How foolish it must feel to buy a new car without this tech in a world that has this tech, only to fund the people spending our tax money to keep it from us and continue pushing fossil fuels.
I may be in the market for a new car soon, which I hope to keep for at least a decade, so this kind of thing bothers me.
I don't want to buy something that's already years behind on efficiency.
Is this how the US falls behind? Missing technological improvements due to blind disagreements with Chinese/etc, combined with inability to update infrastructure? (Unclear how/why but datacenters being stood up so quickly seems like an exception to US’s bad construction)
Data centers are (a) private not public and (b) throwing money at the problem on the assumption of being able to capture a significant chunk of all white collar incomes.
And they're running into the public issues already, such as lack of large power transformer availability and noise complaints from trying to generate their own power.
Many things are private but some of them are more equal than others, the details can be quite intriguing.
Plenty of gas pumps to go around, more of them aren't going to provide anybody private with more of what they crave the most which data centers do provide. That's the reason for the push to abandon EVs and reduce their competing demand for scarce electricity.
New electric capacity, paid for by the ratepayers, would benefit those same ratepayers if used for EV charging but big biz isn't in the game for them.
China is what happens when you put scientists and engineers in charge [1][2].
20 years ago China had a single high speed rail link in Shanghai going to the airport. Now they have more than 30,000 miles of high speed rail where they've bootstrapped all the civil engineering, they make their own trains, etc. The system handles over 4 billion trips annually and they built the entire thing for an estimated $900 billion [3], which is now less than the US spends on the military in a single year.
Every $1 you spend on the military is $1 you don't spend on housing, healthcare, education, roads, trains and other infrastructure. Eisenhower warned about this 60+ years ago [4].
Xi is the first President/leader China has had who literally never worked another job outside of politics and doesn’t speak a foreign language. They gave him a degree in chemical engineering when the universities re-opened after the cultural revolution but he never even had to pretend to use it. Hu, Jiang, and Deng actually worked as engineers and spoke languages besides Chinese (Russian and/or English).
Despite all that, Xi has done really well for China. I was totally predicting the opposite given that Xi was clearly a departure from the technocratic leaders that previously ran China (I thought Xi was a Mao throwback).
Xi is a fascinating figure. I had real concerns when he pushed through repealing term limits. I thought this could be another Putin but that hasn't been the case.
First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Second, real estate speculation was rampant in China for years but Xi quietly popped the bubble more than a decade agao. The property market is still in a dire state but he took the long-term view that housing should be for, well, housing, not investment. He did this by basically increasing the margin requirements that ultimately caused the Evergrade default. I think history will show this was the correct decision.
Third, Xi grew up as "Mao royalty". His father was one of Mao's lieutennants and he was a privileged child of that circle. But when he was a teenager, his father was purged in the Cultural Revolution and was ultimately expelled from the CCP. Xi repeatedly tried to join the party and ultimately succeeded then spending years quietly working in bacwaters.
Lastly, Xi has quietly purused a policy of not relying on the West. Investments in renewable energy has been truly massive. Watch in the coming years as China catches up to ASML and TSMC with EUV, a technology that US has embargoed from export to China.
On a semi related note, military leaders in the US have been warning about the dangers of the American deficit and have a long history of trying to cut waste by getting rid of weapons programs and military bases they don’t need but are constantly blocked by the civilian leadership in Congress because of the job loss.
I mean if you really think about it china already has or is on the verge of:
- energy independence
- ASML level microchip production
- the SOTA of AI
- citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy
- strong local manufacturing
- eastern world support
- yuan recognized as a stable world currency
But they do suffer from issues as well:
- Aging population
- Autocracy (or well, one party system)
- Brain drain (better funding and security in the US and Europe, US has managed to alienate a lot of very promising figures so it's closer to just Europe, but capital markets in Europe are still hit and miss)
It's completely understandable why US is freaking out, china's future still looks a lot more promising than the one US find themselves in.
> citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy
It's certainly not to China's extent, but is America really that opposed to surveillance and lack of privacy?
Yes, we tend to raise a huge stink when evidence of such comes to the surface.
