For those worried about national self-sufficiency, the answer can be public transit, not cars.
It's really funny that China made non-trivial amount of strategic decisions on the assumption that US tech do have network kill switches [0], including using it solely to justify protectionism, while nobody on the earth are crazy enough to do this, we all just call them out, "just an excuse to justify protectionism", then all at a sudden here we are, trying to say "mandating network kill switches" could be a good idea.
[0] Use OpenAI Deep Research or rivals and investigate the word "自主可控".
And no, the answer cannot be public transit. Public transit won't be a valid response to the next Pearl Harbor.
bro was talking about public transit & Chinese cars, my guy.
There are probably plenty of ways to ensure a manufacturing base, but having a robust auto industry is one way that is pretty well understood.
I don’t like the amount of inefficiency caused by protectionism, though.
Go reshore the military. Yes, the Americans and Western Europe lost in EVs. Though, I only ever see Americans turn this event into losing a war.
How about we make it so that only 50% of the residential land is zoned for single family homes and let people build whatever they want on the rest of it? The newly rezoned land will be worth more, so if you want to live in a single family home, sell yours at a profit and buy one in the area still zoned for it.
IMO yes it will, because it just makes sense. Denser cities are more efficient for everyone, normal people included. Transport price per unit drops, rent drops, all infrastructure costs per unit drop. I think most people will happily take a reduction in expenses in exchange for density.
And some places have more space and cars work fine there.
You have some areas that are kind of a middle between the two, those have some trouble.
1. China got here by using protectionism and stealing trade secrets. They subsidized their domestic producers and forced foreign entities to partner and train domestic nationals. They used protectionism to leapfrog us. We shouldn't just let them in and destroy our own capacity.
2. Manufacturing is necessary for a country that plans to go to war. America (and every nation!) needs a strong industrial plant to counter its enemies. Without the ability to switch to making warplanes, tanks, and drones, you'll be unable to fight a drawn out war.
3. We're really not that far behind and our industry will be fine. There's way too much panic here.
> For those worried about national self-sufficiency, the answer can be public transit, not cars.
This is highly opinionated r/fuckcars anti-"carbrain" (as they call it). This does not work in America. It's an opinion of city dwellers who have no exposure to the rest of the country.
Self-driving cars will transform public Transit in this country to be more automotive and less rail based. Not the other way around.
2. I don’t think anyone could seriously look at the US and worry that we might not be able to make enough military hardware. What country makes more weapons than the US?
3. The US auto industry is somewhere between dead and absorbed into the globalized auto industry. Their cost structure can’t compete and the US’ cratering international reputation means exports are falling and China has growth opportunities.
Where I do agree with you is that there’s no reason to panic. All of these things are just fine.
Armored vehicles can be somewhat useful in some war scenarios, but even Abrams tanks weren't enough to turn the tide in Ukraine.
It's probably a bit trickier now, but If sewing machine and typewriter companies used to make machine guns in wartime there's probably a way if there is will.
It's worked in America longer than it hasn't worked. Car-centric infrastructure is actually pretty new, and we basically burned down a lot of rail infrastructure to build it.
The fundamental problem with automobiles is that they're orders of magnitude less efficient per person, so they can't scale. You hit a wall, and then you're just fucked and the only solution is to pivot away from automobiles. No amount of self-driving, or more lanes, or toll roads, will fix that - it's a fundamental problem with the technology itself and how it exists in the world.
I mean, try driving around in Houston today. It's shit, but more than that, it's completely unfixable. 14 lane highways don't magically resolve the problem of everyone having their own little box on wheels they control.
Also, on the topic of urban centers and city dwellers: most Americans live in major metropolitan areas and those areas also make up almost all of the economy in the US. Yes, rural areas are important, but nobody is "targeting" them, so to speak. Those areas are already heavily subsidized by denser areas because that's just how infrastructure how.
How can we fix American industry?
And it's not all that bad. We're something like the number-two industrial country in the world.
Pragmatically, the sanest thing we might be able to do is find a region of the country that is remote enough in every way and turn it into a free for all industrial park so long as workers aren't exposed to excessive danger.
Well first off, I think we need to implement basic accountability. American industries routinely fail in the long-term because they're allowed to. They know they're basically invincible and can absolutely run their companies into the ground and leadership will fly away with too much money than what they know to do with.
