they will do what they are told and they are usually told “make this as cheap as possible” by whoever is paying the bills.
While I reckon some other countries still have specialist manufacturing in key areas that surpasses China, most “common” parts can be made in China to a standard that meets or exceeds Western countries, if you’re willing to pay for it.
> The reason most people still believe that Chinese-made stuff is poor quality is because they will do what they are told and they are usually told “make this as cheap as possible” by whoever is paying the bills.
I’m reminded of all the dismissals people made about the skill levels of Indian software developers when the explanation was that the more skilled ones knew they could do better than the MBAs were offering to make the savings sound even more impressive.
People talking about Chinese manufacturing all being junk are completely stuck in the past.
My grandfather in the 1970s used to complain about crappy Japanese tools. By the 1980s they were world-class. Same is happening with Chinese manufacturing.
There is a joke just about that in Back to the Future (1985)!
>The control arms, subframes, etc all look good and don't fit the 'chinese car bad' narrative you always hear.
While I think the "chinese quality bad" narrative still applies to many Chinese brands, this isn't as universal as it was in the past.
I think my eyes were first opened when I bought myself a Huawei phone(before the Google ban). My first few smartphones had been Samsung, I've always felt the term "planned obsolence" was the best way to describe these phones: After just a year, the phone felt considerably slower, and after two it was almost unusable.
Huawei flagship phones were similar in price to Samsung, but I felt they lasted way longer.
I have had a fairly good run with a lot of these Chinese phones. Huawei when we could still get them was great. Xiaomi is great build quality but they are rotting out their OS with too much bloat and up sell. Oppo has been brilliant in that they are built well, cheap and allow you strip out anything you don't want.
I'd rather own Chinese everything over American. Everything America makes is slop and corners are cut for profits so the owners of companies can own their third home and maybe a yacht. The truth is Chinese engineering quality exceeds the West in almost every domain at this point.
I'd move there given the opportunity, the business owners of America are willing to poison and put the lives of their fellow citizens at risk for literal pieces of paper. I'm ashamed to be American.
I agree with the quality of some of the stuff coming out of China but when it comes to poisons and risking the lives of citizens, I have some bad news for you. That is how they undercut so heavily by foregoing those standards.
China has moved beyond being a "value" manufacturer and they've cleaned up a lot.
Folded into the base is a mechanical backup key, a flat metal blade in a hinged housing. It reads warmer than everything else in the scan. It exists for the moment the battery dies or the RF link fails. Every BYD keyless entry system includes this fallback.
It's simple things like this which incumbent manufacturers need to avoid losing sight of.
This was stated about the key: "Folded into the base is a mechanical backup key, a flat metal blade in a hinged housing."
I own a BYD: this is not true. The key is not hinged; rather, the entire mechanical key pulls out when a small clip is unlatched near the top of the assembly (you can see it in the CT). I assume the circular hinge-looking mechanism in the CT is just a by product of the plastic/metal weld process.
Nonetheless: very cool tech demo!
It was suspected in the past that Lumafield used AI to write the descriptions of previous scans. It is possible they are still doing so.
If it's AI then I'm surprised to see it make this mistake:
> None of these components is particularly extraordinary in isolation
Having a mechanical key hidden in the electronic key fob is nothing new, it’s common on many cars.
I guess my intent was not to point out that it has a mechanical key, rather that the description of the key on the webpage was wrong (it is not hinged).
The mechanical key fallback pattern is standard across the industry for sure.
It's entirely possible that the BYD key they scanned and the BYD key you possess are of different designs.
Ah, I misread your earlier revision's enthusiasm at the end as being about the mechanical key, not the CT scan.
I remember playing with my parent's VW key fob as a fidget toy in the 00s. Little spring loaded switchblade style mechanical key.