But actions speak louder than words, and through our actions we already largely accept surveillance and a lack of privacy.
Everyday consumer apps are some of the worst offenders. Our social media apps listen to us, Amazon Ring doorbells are allegedly accessed by ICE (though Amazon denies it), Flock cameras abound (not to mention the fact they're poorly secured so who knows who else is watching other than the municipalities Flock contracts with), companies own much of our data and sell them to myriad unknown sources on a whim. There are too many examples to list.
No, it's not as severe as China. But we're certainly not trending in the right direction.
The american government pretends to care, but the moment you look deeper (snowden leaks), it's clear that they don't. But the fact still stands, the population is mostly against surveilance while chinese just keep their head down.
They have to keep their head down for fear it will get cut off (figuratively speaking, mostly). I doubt the majority of Chinese civilians are happy to be in a repressed state such as the one they're in.
And unfortunately it's pretty clear the current administration is working hard to enact a similar chilling effect on free speech. It's hard to see how we avoid becoming a similarly surveilled and repressed state if there were a third term.
> They have to keep their head down for fear it will get cut off (figuratively speaking, mostly). I doubt the majority of Chinese civilians are happy to be in a repressed state such as the one they're in.
Around 100 million Chinese people travel abroad every year, and they all return to their country of their own free will. Go to China and see it for yourself. Talk with people, you would be surprised. Go to Shanghai and visit the provinces. This is not North Korea, you can talk with people normally. The majority of them will tell you that they are happy with how much their lives have improved over the last five decades. Every five years during those decades, life got better and better for most of them. And if you read about their history, you will see that this is their natural state. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (more than 2,000 years since the Qin Dynasty) in which stability and order are prioritized over political pluralism.
What is that “choice”? Surely you aren’t like those yokels in the south that think a “militia” running in the woods can take on the the US military or even a decent SWAT force
You're presuming that if they had a choice, they wouldn't accept it.
The reality is that chinese goverment is - overall - delivering results.
People will accept things that bring good outcomes.
There's also upsides from the surveilence and the way things are done in China which makes it way more resilient from outside influence and disruptive bad actors.
Now I don't want the same things in my country, but it suits China to some extent.
How much more surveillance and lack of privacy is there than the US? The US also has
- surveilled cities and less dense places through doorbell cams
- surveilled digital communications
- social credit scores (try getting a bank account if you've opted out of things like lexisnexis etc)
Data Centre builds are being managed by the tech bro companies aren't they? Don't they follow a much different set of rules than 'public' construction? (for better and worse).
Unfortunately, a corrupt autocracy with a strategy seems more likely to win the capitalist arms race than a wealthy but feckless democracy. It’s only slightly ironic that said autocracy calls itself communist.
Functioning democracies are inherently authoritarian. The simplistic, textbook definition of dictatorship, which in the West is generally used to define the foreign other, has no basis in reality.
This vision holds because it presupposes that the only thing people care about is political freedom, when in reality there can only ever be one political class and political freedom is largely about some other political class trying to take control because the current system doesn't favour them in some way.
Western democracies, at their worst, have a largely permanent political class who is elected every year under the pretext of democratic legitimacy. Eastern dictatorshpis, at their best, have a government that is continuously rotated to ensure competent implementation gaining legitimacy from delivery.
Both are contextual and the position along the autocracy axis largely depends on implementation. Whether people can actually vote is irrelevant (Europe is generally one of the worst examples of this, elections constantly, most election produce governments that polls under 20% within months...it is very strange that people call this democracy).
The Chinese are selling their EVs all over the world.
There are credible American auto enthusiasts that have got these cars and have been using them in the. US.
The superiority of Chinese EVs isn’t propaganda.
The gas pumps maybe are just a ruse but we know they are operating in China since unlike the US auto industry the Chinese one is incredibly competitive so if BYD was lying about their gas pumps the nearly 100 other competitors would have called them out
Put political freedom aside. Does China not have massive high speed train networks, the best EVs on the planet, the most renewable energy growth on the planet and a competitive domestic AI industry, and hugely more engineering graduates per year than the US?
