I love my BYD Dolphin Mini. It never occurred to me to look at a US made electric car lol
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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I'm surprised "make our pickups and SUVs even bigger" wasn't suggested.
This child-murder truck is not child-murdery enough!
"It's bigger because of safety innovations."
For the driver, of course. We need more data on dead kids to continue to innovate. And cyclists or anyone else who dares to use a mode of transporation that isn't a box on four wheels.
If you can't fuck em kill em right? /s
Child-animal-wheelchair users-short people-etc.-murder truck*
Chinese manufactures are subsidized and they have a regulated home market to their advantage to build from. It is a well thought out cooperation between companies & government, which the USA and the EU are lacking.
American companies are subsidized with bailouts and tax write offs, it just goes to the owners instead of making the products cheaper.
Error, not like how the Chinese does it. It's literally an integrated government+ industry. There is a worker pipeline and a parts pipeline that intergrates everything with the help of the government. In the us, you get a couple of bucks off a car. Not the same.
Nah the real move is to steal IP, manipulate your currency to decrease the cost of exports and to brutally mine the resources from poorer countries
They learned from the best!
I'd settle for cheaper.
If they stopped adding features nobody asked for it would be a lot cheaper. Look at how Slate is doing.
They haven't delivered anything yet. They have pre-orders for now that will fill a year of production, but how much of that is people who buy anything new but won't buy again, vs sustainable people like this and so customers will keep coming.
Only time will tell.
My bet is that the vast majority of the cost of the vehicle comes from making the basics, and then they add the features "no one wanted" in order to look good in the showroom, because they are a cheap way to sway dumb people to buy their car over a competitors
Battery production is still the bottleneck, so they want to squeeze out as much value per kwh as they can.
Selling one expensive luxury SUV with a 90kwh battery is a lot more profitable to them than selling two barebones econoboxes with a 45wkh battery pack.
And just to clarify, since this is Lemmy: This is not meant to justify or condone their behavior, just explain it.
BYD is picking on GM because GM is the only legacy US automaker making a full range of decent EVs.
The worst thing is GM has a decent competitor (a little bit pricier, but not terrible) in the Bolt, but they are not producing many of them with their new release, and are instead refocusing on larger, worse EVs.
The company that can make an EV that gets you 100 miles range for $10,000 and can fit at least three people will become one of the dominant players.
My cargo e-bike could do that, assuming you can carry an extra battery and the passengers are kids. And for a lot less than $10K, too.
It's annoying how the world, especially North America, is designed around vehicles that "can fit at lest three people" but are most frequently driven by a single person.
I love my ebike, and don't own a car, but even for short trips things would be more convenient with a car. The roads are designed for cars. Parking is designed for cars. Laws protect cars far more than bikes.
Maybe that will change. What happened in the Netherlands since the 1970s gives me hope. But, right now it's sad how the switch away from the gas-powered car seems to be toward electric cars rather than bikes, ebikes and mass transit.
Car brain really is a thing. Here in the UK it seems to be considered a thing that if you can afford one, you have one.
I sold my car (my wife has and needs one to be fair) 4-5 yrs back. Tried to make an ebike work but it didn't fit my lifestyle so I bought an electric moped and it's handled everything I've thrown at it.
Traffic is no longer a thing so it saves me so much time not having to allow time for it, it's generally quicker/as quick as a car on all the trips I do, parking is easy and it's dirt cheap to run.
Not sure I'll ever buy a car again
How often is your wife's car used for household errands? I don't own a car but occasionally I've borrowed one for certain things.
It's cheaper to buy bulky packages of say rice or toilet paper, but they're inconvenient to move without a car. Furniture is nearly impossible to move with the bike I have. I could get a cargo bike, but where I live that would be impractical without a garage or a big shed to store it, whereas a car can just sit in a driveway.
I think I'll be able to get by without a car for the foreseeable future, but I'll probably end up using cars occasionally. If I can't borrow one, I'll maybe start using a car sharing service.
I'd use public transit, but honestly where I live and where I want to go it's only slightly faster than walking, and so it's almost never a worthwhile option.
Any vehicle I have must fit at least 3 people, because at any time I must be able to move myself + the 2 kids. I could get a little 2-seater runabout for 90% of my driving (or maybe a motorcycle or something similar), but then I would have to have another vehicle, at additional license costs, interest costs, storage costs, and then have to guess which one I will need by the end of the day at the start, consistently every time. Because of this, every vehicle I own must be able to do every thing I can conceivably need to do in a given day.
From what I can tell, this condition exists for a plurality of drivers in the driving-centric parts of the US, and so became the standard because it's the minimum for those people.
Additionally, Americans are typically fat and need even more radial maneuvering room. That’s why they find European cars cramped. The comments on cupholders in American car forums are very funny.
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Sure, but your cargo ebike cannot safely or efficiently travel on the highway, which is a requirement for many/most people looking to buy a car.
This isn’t really a factor. Average cost of a new car is 50k and they’re flying off the shelves. There are many EVs lower than 50k, main barrier to adoption is chargers for apartments and FUD.
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The actual thing they need to do in order to compete is in-source parts manufacturing in order to take advantage of economies of scale... Like the Chinese EV manufacturers do.
Basically, toss out the Chicago school of economics thinking and go back to their roots as an all-things manufacturer. Ideally, they'd innovate as part of that by adopting new technologies like 3D printing to bring costs down and accelerate improvements.
I don't mean "3D printing for prototyping." They already do that. I mean, 3D print the final part. If it works for fucking rockets going into space, it can work for cars too. Especially electric vehicles which are much simpler to make.
If you think 3D printing is advantageous for economies of scale, I have a bridge to sell you.
Rockets are the complete opposite of mass manufacturing.
Yeah, 3d printing only makes economic sense if you're not doing mass production. It involves a lot of compromises.
Also, OP argues that it's better to be an "all-things manufacturer". Most of the time that isn't the most efficient way unless you have government assistance in some form. That might just be having patents or copyrights. BYD started as a battery company and has battery-related IP. Now they're China's leading company in patent filings, with over 13,000 of them.
Most of the time it's more efficient to specialize in something and buy parts from other specialists.
In the US at least, auto manufacturers have actually been on-shoring manufacturing for years. It is just that it is mostly automated factories.
Chinese manufacturers have a cost advantage because:
- Chinese labor is cheap.
- China's large population and large institutions combined with their recent history as a labor intensive manufacturing hub means that they have some of the most dynamic manufacturing capabilities in the world. Essentially, they are incredibly rich in the soft skill of creating manufacturing processes.
- The chinese government gambled on EVs early and it appears their gamble is paying off.
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