And yet my Hyundai key fob, despite being the largest fob I've ever seen doesn't do this :/
Anecdotally on my Hyundai ionic hybrid from 2018 it does have a mechanical key in the fob, but it is very non-obvious. It’s physically the same piece as the keyring section at the top of the fob. There is a small catch you release to remove the key from the plastic fob body and it slides out the top.
All this to say Hyundai certainly knows how to do this. If they didn’t do it, it is almost certainly a deliberate omission.
My 2015 Honda had that and my new car does as well.
I wasn’t surprised by the backup key, but rather by how empty it was. I really wish key fobs were smaller. They are quite bulky in a pocket and bigger than all my actual keys combined.
If you own a 3D printer, there are oftentimes STLs people publish online to shrink the size of the fob.
Made my keys much less bulky
Now that’s an idea… I found one for my car, but kind of hate it.
I don’t have a 3D printer currently. I did help my cousin’s kid by one and they told me if I ever wanted to print something to let them know, but I have a feeling I’ll need to design my own with some trial and error.
I’ve hesitated buying one, because the idea of having a machine to melt plastic in my house seems like a bad idea when it comes to air quality.
Depends on the plastic, but even the most benign ones put out very minor amounts of fumes if YouTube testers are to be believed. Note that fumes in this case just means that they are seeing changes in AQI meters, which is something that can happen with too many people sitting in a room.
If it’s something you worry about, the enclosed models frequently either come with, or can be fitted with a carbon filter, and if you are really worried, you can use dryer vent to get it outside.
With the most popular plastic (PLA) at printing temperatures, there isn’t any data showing toxic byproducts. When you get into things like ABS and resin you have to think more about fumes.
> The last company to vertically integrate a car from raw material to finished product at this scale was Ford. Today BYD’s system runs all the way from the lithium mine to the port.
Both BYD and Tesla claim to produce around 75% of their components. Ford is at around 25%.
Tesla is indeed smaller in scale (cars/year):
I assumed this was referring to the early days of the Ford assembly line
Yes, Ford claimed up to 90% in the 1930s when they were producing up to 1.4M cars and trucks per year. (Down to less than 400K in the worst of the depression.)
I suppose it makes sense, back then you wouldn't think there would be an existing supply chain of companies like Mopar just waiting for a car manufacturer to spin up and start buying their stuff
The original Ford plant to raw ore, coal & limestone as inputs. There weren't any Mopar's, but Ford didn't have to build their own steel plants...
The original Model T plant (the Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit proper) was not vertically integrated, and in fact most of the "running gear" (all the complicated stuff, basically everything but the coachwork) was purchased as parts from the Dodge brothers (who owned a plant at what is now Detroit/Hammtramck Assembly -- formerly Dodge Main and then GM Poletown -- a GM plant making EVs like the Sierra and Hummer EVs) and merely assembled by Ford employees (albeit in an admittedly revolutionary assembly line process that changed capitalism forever).
The Highland Park plant was Ford's play to cut the Dodge Brothers out of the process by machining most of his own parts. The peak of vertical integration would be the River Rouge plant which, as you say, machined all its own parts from iron and steel made on-site from raw ore (but never made the Model T).
Still lower than farmers and their horses. :)
They would go so far as to license components for in-source production from suppliers who couldn't meet the needed volume.
So BYD for cars and Samsung for phones and consumer electronics more generally (from fab upwards).
In fact, I believe Samsung is the only company on the planet that can design & build a state of the art smartphone from scratch - silicon/fabrication, SoC, battery, baseband, camera sensor, memory, and display.
What other high tech vertically integrated producers exist in this group?
While I could have sworn RIM put out their own modems (which Qualcomm used to make life difficult for them, especially as the world transitioned from 3G to 4G), and did their own hardware and software, I can't currently find a source
IBM
IBM no longer has fabs (spun off as Globalfoundries and later sold), and no longer manufactures PCs (sold to Lenovo?), but it does make mainframes I guess?
I am still amazed that IBM is pushing their POWER processors forwards for things like their System Z Mainframes. From what I have heard they are still really fast with I/O and general shifting of data but I'm not sure how much better than is than the alternatives.
