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wrt commercial real estate - a big new (relatively new I suppose, opened less than 20 years ago) "mixed use" outdoor mall development defaulted on over 100M in debt. I believe larger than those SF hotel defaults. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bank-forecloses-greene-nearly-113-214445722.html Seems like everything is doing pretty well in that development, not a lot of vacancies - so it must just be difficulty in trying to roll that debt over at much higher rates. Looks like this batch was taken out in 2013. So 10 years, came due. Wells Fargo is going to have to eat *some* loss there. But they still made ~18B the last 12 months, so it'll take a few more of these to make a dent. Smaller banks might still be in trouble this year though with "higher for longer". What this place looks like: https://maps.app.goo.gl/z2sNG2m4w88UZ966A Baddog fucked around with this message at 04:57 on May 14, 2024 |
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Baddog posted:wrt commercial real estate - a big new (relatively new I suppose, opened less than 20 years ago) "mixed use" outdoor mall development defaulted on over 100M in debt. I believe larger than those SF hotel defaults. Ah, these. What you look for is whether the same higher order companies had spinoffs that separately held the surrounding residential. Or who they bought the entire parcel from before it was set up.
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May 14, 2024 05:27
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Trade wars are good and easy to win https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-of...asing-statutory Biden protecting Tesla market share proactively before we start to get shipments of inexpensive BYD cars that make teslas look like crap? Weird. And increasing tariffs on imported solar isn't going to increase solar adoption, or encourage US producers to drop their prices. For many reasons we should be ecstatic about cheap solar panels, and take as many as we can get. If the concern is that we are going to be left high and dry without any domestic producers in any of these markets, I think we should support them with tax breaks or subsidies to be competitive. Not take actions to raise prices across the board. Especially not right now. This just seems like the expedient reactionary choice.
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May 14, 2024 18:32
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Baddog posted:Trade wars are good and easy to win The EV tariffs are nakedly looking at Michigan, not Tesla, and it’s much more politically palatable to put tariffs on a foreign competitor that dumps their goods here than it would be to shovel tax dollars to a company making panels here (with the largest being Qcells, a SK company).
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May 14, 2024 18:45
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Hadlock posted:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mcdonalds-price-increases-fast-food-cost-popeyes-wendys/ My guess is that a lot more low income workers are more or less locked into ready-made food, of which fast food is an easy option, due to their circumstances and general lifestyle. Long story short, higher income often correlates to more leisure time, and more leisure time means more time to do things like cook at home rather than grab something on the way home from your shift. The times in my life where I was pretty much subsisting off of either fast food or pre-made crap (e.g. ramen, TV dinners) were the times when I had gently caress all for money and was working physically demanding jobs. I considered it a win if I made a big crock pot of sausage beans and rice and could munch on that for a week. I was also single, which throws another wrench in the works as far as that goes. Now? I'm married, have a decent job, and I'm a desk drone who isn't too wiped at 5PM to want to even think about standing in front of an oven. One of us cooks most nights of the week, which makes eating out fall much more into the treat category that you're describing than into the necessity category that it was when I was working banquets or in grad school.
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May 14, 2024 18:52
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The thing that seems odd about it all to me is that BYD is supposedly setting up in Mexico. https://mexiconewsdaily.com/business/chinese-electric-vehicle-maker-byd-confirms-plans-to-manufacture-in-mexico/ I mean they’re saying it’s only for the Mexican market. But they’re going to have a plant there, for making hybrid trucks.
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May 14, 2024 18:54
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Byd cars are only so cheap because their government is heavily subsidizing them. They want to squash our domestic manufacturing of vehicles by flooding the market with unsustainably low priced vehicles, and then we'll be ever more reliant on their manufacturing. They're trying to use the same tactic that Uber did to run taxi companies out of business.
