New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) in China

The battle of the tech companies in China over NEVs.
Tencent getting involved with offering its ecosystem

Alibaba getting into L4 autonomous driving

Wired is even covering this

But if interest is bubbling up elsewhere, it’s boiled over in China.

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,

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,

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, and others have agreements to develop software and services with carmakers. The Chinese smartphone maker

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announced plans last October to build four different electric vehicles, and according to

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, rival Oppo has similar ambitions. Earlier this month, JiDU, a company created by the automaker Geely and the search giant Baidu,

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. Baidu has invested heavily in the

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needed for

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with the encouragement of the Chinese government, another reason why it sees itself as a budding carmaker.

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IMO, Apple could've done great here if it had dropped its usual arrogance and worked with BYD instead of now relying on Foxconn to build its cars. Just absolutely stupid stuff.

Horizon robotics is now getting an investment from FAW after already getting partnered up with BYD for some of its chips.

Don't know much about it except that Journey 5 was launched in December and is capable of 16 video inputs and supports multiple sensors including millimeter-wave radar, LiDAR, and ultrasonic radar. Keep in mind that BYD's new luxury car models is said to support all of these type of sensors.

Which is interesting since BYD already committed to Nvidia's self driving toolkit. I have not seen BYD semiconductor come out with anything, so I assume it's not competitive here. Knowing how BYD likes to be in charge of everything, I would be surprised if they don't try to establish full control over self driving chips.

BYD continuing to promote its trucking business and offering the ETP3 van, ETM6 and ETH8 Truck and EYT tractor

Here is a look through BYD's Lancaster factory. It's grown to 5 times the original size over the past 8 or 9 years. It says they hire 500 unionized workers, but I've ready they employ 1000 people. They've gotten a lot of orders from Californian government for building things in California. FYI, Tesla's Fremont factory is 10 times this size. So if BYD wants to build cars in America, it would need a much larger piece of land.

gelgoog said:

Brazil has a highly unequal society. You have the extremely wealthy, and the masses of poor people.
The rich will be moving in their armored cars from their secure gated mansions into gated shopping malls for the extremely rich which you can't enter on foot, while traversing slums in between. It is that kind of place.

So I am not surprised a 100K car would do well in Brazil.

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It's not that bad. Neighbourhoods like Ipanema that are rich is completely open. But the slums next to it do bring in a lot of crime.

For those concerned about VW having 20% ownership of Gotion.
Being partly owned by VW means Gotion will be the primary battery provider of VW and be at the forefront of China/Europe cooperation. Gotion batteries will probably be produced in many gigafactories in Europe. Great way to keep Europe dependent on Chinese Lithium technology.

When China starts exporting abroad, JV with local firm + local production is most likely required. At least on the cell manufacturing portion. That will allow all the battery production to continue to rely on Chinese supply chain of graphite, lithium, nickel, cathode and anode.

This is a very good thread by Taylor Ogan on the future of ADAS tech in China. When I say future, I mean 2023, not 2027. The Chinese market is so far ahead of the West.
I asked him about the processor unit needed, he mentioned at minimum 800 TOPS and at most 2000 TOPS for robotaxi.

Neta 6 is equipped with 6 Lidar, 5 MMW radar, 13 hi-res camera and 12 ultrasonic radar with a 1000 TOPS processor. Not sure if the processor can handle that much hardware, imo.

SAIC Feifan R7, with industry-leading Luminar teach Iris Lidar, six long-range mmW radars and two 4D imaging radars, 12 8mp HD cameras, 12 ultrasonics, and four NVIDIA DRIVE Orin SoCs (same as NIO ET5 & ET7), handling 1,016 TOPS.

BYD's Nvidia also uses Orin SOCs, so I assume also will use 4 such chips for 1016 TOPS.

BYD's Horizon Robotics Journey 5 chips deliver 128 TOPS with 1024 TOPS through multiple processors.

If we want to cheer for Chinese firms then Horizon Robotics will be the one. It's a little behind Orin, since each chip generates 128 vs 254 TOPS.

Also Chinese Lidar firm, looks like RoboSense is a domestic player
the other one being Hesai, which is providing Lidar for Nvidia

China is going to be majority EVs before 2025. Incredible.


This year, China could overtake Japan to be number one car exporting country in the world. Oh hell yes.

China is probably more innovative than Tesla nowadays, at least in autonomous driving.

Can you spot the "ugly LiDARs"? No?