Wouldn't be surprised if that finally gets sunset in the next few years.
I thought GlobalFoundries was AMD's fab division spun off.
They are mainly in services now, no?
For those interested in EV drive-train tear-downs, Munroe Live has some wonderfully detailed videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LfDuyqmsts , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeZzEg3GIcg&list=PLkiDlGyJnp...
"You wouldn't CT scan a car!"
Actually, yes, we would: https://www.kmoser.com/ctscan/
BYD biggest innovation may be organizational more than technological
What can you say about it?
> This prismatic cell is NOT a Blade, but it does share the same chemistry.
Kind of surprised that the part that is perhaps the most "BYD" of the entire car, isn't actually the same cell that the BYD Blade batteries use, which was what I was most excited about seeing :(
LFP prismatics are dirt cheap, I actually thought that was cooler -- it's rare to see a car part for a specific brand that is so close to a COTS equivalent.
Nice.
Those are small parts, though. The interesting part is the E-axle. BYD builds a unit with an integrated motor, differential, axle, and wheel hubs. That, plus an electronics box and battery, is the power train. This simplifies vehicles considerably.
There are E-axle teardown videos. There's no big secret about how to do this. Copying this is hard for Detroit, because they have a huge investment in "engine plants". With this design, BYD doesn't need standalone engine plants.
Tesla ought to be doing this, but they're into performance, not cost. They want to put two or four motors in a car. BYD does make supercars, to show off, but their volume products are reasonably good cars with E-axles and lithium iron phosphate batteries, which work fine. (It's not clear that Tesla is even into car design at all any more, but that's another issue.)
Detroit ought to be doing this, but they insist on making electric cars that are modified gasoline cars. Ford has an electric Mustang, an electric F-150, and an electric Transit. Chrysler doesn't even make cars any more, just one minivan. GM has a good Bolt now, which they are killing to appease Trump.
GM has several EVs that are ground up designs. They look just like the ICE version but that is cosmetic, everything else is different.
Now if only GM's executives could stop snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
> Tesla ought to be doing this, but they're into performance, not cost.
not as much anymore. model s/x discontinued.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/01/tesla-kills-models-s-an...
> BYD builds a unit with an integrated motor, differential, axle, and wheel hubs
So wait, the whole axle is solid then? Like a 1960s pickup truck but with all the weight of the motor and gearbox hanging off it too?
That must give it ridiculous unsprung weight.
it's not really like a 'live axle' from an older truck, it's more like a de-Dion style suspension (or dead axle).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Dion_suspension
you still see these in velocipede-style vehicles commonly.
and to your point : a dead axle is an effort to reduce unsprung weight compared to a live axle; it also lets you actually use alignment as a remediation for asymmetry issues rather than just pre-delivery straightening.
On the platforms I've worked with, the weight isn't the issue so much as the quantity of expensive and vibe sensitive parts that are unsprung.
Looks like they do in-hub motor for buses and in-differential(like everyone else) for passenger cars?
>This simplifies vehicles considerably.
On the contrary, this much integration makes repairs nearly impossible, meaning you might have to swap the whole unit(for a lot of $$$) when something small inside it inevitably breaks.
Check out the articles published by EVclinic that cover such cases.
Aftermarket EV repairs are already big business due to how difficult and expensive the OEMs make it.
On the other hand: If the assembly is reliable-enough, then repair isn't normally something that needs to be pursued in the first place.
Like Honda engines on their myriad pedestrian cars. I'm sure there's exceptions, but the engines tend to be ridiculously reliable. The rest of the car often fails (due to age and/or rot and/or deferred maintenance and/or crash) and leaves a very good engine behind.
Accordingly, junkyards are full of Honda engines that work fine.
Thus, there's very few people rebuilding them. They certainly can be rebuilt, but it usually just doesn't make financial sense to strip it all down and freshen everything up.