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May 14, 2024 18:54
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the prc doesn't care that much about market share, they care about doing wage suppression on their own workers while getting their geopolitical aims (one of the top ones: the middle east has been chaos for 50 years now, don't be dependent upon their oil. the actual top producer is the usa, too, which obviously they won't be dependent on either) and keeping unemployment down. their previous thing for doing that was mass infrastructural investment and mass real estate investment, and that went to poo poo, so now they're refocusing on manufacturing and importing american demand because the mass wage suppression means there's no native chinese household demand. household consumption accounts for the lowest percentage of any economy in recorded history in the prc right now. youth unemployment spiked at spain-and-italy-levels before going back down to rich-european-country levels (which are still vastly higher than american or japanese levels), so it's basically whack-a-mole with the problems of mass malinvestment right now for them. the next mole to be whacking is the currency controls being a gently caress, if the mass gold purchases are any sign. if the currency controls break down they'll have the venezuelan raspao be possible now, ask the venezuelans, argentineans and iranians how that went byd seems like a better investment for the state than fuckin tianjin real estate or ridiculously-unprofitable bullet trains again, that's all bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 19:04 on May 14, 2024 |
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May 14, 2024 18:58
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SpartanIvy posted:Byd cars are only so cheap because their government is heavily subsidizing them. Do you have a link to support this claim
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May 14, 2024 19:06
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Hadlock posted:Do you have a link to support this claim not op but https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Electric-cars-in-China/China-gives-EV-sector-billions-of-yuan-in-subsidies
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May 14, 2024 19:06
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Hadlock posted:Do you have a link to support this claim Here's a randomly googled Bloomberg article that claims to be citing a study, so I'd say chase that down: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-10/byd-got-3-4-billion-chinese-aid-to-dominate-evs-study-says
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May 14, 2024 19:10
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I am curious how that compares to Western incentives. Apples-to-apples is going to be tough; I have no idea the structure of national vs local incentives in the PRC. But just as a few examples - Tesla is going to benefit to the tune of $1.8Bn+ from IRA tax incentives (ps gently caress the administration for choosing that acronym, so annoying!). Tesla received $64MM in state and local incentives for Gigafactory Texas. Tesla received $330MM in incentives from Nevada for the semi assembly line, on top of $1.3Bn in incentives received for the OG gigafactory. That's a lot of money - mostly in tax credits/future abatements, but dollars are dollars. I'm not fully convinced that what the Chinese government is doing is all that different. edit: sources - https://www.rgj.com/story/news/mone...da/69963517007/, https://prospect.org/economy/tax-breaks-cushion-teslas-texas-landing/, https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-taps-biden-tax-credits-offset-ev-price-cuts-2023-07-21/
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May 14, 2024 19:16
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Cyrano4747 posted:My guess is that a lot more low income workers are more or less locked into ready-made food, of which fast food is an easy option, due to their circumstances and general lifestyle. Long story short, higher income often correlates to more leisure time, and more leisure time means more time to do things like cook at home rather than grab something on the way home from your shift. This may seem intuitive but it’s not true. High income people, by and large, work more. Besides the obvious (those who work more make more), there’s also the added cost of leisure time, among other factors. Boston Fed did a study awhile ago: https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/Documents/Workingpapers/PDF/wp0602.pdf For the personal anecdote: when I was a bartender I had defined shifts and the moment I clocked out I didn’t think about work until the next day. Now I have a work phone.
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May 14, 2024 19:26
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I'm not fully convinced that what the Chinese government is doing is all that different. It's not different at all! Add in the subsidies to other car companies and the credits we are giving on the consumer side (now only if final assembly is done in North America), and it's gotta be a lot more than 3.7B. Which is fine, but adding in 100% tariffs as well... Wow, we are not competitive.
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May 14, 2024 19:27
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Baddog posted:It's not different at all! Add in the subsidies to other car companies and the credits we are giving on the consumer side (now only if final assembly is done in North America), and it's gotta be a lot more than 3.7B. i mean yeah, industrial robots cost the same amount of money everywhere and generally perform the same, and wages in NA are a lot higher.
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May 14, 2024 19:34
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if you are wondering about why the prc tries to suppress wages, taiwan revolted and stopped being a dictatorship at $5300 income per capita in 1987, about $14000 in todays dollars. korea revolted and stopped being a dictatorship around 1992, fully, around $8200 per capita then, or around 17000 in todays dollars (process started in 1987 for real). the prc is at $14000 ish right now...
bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 19:43 on May 14, 2024 |
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May 14, 2024 19:40
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Not to mention china has been at this for a while, I’m sure they’ve passed the apex of the investment/return graph. We otoh, are behind and are ramping - they also have the supply side of raw materials locked
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May 14, 2024 19:43
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bob dobbs is dead posted:if you are wondering about why the prc tries to suppress wages, taiwan revolted and stopped being a dictatorship at $5300 income per capita in 1987, about $14000 in todays dollars. korea revolted and stopped being a dictatorship around 1992, fully, around $8200 per capita then, or around 17000 in todays dollars (process started in 1987 for real). the prc is at $14000 ish right now... I would hesitate to link PRC low domestic consumption to any political goals of the PRC, before we go too D&D about this. One element is that the PRC lacks a social safety net (even by American standards), and as such even well-off high-paid workers (like the ~150 Million Chinese people with roughly western incomes) put a much higher % of their income into savings rather than consumption, to provide their own safety net. This was further proven by the COVID epidemic, which China did not compensate workers for at all unlike the EU or US, and eroded plenty of Chinese people's savings and showed them exactly why they must save in boom times. But the core argument is true, which is China is seeking to continue to use manufacturing to drive economic growth, but don't have the domestic demand to support their current manufacturing sector, let alone a growing one. So export the goods instead! Until other countries close off in retailiation. https://www.ft.com/content/4075ac49-f3b6-42a0-88c4-168292048feb https://archive.ph/pyPtS#selection-2363.42-2363.231 Nothingtoseehere fucked around with this message at 20:03 on May 14, 2024 |
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May 14, 2024 19:54
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I think subsidies and credits etc. have to be thought about carefully or you'll reach very bad conclusions about them. A clean energy credit has a policy goal of prompting manufacturers to go green when it's not otherwise in their immediate direct economic interest to do so; in other words, they're intended to offset what would otherwise be a regulatory requirement (you must go green) that would raise costs above their baseline, but still accomplish something besides the baseline status quo of cheaper non-green options. If lots of manufacturers take advantage of that and you just look at the total amount of green energy credits and say "this is the government subsidizing this industry" and just apply that amount as a competitive push vs. China, you will not be reaching a valid conclusion: without that credit, and also without a regulation requiring green energy, how much more would those widgets have cost? If the credit is perfectly designed to exactly offset increased costs, then the answer is zero. If it's designed to actually be an incentive, it should offer at least a little extra profit to the company. Exactly how much is perhaps hard to find out but it should basically always be something less than the total amount of the credit because it's attached to some behavioral change that actually costs something. Tax breaks are also technically subsidies, but like, what does that make taxes? If you have no tax on something, nobody calls that "a subsidy." Right now today we don't have one billion dollar tax on making cars. So the lack of that tax must be a one billion dollar subsidy, right? What a tax break really is is a subsidy in comparison to other companies in that same jurisdiction who don't get that tax break. So if Tesla gets a tax break to build a gigafactory, but Ford doesn't get a tax break to build a big car factory, then Tesla's getting some kind of advantage vs. Ford. From a foreign, competitive perspective, this would matter a lot if that foreign company wanted to build cars in the US but could not qualify for a tax break that the domestic manufacturers are getting: that's the government tipping the scales for sure. But when you try to compare subsidies/tax breaks/whatever the US gives to its domestic car manufacturers vs tax breaks/subsidies/whatever the Chinese government gives to its own car manufacturers, you're not necessarily making an apples-to-apples comparison. What are the "default" taxes in China? What are the regulatory costs that China can give some companies a break on, or get some benefit (environmental policy, labor policy, whatever) that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive for its industries? When we say "china is giving a huge subsidy to its car manufacturers to make them cheaper to export" we are implying that, irrespective of """legitimate""" domestic policy decisions performed through tax or subsidy, they're specifically just spending cash to make their cars unfairly cheap compared to US cars. That may well be a fair implication, but I'm totally unconvinced that it is or is not fair by the simple comparison of total dollar amounts of tax breaks or subsidies on either side. A tariff, on the other hand, is exactly that thing. It's a tax on imported goods to protect a domestic industry. It's not Michigan trying to compete for factories with Texas by offering a cut on state taxes deal. It can be justified by "well they're doing unfair stuff" or just nakedly be "their stuff is too cheap for us to compete, so we'll force our consumers to pay higher prices so they'll buy domestic", but regardless of that justification, it's much more clear that it's a matter of attempting to control trade balance and support domestic producers. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:57 on May 14, 2024 |
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May 14, 2024 19:54
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bob dobbs is dead posted:if you are wondering about why the prc tries to suppress wages, taiwan revolted and stopped being a dictatorship at $5300 income per capita in 1987, about $14000 in todays dollars. korea revolted and stopped being a dictatorship around 1992, fully, around $8200 per capita then, or around 17000 in todays dollars (process started in 1987 for real). the prc is at $14000 ish right now... Can you elaborate on why they did this. I can guess but it sounds like you're more read on this than me