Tesla Model 3 vs Nio ET5

Autonomous parking:

Maybe I should start a new thread: why the "Uyghur law" won't work.

Gotion plans to build production base in Germany with annual capacity of 18 GWh​

Gotion's planned global production capacity will reach 300 GWh by 2025, with 100 GWh in overseas markets.

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GAC's new LPF battery can be charged to full capacity in half hour and have a life span of 1.5 million km (more than 900,000 miles).

GAC unveils new LFP battery technology, claims energy density increase of up to 20%​

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supercat said:

Tesla Model 3 vs Nio ET5

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1541788053575958528

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This is an important area to consider. I actually replied to the twitter thread. Model 3 processor unit can handle 144 TOPS. Taylor says you need 800 TOPS to achieve L4 ADAS. Which means everyone that paid for FSD with a Tesla (including me) got duped into paying 12k that is never going to work. It just simply doesn't have the hardware to do FSD.

As I posted in the semiconductor thread, here is one area where Chinese companies can help out domestic semiconductor firm to be a market leader. Horizon Robotics Journey 5 processor can do 128 TOPS vs 254 TOPS per Nvidia processor. It has investment from every large Chinese automaker. Just think about how much Horizon can improve over time by cooperating with BYD and then taking over the Chinese market. And eventually moving to producing other AI chips.

Same with MWW radar, Lidar, Ultrasonic radar and high resolution cameras. The fear of getting sanctioned will lift domestic suppliers.

supercat said:

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Yeah, I posted this one yesterday. Getting into bed with VW is a good thing. It ensures that VW will be a major buyer and supporter of Gotion batteries. You want Germany to rely on Chinese battery companies rather than get persuaded to join an anti-Chinese Western alliance. Western countries have nothing to offer right now. China wants to keep it that way.

BYD continuing to acquire more land in Shenzhen for more production. Insatiable appetite for BYD cars.

If you want to know how insatiable, check these out. This is tweeting things that got posted on Chinese social media.
already 215K pre-orders in June by the 21st. Estimated to reach 300k this month. Zhengzhou auto shows resulted in 10k new orders for BYD and not that many for other automakers.
Song+ DM-i is really popular and same with Seal. A lot of deliveries that need to be filled. At this point, the order logs will continue to grow simply because they won't reach 300k in monthly production until at least next year. This is insane.

This is a nice chart just showing BYD moving up market
Now, almost half of their cars are above 150k RMB. Only the Song+, Qin and Dolphin really capture the sub 150k market.
Over the next year, you will see a bigger play for the 300k+ market and eventually the 800k+ market with the new luxury series.

The big item still to be announced are Sea Lion (which challenges Model Y) and Sea Gull (which challenges Chery ice cream QQ/WL mini)

As I was looking into Japan and oil blockade in another thread, I started thinking about the strategic implication of China turning to EV on mass.

First of all, the question is how much oil do they produce domestically. As you can see here, they hover at around 4 million bpd for several years now
looks like the overall import is about 10 to 11 million bpd in 2021.

So, I looked up this article for the current oil usage break down in China. As recently as 2019, they were at 14 million bpd. Let's say they were using about 14.5 million at end of 2021 and that's where they are likely to peak in terms of ICE vehicles.

Based on the chart from that webpage, the breakdown by sector is as follows:
Transportation 59%
Petrochemical 12%
Power 1%
Buildings 8%
Other industry 4%
Others 16%

Among transportation, 6.5% of 59% is jet fuel. My guess I that shipping/freight along with jet fuel represent 19% out of the 59% (based on diesel being about 26% of fuel demand and assumption half of the diesel fuel being trucks and other vehicles rather than shipping). So out of the 40% that is probably being used for grand transportation, how much can be cut.