So when an engine does fail on an otherwise-working Honda daily-driver that is actually worth repairing, then the usual move is to swap in a used motor.
---
So if it's reliable enough, and there's also critical mass, then it doesn't matter much if the BYD drivetrain unit has easily-repairable components.
> pedestrian cars.
That's an interesting turn of phrase ...
Thanks. As the owner of a 14-year-old Honda that is equipped in the most lavish of trim options, I found great pleasure in selecting that particular subperlative.
The eternal conflict between "design for manufacture" and "design for maintenance".
Apparently both can be done together, it's just that it takes a bunch more effort so most places don't bother.
I don't have so much knowledge about EV repairs, but I got burnt by this on ICE cars already - had a car fail a regular fitness test on suspension bushes, they weren't replaceable without replacing the whole arm(s). What should've been a $40 part was being quoted as more than the cars value.
(I'm not sure if there was a way around this, there may well have been but I had other things going on and sold for scrap)
FWIW, this has been my experience since 2003 when I had to get suspension work done. Doesn’t matter if it’s a BMW or Honda, dealership or indie repair shop, the story I have heard consistently is that the bushing is part of the arm for structural integrity, stability, <reason I can’t remember, truth or crock>. Bushings typically fail faster than the arm does, and this repair is expensive ($1000+ for performance cars, not that much cheaper for Civics).
The “Design for purported Safety vs. Design for Saving Dollars” principle at work.
> repair is expensive ($1000+ for performance cars, not that much cheaper for Civics)
I can almost guarantee the lion's share of this is shop labor, not parts, and pressing a bushing out and back in would be more expensive after accounting for that labor than just swapping the suspension arms. This is often the piece that gets missed in these discussions of "why am I replacing this huge assembly for a tiny part", if the whole assembly is coming out to deal with that tiny part anyways and shop labor is $200/hour it's cheaper to swap the assembly a lot of the time.
Try getting any repair beyond routine maintenance done on a car in the US for under $1000 these days. Car maintenance is one of the things I'm happy to DIY in most cases because the delta on costs is massive and as someone that works on computers all day it's vaguely enjoyable to get angry at a mechanical object for a change.
I’ve moved in to doing my own plumbing, electric, HVAC. Tend to keep new enough cars that they don’t need much, knock on wood. But it’s not uncommon in “making” $500 an hour or more doing electric or HVAC.
In my area, no tradesman is willing to even get out of bed for less than $1000. They have more high dollar work than they know what to do with and some of them don’t even pick up the phone anymore. You have to be made of money or learn how to DIY everything.
and pressing a bushing out and back in would be more expensive after accounting for that labor than just swapping the suspension arms
Really? It's literally a few minutes (a few dozen $ at $200/hr, or $3.33/min) for any shop with a press. Removing the assembly from the rest of the car is going to take much longer.
Instead of $40 part it is $150 part. Very easy to replace. Less than 1 hour labor for both sides.
https://www.rockauto.com/en/catalog/jeep,2012,grand+cherokee...
that's the reason why BYD provides lifelong warrant for their batteries, motors
Why would it be less repairable? Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable. Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades.
And once they give out, you can just replace the whole unit for maybe $2000.
EU added "cybersecurity" requirements in response to Comma.ai that means that a lot of ECUs going forward use signed messages AND often crypto key pairing against an onboard security auth box. The pairing process often require something like a scuffed up manufacturer rental Panasonic Toughbook with weird half baked apps and passwords. The car would refuse to drive or whatever if the owner wouldn't play along with that game.
>Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable.
Only if someone makes and sells those power electronics to you along with the appropriate DRM tools required for calibration and pairing with the other electronics of the car. Otherwise you're shit outta luck.
>Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades.
Simple != decades of reliability, when the design and manufacturing quality are piss poor in the race to the bottom for cost cutting and shareholder returns. Timing chains were also supposed to last a lifetime but plenty have been recalled due to know timing chain issues from manufacturing quality.
