I was in mainland China a week ago and rode in a few different domestic electric cars when taking DiDi (Uber), from BYD and others. All pretty great experiences, good build quality. A surprising percent of the cars on the street in Kunming were electric - maybe 25%. The other cards make me expect good things from the Xiaomi.
My problem with Xiaomi is the absolutely crazy data gathering.
I visited one of their mall stores of theirs and literally the only product (out of many) not requiring an app was some sort of shaving machine. A goddamn pole fan requiring an app!
On the other hand, all modern cars seem to be pretty bad at this. Tesla cars appear to be a privacy nightmare.
- The car companies claim not only the owners' data, but the data of _any passengers_. I don't think people reasonably expect that sitting in a friend's car grants consent to collect data on them.
- Almost no brands allow people to request their data be deleted.
- Nissan claims the right to know their owner's sexual activity. Kia claims the right to know their owner's sex lives.
> - Almost no brands allow people to request their data be deleted.
I assume this has an implicit "in the USA"? Trying this in Europe would be an awfully bad idea -- GDPR has teeth, unlike most American consumer protection regulations.
Realistically, even iot wall sockets and switch controllers are now a well served market. Is there any electrical appliance that has no merit being externally controllable, and thus a potential data source?
We'd need Synology to gain way more market power than Apple and Google (and Xiaomi and every other global makers) to get a full user managed hub instead of the cloud first approach we have now.
> My problem with Xiaomi is the absolutely crazy data gathering. [...] On the other hand, all modern cars seem to be pretty bad at this.
Exactly. We'll hardly find one car, or for that matter any object with enough electronics on board which is both closed and connected, that doesn't use the technology to gather data on the user. Spying is a profitable business nobody in the industry can resist to.
They are a global brand now. If you use their apps in Europe you are presented with the choice of cloud locations (Germany) and they do comply with the GDPR. There are far worse actors out there then Xiaomi.
Why would there be insurance penalties if my car can't talk to its servers? Or why would a car go into emergency mode every time I took a holiday up in the mountains?
I am glad they went to 800V. The acceleration stat race is getting a bit stupid. But I think 800V is very important, at least for charging. It will not only let you charge fast it will let other people use the charger after you are done.
I hope the industry moves both the fast chargers and the cars to 800V asap. (Naturally, fast chargers should retain 400V backward compatibility). When cars charge faster it is kind of like having more chargers.
800V lets them have all the HV conductors within the car half the thickness.
Back in 2015, it didn't make sense because EV's didn't charge that fast, and battery balancing tech was still expensive (and cost scales proportional to the voltage).
However, now battery balancing tech is mere cents per volt, and customers demanding fast charging means super thick (and expensive!) wires in the car and battery pack.
1000 volt MOSFETS have also become a lot cheaper (used in the motor inverters), whereas before car manufacturers were reusing 600 volt mosfets designed for other things.
The only downside of higher voltages are increased insulation requirements. However, PVC insulation allows 10kV per mm, so the insulation thickness required is still tiny (although clearly you cannot use outdoor air as an insulator in either case).
The 800v is not relevant to “all the conductors within the car“. It is the move from 12 V to 48 V that allows them to reduce the thickness of all the wires within the car. That’s what the cybertruck introduced.
> The only downside of higher voltages are increased insulation requirements.
Is there increased risk to emergency responders who might have to cut into a vehicle to rescue occupants? Or is there a possibility that deformation from an accident could result in metal parts charged to 800V? I hope things are designed to prevent that. Perhaps the insulation you mention is armored for the high voltage paths.
400V is already beyond dangerous, raising it won’t kill you any faster. There’s probably decreased risk because of lower current (less heat to melt things).
EVs have a system that disconnects the battery mechanically when a high speed impact happens. I don’t think there have been any electrocution incidents so far?
Good. They are designed to prevent injuries to first responders (which are nearly always exposed to some hazard when responding to a vehicle accident.)
I did a search and could find no reports of injury to first responders.
Is EV charging actually voltage limited? I had impression that it's limited more by C rating and upstream capacity than by resistance and/or cable thickness requirements.
Somewhat? This voltage isn’t (just) about the battery, but about all power connections. Cables can only take so much current after all! At 150 KW, you need 400 V × 375 A. That is an insane current figure. At 800 V, it’s just half the current.
I’ve used a 300 KW DC charging station once. The cable is very thick and heavy. There are practical limits.
Cable thickness is very much a problem with fast chargers. Many fast chargers now have water cooled cables, because when 500 amps is going down the cable, you either need it super thick with copper or to have the complexity of two water cooling loops (one for the positive conductor, one for the negative conductor, electrically isolated coolant loops).
> The base model, however, only supports 400V charging for its smaller 73.6kWh battery,
This suggests the base model is 400v, while the other models are 800v.
That in turn means that the onboard charger, DC/DC, motor inverters and AC compressor inverter must be different between the models, or that they have designed 400v/800v dual-mode hardware for all those things.
Having so many parts different between models drives up costs.
Having dual-mode hardware also drives up costs - typically the power electronics have cost ~proportional to max voltage * max current. If you need a fixed output power, you are only using half of either voltage or current if the hardware is dual-mode, so you are wasting half of the power electronics cost, which is huge.
