Chinese Automaker Unveils First Electric Car

JuliusSu writes "A Chinese auto manufacturer, BYD, is introducing today the country's first electric car, a plug-in hybrid vehicle. It plans to sell at least 10,000 cars in 2009 for a price of less than $22,000. This put the company ahead of schedule against other entrants to this market, such as Toyota, due to release a similar car in late 2009; and GM, whose Chevy Volt will be launched in late 2010. The company is best known for making cellphone batteries, and hopes its expertise in ferrous battery technology will allow it to leapfrog established car manufacturers."

Comments

Charging an electric car

[seanadams.com]

This is a little OT but I figure someone here might know. With so many electric cars finally coming to market I thought it would be smart to plan ahead even if I'm not ready to take the leap yet...

So, I'm in the process of a remodel and have an easy opportunity to install a high-amperage electric circuit to some location in the garage. Is there any emerging standard for charging electric cars that would dictate the ideal location to put the outlet? I.e. in front of the car, driver side, passenger side, what height from ground, etc. Also amperage, type of plug etc would be good to anticipate, although initially I'd just have an empty conduit running there from the load center.

Re:Anyone can make an electric car

[Frosty Piss]

I avoid any products made in China now because I can't trust them anymore. How much food is recalled and childrens toys? Do you want to be in an accident in one of these things and then find out that to cut costs, they used cheap air-bags?

Another reason to avoid Chinese goods (if their human rights record isn't good enough) is that their industry is ecologically harmful. Chinese industry have little incentive not to polute the environment in some of the most egregious ways.

Re:Your "American" car is full of Chinese stuff

[Facegarden]

That high quality American car is packed to the gunnels with Chinese made parts, including engines.

About the only thing that is truely american is the arrogance.

Arrogance? You obviously don't know much about chinese cars. It doesn't matter where the parts are made, but american cars aren't ENGINEERED in china. So far all the chinese cars that have been engineered in china have been terrible. I remember one example that looked like any other common car in the US or elsewhere, but it did so poorly in crash testing it couldn't even manage ONE STAR. It was a deathtrap.

Don't call people arrogant without checking your own ignorance. I'm not saying the car can't be good, but given what has come out of china so far, people have a right to be skeptical.
-Taylor

Re: I have to wonder

[cdrguru]

Part of the problem is that it would be rather expensive to engineer a car to meet 50 different emission standards. Nobody, except the state's showing their control, wants that.

So why not make it meet the strictest standards? Partly because it just keeps pushing the costs higher for stuff nobody needs in the other 49 states. There is also nothing that suggests there would be one "strictest" standard.

California was allowed to set requirements that no other state had for quite a while. In the beginning it required reworking and adjusting a car that was imported into California before it could be sold there. So you would see cars selling for $3,000 to $5,000 higher in California. Should you be so silly as to buy a car in Arizona when you were a California resident you would be faced with paying that extra amount to have the car modified before it could be licensed. So in a way, we have tried this already and it was a disaster. It might have helped out air quality in California or it might not have. Nobody really knows.

I'd say the biggest problem would be conflicting requirements between states. If this was allowed, and so far the Federal Government hasn't made it clear that such state level regulation would never be allowed, you would have a different set of hardware for each state for each car. Sure, California could have their regulations but there would be nothing to prevent Nevada from having different and mutually exclusive requirements.

The only sensible way is to have one Federal standard. It works for car owners, it works for car manufacturers and it can work for everyone else as well. The problem seems to be enacting some realistic legislation at the Federal level.

Also, it isn't going to help if some states are allowed to regulate batteries for electric and hybrid cars. Not long ago California prevented sales of cars with lots and lots of lead-acid batteries in them because of the hazards of both lead and acid. I do not know what the state of things are today, but there are plenty of people doing electric car conversions using lead-acid batteries. I suspect it is not legal to buy, sell, modify or license such a car today in California. There is no reason to think that other states will be any more forgiving about toxic pollutants if each state is allowed to pass their own regulations.

What's wrong with you people?

[haruchai]

I have yet to see a serious, insightful post about this story. A little googling turned up pics and data although I confess that I don't know what
16 kwh / 100 KM works out to in MPG.

The pictures I saw of the car look pretty nice. Congrats to the Chinese - if this turns out to be a quality vehicle, it may force the Big Three stragglers to dump some of their guzzlers and give
us clean, efficient vehicles we can depend on

Re:Your "American" car is full of Chinese stuff

[Brigadier]

One thing I have learned is never under estimate the Chinese, this is a country that has had a incredible GDP since the days of the silk road. One could have said the same about IBM and the computer. we all know how that went. It's not hard to reverse engineer and improve upon an existing design. The only hard part is consumer confidence and brand recognition. US Automaker have done such a good job of killing consumer confidence that most Americans no longer care where it's made cept the fact of the economy

People laughed about Japanese cars, too.

[Lonewolf666]

When the first Japanese cars showed up in Europe in the 1970s, they were cheap but had a terrible reputation. That has changed. Today they are on the same quality level (and almost as expensive) as European cars. Toyota even ruled the reliability/breakdown statistics for years, only recently some European models have retaken the lead.

I expect that the same will happen with the Chinese cars. They may have not much experience in car making now, but 10 years from now things can look different.

Re:People laughed about Japanese cars, too.

[Iamthecheese]

That won't happen, and this is why. Japan was forced to build robots to keep costs down. In manufacturing, there are three kind of builders: The expert craftsman who is probably well paid to do excellent work, the robot who can drill a hole in precisely the same place 10,000 times, and the poorly paid factory worker, for whom really, really good quality control is needed. Guess which one China employs? It is a fact that a part assembled by machine will, given the same effort put into QC, put out a much better product than the same part assembled by low wage humans. low quality parts=poor system reliability.

Re:Your "American" car is full of Chinese stuff

[0100010001010011]

That explains why a fair number of my graduating ME class went to work for Toyota in the states. They still engineer stuff in Detroit. Industrial Engineers still work in Alabama, TN, Indiana, etc. And those Engineering jobs aren't in China or India. Toyota, Honda, etc are in Japan. VW, BMW, Porsche, etc are in Germany.

I don't get where ./ers are convinced that India and China are full of brilliant engineers that are going to take all of our jobs. There's an Indian at work that came over from India. If you bring this subject up to him he'll explain to you that all the jobs we 'outsource' are just a step above what we give interns to do. Running electrical lines in ProE, etc.