I was in mainland China a week ago and rode in a few different domestic electric cars when taking DiDi (Uber), from BYD and others. All pretty great experiences, good build quality. A surprising percent of the cars on the street in Kunming were electric - maybe 25%. The other cards make me expect good things from the Xiaomi.
My problem with Xiaomi is the absolutely crazy data gathering.
I visited one of their mall stores of theirs and literally the only product (out of many) not requiring an app was some sort of shaving machine. A goddamn pole fan requiring an app!
On the other hand, all modern cars seem to be pretty bad at this. Tesla cars appear to be a privacy nightmare.
- The car companies claim not only the owners' data, but the data of _any passengers_. I don't think people reasonably expect that sitting in a friend's car grants consent to collect data on them.
- Almost no brands allow people to request their data be deleted.
- Nissan claims the right to know their owner's sexual activity. Kia claims the right to know their owner's sex lives.
Realistically, even iot wall sockets and switch controllers are now a well served market. Is there any electrical appliance that has no merit being externally controllable, and thus a potential data source?
We'd need Synology to gain way more market power than Apple and Google (and Xiaomi and every other global makers) to get a full user managed hub instead of the cloud first approach we have now.
> My problem with Xiaomi is the absolutely crazy data gathering. [...] On the other hand, all modern cars seem to be pretty bad at this.
Exactly. We'll hardly find one car, or for that matter any object with enough electronics on board which is both closed and connected, that doesn't use the technology to gather data on the user. Spying is a profitable business nobody in the industry can resist to.
They are a global brand now. If you use their apps in Europe you are presented with the choice of cloud locations (Germany) and they do comply with the GDPR. There are far worse actors out there then Xiaomi.
I am glad they went to 800V. The acceleration stat race is getting a bit stupid. But I think 800V is very important, at least for charging. It will not only let you charge fast it will let other people use the charger after you are done.
I hope the industry moves both the fast chargers and the cars to 800V asap. (Naturally, fast chargers should retain 400V backward compatibility). When cars charge faster it is kind of like having more chargers.
800V lets them have all the HV conductors within the car half the thickness.
Back in 2015, it didn't make sense because EV's didn't charge that fast, and battery balancing tech was still expensive (and cost scales proportional to the voltage).
However, now battery balancing tech is mere cents per volt, and customers demanding fast charging means super thick (and expensive!) wires in the car and battery pack.
1000 volt MOSFETS have also become a lot cheaper (used in the motor inverters), whereas before car manufacturers were reusing 600 volt mosfets designed for other things.
The only downside of higher voltages are increased insulation requirements. However, PVC insulation allows 10kV per mm, so the insulation thickness required is still tiny (although clearly you cannot use outdoor air as an insulator in either case).
The 800v is not relevant to “all the conductors within the car“. It is the move from 12 V to 48 V that allows them to reduce the thickness of all the wires within the car. That’s what the cybertruck introduced.
> The only downside of higher voltages are increased insulation requirements.
Is there increased risk to emergency responders who might have to cut into a vehicle to rescue occupants? Or is there a possibility that deformation from an accident could result in metal parts charged to 800V? I hope things are designed to prevent that. Perhaps the insulation you mention is armored for the high voltage paths.
Is EV charging actually voltage limited? I had impression that it's limited more by C rating and upstream capacity than by resistance and/or cable thickness requirements.
Somewhat? This voltage isn’t (just) about the battery, but about all power connections. Cables can only take so much current after all! At 150 KW, you need 400 V × 375 A. That is an insane current figure. At 800 V, it’s just half the current.
I’ve used a 300 KW DC charging station once. The cable is very thick and heavy. There are practical limits.
Cable thickness is very much a problem with fast chargers. Many fast chargers now have water cooled cables, because when 500 amps is going down the cable, you either need it super thick with copper or to have the complexity of two water cooling loops (one for the positive conductor, one for the negative conductor, electrically isolated coolant loops).
> The base model, however, only supports 400V charging for its smaller 73.6kWh battery,
This suggests the base model is 400v, while the other models are 800v.
That in turn means that the onboard charger, DC/DC, motor inverters and AC compressor inverter must be different between the models, or that they have designed 400v/800v dual-mode hardware for all those things.
Having so many parts different between models drives up costs.