Their trajectory is incredible, and I don't see what burying ones head in the sand does to help the US or Europe or the democratic societies of the world get/stay ahead.
Europe is third since the 2000s. The pushed the Euro to try to limit it (and from the mouth of someone who was present when they pushed, it was also caused by the black Wednesday of 92, the attacks on currencies increased, and the cost to rebuff them too).
And yes, basically, no one should include europe in the comparison until US oil fields are depleted, and even then at best it would be a race for the second place. You can't compete without gas and oil or a huge manufacturing lead, and europe don't have any, and only have specific subset of manufacturing (basically sensors, electronics, avionics, optics, and handmade clothing) that isn't workforce-intensive, nor resource-intensive.
you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind
though in 3.5 months they are gonna ban EU consumers from buying cheap things directly from AliExpress and groom July 1st you will have to pay 3EUR for each ordered item, including that 1EUR screen protector, because it's much better when you can feed some useless middleman than saving money, thanks EU!
> you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind
With that logic, every programmer on this site should spend as much time as possible on Facebook. This will make their salary equal to that of a Meta employee!
Consuming something is not the same as being able to produce it.
For the majority of Americans, “the US falling behind” is not something they care about. The principal thing they care about is not whether the whole is ruined but whether they have an appropriate portion.
An American would prefer that a field make 1 unit of rice if everyone got 1/n units. This is different from cultures where the preference is that you maximize your wellbeing (older America) so that if someone could figure out how to make the field make 10 units of rice, it’s okay if he makes 8 units and everyone else gets 2/n units.
The modern American cultural optimum aims to minimize |x_i - x_j| while growth cultures attempt to maximize x_i. An ironic reversal of roles.
America is also, fundamentally, a divided country where people disagree over basic things (such as the distribution of rice) and there is a massive industry dedicated to amplifying that division.
On almost every topic, the discussion will turn to what that other evil part of society is doing to disrupt the good guys. If people are arguing about how to house people or stop crime (both basic issues), you will never move from these topics.
Most visible example is public infrastructure, middle-income countries in SE Asia have better infrastructure than the US (and most of Europe)...this makes no sense within the prevailing political/economic/social context in the West, it should just be totally impossible.
Maybe. Agree that zero-sum thinking sucks. You gotta grow the pie. But. You also have to share the big pie.
In your example, the current crisis can be represented as:
A field exists and produces 1 unit.
A financial entity buys the field and applies unsustainable methods to increase production 100 units, keep 99.5 of them, distributes 0.5/n. People are pissed that they’re getting half of what they used to despite incredible productivity. The people elect a leader to fix the situation. The leader confronts the financial entity, and returns to the people with 4 units in their pocket and excuses.
No other country in the world has anything like the Republicans in the US, who are the only major political party in the world to oppose the existence of man made climate change.
There may be political parties in the rest of the world that say that the cost of tackling climate change is too high, but they don’t dispute the factual reality of it.
The Republicans were in this position between about 2008 and 2014 when their leaders were McCain and Romney, but Romney’s lack of insanity inspired a massive backlash within the crazy part of American society that then made Donald Trump their primary winner in 2016 as a repudiation to the not completely insane Republican leadership.
I know HN loves to pretend that the Republicans and the Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, but this can be shown to be objectively false by comparing to political parties abroad. Democrats are a normal European center left to center right party with all the flaws that brings with them.
>Just taking an existing fast charger with 150- or 350-kW capacity and swapping in the latest and greatest 1,500-kW chargers wouldn’t get anyone faster speeds. The system would need all new “pipes”—grid capacity—to actually move that much current.
The grid doesn't necessarily mean "pipes" or power lines. You don't build a pipeline to every gas station. Mobile charging robots work pretty well in China.
Also I guess they could put a large battery at the charging station so it can take say a steady 200kw from the grid and be able to kick out 1500kw for ten minutes occasionally. That could also charge from cheap off peak electricity.
now absolutely no reason for American "manufacturers" to innovate on features or price
because they know there will never be competition
meanwhile the highly educated and extremely savvy prime minister of Canada is now allowing those imports
I wonder if any from Canada can make it down here, they should have same safety standards, is there a huge fee for individuals to import vs corporations?
