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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Do the BYD ones comply with European crash/safety standards?

Looks like 5 star ratings across the board for BYD vehicles on-sale in Europe https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/latest-safety-ra...

Would not say these are ultra-cheap. There is probably a lot of "price that the market can sustain" going on here, rather than what it costs them to build the cars

> BYD vehicles on-sale in Europe

But those aren't the sub-$10k ones, right?

No idea. The cheapest they have for sale in the UK is the dolphin for about £26k ("On The Road", so all tax and delivery and registration etc included), but for that you get 250+ miles range and 7s 0-60mph, which not so long ago was Tesla-only territory, and is fairly competitive with what "traditional" brands (ford, VW, etc) are offering in terms of specs and price in the UK.

I don't know if they sell the exact same model (same range, same speed, same tech trim etc) for $10k but I would not be that surprised that they'd be making a huge huge outrageous profit just because they can in the UK, because that is what the competitors are charging so why not?

FWIW there are cheaper things on sale in the UK but they are much lower spec. E.g. £15K OTR gets you a 45bhp (yes, 45!) Dacia Spring that will get you from 0 to 60 in 19s (19!!!) and only go 100 miles between charges. Suddenly that BYD dolphin looks amazing. There is the Citroen AMI for £7.5k OTR, but that is legally not even classified as a car (it's a "quadricycle") has a range of 46 miles, a top speed of 28mph, and has not been crash tested by EuroNCAP ... It would likely be a total shit show if it were though. The BYD looks like a decent option by comparison, but I'd personally not pick one because they are such an unknown in this country and the price needs to be even lower for me to take a punt :)

Got me curious, I feel like it's cheaper to build a car that complies to global safety standards rather than make differing models for domestic (Chinese) and foreign markets.

At least they have 5 stars in the Euro NCAP assessment: https://cdn.euroncap.com/media/82666/euroncap-2023-byd-dolph...

And they're being sold in Mexico in N. America, for 358,800 pesos (1), which is $18,000!

(1) https://mexico.as.com/motor/byd-dolphin-mini-que-tiene-de-es...

Not to my knowledge, if you mean the models for the Chinese market. A 10k model in China is also vastly different from a 30k model in Europe. It’s quite an unfair comparison.

Regardless of that you can't buy any of the $10k models in Europe anyway.

Tata punch EV does global ncap 5 star rating at around $10k

Quick googling showed the Tata Punch EV to cost between $15k-$19k. Afaik, the BYD Seagull is also targeting under 20k EUR in Europe, double the price in China. Might be tariffs.

BYD actually got the lower end of the EU tariffs, possibly because they co-operated with the EU or they got less government subsidies.

Probably more to do with the fact that all cars, imported and produced within the EU, are taxed quite heavily.

In what way?

Some countries like Denmark etc. have very high sales/registration taxes (then again EVs were mostly exempt from them for quite a while, and maybe still are?). In most other countries you only need to pay VAT (~20%) but then there are various rebates/subsidies which might fully offset that (especially for cheap models like this)

Chinese market BYDs are much cheaper because, allegedly, they don’t comply with EuroNCAP (European safety standards).

European spec BYDs tend to have 5-star (max) crash ratings.

…and the corresponding price.

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