(before someone points out that Tesla cybertruck has dual-mode 400v/800v since it can rewire the battery to charge at either voltage... Well it never drives along in the 400 volt mode. And even then, I'd bet the AC compressor is at dramatically reduced power output while on a 400v charger)
It might be a long term cost savings measure if trials with 800v allow them to move their whole fleet to 800v eventually and lower costs in the future.
Besides lots more pictures, carnewschina [1] also reports:
> According to Xiaomi, the SU7 is a pretty aerodynamic car with a drag coefficient of only 0.195 Cd, the lowest among production vehicles.
No doubt this was helped by hiring James Qiu who had previously worked on Mercedes-Benz's Vision EQXX design, a concept car with a record setting 0.17 Cd.
> propelling the car to a stated top speed of 100 km/h (62 mph)
Yeah, definitely not many American markets. Several highways around me have posted speed limits of 75MPH, traffic often flows even faster than that. Driving in a car that can barely reach 60mph would often result in a speed differential of like 15+mph with the rest of traffic. I'd feel extremely unsafe going almost 20mph slower than the surrounding traffic while in a subcompact car.
This thing costs more than 45.000EUR with any kind of equipment and is massive - a far cry away from something like a Renault Clio or similar econobox.
And the average new home in the US is $480k, but at a median income of $31k I would never call it inexpensive. Let’s save it for the truly high value purchases like $90 espresso machines, $400 phone, $400 PC, and $300 TV. Maybe a $10k 10 year old Toyota with 150k miles left?
Median household income in the US is more like $70k. Median individual income is $40k. Median household also varies tremendously by state, Mississippi is around $44k and Maryland/DC area is $90k.
Not in NL they can't... the cheapest I can find is 18k for either model. Some of them appear to be still eligible for a subsidy, but that only brings it down to 16k. Not bad honestly considering that taxes are about to go up for EVs in the Netherlands in 2025. No more subsidization when a 30% of people own an EV!
Mitsubishi sold the i-MiEV in the US for years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_i-MiEV I knew a guy who had two of em. Nobody else bought them and eventually they gave up. There's just no market for EVs with a 60 mile range.
The Chevy Bolt EUV is to my mind the perfect little city car. It’s not really “little” by most standards but if I were buying an EV today this is the one I’d go with. I love my Teslas and will keep them for many years to come but I’m happy that Chevy has this one.
I heard :(. It’s weird to say, but I think Chevy is moving too fast. The Volt should still be around, it’s a great “starter” car for the EV shy. Now they’re rushing headlong into trucks when I think there’s a real market for the compact crossover EUV. I suppose trucks are high margin and now that “little” trucks are back they can take part of that segment.
My friend bought a used Honda Clarity last year. It is a hybrid but all electric for the first 30-odd miles, which doesn't seem like a lot but he runs a roadside assistance company and that 30 miles is his typical range, it's saving him 1-4 gallons of gas a day depending on the timing of his calls.
He really likes it and would consider a new one when he's done with this one but they quit making them.
I wish it was not true, same with the Nissan leaf. I know the leaf was never a great seller but it seems that now the EV market is getting hot, these cool compact EVs are being discontinued.
The Chevy volt was also ahead of its time and a shame they got rid of that so quickly.
Probably far from the main reason but related: EV tends to be heavier than their gasoline counterparts so the infrastructures will need to adapt in the long run. Road thickness grow by vehicleWeight^4.
Dacia Spring is still a Chinese car that's got nothing to do with the Romanian brand, it's just a rebadge to a brand the EU consumers are familiar with.
It's fully enclosed, has 4 wheels and a steering wheel.
In (some) cities it's a faster commuter than any two-seat convertible, as it can legally get away with straddling the line between a car and a bicycle.
It doesn't appeal to me personally, but I regularly see it used as a city commuter in Amsterdam.
Most of the previous comments take it to mean a small car that doesn't need to travel very fast or far, perhaps in a city where parking is scarce.
But some of my commutes have been very long, or very far, or very fast. If I'm going to spend three hours, or 100 miles, or average 80+ mph on it every single day, I'm not going to get a small econobox.
We all know commuting is an awful, awful experience; but when people spend a lot of time in their car, it's no surprise that they're spending more money to make that experience slightly less awful.
Why exactly do you need an enormous car to feel comfortable on a commute? This attitude is frankly leading to an enormous ballooning in the size of vehicles on the road, which is having tragic consequences for pedestrians. As somebody in the 98% height, and who is perfectly comfortable in well designed "econo-boxes" (vw seems quite good at this), I find the desire to get enormous SUVs for a highway commute terribly unfortunate.
Given the vast majority of new car sales in the US and SUVs and trucks, I'm skeptical that most are being purchased to cope with chronic back pain.
Europeans have also not entirely abandoned the concept of vans, which although not as fun as a rear wheel drive hemi, are generally more comfortable, accessible, and efficient than SUVs.
A lot of families in the US are forced to larger vehicles (minivans or SUVs) when they have a second child -- my wife and I greeted twins and had to get rid of our VW Jetta because it could _barely_ fit 2 car seats in the back.
At least in Europe, the industry has lobbied away the possibility of cheap cars. From 2024, "Intelligent Speed Assist" and data recorders are mandatory for new cars.
Chinese manufacturers are going to obliterate the EU auto industry.
I saw Nio break the 1k range mark on a single battery charge the other day. That and their battery swapping stations. Now this.