It’s highly impractical to import cars less than 25 years old into the US for anything beyond “show & display” licensing, and that’s only for select models.
Modifying them to meet US safety standards and then getting them approved is arduous and expensive, especially if there’s no comparable US model to emulate / borrow parts.
What are the requirements of vehicles that drive across the border, like if a Canadian family is holidaying in Buffalo?
If they're driving a BYD, do they get stopped at the border?
What if they sold their BYD to a US family? Can it be registered and insured? I'd guess not, therefore it wouldn't get bought by a US resident in the first place.
Border-crosser here: Many Canadian-model-only vehicles are driven in the US by tourists and the like - you can bring it in for up to the year temporarily.
> Nonresidents may import a vehicle duty-free for personal use up to (1) one year if the vehicle is imported in conjunction with the owner's arrival. Vehicles imported under this provision that do not conform to U.S. safety and emission standards must be exported within one year and may not be sold in the U.S. There is no exemption or extension of the export requirements.
To actually legally permanently import the vehicle, you have to go through the rest of the onerous CBP requirements, validate safety standards, etc, etc - and that's when it becomes a true screwball and it'll never happen. But yes, I guarantee you'll see some BYDs running up and down the Northeast, and very likely spot them around Florida as snowbirds drag them down with them still. I think I'm even more likely in my position to see a BYD with red Ontario diplomat plates, now that I think about it...
It happens all the time that a government regulates foreign industries while giving domestic ones relatively free reign. Canada has no car manufacturers. Europe has no Facebooks or Apples. The US doesn't make diesel cars.
Canada might not own car manufacturers but they do have factories that build cars for GM, Ford, etc, and these are important to their economy. I thought some were sold in the US even?
Chinese companies aren’t exactly building factories in Canada to sell to NAFTA, but I guess Carney figures it’s worthwhile overall?
Many are made in Canada [1]. I remember traveling to Quebec in the early 2000s and being surprised to see more people driving Fords than back home in the US.
I suspect part of BYD’s strategy is to get a foothold in the North American free trade zone. Maybe they won’t be able to export to the US at first. But if I recall correctly, an import US legal principle is that laws/tariffs cannot discriminate against a single company (excluding for national security). So BYD will simply iterate toward a design that satisfies US regulators. I am not familiar with Canadian safety regulations but I would be surprised if they were dramatically different. Unless American car manufacturers can find it in their hearts to sell an affordable car, this is an existential threat.
now now, Canada is only allowing 50K of these cars to be imported per year. This is a middle power extending a hand to a superpower in the new multipolar world, nothing more. Also BYD subsidies (and sales) in China have been dropped in the past year.
Is the tech better? Yes. Is protecting domestic auto capability from subsidies in the National Interest? Debatable. This convo always circles around to how we characterize subsidies (EV credits for Elon, direct state sponsorship by China) in a way that's always concealed just enough from the general public to stop people from asking hard questions.
At the same time, he was encouraging domestics manufacturers to start building their own EVs out, which opened up the possibility of unbanning, with reasonable import duties, once the American companies were competitive.
However, right now we are pushing American companies to go in the opposite direction and dismantle their EV efforts.
I think you'd have to be a bit ignorant of very recent history to think that America is some cesspool of lack of innovation in the electric car industry. They invented it, despite there being no competition at the time.
America certainly did not invent electric cars. Depending on which electric car you consider the first real one, the inventor was either French, British or German [1].
I have a feeling that half the reason they're doing this is that they don't have a good idea how to increase energy efficiency.
Case in point:
2026 BMW i3 - 900km WLTP from a 108kWh battery.
2026 Denza Z9 GT - 800km WLTP from a 122kWh pack.
The former charges at a maximum of 400kW, while the latter at over twice that which saves... about 10 minutes at the charger after 450km of driving(12 vs 22 minutes approx).
Many such examples with Chinese manufacturers putting 700kg battery packs into the vehicles just to be able to say it's this and that kWh.