The American school of business is make short-term decisions now, over and over again, forever, until you eventually blow up. This is how basically every company is run. It's an almost debt-driven mindset. It's a greedy algorithm. Take on any amount of loan now, and say "fuck it" when it comes to interest. When the chicken comes home to roost, who cares, you can leave.
That's why American industries will be competitive for a couple decades and then quickly be so far behind it seems it's impossible for them to catch up. They get a tiny little taste of market success, and they immediately stop investing into their future and start cashing in right now. We're even seeing this with Tesla.
It can work fine in normal situations, but any kind of stress, and anyone without a car is completely stuck. Bad weather, labor strike, high demand, evacuation, moving day, there's a politician in town and roads are closed, there's a celebrity/show in town and you want to go somewhere else, power outage, windstorm and some roads are closed.
Any kind of stress and public transit fails. Which makes it the opposite of self sufficiency.
https://www.tampabay.com/hurricane/2024/10/07/tampa-bay-traf...
I don't know the extent to which demand plays a role. Ford makes F150s because people buy F150s. They have to be forced to make smaller cars, and lose money on them.
Certainly not making as much as they can make on an F150, (I think the estimate on a Maverick is somewhere around 500-600 a car to ford).
As far as overall 'demand', there is a bit of market distortion (depending on how you look at it) as far as dealers frequently trying to push people into bigger vehicles because they are inherently more expensive and they get more commission and profit too. [0]
[0] - I've had this happen more than once, even when I knew what car I wanted to buy.
Not talking about US in this case.
Isn't China free to build a car factory here, with their technology?
If 6% of your economy is directly tied to auto manufacturing (Germany) than by allowing ultra-cheap cars to flood the market will just piss off workers who inevitably get laid off in the chaos. Europe is starting to catch up on competing with price again (see Citroen for examples) but it takes time to build these factories and there is a lot more red tape wade through.
The US is trying to tackle the affordable car space through weird startups and longshots, but their production numbers will be so much less than demand for another decade if they even gain real traction in the market at all.
If a country wants to give up on their own automotive exports that's fine, but they need a plan for how to proceed when those jobs are gone and so far nobody has that plan figured out yet. Until then, they will continue to tariff the crap out of any competitors and keep kicking the can down the road.
The rest getting decent cheaper cars might not be worth the trade-off of also getting a more unstable society.
Then, some chemistries/designs have better cycle endurance, some can probably recharge faster at given depletion levels. When charging an almost totally discharged battery, there's lots of "slots" for the incoming charge to fill, but as it fills up, it will inevitably take more time to locate a "slot" to occupy.
Solid state and semi-solid state may be at play here, since a solid state battery is theoretically more durable as well.
Or, to your point, it is a marketing stunt that doesn't care about cycle endurance. How would we tell? Battery reporting is still horrendous at delineating the tradeoffs/limitations per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025930 but hoping that mainstream media don't "gee whiz" science and technology reporting is simply not going to happen, especially in the clickbait era.
Supplying this kind of energy at scale is not possible currently. So they could deploy a few of these around but they simply can't be ubiquitous. Not to mention charging curves make a big difference as do real-world conditions. Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.
Oh, and finally, 5 minutes is still slower than filling up a car's tank.
China also has extreme climates.
Roughly the same total amount of energy is needed within the same period of couple days either way, having the capacity to charge faster when possible should be a good thing.
>Do you get full speed if it's below freezing?
I live somewhere where it's reasonably regularly -30F and no electric car does well neither charging nor distance despite claims of battery pre-heating and such. You have to pick a car for the environment it's going to be used in.
5 minutes is hugely impressive for our current day and we need to remember these moments as the tech continues to get better. This is just the beginning of EV infrastructure!
But it's already independent of the size of the battery. You don't really get any increase on the max charging speed by dividing it up differently, any more than you can create cake by cutting a whole cake into pieces.
The way to improve it is with battery chemistry, and probably with more capable power electronics.
This isn't really relevant. The question is if charging speed is sufficient and it's hard to see five minutes being a deal breaker in any scenario.
Meanwhile, gas cars are still a dead end pollution wise, unless you are pro-dead earth I guess. So there is that.
If you've got a 1-megawatt power supply, there are things you can do about that.
The article also mentions that the charger has its own battery reserves, which it can fill in between fill-ips, and then use to help provide those high peaks. Load averaging.
Then there's your list of gotchas. Oh will it work in the cold? Will it work in heat? Ok yeah maybe that will diminish charge rate maybe. But this habit of looking for problems, looking for reasons to discredit and ignore is a horrible perspective, risks ignoring so much possibility because of such a negative minded orientation.