Meanwhile BMW is still making a diesel X5 with colorful lights for about >100k in 2023 and also a diesel series 7. The exhaust on these stinks like the one in a VW from 2004. Their electric and hybrid offerings are also a joke.
Another player, Daimler, put a washing machine sized electric motor coupled onto the automatic gearbox into some of their hybrids, along with a underpowered 1.6L engine. The tumble dryer engine is powered by a 20kW battery, wasting juice as drag and heat in the gearbox. They had the gearboxes lying around from start/stop ICEs and found a use for them: dumping them onto an unsuspecting public. That is their idea of a hybrid. Of course it's underpowered and burns gas like there's no tomorrow the moment that you stop driving like grandma.
Renault is possibly the only brand with decent offerings. Everybody laughs while Dacia Spring, another Chinese built car, is leading the EV sales this year. Dacia is the budget brand in Renault's portofolio.
The demand is there, just not for Audis. VW is barely present in the top 9[1] with the ID4, 120k units sold compared to >1M Tesla Y+3. The rest is Chinese cars, BYD, GAC, Wuling. By volumes[2] BYD is #1, closely followed by Tesla and then a mix of German and Chinese companies with much smaller (<1/4x) market share by Q3 2023.
So, what sells? Compact crossovers and sedans (C-segment) priced around €40k, with a much smaller market for compact more affordable EVs (B-segment) priced below €25k. What is Audi offering? Four beefed up SUVs (J-segment) and a sports model (S-segment). What is BMW, the top German automaker by 2023 sales offering? Three sedans (E and F-segment), a SUV (J-segment) and Minis (B-segment). Tesla and BYD are spot on, the others not so much. All the German automakers combined cannot even match Tesla volumes.
You mean the cars that had GPS maps and cruise control anyway will have to take the speed limit from the GPS map and apply it to the cruise control? Horror, the cost!
> as well as chassis stamped by its die casting machines with a clamping force of 9,100 tons — beating that of Tesla's apparently.
This seems incoherent to me? Metal stamping is a process, and die casting is a separate process, from what I understand. Is there any reason to die cast a chassis? Does the press strength around the casting molds matter? I’d assume chassis parts would be built out of stamped and bent sheet metal?
Tesla has switched their newer lines to casting. It seems like it's mostly about manufacturing efficiency rather than strength -- they can cast the whole underbody of the vehicle as a single piece rather than having dozens of stamped pieces that need to be welded or riveted together. Initially they were doing the front half as one piece and the back half as another, but they've needed to get bigger and bigger (higher- and higher-force) machines as they've gone from two-piece to single-piece construction.
When die casting, you inject semi-molten metal into a cold mould.
The mould must be held closed while metal is being injected. The "9100 tons" refers to the force keeping the mould closed. That force is approximately proportional to the surface area of the object being cast.
Xiaomi is China's Apple, so what happened to the rumored Apple car? Haven't heard anything for a while, but Wikipedia claims it's still planned for 2024-25:
Calling it: Apple will partner with an established automaker such as Goldman Sachs^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HPolestar and customize the infotainment OS.
> Much like Volkswagen, Xiaomi already knows that car owners still prefer to have some physical buttons,
Despite decades of experience in the industry, until very recently Volkswagen weirdly thought the opposite was true. It's incredible it's taken them this long to U-turn on what's been a blindly obvious problem with their current interior designs. It got the point where every other manufacturer, that did the (old) sensible thing, was praised.
I wonder how many generations before those CPUs get replaced by a Chinese native competitor. I'm guessing the Qualcomm infotaintment processors will be replaced soon.
High end semiconductors is one area where China has a lot of ground to catch up on. They can make them fast, or cheap, but can't make them fast and cheap yet. They have a similar problem with jet turbines, and most of it is related to materials engineering.
Cars are an interesting example of where it might not super matter that the chips lag. Even a lot.
If you are dumping kW of power into electric motors and climate control, having an inefficient hot not-great 200W computer or two running in car entertainment might not be super noticeable.
The downsides of needing bigger VRMs to power the cores, and needing more cooling are both real costs, that diminsh the effectiveness of trying to save money on cores. But it is interesting to me that this feels like the one segment where people might not notice 100Ws of egregiously inefficient computing, because it's such a small fraction of the total power budget.
But unlike cold war they have market based economy ... so I think that the west will be unpleasantly surprised how little we will be able to slow them down. Also - programmers have started to learn how to squeeze performance again out of the little hot rocks.
It has worked for a few decades now. While almost anything else is easy to reverse engineer, the trial and error used to come up with advanced semiconductors and jet turbine engines is really hard to discern by looking at end products, and the secrets are heavily locked down in Europe and the states (even Taiwan, Japan, Korea have to import materials and equipment from a very few locked down sources for their own fabs). China will eventually get there, but they are 10s of years and billions of dollars away from it. Because of the scale of the work needed, it is also unlikely to come from private industry, and with public research a lot of that money is going to be siphoned off to corruption.
> similar problem with jet turbines, and most of it is related to materials engineering.
I think better modelling techniques and far cheaper and better CNC machining will more than make up for subpar materials.
After all, the blades inside a jet engine already have a melting point lower than that of the internal gas temperatures, and there is no limit to film cooling, as long as you can model it precisely enough.
