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Comment by sremani | Hacker News Reader

China has around 25 electric car manufacturers not too unlike Detroit in its hay-day in 1920s. Sooner or later many will crash and burn and some merge to become bigger players. Long story short, industries with heavy CapEx sooner or later end up being handful of players.

BYD buses and ABQ rapid transit saga is an interesting one. Most of the Chinese electrics are not up to the snuff and so Albuquerque decided not to order any new buses and send back the ones delivered.

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Sadly, the people in ABQ I know blame their city government for this fiasco, and not the manufacturer. They're still sore about the empty bus-only lanes running down some main streets that were built for this.

to be fair the buses are/were just one in a long line ART fiascos

and who selected the manufacturer?

Well, yeah, but there was no reason to look at their bid and assume they'd shit the bed.

Yet Indy is using BYD electric buses for their new Red Line rapid transit. The line just opened a few weeks ago.

Be interesting how it'll function during the cold weather - there were problems with these buses that BYD is scrambling to fix.

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/transportation/201...

Are you including Geely in your list of manufacturers? Geely owns Volvo, and I'm eagerly looking forward to the (electric) 2020 Polestar 2 going on sale[1].

The tech will likely percolate downwards to Geely's non-flagship cars over the next few years.

1. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/volvo-spinoff-polestar-...

Now that is one good looking electric car... I can see a bit of the Volvo aesthetic there.

Interesting. I've only seen their gas vehicles in Egypt where they are a popular middle class car. Didn't know they're doing electric.

So far no Volvo’s built in China have left China, the Volvo’s driven in the rest of the world are built outside of China. Will be interesting to see how Chinese vehicle production for international market works out.

Geely only owns Volvo Cars. The buses and trucks are still Swedish (AB Volvo).

Yes and I recently read overall investment is around $28 billion in electric vehicles, across all these startups. By comparison, VW alone is investing €80 billion.

Just fyi, €80 billion is $87.55 billion.

Yeah there are some good articles noting how many manufacturers there are and they basically expect a large % to fall by the wayside dude to being behind with tech, funding, connections, etc. My understanding is there are maybe a handful at most that investors and analysts think have nearly enough of what is needed to make a good longer term run at it.

Could buy them from Volvo in Sweden instead. That's the truck and bus company that is still Swedish not the car company that was sold off to Ford in 1999 and is now owned by Geely.

Or Solaris (25% share of 2019 Euro electric bus market). https://www.solarisbus.com/en/vehicles/zero-emissions/urbino... >3500 buses deployed and operational in Europe to date with more orders coming in.

Same with LA Metro's BYD order. Their buses are some of the newest in the fleet but have the same quantity and severity of maintenance issues as the oldest operational buses in the fleet.

They should have ordered Solaris instead of BYD. My city was considering BYD but they were handling low temperature well.

I'm surprised as Shenzhen has 16,000+ electric buses (BYD?)

IIRC China heavily incentivized bus conversions to electric. Neighboring Hong Kong tested and rejected BYD buses because the range was very poor and got eaten up by the hills, and they weren’t getting money from China to do it. That’s part of the reason why Albuquerque had such a poor experience; the route has 1000 ft of elevation gain.

> got eaten up by the hills

Maybe the busses sucked, but this doesn’t make sense as a general point against electric: hills are where EVs shine most. Through regen you can get back most of the energy you spent getting up the hill.

You probably need a big capacitor though, or a very big battery with good cooling. So I can imagine cheap-o electric buses would have issues.

I would love to see the math on what kind of capacitor/battery you would need to capture 1000 ft of elevation loss by a city bus.

The issue is not torque or power, the issue is the range, particularly going uphill consistently. Regen is not 100% efficient, the route seems to be 1000 ft of gain or loss in one direction, and the Albuquerque buses were sold on the explicit promise that they could last pretty much a full day without charging, which turned out to be false.

If you can't run the bus back and forth a full day without charging, this requires more buses to run the same service as a diesel fleet, which makes it a very expensive CapEx item because sourcing decently located space to store and maintain buses is not cheap, nor is maintaining all those extra buses.

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