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CT scans of BYD car parts

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Re: CT scans of BYD car parts

#81
post #67
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So BYD for cars and Samsung for phones and consumer electronics more generally (from fab upwards). In fact, I believe Samsung is the only company on the planet that can design & build a state of the art smartphone from scratch - silicon/fabrication, SoC, battery, baseband, camera sensor, memory, and display. What other high tech vertically integrated producers exist in this group?

IBM

IBM no longer has fabs (spun off as Globalfoundries and later sold), and no longer manufactures PCs (sold to Lenovo?), but it does make mainframes I guess?

Re: CT scans of BYD car parts

#83
post #59

> The last company to vertically integrate a car from raw material to finished product at this scale was Ford. Today BYD’s system runs all the way from the lithium mine to the port. Both BYD and Tesla claim to produce around 75% of their components. Ford is at around 25%. Tesla is indeed smaller in scale (cars/year): BYD 4.6M Ford 4.4M Tesla 1.6M

So BYD for cars and Samsung for phones and consumer electronics more generally (from fab upwards). In fact, I believe Samsung is the only company on the planet that can design & build a state of the art smartphone from scratch - silicon/fabrication, SoC, battery, baseband, camera sensor, memory, and display. What other high tech vertically integrated producers exist in this group?

While I could have sworn RIM put out their own modems (which Qualcomm used to make life difficult for them, especially as the world transitioned from 3G to 4G), and did their own hardware and software, I can't currently find a source

Re: CT scans of BYD car parts

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Ford claimed up to 90% in the 1930s when they were producing up to 1.4M cars and trucks per year. (Down to less than 400K in the worst of the depression.)

I suppose it makes sense, back then you wouldn't think there would be an existing supply chain of companies like Mopar just waiting for a car manufacturer to spin up and start buying their stuff

The original Ford plant to raw ore, coal & limestone as inputs. There weren't any Mopar's, but Ford didn't have to build their own steel plants...

Re: CT scans of BYD car parts

#85
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be less repairable? Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable. Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades. And once they give out, you can just replace the whole unit for maybe $2000.

>Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable. Only if someone makes and sells those power electronics to you along with the appropriate DRM tools required for calibration and pairing with the other electronics of the car. Otherwise you're shit outta luck. >Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades. Simple != decades of reliability, when the design and man…

There is nothing terribly complicated there. It's just an AC motor ("brushless DC") with a classic 3-phase inverter and a resolver. There are plenty of companies that make controllers for this kind of setup. Granted, they are typically not powerful enough for SOTA drivetrains, but it's a question of time.

Power electronics will need to fit into the footprint of the e-axle. Or maybe you'll need to manufacture a new housing. Both are easily doable for small companies.

> VW and Kia/Hyundai EVs were found to use custom dimensions motor bearings that can't be bought on the open market from anywhere, so only the OEM and their dealers can get them via their supply chain.

Again, an independent manufacturer can easily make them.

Re: CT scans of BYD car parts

#86
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels. Which is why I'm so baffled how and why the EU has spent so much time and effort regulating batteries and charging ports for phones, but still ignores this massive issue of ease of repairability and right to repair of personal vehicles that has been plaguing car owners since the ICE days and is now only getting worse with EVs, that's costing us a lot mo…

Any electric gear with the battery as its main wear part. Ebikes. Sit-on mowers. Cars. This is about so much more than cost. Agency, autonomy, environment, efficiency, geopolitics even. I refuse to buy drm'ed gear. The exception is second hand where I can reliably avoid the drm with little effort. At its simplest, that means never using specific drm'ed functionality. At its most complicated, that means mitm'ing an en…

Even older chemistry EV batteries last over 200k miles.

Given that so far in my 20 years of driving I've only racked up around 80k miles, that 200k "wear part" will out last the rest of my time on earth.

Re: CT scans of BYD car parts

#87
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels. Which is why I'm so baffled how and why the EU has spent so much time and effort regulating batteries and charging ports for phones, but still ignores this massive issue of ease of repairability and right to repair of personal vehicles that has been plaguing car owners since the ICE days and is now only getting worse with EVs, that's costing us a lot mo…

Any electric gear with the battery as its main wear part. Ebikes. Sit-on mowers. Cars. This is about so much more than cost. Agency, autonomy, environment, efficiency, geopolitics even. I refuse to buy drm'ed gear. The exception is second hand where I can reliably avoid the drm with little effort. At its simplest, that means never using specific drm'ed functionality. At its most complicated, that means mitm'ing an en…

There are lots of parts on a car that will likely wear out faster than the battery on a modern liquid cooled large NMC or LFP lithium battery. You should be able to get over 200,000 miles on the battery. You probably won't get near that much from the suspension, etc.

Re: CT scans of BYD car parts

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it makes sense, back then you wouldn't think there would be an existing supply chain of companies like Mopar just waiting for a car manufacturer to spin up and start buying their stuff

The original Ford plant to raw ore, coal & limestone as inputs. There weren't any Mopar's, but Ford didn't have to build their own steel plants...

The original Model T plant (the Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit proper) was not vertically integrated, and in fact most of the "running gear" (all the complicated stuff, basically everything but the coachwork) was purchased as parts from the Dodge brothers (who owned a plant at what is now Detroit/Hammtramck Assembly -- formerly Dodge Main and then GM Poletown -- a GM plant making EVs like the Sierra and Hummer EVs) and merely assembled by Ford employees (albeit in an admittedly revolutionary assembly line process that changed capitalism forever).

The Highland Park plant was Ford's play to cut the Dodge Brothers out of the process by machining most of his own parts. The peak of vertical integration would be the River Rouge plant which, as you say, machined all its own parts from iron and steel made on-site from raw ore (but never made the Model T).

Re: CT scans of BYD car parts

#89
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a mechanical key hidden in the electronic key fob is nothing new, it’s common on many cars.

And yet my Hyundai key fob, despite being the largest fob I've ever seen doesn't do this :/

Anecdotally on my Hyundai ionic hybrid from 2018 it does have a mechanical key in the fob, but it is very non-obvious. It’s physically the same piece as the keyring section at the top of the fob. There is a small catch you release to remove the key from the plastic fob body and it slides out the top.

All this to say Hyundai certainly knows how to do this. If they didn’t do it, it is almost certainly a deliberate omission.

Re: CT scans of BYD car parts

#90
I've got a friend whos a master tech/trainer with our state automotive body, and is HV certified etc for dealing with these cars. He's currently got a BYD Shark strewn across his workshop for an autopsy.

I have to say I'm super impressed with how heavy duty everything is. The control arms, subframes, etc all look good and don't fit the 'chinese car bad' narrative you always hear. The powertrain components all look to be extremely high quality.

I've poked around a few EV's with him now, and I do feel like the Chinese market cars are evolving to a really good standard faster than their Korean counterparts did back in the 80s/90s.

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