If I had a few years of my life to spare, I wanted to make a demo gas turbine generator with all the moving parts made of chocolate to demonstrate that effect.
They don't need to fab it right now. Xiaomi isn't banned from using TSMC. So they can design it and get it built by TSMC/Samsung. In long run yeah they'll need independence on fab also. But for this use case 10nm should be good enough for now, which SMIC can make quiet competitively.
Another premium EV for a premium price. I wonder if it manages to find a spot in the market. It seems that at the moment there is a lot of premium EV supply while demand is cooling down.
Doesn't really look like a cooldown cycle for me in China. The competition is extreme there. Weekly new releases with another cool state-of-the-art feature. Pure innovation going on there, which makes me, as a German, kinda worried...
China is absolutely gonna destroy the West with EVs.
Western companies are completely asleep at the wheel, pun not intended.
The U.S. is trying to do some good old fashioned protectionism to protect its industry but it’s either gonna fail, or it’s gonna reveal the massively lagging U.S. economic system which is incapable of building infrastructure and is increasingly incapable of encouraging R&D and new industries.
The only thing that could hold the Chinese back right now is the Chinese govt which has already managed to destroy 2-3 industries over the past few years (the extremely fast growing tech industry comes to mind) with arbitrary policy and decision making.
If I were a Chinese company right now, I would try and diversify my supply chain, R&D and even top talent into safer Western countries with auto making talent like Germany. However, fierce price competition in China may mean they don’t really have the luxury to do so.
I think now would be the time for the EU or individual European counties to sprinkle some light protectionism on their auto industry to give Chinese EV makers a reason to shift there without angering their Chinese govt overlords.
> If I were a Chinese company right now, I would try and diversify my supply chain, R&D and even top talent into safer Western countries with auto making talent like Germany. However, fierce price competition in China may mean they don’t really have the luxury to do so.
There is a big influx of these to Malaysia and Singapore. Pretty sure other countries too but these two stands out because they already have some local Chinese population; which makes the Chinese feel more at home. I am also reading that Chinese low-skill manufacturing is trying to find a foot in Africa; though not sure if that's going to work out.
To be fair Chinese government does encourage Chinese companies manufacturing/investing abroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Out_policy). From companies' perspective the issue is always high cost (compare to China) and lack of experience.
(BTW the tech industry is not destroyed by any means. Since the goal at that time was anti-monopoly...it did limit the market power of top players though hard to tell its net utility)
"The U.S. is trying to do some good old fashioned protectionism to protect its industry but it’s either gonna fail"
This is because in real politik vehicle manufacturing means the ability to make war machines and artillery. If we subsidize China more it is just asking for military losses.
UK has vehicle manufacturing but no steel production. In case of a war, it's military production is zero.
They ordered new NLAWs to be produced, in peacetime, and the lead time on a small batch is like 3 years. I do not see any possibility of winning a prolonged war against any enemy that wears shoes more sophisticated than sandals.
The Western military-industrial complex was dissing primitivity and backwardness of Russian army, and with 10x the budget, I thought they were right. I thought Ukraine would lose militarily, or politically, or lose morale, thank kind of thing.
I never imagined that western military complex is so proud of having it's few expensive and fancy toys that it has actually grown incapable of producing abundant supply of shells and bullets. South Korea supplied more artillery shells to Ukraine than US or EU. Looking at the state of affairs, i cannot help but thing corruption and fraud.
But how can this be? We are comparing to the two most corrupt countries on the plane, Russia and China.
All of western military leadership that is currently antagonising China must be barking mad, China has 10x industrial capacity of Russia.
Taxes, mostly. The Western governments expenses have ballooned. Too much money is being siphoned everywhere and for everything that they needed to cut funding for other stuff that they didn't immediately need. Plus they know that the US will have their back, at least until Trump got elected.
I agree. I was there a month back and the EV adoption is incredible. From small scooters, delivery vans to sedans. EV is roaring there and from the little I saw, innovation growth is crazy. Went into a small factory for making solar street lights and it was full of solar panels and EV battery cells… note that this was a small factory with container loads of cells!
That's the supply side. But is there enough demand to buy all those cars?
Every time a new model with better battery chemistry, longer range, faster charging is released, it makes a bunch of older models with previous-gen batteries, shorter range, slower charging obsolete to the point of unsellability. Then they end up rotting in an overgrown lot somewhere. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/
Because of the fast release cadence, a model might become outmoded before it sold enough cars to recoup the development cost, but of course manufacturers can't just stop to save money while everyone else is putting out new models at breakneck speed and eating into their market share. So they're caught in a hamster wheel, burning cash while hoping that someone else will go bankrupt first. WM Motor looks like a candidate: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chines...
There's some techlore floating around https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2023/12/03/bri-notebook-the-... claiming that the overcrowded market is actually good for the industry as a whole because it makes it more competitive abroad, but that's cold comfort for investors who hoped to make their money back and then some.
This happened a lot in other industries if not every, like IEM (Chi-fi), PC gaming handheld, mechanical keyboard, smartphone, 3d printer, solar pannel...At this point it feels a combination of abundant manufacturing know-how, strong entrepreneur culture, fast pace decision making, government policy, fierce market competition and all other reasons creates a synchronizing effect that always causes overcapacity + racing to bottom.