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May 14, 2024 19:58
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the initial spark of the 1989 stuff in tiananmen was students wanting rights and poo poo, but what led the industrial workers and normal peeps to join in and get fuckin angry and de facto get surprisingly close to civil war was 30% inflation (official: de facto, 100%). you gotta do wage suppression if you want economic growth without too much inflation. they are ideologically not really happy about the insane inequality that also resulted but sucked it up because they were more scared of inflation. that was pretty directly related to the taiwanese and korean transitions to democracy because of the same students-complaining-now-the-workers-join-in-because-of-inflation dynamic. but that, in turn, was because of the investment-led growth thing running out because of malinvestment in korea and taiwan, too. so that's how the path goes and why the income per capita would be related, because that has tended to be the point at which that path stalls. with japan and the soviets, who did it first, too. the only countries that get to like, 50k usd p/a or whatever have been democracies, tax havens and gas-stations-pretending-to-be-countries bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 20:08 on May 14, 2024 |
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May 14, 2024 20:04
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you all are missing the national security angle of the chinese EV thing. an internet device attached to a known user and with a bunch of cameras is a security nightmare, especially when it’s a CAR, constantly tracking location and habits. https://www.brown.senate.gov/newsro...mart-technology imagine a fleet of BYD cars being driven to/from government sites every day. lol. it’s like tiktok but worse. china, of course, requires car data to be stored within china. https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jones/202404291090/tesla-wins-data-security-clearance-in-china
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May 14, 2024 20:07
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pmchem posted:you all are missing the national security angle of the chinese EV thing. an internet device attached to a known user and with a bunch of cameras is a security nightmare, especially when it’s a CAR, constantly tracking location and habits. that's cause for embargo, not tariffs
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May 14, 2024 20:07
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bob dobbs is dead posted:that's cause for embargo, not tariffs National security has a price and it's really just pennies on the dollar.
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May 14, 2024 20:20
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Leperflesh posted:... It's not Michigan trying to compete for factories with Texas by offering a cut on state taxes deal.... This is *another* massive discussion/thing that irritates me. The race between states (and cities) to not just zero taxation, but subsidization. My little town can't be happy with just being a bedroom community and subsisting on real estate taxes, they feel like they also gotta have a lot of jerbs. So in an attempt to persuade companies to relocate here, they offer an endless parade of breaks and giveaways. And every other city/state is *also* doing that, so there isn't any competitive advantage. We raced to the bottom..... so then what exactly is the benefit of having these companies in our town? I feel like the plot has been lost. At some point I think we gotta establish minimums for the various levels of jurisdiction, so we don't just shoot ourselves in the foot. I suppose then you compete on non-monetary incentives such as "in this town we don't allow workers to take water breaks". But we're already at that point anyways! I suppose the burden has just been shifted over to income, sales, and/or (non-corporate) property taxes in most places, and maybe an argument might be made for "that's ok, the taxes get collected at some point". But I guess what I'm arguing is that when it is incredibly easy for a company to relocate, there has to be some federal guidance/intervention to keep states/cities from economically castrating each other.
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May 14, 2024 20:39
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This feels a bit like the problem is bedroom communities don't have any competitive advantage in labour so they can only compete on cost. If you look at the tech cities for example or even cities in general, the advantage of moving there is access to the ecosystem that attracts talent and capital. If your community doesn't want to compete on price, what else are they offering?
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May 14, 2024 20:51
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I think that regional competition partially stems from gross economic disparities and the general emptying-out of rural and middle america. Cities struggling to keep a population or keep young people - especially college-educated young people - from leaving, lacking the reputation as a <x> Valley with a big base of workers skilled in a particular area, and perhaps coping with state-level regulations or taxes they can't do anything about, really scramble to find "something we can do" to stop or reverse the trend. If you can get two big companies in a particular industry to move in, and that attracts three or four more smaller ones to start up, maybe you can be a little Silicon Valley, or be like the insurance industry in Omaha or one of the car building places, and then that "sticks" and becomes the basis for regional prosperity and growth. It's such an attractive idea. I don't think it really works, like you can't force it. I can't think of any cases where a city or county or metro area decided "we're gonna import this industry and make it work" and then within ten years it's working, like, fast enough to save people from having to leave to find work. Some of the gross economic disparities stem from the fact that cities have to fund themselves via local taxes in the first place. Zoning for dollars is a big problem. Underfunded local schools discourage higher income people from moving there to feed more lucrative companies that generate higher tax amounts, a negative feedback loop of municipal decrepitude. How does that work in China? Do they pay for school with local tax dollars? I have the impression the national government has far more local power there?
