Uber and China's BYD agree deal to roll out 100,000 EV fleet Uber and BYD have struck a deal to bring 100,000 BYD electric vehicles onto the Uber platform, starting with Europe and Latin America. According to the announcement, the deal is expected to give drivers on the Uber platform access to cheaper EVs and bring down their total cost of ownership. However, slightly worryingly for …
"our cutting-edge EVs become a common sight on the streets of cities worldwide"
Until the TLAs decide that having Chinese controlled autonomous vehicles on said streets is a national security issue.
If we can't risk allowing them to route phone calls there is no way we can allow them to route MPs' taxis.
It is the logical progression of current policy.
Lets see if this cannot be dodged with Uber being the front decoration and officially handling all the data in country. Much like microsofts alleged "eu-only cloud" which is officially supposed to not copy everything over to the US.
All in all, its good to see some competition going on. Electroimmobility has already enough technical issues, theres no need to add monopoly pricing to those things and considering quality, its a blessing if tesla isnt the sole purveyor of self driving explosive devices. Charging however, will stay the main bottleneck and the main reason why electroimmobility isnt useable in too many places.
You're daft if you think BYD's cars are any better than Tesla. Mainland Chinese prefer buying Teslas over BYD's refuse for a reason. They are built to low standards and have a myriad of questionable design decisions. Five minutes of research will show you this.
I am not at all excusing Tesla's shoddy QC, staffing, or their very own questionable design decisions, mind you. But I'd rather be in a Tesla anything than a BYD anything, by a wide margin.
People in China will buy a Tesla because it is a status symbol, not because it is better than any home grown vehicle.
Despite what is talked about the Chinese vehicles are now very good, whether ICE or EV. The Chinese are very good at chipping away until what they have is just as good quality, if not better than Western products. They think long term.
Why do you think most of the electric busses in the UK are Yutong?
Equally why are we totally screwing up UK companies who can economically convert existing ICE buses to EV over buying new Chinese?
Despite what is talked about the Chinese vehicles are now very good, whether ICE or EV. The Chinese are very good at chipping away until what they have is just as good quality, if not better than Western products. They think long term.
I call bullshit on this entire paragraph.
Chinese corporations are known for stealing IP, copying designs, lying to regulators, and pushing cheaply produced crap. You can't honestly believe anything you just said when you look at the state of the market and general consumer feedback.
Furthermore, my default opinion for any shilled corporation—not just Chinese ones, and especially anything EV— is negative, and everything I've seen about BYD has cemented that belief. They came out of nowhere, claiming to be a market leader and innovator, like so many others. Yet Chinese social media shows their cars catching fire and failing at a concerning rate, where it's expected such information should generally be tightly restricted. In that regard, who knows how many instances of that we have not been able to see.
Getting into the car market is difficult enough as it is, and Western EV companies are flopping left and right. I fail to see how BYD will be able to break into the market with their lackluster products without cutting major corners, which is yet another reason I do not trust them.
I don't know anything about UK EV buses. Don't see how that's relevant to discussing BYD.
Yet Chinese social media shows their cars catching fire and failing at a concerning rate
Whereas a Toasty Tesla is not even news anymore here. Or do you think fire brigades keep water containers handy for no reason whatsoever?
If you live in a building where Tesla's are charging in a basement garage, start planning for escape routes - the heat of a Toasty Tesla can cause structural damage to the building, and once it's properly on fire it's a swine to remove.
The chosen battery tech on BYD, the so called "blade" cells in rectangular shape are way more stable than the bunch of parallel welded 18650 liquid cooled mess in teslas. The "super cell" will add to the danger of thermal buildup and the battery connectors for each cell are a lot bigger in BYD, giving them a lot more reliability when it comes to high current charging and discharging so battery wise, BYD has a clear advantage. Considering avoideable flaws and design issues in teslas, BYD doesnt look too bad at all.
Concerning your statement about chinese customers favouring teslas, thats not due to quality but for status. Run around with the most expensive crap you can show off - it seems chinese people are not too different from spoiled western rich brats.