Ironically Chinese government has quite a lot experience handling overcapacity, sometimes caused by them sometimes not :/
"Non premium" EV would still have to handle the "we have 1000km of highway to do once a year on a charge, and we won't buy the car until it does". Which also translates as "non premium has to be as expensive as premium".
We were supposed / dearly wishing to have solved that by now, thanks to all the "battery breakthroughs" that made it to the front page of HN in the last decade.
How about "Someone who has to rush to a loved one on a very short notice" ?
Sure, it's a worst case scenario.
How about "someone who's traveling on the exact same bank holiday as the rest of the country, and will not for the love of any deity wait for an hour on a packed highway station while every one is recharging ?"
My point is not that "it's what people actually need 99% of the time", but that "the worst case" is the bar to clear.
Ironically, it's kinda the same issue as electricity grids, except you can't buy range from your neighbors.
Oh, and it has to be cheap, too, by the way.
I honestly though it would be done by the 20s. It's getting harder and harder to argue for EVs every year that goes by without such a model - which also happens to be "every year that goes by without me being able to afford an EV".
Mechanically, over 300 miles, you take an airplane rather then drive 5 hours to your destination if it’s a life of death situation. Making bigger batteries is a giant waste of resources there.
Good luck getting a flight that fast. Sometimes driving overnight can still be faster. Especially if you need to get somewhere after you get to the airport as well.
Unless you're flying directly into your final destination, I would argue driving is probably faster for everything assuming you need to leave in 12 hours or less. Not to mention exponentially cheaper (ignoring depreciation).
In Europe, I would agree that flying could often be easier and/or cheaper. In the US, I can drive 500 miles (800~km) in 8 hours or less, passing through a few major cities with light/moderate traffic.
When you take into account airport travel, security time, the actual flight time, and leaving the airport, that is often 4+ hours for a 1 hour flight. Short haul flights also only tend to run once or twice a day unless you're traveling between busy cities, so you need to factor that waiting time in as well.
For a middle-age (+) person with friends and family that are starting to die of old age, being able to drop everything and drive overnight to say goodbye could be really important to them. This is something I had not really considered before when thinking about EV charging speeds. Until now, I had really only thought about vacations or business travel, which is not that time sensitive.
Good thing that we read the front page of HN every day, so we can just hop in the closest Hyperloop for the bulk of the trip, then travel the last mile in an autonomous electric flying robotaxi to visit our loved ones - who are not dying anyway because their desease has been crispr-ed away in the metaverse by an AGI.
Not sure how you're going to travel the ~100km from the closest airport to the place you need to go, if you happen to have the audacity to dare having to reach people living in "the middle of nowhere".
I completely agree this is a giant waste of resource to do that with the current battery tech, and that it results in completely unaffordable, suboptimal cars that most people can neither afford nor agree to buy.
Which is also why we need better tech yesterdecade.
The situation really has to improve a lot before the end of the 20s arrive, otherwise we'll see civil unrest unlike anything you can imagine. Our next election cycles in Europe will be 50/50 immigration ("they're coming from your job") and transportation ("they're coming for you car !"). Guess who wins this game ?
This is a huge problem. While Tesla has portable superchargers that they bring out on bank holidays to handle extra demand, everyone else is super bad at handling peak capacity (I only charge at home, except on holidays, when everyone else is vying for the same chargers!).
I'm dreaming of being able to drive an EV from Seattle to Anchorage, so that kind of range would reduce the amount of time spent at RV parks (until BC hydro completes their EV charging network in northern BC, then it won't matter as much anymore).
Once the battery is bigger than 300 miles or so, charging speed matters a lot more than battery size, in my opinion. I've done 4 3000km trips in an EV.
> "we have 1000km of highway to do once a year on a charge, and we won't buy the car until it does"
This is the kind of fucking around that eventually leads to finding out. There is a reason Professional drivers aren't allowed to drive for more than 11 hours in a day, and have to take regular brakes.
Is this kind of highway fantasy or just US car culture?
In Europe I do not know a single person that has ever driven 1,000 km in one day. Let alone without stopping to refuel.
You not knowing anyone is not a good indicator of a phenomenon existing or not.
You don’t know any Eastern European who drives from the UK to their home country twice a year? London to Warsaw is 1000+ miles and can be done with the ferry in under 24 hours. Here, an estimate from Google maps: 18 hr 19 min (1.015,6 mi)
via A2 and A2.
There are thousands of those people on European roads every year before Christmas and after NYE, and in holiday season. I did it myself a couple of times years ago.
> There is a reason Professional drivers aren't allowed to drive for more than 11 hours in a day
Yes, 7 to 40 tonnes of reasons and legal rest breaks required between work shifts. Professional drivers do a job, not just driving.
It's going to be a fun time when your car is vulnerable because the manufacturer decided to stop software patches. Xiaomi isn't known for long term support, their phones get max 2-3y of updates (they release so many versions it's crazy). I am going to stay with my low tech 2013 Toyota for as long as possible that's for sure.
what changes in conditions would make a previously stable car unstable? Genuinely curious. Because I'd assume software patches tend to exist solely to make incremental improvements, not fix glaring issues - if there were any I'm sure regulation would mandate that they get patched no matter how old the model.
When someone finds a huge security hole (eg "blast this signal over high power bluetooth and you can make all Xiaomi cars within 1 mile immediately go to full throttle and crash!").