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May 14, 2024 20:55
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One of the big advantages of bringing in big companies, even if they are not paying taxes, is that in theory all the workers are spending money on rent, food, haircuts, ect. I definitely don't think it really works in the long term but I suppose a few years off anything is better than nothing. Locally we had a big employer that provided lots of great blue collar jobs in the reason, but the second local government tried to change things they just moved somewhere else offering a better deal.
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May 14, 2024 21:01
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Leperflesh posted:It's such an attractive idea. I don't think it really works, like you can't force it. I can't think of any cases where a city or county or metro area decided "we're gonna import this industry and make it work" and then within ten years it's working, like, fast enough to save people from having to leave to find work. Miami isn't exactly a bedroom community; maybe perhaps to NYC. What's your take on Miami doing this recently With remote work Miami is a thriving economy but traditionally has been transport, finance (particularly for the Caribbean and Latin America) and of course tourism. Tech as a growth target is moderately new
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May 14, 2024 21:11
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Lord_Hambrose posted:One of the big advantages of bringing in big companies, even if they are not paying taxes, is that in theory all the workers are spending money on rent, food, haircuts, ect. It’s also worth noting that, in situations where it’s the state offering incentives (and not a county or municipality), it’s a way to redistribute some wealth—that is, the state coffers being filled by say a large city being used to subsidize a company putting up jobs a few hundred miles away.
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May 14, 2024 21:25
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"tech" is too vague really, it's virtually meaningless these days I have not heard of any tech companies moving to Miami, has that happened? What's Miami's university situation like? I know more broadly that Florida's public university situation is in an absolute shambles because of Desantis et. al. I found this which I guess means it's "officially" a tech hub, but that press release says there are 31 inagural tech hubs around the country, which OK but also lol, quote:A Tech Hubs Designation is a strong endorsement of a region’s plan to supercharge a critical technology ecosystem and become a global leader over the next decade. Tech Hubs Designees were eligible to apply for the Tech Hubs Phase 2 Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) (PDF). The deadline to apply was February 29, 2024. EDA will award implementation grants to approximately 5-10 Designated Tech Hubs, with each of those Hubs receiving approximately $40-$70 million across several projects. Here's general info about the program https://www.eda.gov/funding/programs/regional-technology-and-innovation-hubs It's cool and good to invest in training and development at a national level, and target it at places that seem to already have the infrastructure necessary for that to be viable, but I have no idea if Miami in particular stands out here and it remains to be seen whether this will bear fruit. IMO cities and regions thrive when they have key critical infrastructure including very good universities, have local amenities and climate that can attract people to want to live there, and have somewhat varied economies that can weather a downturn in one particular industry. SF Bay, a "tech hub", has a diverse economy and job base:  (source) If all it had was computer companies, and also wasn't an especially pleasant place to live, it might have collapsed in the 2000 tech collapse.
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May 14, 2024 21:27
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Krugman has an Op Ed up on the new tariffs. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/opinion/china-imports-tariffs-biden.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
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May 15, 2024 05:52
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Krugman has an Op Ed up on the new tariffs. archive link https://archive.is/LNXw7
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May 15, 2024 05:56
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Baddog posted:Trade wars are good and easy to win BYD is genuinely impressive, I've seen their cars earlier this year and it's Tesla with quality the level or Toyota/Honda. Nothing fancy but the thing it's astonishingly affordable. On another hand, it's a enormous indictment of the American automotive industry. They just can't innovate.
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May 15, 2024 06:46
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they can innovate, they can't make things cheap. currency and labor too expensive. equities are also a nonentity in the prc, so margins can go to poo poo and peeps will still be fine investing im not defending tesla, but its a pronounced feature of the decades long expensiveness of the dollar that it fucks over exports and thriftiness bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 06:59 on May 15, 2024 |
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May 15, 2024 06:54
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May you expand upon that?