5 minutes is more than good, imo. At. If you think about the steps before and after filling up, there's a couple minutes of pulling off the road, turning off the car, getting out, walking around, setting up payment, opening the fill up, selecting fuel grade, inserting the filler. You can absolutely speed race this down to 2-3 minutes, but but usually a gas station stop is 5-10 minutes of lost time for most people today. It feels like 5 minutes of waiting is really not a big deal. Is it slower? Yes. But is it significantly slower? Not really, not usually.
It's just so sad having such energy poured into negative mental energy, into convincing people against doing better things. The world deserves better than to be beholden to pestilences of the mind.
The Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Station in my home state of Maryland outputs 1700MW on a typical day. This is enough to power a third of the homes in the state. According to some estimates I found, there are more than 1450 EV charging stations of all types in the state (not enough even for current EV adoption and many are L2 chargers). I can't find over what timescale each charger uses 1MW (per second?) but let's say it's 1MW of power for the 5 minute charge. Let's say each 1MW charger is used twice per day for a single charge each. If all 1450 chargers are used twice per day (2MW/day), you've now exceeded the output of Calvert Cliffs. This is the scale we're talking about.
It's not negative to point out these absurdities, it's vitally important because many jurisdictions are getting ready to ban the sales of new gas cars in 5 years. People depend on working cars for their livelihoods.
But it's worth pointing out that if there's 1450 chargers today & many of them are L2, replacing them with 1MW chargers wouldn't actually change the energy demand at all. It would just be faster charging, not more net charging; people wouldn't be likely to be driving more all of a sudden (ok, ride-share drivers would be on the road a slight bit more).
But yes, we do need to be building more energy capacity (something that places other than the US are doing effectively).
For most people charging speed only matters on long trips.
For normal day to day driving those who cannot do their charging at home will often use chargers at their destinations. For example 3 of the 4 grocery stores I shop at have chargers in their parking lots (2 have level 2 charges, and the other has 150 kW DC chargers). If I didn't have home charging I could charge while doing my grocery shopping, and so as long as it finishes by the time I've finished shopping the time doesn't matter.
Even if there are no destination chargers they can use, so charging does involve a special trip, at the rate that BYD demoed (262 miles added in 5 minutes) a typical driver in the US would need 5-15 minutes every week or so.
On long trips generally people want breaks every few hours for the restroom, to stretch, or get food and drinks. At the charging speed BYD demonstrated a large fraction of people on long trips could do all their charging during those breaks, with the charging taking place while they are using the restroom, stretching, or buying their food and drink.
Having done a long road trip at the end of April, I can comfortably say that any time we stopped to get gas, the stop was longer than 5 minutes in general anyway.
> They're getting faster speed by pushing a huge amount of power to the battery (1MW!).
Valid concern given that's honestly scary from a battery life and safety perspective, especially when coupled with China's downplaying of the fire issues observed with some of their brands...
> Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.
You might not, but I will state that I've had many a gas station in the US where for whatever reason below freezing has definitely slowed down the pumps. Even if it was still less than 5 minutes, I'd rather the workflow of 'plug in the charger and then go back and sit in the car' than 'Wait at the pump because you've seen even attended pump kickbacks go wrong and it's state law anyway'...
That’s not typical currently though and I presume it’s similar elsewhere.
edit: it seems some are confused. I'm saying a PHEV is superior to BEV.
We tend to act with a scarcity and "what if" mindset.
It doesn't matter if you never drive 400 miles, or rarely, you're spending money, significant one in case of a car, thus range becomes an issue.
400 miles is the range where I
1. Seriously consider flying
2. Plan it in such a way that I can have lunch as a long break between driving sessions.
3. Rent a car and carpool with other people if it's a road-trip type thing.
It just so happens that my friends are either all within 150 miles of me, or so far away that driving isn't a real option.
I've known far more people who have to do a 400-600 mile drive at least once a month.
All you're doing is letting a dickhead bully win and letting bad people get away with bad behavior.
If I'm in my WRX and I do need to go above 75 quickly, I can drop into 4th and get to 80 more quickly. But I've got a stick so I can do that. If I'm in something with a slushbox, I have to wait for the thing to decide that downshifting is needed before it will pick up. I'll admit the Toyota Hybrids hit a good 'in-between' for these (probably closer to an EV than either a Manual or a slushbox.) I'll get a bit of instant acceleration but anything after a half second to second is a bit slower.