Or when a server the car uses gets shut down, and suddenly basic operations like opening the doors can't be done because it turns out the car's OS pings that server before letting any door open.
But don't you think there would be larger regulatory forces in play that would protect everyone from these types of issues? Xiaomi isn't just gonna refuse in a situation like this.
I have a feeling we're gonna loose the EV race same how we lost the software race and then the mobile race. Our auto industry could be the next Nokia.
Sure, I'm confident the lobbied EU leaders will put speedbumps in place for the Chinese Auto makers in the EU market, but that will do more harm than good as the local brands won't be under enough pressure to innovate, knowing the governments have their back regardless.
> we lost the software race and then the mobile race
Was the EU ever really in the race to begin with? They really wanted to be, but you can't actually centrally plan a working software or hardware economy.
> EU leaders will put speedbumps in place
That's the only tool they understand how to use. It's sad that this makes them feel they have to constantly use it.
> knowing the governments have their back regardless.
Yea.. you almost get the feeling these policies are _designed_ to create monopolies and have nothing at all to do with fostering competition.
At least European car makers are trying to stay in the race, but the Japanese appear to have just given up. Toyota is still spruiking hydrogen and others like Mazda don't even have plans to start building EVs.
In China that's just another Tuesday. I'm not sure why you don't think you are seeing it. Now, if they export such a product to Europe or the USA, that's another story.
You can buy the battery outright (in which case you don't use the swap stations) or you can use a battery subscription to swap to a new battery as needed.
Nio has three battery sizes: 75 kWh, 100 kWh, and soon a 150 kWh option. All in the same physical dimensions:
Well, Teslas aren’t going to get either one anytime soon, but you could buy a Hyundai which has both features. (Granted, you’ll have to get top-level trim for the HUD). You might also find that it is a better car than a Tesla.
I switched from Hyundai to Tesla , and will never go back. It’s an absolute gimmick. With Hyundai even basic things work bad , like heating during winter
The Mercedes HUD on their electric cars has some augmented reality features, highlighting where you'd supposed to turn in the outside world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp4O4AsGkZM
A lot of cars have a hud option, even a toyota corrolla has it where it just reflects on the window. Helps me keep attention on the road better since it's in my line of sight. A hud would help keep the minimalist aesthetic with 'fighter jet' vibes or whatever excuse is needed for elon to say yes to it.
Car makers do it all the time. I have curves of our older BMW 5 series (f11) burned in my head.
New VW passat came out, I saw it from up close and all subtle front and side curves are there, at same spots, done in >98% same way.
These automakers are mega corporations now, not some passionate geeks working out of garages. They follow trends, curb any unique excellence in order to have uniform brand design. Chinese, they take western brands with just copy&paste, I havent seen much more. Everybosy should see Taycan in that design.
There’s “taking inspiration from” and straight out copying. The line is admittedly blurry.
But in this case, I kind of feel it leans a bit towards the latter.
This isn’t the first instance Chinese automakers have copied designs. There have been outright shameless egregious clones of various BMWs, Porsches, etc. I don’t know what the legalities are, but those were never intended for sale outside of China IIRC.
No idea where do you find similarities between the f11 bmw and a passat except both having 4 doors and 4 wheels. They look completely different, especially the f11 with that beautiful round front and that round muscular rear line of the touring.
It of course depends in personal taste but Chinese car makers seem to all be targeting global expansion and are all conscious of good design because they do make efforts in this area and none of their models is ugly.
Western Automakers already control their respective markets and are seeking to break into china, so they design towards chinese consumers. Chinese automakers already control their respective markets and are seeking to break into the western markets, and thus design towards western consumer tastes.
You would think that "savy" HN visitors who know about A/B testing, market data driven decisions, etc. would know that if something looks ugly it's usually designed that way for a reason. But keep being smug while you ruin your website/app's color schemes and layout based on the same data driven corporate design strategies.
As it happens, and although China requires (or used to require?) a joint-venture to produce in the country, Volkswagen used to pretty much own the Chinese car market.
The 500 mile range is a pretty standout feature. That beats basically anything currently on the market aside from the eyewateringly-expensive Lucid Air.
Maybe you've already taken this into account, but CLTC ratings tend to be 20-40% higher than the way range is calculated in the US. eg a Tesla MY LR has 330 miles of range in US vs 430 miles in China, but it's basically the same car
That seems like an unreasonably high level of confidence to have when paired with no supporting material.
A Model 3 has a battery no larger than 83kWh. A BMW i4 has a battery no larger than 84kWh. This car has a 101kWh battery. Considering the cars appear roughly approximately equally aerodynamic, it seems reasonable to expect the car with the 20% larger battery to be able to go about 20% further.
It is not only about battery size, but also about efficiency. Model 3 and i4 have very efficient motors, specially the BMW (non-permanent magnet type). I have difficulties believing than Xiaomi can reach such efficiency levels in 36 months development. It is also important to note that those 20% extra kWh are heavy, and need to be accelerated to cruise speeds several times during normal-driving. I stand my point and don't think that the xiaomi will even reach 700km in best conditions (The BMW i4 made around 650km)
Slightly off topic, but tengential : EV's range is usually measured using some sort of "mixed" cycle like WLTP where you do a bit of slow speed, a bit of high speed etc.