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May 15, 2024 07:10
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Gucci Loafers posted:May you expand upon that? which part? strong dollar makes buying stuff from overseas cheap, selling stuff overseas expensive. the US dollar is in constant demand due to its stability, which comes from the strength and diversity of the US economy; that demand makes the dollar useful as a trade currency, which increases the demand, and ultimately entrenches the dollar as the global reserve currency. Being the reserve currency reinforces the dollar's stability, since in times of crisis, weaker economies will try to shore themselves up with extra dollars, bidding up its value - paradoxically this happens even if the crisis originates in the US and explains how we came through the unsteadiness last year so much more cleanly than everyone else. Anyway we've been in this virtuous circle since Nixon drove the final nail into the coffin of the gold standard, and the dollar is now insurmountable, at least for the foreseeable future this is all pretty good for american consumers except it makes stuff produced here relatively expensive. for cheap mechanized agriculture products that's fine, for highly labor-intensive services like healthcare, education and construction it sucks but is unavoidable, but for large-scale non-specialist manufacturing like cars it's a death sentence, and the only reason the american auto manufacturers have clung on is a combo of protectionism and subsidies. You have to have noticed that the only US cars on the road any more are trucks and SUVs and that toyota et al aren't allowed to sell their good trucks at a good price here - the hilux would eat the f150 alive the same way the camry did for sedans if not for the tariff, and that would be the end of american auto manufacturing
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May 15, 2024 08:43
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Gucci Loafers posted:BYD is genuinely impressive, I've seen their cars earlier this year and it's Tesla with quality the level or Toyota/Honda. Nothing fancy but the thing it's astonishingly affordable. On another hand, it's a enormous indictment of the American automotive industry. They just can't innovate. One of the cooler things is the battery swap, where you just pull into a station, get an entire battery change in ~1 minute and just keep moving. Tesla's superchargers are nice enough and way faster than the others, but it still takes about half an hour to get an 80% charge from near zero. And you're tied to your battery, which is slowly degrading and starting to become a problem for the people with older teslas. Getting a new battery is prohibitively expensive. China has had their design out there for long enough to build these stations *everywhere*. Why haven't any of the western designers copied that innovation and made it so that changing the battery pack on your car is as easy as swapping the battery on your drill? Who knows. Slow as poo poo. Bar Ran Dun posted:Krugman has an Op Ed up on the new tariffs. Man, Krugman is always carrying water for the establishment. "Normally as an economist I'd be against trade wars and in favor of getting cheap green-energy panels from china, but it's just not politically possible right now, we need to protect our coalition and continue building expensive low quality poo poo that no one wants and doesn't make sense to install unless we offer a shitload of (means-tested) subsidies".
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May 15, 2024 12:49
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Baddog posted:One of the cooler things is the battery swap, where you just pull into a station, get an entire battery change in ~1 minute and just keep moving. Tesla's superchargers are nice enough and way faster than the others, but it still takes about half an hour to get an 80% charge from near zero. And you're tied to your battery, which is slowly degrading and starting to become a problem for the people with older teslas. Getting a new battery is prohibitively expensive. China has had their design out there for long enough to build these stations *everywhere*. Why haven't any of the western designers copied that innovation and made it so that changing the battery pack on your car is as easy as swapping the battery on your drill? Who knows. Slow as poo poo. Batteries being of variable quality, you might swap out "your" good battery for "their" bad battery, and be hopping mad about it. You could also potentially build counterfeit batteries and use the exchange system to get real batteries in exchange. How realistic these scenarios are doesn't do much to affect peoples' attitudes. That said, if these battery exchanges are widespread in China, I have to assume they've dealt with these issues there already. ...though they might have "solved" them through mass surveillance, which isn't exactly ideal.
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May 15, 2024 13:24
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| # ? Jun 6, 2024 12:56 |
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Baddog posted:One of the cooler things is the battery swap, where you just pull into a station, get an entire battery change in ~1 minute and just keep moving. Tesla's superchargers are nice enough and way faster than the others, but it still takes about half an hour to get an 80% charge from near zero. And you're tied to your battery, which is slowly degrading and starting to become a problem for the people with older teslas. Getting a new battery is prohibitively expensive. China has had their design out there for long enough to build these stations *everywhere*. Why haven't any of the western designers copied that innovation and made it so that changing the battery pack on your car is as easy as swapping the battery on your drill? Who knows. Slow as poo poo. there is a reason that BYD, the best of the Chinese EV OEMs, is not doing this. its not actually a super useful innovation compared to just doing faster DCFC on higher voltage platforms. it requires a fair amount of precision infrastructure to execute the swap, it requires production of additional batteries to be position for swaps, it requires commonality of design of a very large component across multiple vehicles and platforms, it means that the battery can no longer be a structural element of the vehicle, and there are issues with water, dirt, debris, etc. NIO is driving the bus on this thing and I am sure their desire is to have a fairly closed ecosystem based on their standards. here's a decent summary about it: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/05/chinas-nio-to-expand-battery-swap-services-to-gain-ev-infra-edge-.html KYOON GRIFFEY JR fucked around with this message at 13:27 on May 15, 2024 |
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May 15, 2024 13:25
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