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.).
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.
Zero auto-pilot features, no cameras, just plain Android tablet you can install .apk you want.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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).
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.
However, I agree that Chinese EVs are a serious competition to other EVs.
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
Also good luck getting any replacement parts down the road wherever you live.
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.
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.
I'll leave the technical details for the engineers. :)
[0] www.gogoro.com/gogoro-network
The batteries are small compared to what you'd need for a car - they're maybe slightly larger than a standard lead-acid battery.
https://cnevpost.com/2025/03/04/nio-97800-daily-battery-swap...
They are out there, of course, the standardization part isn't there.
May be you can be sure of that. But can you be sure of the new battery that you just got, will discharge safely..?
It’s literally a concept car in production…
No. It's not.
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.
The batteries are the same size that they were previously, so the kWh pulled from the grid doesn't change.
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.
[0]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3301053/unus...
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.
- 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
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.
its already a blackmarket industry.. i bet they dont care much about where how the batteries are made.
"Trump administration moves to dismantle EPA’s science office" - https://www.ehn.org/trump-administration-moves-to-dismantle-...
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
Reminds me of this picture:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/CERN-cab...
https://www.cpcworldwide.com/Liquid-Cooling/Electric-Vehicle...
Maybe it will deteriorate it, but it seems that the effect that different charge types have on batteries may not be complete yet.
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...
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-insights/latest-marke...
During winter, without using carbon fossil generated energy, it's pretty unrealistic, isn't?
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
>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)
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.