VW and Kia/Hyundai EVs were found to use custom dimensions motor bearings that can't be bought on the open market from anywhere, so only the OEM and their dealers can get them via their supply chain.
There is nothing terribly complicated there. It's just an AC motor ("brushless DC") with a classic 3-phase inverter and a resolver. There are plenty of companies that make controllers for this kind of setup. Granted, they are typically not powerful enough for SOTA drivetrains, but it's a question of time.
Power electronics will need to fit into the footprint of the e-axle. Or maybe you'll need to manufacture a new housing. Both are easily doable for small companies.
> VW and Kia/Hyundai EVs were found to use custom dimensions motor bearings that can't be bought on the open market from anywhere, so only the OEM and their dealers can get them via their supply chain.
Again, an independent manufacturer can easily make them.
Most of those stories are 1/ crashes and 2/ hybrids. Again, with rare exception, manufacturers are just making gas cars with EV power trains. Tesla and BYD are making next gen transport. Are you old enough to remember when TVs broke so often that TV Repairman was a job? One day we will look back on car mechanics the same way.
I do remember the visceral joy of trying to keep a supercharged Camaro on the track, but those memories are overwhelmed by the terror of “what is that noise”. Now I drive a Tesla that accelerates faster than that Camaro, handles better, and hasn’t been to the shop once.
If I win the lottery I will buy another Camaro and a Corvette and I’ll work on them for fun, and kids will look at me the way I looked at old men who take care of antique steam engines and traction engines and take them to fairs. That sure is a lot of noise and smoke and doohickeys for very little speed and power!
I own a Model 3 and I like driving it, but I scratch my head at everyone who claims there are no mechanical problems. I'm glad you didn't have any, but there are some repairs that are almost obscenely common.
In the past year, the heater failed (PTC Heater had to be replaced), and the lateral link ball joint ball joint had to be replaced. That is about CAD5000$ worth of work. There is also an issue with a wire in the rear center seatbelt that broke (but after a check, it doesn't really have any safety concerns wrt airbags so it is OK to leave as is), and the top roof glass cracked. (I also had to replace the front windshield, but that's normal in Calgary and I don't hold it against the car)
I'm not "rough handling", I have a Toyota Sienna without any of these problems. On the bright side, the battery has no problems and no imbalances so fixing it will keep the car running for years (hopefully).
I bring this up because I find it very annoying that people were painting hagiographies of these cars when they have real issues. None of the issues above should be happening. Moreover, there are no 3rd parties providing parts (supposedly because of patents).
In the end, I'll never buy another gas car again but my cute tiny car has a bigger turn radius than my Sienna. It's lost more value than my Sienna. I agree with the poster who said that it isn't even clear if Tesla is interested in cars anymore.
If BYD is also creating cars that are expensive to maintain, then hard pass. I'm ok with having legislation to fix this.
My Model Y headlight failed. Bought the ballast for like $125 on eBay. Had to take my dang front of the car apart, but Tesla had a really nice manual online. So it has pros and cons for sure!
> manufacturers are just making gas cars with EV power trains. Tesla and BYD are making next gen transport.
From what I see online, Teslas, especially MS/MX, are actually quite like an EV-swapped Toyota than anything futuristic. A lot about their cars(exception being CT and Semi) are ICE-mass-market-car coded. They're car equivalents of ARM PCs in ATX form factor like NVIDIA's DGX Station, opposite to the likes of trashcan Mac Pro.
MS/MX have been discontinued. Their basic design was ~ 20 years old (2007)
I think model 3/y were more clean slate designs.
>Most of those stories are 1/ crashes and 2/ hybrids.
No, they're faulty coolant seals of the electric motor, wrecking the power unit.
>but those memories are overwhelmed by the terror of “what is that noise”.
I just turned up the music till the noise went away. Problem solved.
>Now I drive a Tesla that accelerates faster than that Camaro, handles better, and hasn’t been to the shop once.