Having dual-mode hardware also drives up costs - typically the power electronics have cost ~proportional to max voltage * max current. If you need a fixed output power, you are only using half of either voltage or current if the hardware is dual-mode, so you are wasting half of the power electronics cost, which is huge.
(before someone points out that Tesla cybertruck has dual-mode 400v/800v since it can rewire the battery to charge at either voltage... Well it never drives along in the 400 volt mode. And even then, I'd bet the AC compressor is at dramatically reduced power output while on a 400v charger)
It might be a long term cost savings measure if trials with 800v allow them to move their whole fleet to 800v eventually and lower costs in the future.
Besides lots more pictures, carnewschina [1] also reports:
> According to Xiaomi, the SU7 is a pretty aerodynamic car with a drag coefficient of only 0.195 Cd, the lowest among production vehicles.
No doubt this was helped by hiring James Qiu who had previously worked on Mercedes-Benz's Vision EQXX design, a concept car with a record setting 0.17 Cd.
> propelling the car to a stated top speed of 100 km/h (62 mph)
Yeah, definitely not many American markets. Several highways around me have posted speed limits of 75MPH, traffic often flows even faster than that. Driving in a car that can barely reach 60mph would often result in a speed differential of like 15+mph with the rest of traffic. I'd feel extremely unsafe going almost 20mph slower than the surrounding traffic while in a subcompact car.
This thing costs more than 45.000EUR with any kind of equipment and is massive - a far cry away from something like a Renault Clio or similar econobox.
Not in NL they can't... the cheapest I can find is 18k for either model. Some of them appear to be still eligible for a subsidy, but that only brings it down to 16k. Not bad honestly considering that taxes are about to go up for EVs in the Netherlands in 2025. No more subsidization when a 30% of people own an EV!
Mitsubishi sold the i-MiEV in the US for years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_i-MiEV I knew a guy who had two of em. Nobody else bought them and eventually they gave up. There's just no market for EVs with a 60 mile range.
The Chevy Bolt EUV is to my mind the perfect little city car. It’s not really “little” by most standards but if I were buying an EV today this is the one I’d go with. I love my Teslas and will keep them for many years to come but I’m happy that Chevy has this one.
Most of the previous comments take it to mean a small car that doesn't need to travel very fast or far, perhaps in a city where parking is scarce.
But some of my commutes have been very long, or very far, or very fast. If I'm going to spend three hours, or 100 miles, or average 80+ mph on it every single day, I'm not going to get a small econobox.
We all know commuting is an awful, awful experience; but when people spend a lot of time in their car, it's no surprise that they're spending more money to make that experience slightly less awful.
Why exactly do you need an enormous car to feel comfortable on a commute? This attitude is frankly leading to an enormous ballooning in the size of vehicles on the road, which is having tragic consequences for pedestrians. As somebody in the 98% height, and who is perfectly comfortable in well designed "econo-boxes" (vw seems quite good at this), I find the desire to get enormous SUVs for a highway commute terribly unfortunate.
At least in Europe, the industry has lobbied away the possibility of cheap cars. From 2024, "Intelligent Speed Assist" and data recorders are mandatory for new cars.
Chinese manufacturers are going to obliterate the EU auto industry.
I saw Nio break the 1k range mark on a single battery charge the other day. That and their battery swapping stations. Now this.
Meanwhile BMW is still making a diesel X5 with colorful lights for about >100k in 2023 and also a diesel series 7. The exhaust on these stinks like the one in a VW from 2004. Their electric and hybrid offerings are also a joke.
Another player, Daimler, put a washing machine sized electric motor coupled onto the automatic gearbox into some of their hybrids, along with a underpowered 1.6L engine. The tumble dryer engine is powered by a 20kW battery, wasting juice as drag and heat in the gearbox. They had the gearboxes lying around from start/stop ICEs and found a use for them: dumping them onto an unsuspecting public. That is their idea of a hybrid. Of course it's underpowered and burns gas like there's no tomorrow the moment that you stop driving like grandma.
Renault is possibly the only brand with decent offerings. Everybody laughs while Dacia Spring, another Chinese built car, is leading the EV sales this year. Dacia is the budget brand in Renault's portofolio.
You mean the cars that had GPS maps and cruise control anyway will have to take the speed limit from the GPS map and apply it to the cruise control? Horror, the cost!
