BYD are making giant strides to the point I believe they have a chance of making something good here, but it’s way too early to tell. More competition in the space is good for everyone though.
And it’ll probably be a copy of somebody else’s design, and a generation or two behind. That’s just not China’s current wheelhouse.
They are also capable of making decent cars they sell for as cheap as $10-15,000.
The general manager of BYD’s Ocean lineup has revealed in the past that the company hopes to use its in-house chips for cheaper models in the near future. Even the cheap Seagull will get autonomous smart driving features next year.
If they’re putting autonomous capability in even their cheapest models, that will quickly give them a huge fleet to potentially pull training data from. I’m curious to see what sensor suite they go with. Full-blown radar, lidar, ultrasonics, etc, or vision-only?
Also, to me this means future self-driving transit will be commoditized.
If robotaxis can be as cheap as $10K, then their main cost per passenger journey will be the electricity to run them.