Good for you, but do you know there's a whole lotta other EV brands out there? And many are not as well and reliably designed as your Tesla.
>I do remember the visceral joy of trying to keep a supercharged Camaro [...] If I win the lottery I will buy another Camaro and a Corvette and I’ll work on them for fun
Nice story, but what does all this have to do with the parent you're replying to? Did he mention ICEs anywhere?
> turned up the music till the noise went away
I viscerally hate people who do or seriously suggest this. First, ignoring any strange noise in a car almost always leads to more expensive and stressful repairs down the road. Second, how the hell do people hear a noise and are simply okay with not knowing the source? Not understanding the situation and not being able to make any kind of informed decision?
There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.
Edit: I agree with you and upvoted your comment which I feel was unfairly downvoted. But economics are going to win here, only a tiny fraction of the user base of cars (or phones) tinkers with them.
People don’t want cars they can tinker with, they want cars they can get repaired instead of replaced when something breaks….
People actually want a convenient and cheap service for getting around. All other considerations can be derived from this. If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it. Currently this is almost never the case of course, but if it happens in future, watch people switch behaviour instantly.
> If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it.
This is doing a lot of work but I'm going to go with a charitable interpretation. I seriously doubt that we'll ever hit a state where replacing a 2 ton vehicle is cheaper than repairing it. And if we do, I'll have to re-evaluate my charitable interpretation, because something shady is likely going on.
The crazy thing is people don't even repair things that are cheaper to repair than replace. Our countertop icemaker broke and my wife wanted to throw it out. I fixed it with 20 minutes of time and a $15 motor from Amazon.
I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive. People in large part have no idea how to repair anything they own. This mass ignorance is leading to some pretty poor market incentives.
A lot of it does come down to a cost / benefit analysis where time preference is extremely overweighted due to an abundance of seemingly free credit and, shall we say, a tragic dustbowl famine of available cognitive resources.
>I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive.
I don't think this is true. If this is the trend you're seeing it's probably because you're sampling through people with relatively high disposable income(or who don't mind endless credit card debt), who can just afford to throw away broken things when it's just a rounding error of their income.
But if you look at lower income people(with sane spending habits and financial literacy) you'll see how they first ask around if something can be repaired before they claw money from their checking account to buy something new.
My local facebook group is full of students asking if someone can fix their macbooks for cheap as they can't afford a new one or what Apple is quoting them, which is close in cost to buying a new one.
My minimum wage gf still had her barely functional Windows 7 notebook up until a year ago because she didn't feel like spending money to buy a new one if I could just keep fixing it.
Some broke people try not to buy new things if they can, but some are broke because they can't stop buying new things.
well, people want to have enough money to do what they need to do, of course, so they will choose things that they can in order to minimize cost and time spent, and increase convenience. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to own things that can be repaired. Owning repairable things is also valuable. I don’t think anyone actually wants to “own nothing and be happy”. But they might be able to be coerced into it, sure.
>There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.
Which is why I'm so baffled how and why the EU has spent so much time and effort regulating batteries and charging ports for phones, but still ignores this massive issue of ease of repairability and right to repair of personal vehicles that has been plaguing car owners since the ICE days and is now only getting worse with EVs, that's costing us a lot more money than what's costing users to pay Apple to replace your cracked display and dead battery.
It feels like they just keep going for the lowest hanging fruits to score easy wins that don't impact local industry, while ignoring the entire forest behind them.
Jarvis, pull up on the central HUD how much the EU car industry spent on lobbying in the EU over the last 15 years.
The EU is beholden to the Germans, ease of repair would wreck the profit margins of VAG, BMW and Daimler both because of reduced after-sales profits and due to cost increases to manufacturing and engineering.
Any electric gear with the battery as its main wear part. Ebikes. Sit-on mowers. Cars.
This is about so much more than cost. Agency, autonomy, environment, efficiency, geopolitics even.