All in all, i dont believe they differ too much. Teslas flaws and BYD flaws somewhat cancel each other out. I still see BYD a better alternative or at least a long needed competitor because of the much better battery concept and - also battery wise - teslas unexcuseable failure to develop their battery packs beyond prototype stage. Using 18650 was okay for the first one or two models, using readily available resources but the "super cell" bullshyte ignores so many literally life threatening conceptual issues that i consider this a real threat to safety.
Considering avoideable flaws and design issues in teslas, BYD doesnt look too bad at all. [...] All in all, i dont believe they differ too much. Teslas flaws and BYD flaws somewhat cancel each other out. I still see BYD a better alternative or at least a long needed competitor
I am not a battery engineer so I can't comment on the quality of the battery tech. But comparing BYD to Tesla is comparing rotten apples to rotten oranges—both have flaws in their own unique ways, and rather than equate to a similar level of crapness, I would prefer one to be markedly better to the point of being an actual positive.
I am all for market competition but trying to displace one flawed product with another flawed (or unproven, take your pick) product is not my idea of a good time. I am not at all sold on EVs and have yet to see any company plan to make something I would actually want to drive—except maybe something from Caterham.
You have a good point about the status favoritism with Tesla. I didn't consider that angle. It's probably not possible to differentiate purchases for legitimate quality concerns vs face, so I'll reneg on that.
Many people in china buy byd because they are racist and think because its chinese its the best.
We see the same thing in russia many believe russia is the best.
THe same was true of Tesla for a long time, people bought tesla simply becaue they are also racist and thought tesla is automatically better than european or japanese cars completely ignoring the fact they had no proof for their statements and they ignored the stories about quality.
You would think having what equates to spy vans driving around on the streets, vans replete with multiple camera and microphone arrays, would be a call for worry. Especially since BYD is as much in the CCP's pocket as Huawei is. And if they're self-driving, who's to say a "BYD representative" could tell it to drive to any location? Let's call it a "bug" that it drove into a secure government facility. Yes, we "accidentally" recorded classified information, and we "promise" to delete it.
And if it were like you assume, where exactly is the big difference to other EV ?
And, by the way, when it comes to unwanted data hoarding:
"The main issue is that this excessive log file writing causes eMMC flash wear. Flash memory is generally only rated for some tens of thousands of write cycles. What happens is that the flash memory starts to fail when writings can no longer be completed. When one block fails, parts of the firmware may also become unreadable, leading to poor operation or failure of the MCU completely.”
https://insideevs.com/news/376037/tesla-mcu-emmc-memory-issue/
What does the lifecycle of flash storage (specifically eMMC, which may not even be used on BYDs) have to do with anything? Telemetry and other data is shipped off via data connection regardless. If everything stayed on-device I would care substantially less from a data privacy standpoint.
Anyway the point of my post is to reinforce what was said earlier. If government bodies can't trust telco OEMs, why should they trust driving cameras? Both with ties to the government?
And there is absolutely no difference, other the owner of the data, when it comes to siphoning information out of the average modern smart car. I don't know why you are being so defensive. Got some Pooh blood on you?
The lifecycle of the degraded storage gives a hint on how much data was logged, and if you actually had read the article provided,or any other full article on this mess, all of this was transferred back home.
And concerning governments and "trust": if they are so in fear that they cannot do a man in the middle attack or that their "hackers" are unable to not only thwart phone home to china but also redirecting it to the usual TLA, that says a lot about the "governments" trust in the (in)competence of their own cyber warfare squads.
Its not like those cars have satellite connection (yet?) so as long as they need to go over any network thats controlled by "the government" in alleged fear, its quite unlikely that the phonecalls to china have a chance of going through undetected and unstolen.
My MG4 handles rather nicely. I mostly drive like an old fart but have played with it a couple of times to check what's available should I need it and I've been pleasantly surprised, you can feel the weight a bit but not as much as I was expecting. The only things that let it down are the "driver aids" like the lane-keeping assist (which I can only assume was sponsored by car repair companies) but from what I can tell that's the case on a lot of modern cars regardless of country of origin.
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