I don't know about anyone here but after 400km or so I'm done and want to at least stretch my legs.
Based on the figures here, they’re claiming around 400 miles of range added in 300 seconds (60% of the full 677 mile range); contrast this with around 100 seconds for a typical gas pump (8 gal/min) and typical efficiency (30 mpg). It suggests that you’d need around 5MW chargers to truly get to the speed of a gas pump.
On the other hand, 5 minutes is already a huge improvement over 15-30 minutes, and it’s fast enough to remove much of the friction of recharging an EV.
Really wish this kind of tech would come to North America…
Neither article really explains how they are able to charge this fast, aside from “vertical integration” and slightly increased energy density in the battery design. No real details on the charging technology itself.
With 5 minute charging, suddenly conventional gas stations can be used for EVs just as they are for ICE. Nice thing about 'plugging in' as opposed to 'filling up' is that a charging car can be left completely unattended (while you go to pay, get a coffee, or whatever).
Seems that the technological barriers have been overcome, now we just need to build out the infrastructure - which could be as simple as retooling existing gas stations. No need to electrify every parking space or such like.
Yes, retooling gas stations is the way to go. Already happening in Norway where stations now show the price of kWh in addition to gas and diesel prominently on signs by the road. Charging is just a different kind of pump.
Although the thought of getting an electric car has passed through my mind on a few occasions, I'm not 100% familiar with the intricate technical details. (for some reason, the tax incentives where I live are still in favor of continuing with the small petrol car I have. Taxes are primarily a function of weight in the Netherlands, and anything besides a lightweight Dacia Spring would imply significantly higher monthly expenditure for me).
What I'm wondering w.r.t. this article is: wouldn't such fast charging shorten the battery lifespan?
I have experience with ebike batteries. Bosch in particular, with very decent 29E samsung cells, that after 70k km or so, basically halved their capacity. I imagine this effect is severily reduced with a car battery because there are a lot more than 10p, so all the wear is distributed more evenly, and 29E are very old technology.
Rule of thumb for modern EVs is to not care about the battery at all. They are expected to last longer than the car. I would doubt even faster charging significantly changes this, or if it does it’s worth the trade off to those who need it.
I believe you meant to write “10S” instead of 10p. I’m not 100% sure, but you were talking about e-bike batteries, which are often 36V, made out of 10 cells (or banks of cells) in series. The nominal voltage of most lithium chemistries is 3.6-3.7V.
EV batteries have many more cells in series, for example my car is 104S, and 800V cars have (obviously) more than 200 cells in series.
And the longevity of car batteries isn’t about wear being distributed “evenly” (a healthy battery can’t really wear “unevenly”, you always load all cells at once). EVs take care of their batteries, they cool them, heat them, balance them periodically, and they don’t actually pull that much power from them. They also keep the cells within pretty conservative voltage limits.
Indeed, I meant 10S. And what I meant by load being distributed along more cells, is that since you have many more cells, current drawn from each is lower. Which greatly prolongs the lifetime.
And hence the question I had with charging too fast. Since discharging faster clearly wears them more quickly, surely charging faster has a similar effect, since it's mostly the reversed process? A question probably easily answered with a query to a LLM.
“Number of cells” doesn’t really tell you anything about current and how it will affect the battery. The number of cells in series gives you the nominal voltage of the entire battery, and the P number (number of cells in parallel) rarely tells you anything useful — three 2000 mAh cells in parallel are equivalent to one 6000 mah cell, and both approaches are valid and used.
What you care about is actually the mass of the cells, basically the total weight of the active material. More material means higher capacity and can withstand more current.
For example, my car is 104S and that’s it, no parallel connections, but the individual cells are huge (~170 Ah each).
Cool! My only concern is that Wired has a very long and consistent history of advertising technologies that don't work quite as they say. So let's hope this is real.
Absolute garbage. Just stop and think for one second what kind of power delivery is required to do this and you will quickly realize that’s it’s not feasible anywhere other than as a demo.