I refuse to buy drm'ed gear. The exception is second hand where I can reliably avoid the drm with little effort. At its simplest, that means never using specific drm'ed functionality. At its most complicated, that means mitm'ing an encrypted can bus.
There are lots of parts on a car that will likely wear out faster than the battery on a modern liquid cooled large NMC or LFP lithium battery. You should be able to get over 200,000 miles on the battery. You probably won't get near that much from the suspension, etc.
Even older chemistry EV batteries last over 200k miles.
Given that so far in my 20 years of driving I've only racked up around 80k miles, that 200k "wear part" will out last the rest of my time on earth.
The EU has scored wins there though.
The mobile phone industry turns product into landfill on a yearly or more frequent basis.
People might do a yearly model swap on a car, but the car itself stays on the road for 10-20 years.
Changing how it's built needs to be done cautiously, but also has a much longer payback period.
I’m very confused as to why this is downvoted but I tossed you an upvote since I do my best to work against the constant brigading I always see on this forum.
> Fourteen pins in two parallel rows carry every signal this panel produces to the rest of the vehicle. Automotive connectors are among the most common failure points in modern cars: corrosion, fretting, and thermal cycling work on these joints over years of use. One connector failure on a module this integrated takes out mirrors, windows, locks, and child safety all at once.
Pack that shit full of silicone dielectric grease, check it every year or two, and it should be good for decades.
This sounds like copy written by someone who hasn't actually spent a lot of time with the automotive world and in trying to sound like they have.
Electrical connectors on automotive harnesses are far, far more reliable now on modern cars than they ever have been in the past, even with the increase in number of such connectors.
Companies like Delphi and Amphenol put immense engineering effort into the way modern connectors are designed, with weather sealing and contact plating that is way better than anything pre 1990's-ish was. Plastics really got way better after the turn of the Millenium compared to what they were before- I remember working on 1980s cars in the early 2000s (so, 20 year old cars) where connectors would ofter crumble in your hands when disconnecting them, or have completely corroded terminals, terrible sockets that yield and wouldn't keep continuity, etc. Compared that to all the cars I've worked on in the last 20 years where connectors have just not really been a worry (among the brands I've work on, at least). The electronics / sensors / modules themselves are much more likely to fail than the connectors they attach with, in my current experience. The only time connectors seem to fail is when cycled roughly/wrongly by people doing service incorrectly. Failure in place? Rare.
Anyone who thinks automotive electronics were more reliable in the past, live a bit with the electrical systems of a car from the 1970's thru the mid 1990's and report back to me on how that goes. Bonus points if it's Italian or British.
I want to buy a Chinese car and I am annoyed that my protectionist government won’t let me. Lowering transportation cost would be the most impactful thing to my budget.
All that serves to do is ensure the American car industry falls far behind by being coddled into a lack of competition.
Toyota showed the world the Toyota Production System. What Tesla, Kia/Hyundai, and Chinese EVs have shown American automakers is how much vertical integration can be an asset, especially with the lower part counts of electric vehicles.
The model where every part is contracted out to parts manufacturers is proving to be antiquated.
Totally agree, this protectionism killed the Australian car industry because eventually you just can’t compete.
All you need to know is that BYD cars are good enough that the US had to effectively ban them.
I don’t think BYD would be a hit in the US as they are in Europe. It’s an entirely different market. They may be relatively successful just not to the point of taking an important market share, they would probably be like Mazda. Many of the subsides for Chinese EV ended this year too, and they are now realizing price alone is not a differentiator. So even if BYD eventually makes it to the US, they will be priced close to other brands like KIA and Tesla, but without the advantage of the brand and strong local presence. So no, there’s no concerns with BYD and we may see them sooner than later in the US.
BYD only entered the Australian car market in 2022.
They are now the 2nd biggest seller after Toyota (https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/insight/byd-overtakes-rivals-...).
They are also priced much lower than KIA and Tesla.