> as well as chassis stamped by its die casting machines with a clamping force of 9,100 tons — beating that of Tesla's apparently.
This seems incoherent to me? Metal stamping is a process, and die casting is a separate process, from what I understand. Is there any reason to die cast a chassis? Does the press strength around the casting molds matter? I’d assume chassis parts would be built out of stamped and bent sheet metal?
Tesla has switched their newer lines to casting. It seems like it's mostly about manufacturing efficiency rather than strength -- they can cast the whole underbody of the vehicle as a single piece rather than having dozens of stamped pieces that need to be welded or riveted together. Initially they were doing the front half as one piece and the back half as another, but they've needed to get bigger and bigger (higher- and higher-force) machines as they've gone from two-piece to single-piece construction.
When die casting, you inject semi-molten metal into a cold mould.
The mould must be held closed while metal is being injected. The "9100 tons" refers to the force keeping the mould closed. That force is approximately proportional to the surface area of the object being cast.
Xiaomi is China's Apple, so what happened to the rumored Apple car? Haven't heard anything for a while, but Wikipedia claims it's still planned for 2024-25:
Calling it: Apple will partner with an established automaker such as Goldman Sachs^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HPolestar and customize the infotainment OS.
> Much like Volkswagen, Xiaomi already knows that car owners still prefer to have some physical buttons,
Despite decades of experience in the industry, until very recently Volkswagen weirdly thought the opposite was true. It's incredible it's taken them this long to U-turn on what's been a blindly obvious problem with their current interior designs. It got the point where every other manufacturer, that did the (old) sensible thing, was praised.
I wonder how many generations before those CPUs get replaced by a Chinese native competitor. I'm guessing the Qualcomm infotaintment processors will be replaced soon.
High end semiconductors is one area where China has a lot of ground to catch up on. They can make them fast, or cheap, but can't make them fast and cheap yet. They have a similar problem with jet turbines, and most of it is related to materials engineering.
Readit News
I visited one of their mall stores of theirs and literally the only product (out of many) not requiring an app was some sort of shaving machine. A goddamn pole fan requiring an app!
On the other hand, all modern cars seem to be pretty bad at this. Tesla cars appear to be a privacy nightmare.
Some notable takeaways:
- The car companies claim not only the owners' data, but the data of _any passengers_. I don't think people reasonably expect that sitting in a friend's car grants consent to collect data on them.
- Almost no brands allow people to request their data be deleted.
- Nissan claims the right to know their owner's sexual activity. Kia claims the right to know their owner's sex lives.
Realistically, even iot wall sockets and switch controllers are now a well served market. Is there any electrical appliance that has no merit being externally controllable, and thus a potential data source?
We'd need Synology to gain way more market power than Apple and Google (and Xiaomi and every other global makers) to get a full user managed hub instead of the cloud first approach we have now.
Exactly. We'll hardly find one car, or for that matter any object with enough electronics on board which is both closed and connected, that doesn't use the technology to gather data on the user. Spying is a profitable business nobody in the industry can resist to.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
I hope the industry moves both the fast chargers and the cars to 800V asap. (Naturally, fast chargers should retain 400V backward compatibility). When cars charge faster it is kind of like having more chargers.
800V lets them have all the HV conductors within the car half the thickness.
Back in 2015, it didn't make sense because EV's didn't charge that fast, and battery balancing tech was still expensive (and cost scales proportional to the voltage).
However, now battery balancing tech is mere cents per volt, and customers demanding fast charging means super thick (and expensive!) wires in the car and battery pack.
1000 volt MOSFETS have also become a lot cheaper (used in the motor inverters), whereas before car manufacturers were reusing 600 volt mosfets designed for other things.
The only downside of higher voltages are increased insulation requirements. However, PVC insulation allows 10kV per mm, so the insulation thickness required is still tiny (although clearly you cannot use outdoor air as an insulator in either case).
Is there increased risk to emergency responders who might have to cut into a vehicle to rescue occupants? Or is there a possibility that deformation from an accident could result in metal parts charged to 800V? I hope things are designed to prevent that. Perhaps the insulation you mention is armored for the high voltage paths.
I’ve used a 300 KW DC charging station once. The cable is very thick and heavy. There are practical limits.
