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I checked out a half dozen “long term” reviews from Australia and Asia about these cars and find some curious quirks not well reported yet in the US. The first
by 6stringmerc 2y ago
I checked out a half dozen “long term” reviews from Australia and Asia about these cars and find some curious quirks not well reported yet in the US. The first is the range claims are utter horse shit. They don’t get nearly the distance or efficiency advertised. The battery charging is really slow even at max juice input. They often have mechanical bugs that reflect poor engineering development attention to detail: crap reverse camera (worse than a Ring), interior materials the same color but different and mismatched shades, wiper and signal indicator stalks on opposite sides from the expected (as in different than every other car on the market), ridiculously cheap stock tires, and one developed a “concerning” steering return-to-center friction needing service attention.
Most of these reviews were in the 15,000 to 20,000 km range. That’s right - km, not miles! Personally I’m anti-hype on BYD because while I am also anti-Tesla, I find mass market engineering from China to consistently underwhelm. For comparison, I loved my Volkswagen Golf GTI 1.8T 5 speed from 2003. How many millions of those well engineered, reasonably priced VW Golfs of that generation were manufactured and sold worldwide? I’m really interested in the new MB CLA. Prius 2.0 looks sexy as hell.
To be frank, until I see somebody like Jeremy Clarkson review a BYD, or Tavarish, or Lewis Black, I’m reluctant to feel like I’m missing out here in the US. There’s already enough image-over-substance crap in this country. Can one of these actually make it 30,000 miles in everyday use in the DFW Metroplex without shaking themselves to pieces or becoming insufferably tedious?!
- starship731 2y agoBest selling EV manufacturer in Brazil, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Entire Southeast Asia, and we're supposed to believe the zero-source provided claims of some random HN poster. European car manufacturers should really invest more in their "Trash Chinese Competitors' Online Reputation" department.
- jocaal 2y agoBYD is not a very experienced company. According to [0], they produced 455,073 vehicles in 2019 and 4,304,073 in 2024. This growth rate is quite unheard of in the automotive industry and I would expect serious quality compromises to achieve that. [0] https://tridenstechnology.com/byd-sales-statistics/ https://tridenstechnology.com/byd-sales-statistics/
- esperent 2y ago> not a very experienced company BYD's auto division was founded in the same year (2003) as Tesla and produced it's first car 3 years before Tesla did (2005 vs 2008). They've been making batteries since 1995. I'd say that gives them as much claim to experience specifically related to electric cars as any nearly any other car company in the world.
- jocaal 2y agoThe thing is, battery manufacturing and general automotive manufacturing skills are orthogonal to each other. There is very little skill overlap. I guess they have been doing it longer than tesla, tesla even outsourced the general automotive parts to lotus initially, but tesla isn't known for quality either
- esperent 2y agoWhich company do you think has the most experience at high volume electric cars? And does this translate to a higher quality/price ratio than Tesla or BYD?
- brianmcc 2y agoFWIW I do think you're right that we should treat a new entrant to the (mainstream) market with at the very least some "optimistic skepticism". Personally I'd like to see some stronger competition in the market and wish them well, but I'd also like to see how the dust settles and some build-up of evidence for reliability etc when properly assessed against other makers.
- more_corn 2y agoI rode in a handful of BYD vehicles recently. They’re fantastic. It is early days yet so we won’t know how their quality and reliability stack up over time, but electric cars require 1/3rd the maintenance so it might turn out not to even matter as much as it does on an ICE car.