FWIW I now own a GWM Cannon Αlpha PHEV pickup. Have also owned a Jeep Wrangler - the tech, build quality and reliability is not even on the same planet.
I can't imagine how the US manufacturers would compete with the Chinese ones on a level playing field. Not from the US, but it's hard to see how any administration would allow that. Would be the end of the local industry.
US manufacturers' niche is half-ton and above trucks. Even mighty Toyota's offering is playing distant #4 in that market with Nissan capitulating after 20 years of trying.
The BYD Shark 6 is already a hit, and the upcoming Shark 8 is aimed squarely at the ginormous US-style truck crowd.
https://bydautomotive.com.au/shark-6
https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/byd-shark-8-co...
They're selling well just 5 miles from El Paso with reportedly much interest from US customers.
The U.S. Wants to Ban China's High-Tech Cars but They're Already Here in El Paso - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48363751
* WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/chinese-cars-byd-geely-u-...
> It’s an entirely different market
One without cheap cars or EV's, even though that's what people want and need now.
BYD is not just zippy little city cars. The BYD Sealion 7 SUV (EV) and Shark full-size truck (PHEV) are incredibly popular in Australia, which is a very similar market to the US, and I'm sure they would sell like hotcakes if allowed into the US.
https://bydautomotive.com.au/sealion-7
https://bydautomotive.com.au/shark-6
It's worse than that. Trump's tariffs have knee-capped North American auto companies right when they needed to be upping their game. The auto sector is tightly integrated across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. Or was... Now there's tariff's on every part and frame that crosses a border. The American plan seems to be to put up a wall and force Americans to buy domestic while nobody else in the world buys American cars.
The lada and movkvisch of car brands with people willing to cross the wall to buy BYD in Mexico
Potentially predicated on anti-dumping rules.
I am torn on this. Anti-dumping is one thing, and yet disruption was an overused keyword for a long time in Silicon valley.
1. Huge scale subsidies like this are effectively a manufacturing attack. This is mean at the level of international politics and yet the world recently seems to be waking up to the idea they were handing over every practice of manufacture to China.
2. On the other hand, while the Chinese car companies are finding their footing they have not yet perfected the bullshit tiered marketing approaches that see relatively cheap to manufacture features gated to "high-equipment level" cars.
For example, now even the cheapest cars can have 360 degree parking cameras. Of course, the Chinese engineering level remains to be seen but many would argue this is competition in the market.
CT scans of BYD car components. BYD is fully vertically integrated at a level unseen since early 20th-century Ford.
Previous lumafield blog posts have been full of amazing graphics and knowledge.
But this one seems to be "state the obvious" and "recant political talking points with no new evidence".
This looks like a stealth advertisement for their CT scanning business. There is nothing educational of value for the general public here.
The only reason you would do this is for competitive analysis and I assure you the other car companies have already analyzed these parts.
Yes, that’s exactly what it is. On the other side of it though, so what, we get to look inside stuff with a cool scan. They’ve been doing these posts for several years now, and they’re all interesting.
I would say that there’s quite substantial value perhaps not to the general public but to the general HN user from their reports. I was very excited to see them have a public scan of an LFP battery because the previous scans they did of batteries were very informative on which brands to trust and the level of inconsistency that can exist. Their analysis of BYD’s battery design is very useful to someone who is looking to understand LFP and the levels of quality control necessary to have safe batteries. The reports are a bit of a “How it’s Made” but written for the target audience of engineers and has similar utility.
The part where they highlight the rippling in the lithium battery was interesting. They mention it can accelerate degradation over time. It's unclear if this specific example is within tolerances, but I have seen in other CT scans how dramatic the lithium rippling can become.
But overall, yeah, this is mostly an advertisement. They have other videos on their YouTube where they scan random items.
It's called content marketing, and there's nothing stealthy about it in particular.
There actually is a company who does this. full tear downs, of cars top to bottom. Interesting stuff
https://www.jalopnik.com/the-fascinating-company-that-tears-...