BYD's bet on EVs is paying off as drivers ditch gas amid rising oil prices

If one removed the country names and just looked at where investment (focus, planning, and money) was, we would see two greatly different pictures.

One country is disincentivizing or even blocking renewable energy production, rolling back climate protection measures, trying to revitalize the coal industry, slashing investment in scientific research of all kinds, demonizing higher education, and spending vast and rapidly increasing amounts of public funds to create direct, physical conflicts.

Another country is increasing their renewable energy generation capabilities dramatically each year, encouraging EV adoption, investing very heavily in scientific research, and also investing in military (although without initiating direct physical conflicts).

One of these two countries is riding on momentum, but the drag from waste and mismanagement of resources is increasingly slowing it. The other country is building momentum while reducing drag.

The difference in these approaches will be obvious in a decade, and in two decades one of the two countries will be just another chapter in a book about the rise and fall of empires.

Genius strategy by the USA to disincentivize EVs, disincentivize solar and wind, increase dependency on oil & gas, and...start a war that makes oil and gas more expensive for everyone. Markets are now forecasting oil prices will stay above $100 a barrel for multiple years. Best of luck to the economy.

I finally put my money where my mouth is and bought a PHEV. In the past month I've done all my errands around town exclusively on battery power (30-40 miles per charge) from a home L1 charger.

I know EV purists will complain about the complexity of maintaining the gas engine, but this hits the perfect sweet spot for me - it doesn't weigh a million tons, it cost under 40k new, and the one weekend a month when I need to I can drive 300 miles each way on a single tank of gas.

It's funny to see these gas prices spike as companies are announcing they're killing their EV models here in the US.

We should do something here.

Nothing will be done at Federal level.

But california is big enough to make things moving without any federal level law.

For example, what about this:

- no sales taxes on new EV sales

- free registration for 5 years

- free bridge tolls for 5 years

This will be paid by increasing gas taxes, sales taxes on ICE, and registration fees for ICE.

That might convince some of companies to start making EVs again.

BYD are about to launch an EV that charges from 10 to 70% in 5 minutes. As much as I recoil at a brand called "Build Your Dreams", that is quite compelling.

https://www.byd.com/us/news-list/DENZA-Z9GT-to-start-Europes...

How much many more wars over gas or oil do we need to finally just take the energy that (for the most part) is available locally and renewable?!

The petrol era is coming to an end. Our current administration might desperately want to remain a petrol state (for reasons that escape me), but it will only delay the inevitable. The EU is not much better either. The writing has been on the wall, and even since the Russian invasion into Ukraine not much has happened.

What is going on? Are we all insane, or is it just intense lobbying of yesterday's petrol industry?

~4 years ago my wife and I planned on buying one EV and one ICE car purely as a hedge on both. We bought the EV first. After ~1mo of driving it we changed our plans and went for 2 EVs. Even driving long distance (we've made a ~3hr drive around every 10 days for the last 4 years), the convenience factor of EVs has outweighed gas. That doubled once we got solar - there's just something magical about having the operating cost of your vehicle be near zero. Even maintenance is significantly less for the EV. I will never buy a gas car again - it feels like switching from a platter hard drive to a SSD, once you make the switch it's very hard to go back.

I'm in Shenzhen currently. Do you know how quiet the city is, even during rush hour? It's amazing. All because almost every car is electric. Even the damn scooters. It'd actually be enjoyable to be outdoor in downtown if they fixed the air pollution… (some of which of course powers these cars… for now.)

If your time horizon is long enough, the best possible investment thesis is to assume that climate change is real and the energy transition is inevitable.

I’ve worked in clean energy software and hardware since 2014. I’m currently looking for a new position, and recently some research firms came out of the woodwork offering to pay me a high consulting rate just to better understand the market. I wasn’t even looking for this, they just came to me. All they said was “interest in this area is increasing.”

P.S., if you’re looking for someone with deep domain knowledge and senior-level engineering skills for your clean energy project, I’m available. https://matthewgerring.com

It’s been a month. Not long enough for a trend. Every time gas prices spike these celebratory pieces come out and then when gas prices drop at the end the consumer markets revealed preferences are made bare again. Let’s find out if this can sustain for more than a year after gas prices drop.

It seems really unlikely to me that 2 weeks worth of high oil prices is anything more than a rounding error in BYD's years (decade?) long bet on electric cars.

Even if they tripled their sales for the last two weeks, it wouldn't be relavent to if their bet will ultimately pay off.

Guys I own a BYD and love it, but oil prices have risen in the past, like, two days. Perhaps the headline is a bit sensationalized?

It also helps that BYD cars are very aggressively priced and are genuienly pretty good. Here in the UK they are getting pretty popular and it's easy to see why - legacy companies like VW and Audi are (for the lack of better word) taking the piss with their pricing and with penny pinching on literally everything.

What I find most amazing about all this is that this is literally the market that Tesla was aiming for. Affordable EVs for regular people was their whole thing, they were years ahead of BYD, already had an established brand, they just had to keep doing what they were doing, adding cheaper models to their lineup, and they would be much stronger competitors.

you got the smartest man on Earth, Mr. Orange telling American to drill drill drill while American is losing its edge on EV.

I'm sorry to be that guy, but can we reintroduce a good dose of skepticism in our mental diets?

BYD was already selling a ton of cars when the oil prices were "low", of course there's some very creative accounting business moves you would expect from a Chinese company like BYD ( companies from other places have their own peculiarities too ).

Gas prices have been "sky high" for a week and people who are under financial stress just decided to ditch their cars and buy a brand new BYD? Are we children now? listening bedtime stories?

The concept of electric vehicle is technically superior to support the context and lifestyle a large majority of people have. It will "win" over time. There is no need to this bullshit simplistic feel-good articles.

Btw, the the market movements of people trying to get rid of their gas-guzzling SUVs when prices are high and trade them for a smaller and more economical car ( what they should have been doing in the first place.. ) already happened in the past many times, there is no news here. But these movements don't happen in a time span of a week or a couple weeks.

Sorry for the rant, but between AI's "Absolutely, you're entirely right!" and these bullshit articles.. I don't know.

To be clear: EV's will "win" and BYD has been selling a ton of cars because they are cheap and not terrible right out of the gate, also people don't have much disposable income.

i cant wait until we can have these cars in the US. looks like I'm going to be pretty geriatric by that time but it's absolutely stupid how many ICE cars are still all over the place at this point

China is going to take over the world economically off of this energy crisis. They print solar panels like America prints money.

Will be so funny watching the rug pull when the cheap overnight electricity rates disappear, especially in the UK where electricity is very expensive.

Not if. When. You never 'win' in the UK, not in the long term

Ah yes, I'm sure in the Philippines, where the average yearly salary is ~ $4k USD, everyone is rushing out to buy brand new EVs tomorrow, which they will plug into their tin-roofed shack to charge.

In reality, most working class Filipinos travel via public transit or ICE scooter.

I know they write this stuff to generate clicks but at least pretend to try.

> While Asia, particularly Southeast Asian countries like Thailand and the Philippines, has higher EV adoption rates than those of the US and Europe, at around 40%, they are still hit hard by rising oil prices.

That figure is highly misleading. Yes, 48% of new vehicle sales in Thailand are now EVs, but their share of total vehicles on the road is much smaller: I can't find recent figures, but it'll be far less than 10%. (Share of new sales was under 20% until late last year.)

The Philippines is even further behind, with share of new sales under 10%.

Of course total fleet composition will eventually converge on new sales, but given that the lifespans of cars are measured in decades, it takes longer than you'd think.