Sometimes, but not so common not in my experience.
But I don't think a powerful engine is needed in that scenario either. The only case where it's really needed is accelerating up a steep hill.
Also, a bigger motor can be more reliable, if you're not running it at full bore you've probably got better heat dissipation so it will last longer.
The other issue is people's addiction for large vehicles; bigger vehicle means bigger battery means more weight means more power needed to move everything. As an example a Blazer EV weighs 25-35% more than the ICE version. Take that with the comments about reliability, it counter-intuitively makes a lot of sense that the Blazer EV has a 500hp motor vs the 200-300HP in the ICE.
As far as 'acceleration' itself, Acceleration tends to be more of a factor of torque curve. Electric motors tend to give lots of torque very quick... I accidentally chirp the tires on my Ford Maverick in a year more times than I was ever able to do even trying in my WRX. [0]
[0] - Sure, the WRX is all wheel drive but it's also a good 450 pounds lighter than the Mav.
The i3 is rear wheel drive but it's also rear wheel motor. Bigger skateboard battery means lower center of gravity. But perhaps the biggest factor is RWD the drive wheels don't have to steer (I'd say at least 2/3 of my 'chirps' were starting a turn). I'd be willing to wager the BMW has a better TCS software too.
Also I don't run stock tires on my Maverick, I run DriveGuard Plus[1] which are probably less grippy than the standard tires.
[1] - FWIW The WRX has 'OG' DriveGuard tires, The Plus supposedly are a -little- more grippy... Only lost 1 or 2 MPG on the Maverick changing to them from stock.
I think it's hard to economically hit that and give a car that folks are OK driving within limitations.
Mazda tried to do a range extender setup on the MX-30, however it didn't sell that well and my understanding is the range extender wasn't good for hills or highway cases.
Non Range Extender setups, actually typically work better if you're stuck in gas mode than a range extender, mostly because you can use the mechanical energy from the ICE more directly than the losses of something feeding energy directly into the drivetrain. However, once you hit that point anything after 2 or 3 KWh of battery is just dead weight on the car. I'm guessing that's why even the Prius prime is only around 40 miles of range.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the US addiction to huge vehicles (which need even bigger batteries...)
Edit:
Seeing the edit of what I'm replying to, I'll add that yes PHEVs are probably a 'better' option than BEVs for many people, but the cost of a PHEV can be as much or more than a BEV. Look at a Chevrolet Equinox EV vs a Rav4 Prime. The Rav4 Prime is 10K more expensive. Happy to consider a different comparison here but overall nobody has figured out how to make a PHEV that is cheaper than a similar EV.
$28,790: MSRP of the 2022 Niro L HEV (hybrid)
$34,390: MSRP of the 2022 Niro EX PHEV (plug-in hybrid with an electric range of 51 kms.
$46,790: starting price of the 2022 Niro EX EV (all battery electric vehicle with a range of 386 kms)
it's just simple math. if you take a 400 mile road trip 4 times a year, and your electricity is totally free for the sake of example, gas is 5 bucks a gallon, how long does it take for the EV to pay itself off, assuming the regular commute is 40km daily otherwise? answer is almost 15 years. doesn't make any sense.
I think targetting the 99.9th percentile trip is maybe even a bit low. A commuting American has at least two car trips per typical day, probably more like 5. So 1 trip in a thousand means something that comes up more than annually.
Tesla rival BYD launches five-minute battery in $30k model (60 points, 2 months ago, 58 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43670271
BYD unveils battery system that charges EVs in five minutes (24 points, 3 months ago, 13 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43390262
BYD and CATL aim to launch new EV batteries with 6C charge rate (38 points, 11 months ago, 47 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40706337
fullshark•4h ago
amriksohata•2h ago
agumonkey•1h ago
mamonster•1h ago
I've never been in a BYD(hard to get in Switzerland), but I've been in all the Teslas. The Tesla build quality is atrocious when compared to BMW, Mercedes or Audi. Are you saying BYD is worse than that?
lancewiggs•33m ago
dzhiurgis•9m ago
I almost want even larger, more powerful vehicle than my Model Y. But can’t imagine dealing with its software and uncertain future. Also I’d rather support Musk than Chinese.
I drove Atto3, which is older vehicle now. UX is nowhere close to Tesla, but I’m keen to try newer ones.
const_cast•21m ago