BYD owns its entire EV battery supply chain and its CEO is both a relentless cost-cutter and "natural engineer," as Charlie Munger put it.
When China’s BYD recently overtook Elon Musk’s Tesla as the global leader in sales of electric vehicles, casual observers of the auto industry might have been surprised.
But what’s caught other carmakers around the world off-guard is something else about BYD, which is backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway: its low prices.
“No one can match BYD on price. Period,” Michael Dunne, CEO of Asia-focused car consultancy Dunne Insights, told the Financial Times. “Boardrooms in America, Europe, Korea and Japan are in a state of shock.”
BYD can keeps its costs low in part because it owns the entire supply chain of its EV batteries, from the raw materials to the finished battery packs. That matters because a battery accounts for about 40% of a new electric vehicle’s price.
No not the airbags, the safety standards being "obscene", cost prohibitive and not yield good results.
So if American standards are preventing additional competition it should be because they have a very high standard which should bare out in terms of road and pedestrian deaths and injuries. It does not. Therefore the "obscene" standards are another example of poor results to cost.
Not really conclusive as there have been increases in speeding and drunk driving that cause total accident numbers to go up. A more relevant stat would be fatality or injury rates per accident.
Car safety regs have nothing to do with pedestrian deaths? So cars with poor visibility due to design choices are in no way related to car safety or pedestrian deaths?
Cars having impact ready bumpers and lowered engine blocks that have a direct correlation with lower chances of death or serious injury in the event of a collision with a pedestrian or cyclist are completely unrelated to safety regulations?
Hey since you seem to be ignorant of old car safety hazards ive got a '78 Ford pinto to sell you.
But seriously modern American cars (or atleast the post 80s ones) are a shitton safer than their old counterparts. And this is coming from someone who loves old piece of shit cars (Id drive the Homer).
Modern American safety features to a point were paid in blood. Tuna canning in small cars is isnt nearly as common as it once was, and the pealing the smashed in head of the drive off of the stearing wheel isnt all that common anymore.
There are certainly some so called safety features that are laregly pointless IMO but my hatred of back up cams aside, survivability of car crashes have skyrocketed.
If you want people to buy new cars every year wouldn't you make the new cars look different? More exiting or whatever? We used to have awesome fins on the back of cars now we just get a shiny grill. "planned obscelensce" doesn't force them to make cars that all look the same. That's safety regulations.
Fins and spoilers are cool but like if their removal saves lives then I'm all for it.
Cars all looking the same is because of the tightening of supply chains, it is cheaper to make everything apply to as many models as possible.
I can't remember which brand it is, whichever supercar brand is under VW, but they have parts shared with golfs and audis. This efficient but doesn't make for huge variations.