The most eye-stealing highlight is the Flash Charging technology, which works in conjunction with the latest Blade Battery 2.0.
– Charging from 10% to 70% takes only 5 minutes.
– To charge to 97%, it only takes 9 minutes.
– Even in temperatures as low as -30°C, it can still be fast-charged in 12 minutes.
Love how they translate the price to USD when sadly there’s no way in hell well ever see this car in the US.
Also no mention of crash test ratings. Which is likely the real reason we won’t see it here, and even if we did it would never be for that price because that price is subsidized by the Chinese government.
Edit: Why do so many people think pointing out that some Chinese EVs have been through crash test ratings refute that this article doesn’t mention them?
Also, please note that all the ones that have good ratings aren’t being sold for $22k.
Hmm, good question, and a quick google later:
Chinese EVs may not have to pass USDOT crash tests, but they do have to pass Euro NCAP crash tests, and Chinese NCAP crash tests, which are similar.
And a lot of them did quite well in that regards.
And and they also have to pass however Canada does crash tests as well.
BYD vehicles all rate 5 stars in the Australian ANCAP ratings as well.
The “Chinese vehicles aren’t safe” thing is just fear mongering these days or, more generously, a misapplication of their micro vehicle standards for low speed urban use to ordinary passenger vehicles.
I’m wondering if I can ship one over?
I believe you can import them, but it is a 100% tariff. So your $22k car becomes $44k plus delivery charges and local registration fees/taxes. So very quickly becomes not worth it. Which is why the tariff exists.
There is also the matter of which charging standard is needed. The US of course not using the same standard as the rest of the world.
I was going to buy one of the new rivians for about 45k, not sure if they released prices yet. My husband has one of the more expensive Rivians and they’re really cool. That being said, byd is cool too and even with import fees it looks doable. Gotta think about it.
JFC…a Rivian costs 140k in Canada
Yeah it was an investment for sure.
Cars are a bad investment, even if it saves you a bit of money on gas. Depreciation will hit that Rivian like Tesla FSD hits a brick wall.
It’s a 68kWh pack. The 5 min metric is 60% of that. So 41kWh. To do that in 5 min would require 490kW chargers. This is pretty much only available from the latest Tesla super chargers. So while it’s great that the car can support that, articles about it should include the fact that there is very limited support in charging networks for it.
All 3 metrics are important to evaluate together:
- Peak power draw, in watts, describes one type of limitation in charging, that exists somewhere in the chain between the grid itself, the charger, the charge controller, and the batteries. Showing off a very high charging capability on this metric is impressive (for a charger/car combination), and usually shows the bottleneck is somewhere else. Sometimes it’s even in the electrical substation where a rack of several chargers can each deliver high power but can’t charge every station at full power simultaneously
- Total energy delivered over a particular amount of time (aka average power). High peak power needs to be sustained to be useful.
- Percentage charge delivered over a particular amount of time. The nature of modern batteries means that the maximum charging speed has to slow down closer to each cell’s full charge. So charging from 40% to 60% can be much faster than charging from 80% to 100%, even if the total energy transferred and stored is the same.
All 3 matter. #1 is an engineering flex and helps avoid bottlenecks into #2, which you correctly describe as being an important metric, and affects just how far you can expect to drive off of that charge. And #3 translates into actual user experience, which is also really important. None of the three metrics can be assumed by simple multiplication of the others, because none of it goes at constant rates in all contexts.
Why give the price in USD when the people who need them most in the US will not be able to buy them?
To specifically spur ground-up pressure on the US government to try to allow BYD and other manufacturers direct access to the US market, since there are effectively no EV manufacturers in the US except Tesla.
All great and I’d love it BUT
Will it track the shit out of me?
And before anyone goes “But Murrica!”, I don’t give a shit. I don’t care who wants to spy on me, the USA, China, Russia, fuck all those dictator governments, I want NOBODY spying on me.
I want MY car, if I really need one, to be MY car, and nobody else’s.
Will it track the shit out of me?
They have Android Auto and Apple’s car thing, so yeah.
I think that if the cars themselves had hidden malicious spy shit, other manufacturers would be paying some very concerned journalists to keep pointing it out.
I’d really love to see how one of these does here in Northern Canada. There are almost no electric vehicles here because of the performance of batteries in the long, cold winter.
Isn’t that similar to Norway where now almost no non-EV cars are being sold?