I'll bite. They dumped a lot of power in a small amount of time. Sounds like the perfect job for a mega capacitor to streamline deployments. Other than the successful technology, Mrs. Lincoln, what are your gripes?
Cool now at your busy "gas" station keep it working as the pile gets exhausted and you don't have the supporting grid to be able to deliver the needed power to keep it stocked with "gas".
At least not in Europe.
From what I read it's 1500 kW at 1000V or Peak use of 1.5 MW at 1000 A. That's a crazy amount of power.
You will exhaust your piles quickly, or they are enormous. So it's like "quick-charge" until we run out?
With the range as good as a modern EV the charge time already isn't a particularly that bad. I'd much prefer more chargers (so that you can combine charging with something else you were going to do anyway) than faster ones.
I tend to agree but I think the strategy here is to convert people who stubbornly cling to gas vehicles because EVs somehow defy their expectations. I have been approached many times at highway rest stops by people who are curious and slightly skeptical about the EV value proposition. They see me hanging around the vehicle for a half hour and think “ugh, no thanks” as if that’s all I do when I travel. What they’re not seeing is that I rarely use public chargers at all, because 99% of my charging is done either at home or at the charger in the parking lot at work. It’s really just road trips. Not to mention, if you’re an ICE owner hanging around long enough at a rest stops to notice that I’m hanging around, are you really that much faster on a road trip?!!
Back on topic, I am ok with losing a little efficiency in the fast charging process if it means that more people switch away from a horribly inefficient and polluting technology.
> Thousands of FLASH Charging stations have already been installed in China, and BYD has committed to a global rollout that will include an initial wave of FLASH Chargers in Europe. Further details on the plans, and how they will support the Z9GT's arrival, will be revealed in due course.
How foolish it must feel to buy a new car without this tech in a world that has this tech, only to fund the people spending our tax money to keep it from us and continue pushing fossil fuels.
I may be in the market for a new car soon, which I hope to keep for at least a decade, so this kind of thing bothers me. I don't want to buy something that's already years behind on efficiency.
Is this how the US falls behind? Missing technological improvements due to blind disagreements with Chinese/etc, combined with inability to update infrastructure? (Unclear how/why but datacenters being stood up so quickly seems like an exception to US’s bad construction)
In a word, yes. In a few words, yes that's the entire situation summary. No long term strategy exists for the entire country.
There might be no industrial long term planning, but I think it’s because the US operates in a different mode — financial (late) Capitalism.
Data centers are (a) private not public and (b) throwing money at the problem on the assumption of being able to capture a significant chunk of all white collar incomes.
And they're running into the public issues already, such as lack of large power transformer availability and noise complaints from trying to generate their own power.
But gas pumps / electric charging stations are also private.
Many things are private but some of them are more equal than others, the details can be quite intriguing.
Plenty of gas pumps to go around, more of them aren't going to provide anybody private with more of what they crave the most which data centers do provide. That's the reason for the push to abandon EVs and reduce their competing demand for scarce electricity.
New electric capacity, paid for by the ratepayers, would benefit those same ratepayers if used for EV charging but big biz isn't in the game for them.
China is what happens when you put scientists and engineers in charge [1][2].
20 years ago China had a single high speed rail link in Shanghai going to the airport. Now they have more than 30,000 miles of high speed rail where they've bootstrapped all the civil engineering, they make their own trains, etc. The system handles over 4 billion trips annually and they built the entire thing for an estimated $900 billion [3], which is now less than the US spends on the military in a single year.
Every $1 you spend on the military is $1 you don't spend on housing, healthcare, education, roads, trains and other infrastructure. Eisenhower warned about this 60+ years ago [4].
[1]: https://en.clickpetroleoegas.com.br/All-of-China%27s-preside...
[2]: https://www.economist.com/china/2023/03/09/many-of-chinas-to...
[3]: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2152581/huge-668bn-high...
[4]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
Xi is the first President/leader China has had who literally never worked another job outside of politics and doesn’t speak a foreign language. They gave him a degree in chemical engineering when the universities re-opened after the cultural revolution but he never even had to pretend to use it. Hu, Jiang, and Deng actually worked as engineers and spoke languages besides Chinese (Russian and/or English).