Is there a "dumb" test that just fill up the battery, put the car on a bench, goes up to 130km/h (or whatever a sensible value for "highway speed" is), and waits for the battery to be empty ?
This is partially it, but it isn’t hard to calculate the CdA of a car and then add resistance to the rollers equivalent to the expected wind resistance, however the bigger reason is that cars operate in a dynamic environment and you don’t actually want to know how far they’d drive at 100kph with no additional wind in a straight line. It just isn’t helpful.
The driving cycles have a number of issues but they purposefully try and capture more of the range of dynamics to help consumers better understand what they should actually expect from vehicles.
It is like comparing CPUs only on their ability to multiply quickly vs a suite of software benchmarks.
Still, it seems like you're saying "the number would be unrealistic", but I'm not sure people want a realistic number, just a "worst case scenario"...
I understand that standard tests try to measure something "realistic", but they end up giving a value that is not what people are waiting for - which is, again, and I can't stress it enough because it's 100% of the conversation i still have about EVs with every single person I talk to - "insurance that I will be able to visit my mum on a single charge at the other end of the country".
I understand it's a bad question to ask and people don't really need _that_ range, but apparently they need _that_ info :/
Right, but those people would then get their EV, go for a 20km drive in bad EV conditions, see their range decrease by 30km, and call the manufacturer a liar. Been there, done that. Family member sold theirs because they weren’t “confident in the range” despite never driving more than 80km in a day.
Truth is I think some people just don’t want them and they look for a “logical” out since that conflicts with their desire to be less impactful to the environment.
A 75kwh battery pack has the same energy as ~8.5 liters of gasoline. While the conversion of that energy to movement is far more efficient than a gasoline engine, that’s still a small amount of energy comparatively, so the variance is going to be very, very high.
Also depends on speed - for electric cars most economic speed is kinda low, due to atmospheric drag. So in city cycle electric cars will do much much better than gasoline ones.
Ignoring wind resistance is what he wrote, but I think it's the opposite of what he meant. A highway test that accelerates once to a high speed and maintains that speed is mostly about aerodynamic drag.
E.g., one would have to model and output the relevant solar spectrum to heat the vehicle and see how it responds to the IR heat load in maintaining human and battery operating temperature. Same with cold cycles, and the details get complicated when you try to average out the experienced conditions.
One of Tesla's mileage advantages comes from using the most advanced multilayer mirrors in their glass to minimize the effect of radiant heating/heat loss.
Fun aside: An interesting side effect of the technology is the appearance of red droplets when rain or dew is on the glass with the proper sunlight conditions:
Youtube has some videos of highway road tests at 70mph (just search "highway range test EV 70 mph") if you're curious. Actual road tests are nice because they give you a good idea of wind resistance + some elevation variance - which is what you'll likely encounter doing road trips which is when range is most important.
No, Xiaomi is crazier, they send something every 5 seconds once the phone is awake and every app of their built in app suite will do the same. I've observed this with a dns filter app. I've owned many phones and I've never seen anything this crazy
"Both iOS and Android...transmit telemetry data to their motherships even when a user hasn’t logged in or has explicitly configured privacy settings to opt out of such collection. Both OSes also send data to Apple and Google when a user does simple things such as inserting a SIM card or browsing the handset settings screen. Even when idle, each device connects to its back-end server on average every 4.5 minutes...In the US alone, Android collectively gathers about 1.3TB of data every 12 hours. During the same period, iOS collects about 5.8GB."
The quote above made it a bit unclear, they measured it at 1MB vs 52kB per device:
> When idle, Android sends roughly 1MB of data to Google every 12 hours, compared with iOS sending Apple about 52KB over the same period. In the US alone, Android collectively gathers about 1.3TB of data every 12 hours. During the same period, iOS collects about 5.8GB.
Yeah their android skin is literal malware (and I don't say that lightly, it is impossible to get rid of most of the apps, it installs random stuff constantly, will stop some features from working if you disable unrelated stuff, and is filled with ads). It also has that weird "chinese sales app" aesthetic that is common to banggood, AliExpress and even creality cloud. But you can't beat the price for the hardware, and it's super straight forward to just wipe out the OEM ROM since they allow for bootloader unlocking.
The funny thing you can't block the requests unless you want to drain the battery because ...behold... there is no backoff logic when the connection fails so it goes into an infinite loop lol
The custom roms were not an option since i needed google's safety net feature but i got a different phone eventually
So I guess for most of Europe and the US you would be right. Thankfully that's just a relatively small part of the world though. If anything, all things considered having the US as your adversary is much much more risky. so outside of US vassals/allies, I think picking China as your poison in terms of spyware is the least risky option. China might like to pretend they are on the same level as the US but they absolutely cannot project their strength (or meddle in domestic affairs of other countries ) in any similar way.
China is actively helping Russia. They’re not neutral, and they’re not simply opportunistic like India. I don’t how much clearer it needs to be aside from China invading Taiwan.
As an individual, most threat I have will be from my own govt. and politicians/police by simple virtue of overlap and the authority they have to mess my life. So given choice, I'll prefer minimum additional info to my govt.
Yes, one is not better than the other until there’s a security issue in Europe that actively threatens the EU. Then miraculously Western Europeans will suddenly remember that the US is an ally. This is exactly why many US voters are growing tired of subsidizing the EU’s defense.