There are 2 things to test out here. The first is what happens when China reaches 80% NEVs as new cars by 2027? Let's assume the following scale up.
2022 30%
2023 40%
2024 50%
2025 60%
2026 70%
2027 80%
The current average car age in China is about 5 years. Which means, the cars delivered from 2023 to 2027 will likely represent half of the cars on the road by 2027. So for half of the cars on the road, they are about 60% NEV. For other half of the cars on the road, let's they are 15% NEV. In total, it would be bout a 65%/35% mix of ICE to NEV cars on the road. If we assume there are some aggressive cash for clunkers trade in, it's not hard to see 60/40 split of ICE/NEV cars by 2027 vs probably 90/10 split right now. If we assume that in natural environment, fuel demand from cars increase 5% a year for the coming years (assuming some fuel efficiency improvement among ICE cars year on year), then by 2027, fuel demand may otherwise be 30% larger than what it is now. 1.3 * 60 = 78. So, fuel demand from cars might go down 15% during this time. Considering that trucks/vans/fork lift/other transportation sectors are also seeing massive electrification, it's not unreasonable to assume a similar 15% drop in fuel demand across the transportation sectors. Overall, that would drop transportation sector fuel demand from 40% of 2021 total to 34% of 2021 total. Even if we optimistically assume no growth in fuel consumption from jet/shipping/freight fuel, the entire transportation sector would still be at 54% of 2021 usage. It seems to me that China will not get a major drop in oil usage as long as industrial sectors continue to use oil at the same of higher rate. Although, if NEV adoptions reaches close to 100% by the end of this decade and we also start seeing sustainable fuel/electricity/hydrogen starting to get adopted in aircraft/shipping/freight, we could see entire transportation sector dropping 30% from its high point in 2021. And by 2035, we could see that number down 2/3 vs 2021 numbers as almost all the vehicles on the road becomes either electric or hydrogen powered and good chunk of the shipping/airline use sustainable fuel/hydrogen.

The other question is what happens by the end of this decade if a war breaks out and China loses its access to Middle East oil and only have access to oil from Russia through pipelines and Far East oil tankers + possible oil from Myanmar pipelines. According to
They have the current pipeline running to Heilongjiang that currently supplies 600k bpd and then kazakhstan pipeline that supplies up to 400k bpd. There is also the far eat oil tanker from Russia that maxes out at 80 million tons a year, although only 40 million tons were shipped to all buyers last year (equivalent to about 600 bpd). Let's say they build higher capacity pipeline for both oil/gas over the next few years and upgrade that oil tanking facility, it's not inconceivable for Russia to continue to export up to 2 million bpd to China via pipeline, oil tankers and train. If China can get another half million bpd through Myanmar through pipeline/train/truck. They could conceivably get even more import from other countries that don't get cut off, then even in the worst case scenario of getting cut off from Malacca straits and Pacific Ocean, they can probably get 7 million bpd a day (if you include the 4 million bpd produced in China). If we look at China's oil usage in the transportation sector, they can easily just stop 90% of non-military ground transportation that use gas/diesel, because there will be so many PVs, buses, taxis, trucks and industrial vehicles using battery/hydrogen power, that society can still function without those 40% of vehicles on the road. If they significantly reduce commercial airline travel and shipping/freight (due to collapse in export), then transportation sector as a whole could be down 80% in gas consumption vs 2021 numbers which would be 59% * 14.5 million bpd * 0.2 = 1.7 million bpd in transportation. The remaining sectors could also see some reductions from less production of chemicals (like plastic) that are not needed in a wartime economy or just more savings. If, that's down 20%, then 41% * 14.5 bpd * 0.8 = 4.7 million. I think the Chinese economy/society would still function fine even if it only has access to domestic production + Russian/CIS/Myanmar imports. They would not even have to use strategic reserves. Countries like Japan and South Korea would suffer a lot more from getting cut off from oil producers in the Middle East/Africa, since they don't have domestic production and Russia can turn its back on them. More importantly, their societies are still too reliant on ICE vehicles for transportation to not get impacted by a 90% cut in oil import.

A lot of shipping is moving towards using natural gas a fuel. You could also run buses and trucks on it on long distance routes where electric still isn't effective. In Russia this is happening to some degree but China does not have the same amount of natural gas resource to go on something like this.

Japan and South Korea have highly developed public transportation. Subways and trains and most of it is electric. So they would be less affected by an oil shock than the US would. If there was an oil shock, the US would stop oil exports and try to decouple from global oil market since US citizens are highly car dependent and driving 2 or 3 hours to work isn't uncommon.

In Japan, it is quite common for people to only need to use the car on weekends.

gelgoog said:

You could also run buses and trucks on it on long distance routes where electric still isn't effective.

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I don't think it is worth it for China to invest on this. New battery technology is being rolled out next year. Scale this up for electric buses and you are done. No reason to change the whole infrastructure for buses that run on natural gas.

The return on investment is way too low, and most likely harmful as there are opportunity costs involved.

The new batteries rolled out show significant range improvements

Russia's high speed rail infrastructure is not nearly as developed so buses for long distance connections are more important.
In China's case I do not know the numbers for long distance bus trips or average distance but I doubt the amount of miles traveled is as significant. Probably trucking, farming, etc, are the major users of diesel.