This suggests the base model is 400v, while the other models are 800v.
That in turn means that the onboard charger, DC/DC, motor inverters and AC compressor inverter must be different between the models, or that they have designed 400v/800v dual-mode hardware for all those things.
Having so many parts different between models drives up costs.
Having dual-mode hardware also drives up costs - typically the power electronics have cost ~proportional to max voltage * max current. If you need a fixed output power, you are only using half of either voltage or current if the hardware is dual-mode, so you are wasting half of the power electronics cost, which is huge.
(before someone points out that Tesla cybertruck has dual-mode 400v/800v since it can rewire the battery to charge at either voltage... Well it never drives along in the 400 volt mode. And even then, I'd bet the AC compressor is at dramatically reduced power output while on a 400v charger)
> According to Xiaomi, the SU7 is a pretty aerodynamic car with a drag coefficient of only 0.195 Cd, the lowest among production vehicles.
No doubt this was helped by hiring James Qiu who had previously worked on Mercedes-Benz's Vision EQXX design, a concept car with a record setting 0.17 Cd.
[1] https://carnewschina.com/2023/12/28/xiaomi-officially-unveil...
The statement about the V6 is throwing me. Can anyone fill me in what they're using the V6 for? I thought the SU7 was full electric, not a hybrid.
Has anyone considered making an inexpensive, reliable, simple EV for commuters?
These have been around for awhile, they aren't really suited to the American market though; e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuling_Hongguang_Mini_EV
Yeah, definitely not many American markets. Several highways around me have posted speed limits of 75MPH, traffic often flows even faster than that. Driving in a car that can barely reach 60mph would often result in a speed differential of like 15+mph with the rest of traffic. I'd feel extremely unsafe going almost 20mph slower than the surrounding traffic while in a subcompact car.
> Starts at $35k
Deleted Comment
Most of the previous comments take it to mean a small car that doesn't need to travel very fast or far, perhaps in a city where parking is scarce.
But some of my commutes have been very long, or very far, or very fast. If I'm going to spend three hours, or 100 miles, or average 80+ mph on it every single day, I'm not going to get a small econobox.
We all know commuting is an awful, awful experience; but when people spend a lot of time in their car, it's no surprise that they're spending more money to make that experience slightly less awful.
Chevrolet Chevette equivalent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Chevette
It's just that they have two wheels and no climate control.
I saw Nio break the 1k range mark on a single battery charge the other day. That and their battery swapping stations. Now this.
Meanwhile BMW is still making a diesel X5 with colorful lights for about >100k in 2023 and also a diesel series 7. The exhaust on these stinks like the one in a VW from 2004. Their electric and hybrid offerings are also a joke.
Another player, Daimler, put a washing machine sized electric motor coupled onto the automatic gearbox into some of their hybrids, along with a underpowered 1.6L engine. The tumble dryer engine is powered by a 20kW battery, wasting juice as drag and heat in the gearbox. They had the gearboxes lying around from start/stop ICEs and found a use for them: dumping them onto an unsuspecting public. That is their idea of a hybrid. Of course it's underpowered and burns gas like there's no tomorrow the moment that you stop driving like grandma.
Renault is possibly the only brand with decent offerings. Everybody laughs while Dacia Spring, another Chinese built car, is leading the EV sales this year. Dacia is the budget brand in Renault's portofolio.
Where does the rest of 20.000+ increase of car prices come from? ;)
This seems incoherent to me? Metal stamping is a process, and die casting is a separate process, from what I understand. Is there any reason to die cast a chassis? Does the press strength around the casting molds matter? I’d assume chassis parts would be built out of stamped and bent sheet metal?
The mould must be held closed while metal is being injected. The "9100 tons" refers to the force keeping the mould closed. That force is approximately proportional to the surface area of the object being cast.
https://proleantech.com/xiaomis-super-large-die-casting-tech...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_electric_car_project
Despite decades of experience in the industry, until very recently Volkswagen weirdly thought the opposite was true. It's incredible it's taken them this long to U-turn on what's been a blindly obvious problem with their current interior designs. It got the point where every other manufacturer, that did the (old) sensible thing, was praised.
Interestingly, NVIDIA is making good moves in all the areas related to AI.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/5nm-NIO-Shenji-autonomous-driv...