I guess your media conveniently skips the part where joining NATO means destroying your own long range weapons. This is what they forced Bulgaria to do and they made a very big deal out of it.
What you're skipping over is that the reason the US asked for their destruction is that having a NATO ally with weapons that violated the INF treaty with Russia wouldn't have been good idea.
We have subsidized your defense for decades now which is a big reason how entitlements like socialized healthcare was able to work in the EU despite not having the long term birthrates to cover it. It’s a much bigger gift than cheaply produced goods. Also every time there’s a mess in Europe, we have to clean it up without getting paid unlike the CCP with their low cost goods. The cost in blood and taxes would be much easier to swallow for Americans if there was at least some gratitude from the Western Europeans.
> We have subsidized your defense for decades now which is a big reason how entitlements like socialized healthcare was able to work in the EU despite not having the long term birthrates to cover it.
No, socialized healthcare works in Europe because its cheaper than the US system, massively so. The US just chooses to waste extra money to assure that large segements of its population lack access to quality healthcare.
Having hostile neighbors you either need to spend real % of GDP to protect yourself or have a powerful ally , any other way of thinking is delusional. So yes, your medicine goods are at least partially sponsored by US
> Also every time there’s a mess in Europe, we have to clean it up without getting paid
You're too high on your own supply if you really believe this to be the case... The reason Europe has proper healthcare is because the US has a huge army? Give me a break...
Please, start provide some actual backing by numbers of what you're saying if you're gonna try to spread propaganda around here.
It’s simple. You have finite resources and you have to choose where to spend those resources. The EU has chosen healthcare and pensions which leaves almost nothing for defense. Guess who has to make up for the shortfall?
Oh yeah , and what happened to Europe , when they pray to share more money to Ukraine because EU was eating cheese , drinking beer and not thinking about defense , maybe except Poland . And meanwhile also let corrupt themself and give away their energy market to Russia . Oh well Russia bought lots of weapons on this money to start attacking EU
One reason Germany has been able to afford more entitlements for its citizens like socialized healthcare is due to the fact that it virtually had no defense expenditures for decades. We can say the same for most of Western Europe. The US has subsidized the defense of the EU for decades.
As for occupation, I wonder what Germany did in the 20th century to merit it?
No one is forcing the USA to keep it's European military bases, and no one is forcing the USA to spend 3.5% GDP on its defense budget. You do that out of your own free will. And you spending that amount of money on military, has no bearing on whether you could have free health care or not, the obstacles to that are purely political.
You will get what you wish sooner than later because our defense spending is unsustainable and we won’t have a choice in the end. We’re starting to see the cracks with terrorists hijacking cargo ships without repurcussion.
You really have to understand and look at the numbers, and also model the economics of what you're writing about, to get a sense of how wrong you are. May i suggest you start on this big quest by looking up how inflation gets imported and exported?
Not in a post, but here's a few books for you:
Seignorage on a global reserve currency: read "the global minotaur", the story of oil: read "Oil, Power, and War" by Matthieu Auzanneau, and for completeness: "The brothers" by Stephen Kinzer.
Assuming you are German, then: The US liberated your country from fascism, saved half of your country from 50 years of soviet occupation, rebuilt your country with the Marshall Plan after your country started two world wars that killed 100 million people, and now defends your country from genocidal russian aggression because your country is too cheap/lazy to meet your NATO defence spending obligations.
If you can trust the US to defend you from Putin, you can trust the US to handle your data. China doesn't have that relationship with Germany as far as i'm aware
It was primarily the USSR that liberated us from fascism, while the USSR stopped its occupation of east Germany, the US never stopped.
And wasn't it Christina Nuland that said "Fuck the EU" while instigating the Ukraine Coup? Wonder why we should trust the US when it has been one of the worst "Allies" we ever had...
You sound like one of these Russian tools claiming that “Russia never liberated Western Europe from nazis so that means nazis are fine in Western Europe and Russia must liberate Western Europe”. Read less friggin’ Russian propaganda.
US has all the rights to say fuck the EU because despite all the investments people there are still as blind and don’t want to look into reality like before WW2. Let’s send billions of dollars to a country where every day on tv they discussing how to invade EU, sure let’s do it . Lets reduce the number of troops and cut military spendings while same country is doing through rapid militarization , oh yeah that’s very smart , sure . But someone said fuck EU while throwing away billions to make at least more weak your direct enemy. What a bad ally
USSR sponsored Nazi gave them all kind of goods and attacked Poland and Finland in the begging of war . After that occupied half of the Europe , and when anyone tried to escape communism they kill them violently. What a liberators. Oh and US was sponsoring USSR during the war as well , once they switch from being a Nazi ally
But that's not what occupation means. Consider that the US has military bases in the UK too, but nobody could say with a straight face that the US is occupying the UK.
Maybe we shouldn’t have done that, if they’re not at least a bit grateful.
Social media makes me want to withdraw behind our oceans. Let them hate us for free, at a distance - no reason we should subsidize them if they don’t even like us
It’s a very not important difference. One is doing it for commercial improvements and make your car better another wants to build maps and spy on you thinking how to destroy your golden billion good life . And their range of thinking goes from purely economic to having a direct war.
There are tons of interviews with regular people in China directly saying they are preparing for the war with West. So yeah no difference