Despite all that, Xi has done really well for China. I was totally predicting the opposite given that Xi was clearly a departure from the technocratic leaders that previously ran China (I thought Xi was a Mao throwback).
Xi is a fascinating figure. I had real concerns when he pushed through repealing term limits. I thought this could be another Putin but that hasn't been the case.
First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Second, real estate speculation was rampant in China for years but Xi quietly popped the bubble more than a decade agao. The property market is still in a dire state but he took the long-term view that housing should be for, well, housing, not investment. He did this by basically increasing the margin requirements that ultimately caused the Evergrade default. I think history will show this was the correct decision.
Third, Xi grew up as "Mao royalty". His father was one of Mao's lieutennants and he was a privileged child of that circle. But when he was a teenager, his father was purged in the Cultural Revolution and was ultimately expelled from the CCP. Xi repeatedly tried to join the party and ultimately succeeded then spending years quietly working in bacwaters.
Lastly, Xi has quietly purused a policy of not relying on the West. Investments in renewable energy has been truly massive. Watch in the coming years as China catches up to ASML and TSMC with EUV, a technology that US has embargoed from export to China.
On a semi related note, military leaders in the US have been warning about the dangers of the American deficit and have a long history of trying to cut waste by getting rid of weapons programs and military bases they don’t need but are constantly blocked by the civilian leadership in Congress because of the job loss.
I mean if you really think about it china already has or is on the verge of:
- energy independence
- ASML level microchip production
- the SOTA of AI
- citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy
- strong local manufacturing
- eastern world support
- yuan recognized as a stable world currency
But they do suffer from issues as well:
- Aging population
- Autocracy (or well, one party system)
- Brain drain (better funding and security in the US and Europe, US has managed to alienate a lot of very promising figures so it's closer to just Europe, but capital markets in Europe are still hit and miss)
It's completely understandable why US is freaking out, china's future still looks a lot more promising than the one US find themselves in.
> citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy
It's certainly not to China's extent, but is America really that opposed to surveillance and lack of privacy?
Yes, we tend to raise a huge stink when evidence of such comes to the surface.
But actions speak louder than words, and through our actions we already largely accept surveillance and a lack of privacy.
Everyday consumer apps are some of the worst offenders. Our social media apps listen to us, Amazon Ring doorbells are allegedly accessed by ICE (though Amazon denies it), Flock cameras abound (not to mention the fact they're poorly secured so who knows who else is watching other than the municipalities Flock contracts with), companies own much of our data and sell them to myriad unknown sources on a whim. There are too many examples to list.
No, it's not as severe as China. But we're certainly not trending in the right direction.
The american government pretends to care, but the moment you look deeper (snowden leaks), it's clear that they don't. But the fact still stands, the population is mostly against surveilance while chinese just keep their head down.
They have to keep their head down for fear it will get cut off (figuratively speaking, mostly). I doubt the majority of Chinese civilians are happy to be in a repressed state such as the one they're in.
And unfortunately it's pretty clear the current administration is working hard to enact a similar chilling effect on free speech. It's hard to see how we avoid becoming a similarly surveilled and repressed state if there were a third term.
> They have to keep their head down for fear it will get cut off (figuratively speaking, mostly). I doubt the majority of Chinese civilians are happy to be in a repressed state such as the one they're in.
Around 100 million Chinese people travel abroad every year, and they all return to their country of their own free will. Go to China and see it for yourself. Talk with people, you would be surprised. Go to Shanghai and visit the provinces. This is not North Korea, you can talk with people normally. The majority of them will tell you that they are happy with how much their lives have improved over the last five decades. Every five years during those decades, life got better and better for most of them. And if you read about their history, you will see that this is their natural state. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (more than 2,000 years since the Qin Dynasty) in which stability and order are prioritized over political pluralism.
I mean I didn't say it was a good thing. It's a benefit (to the government) that it is already widespread and accepted as part of life.
> citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy
citizens had no choice.
Neither do US and European citizens. We seem to be accepting the same amount of surveillance and lack of privacy still.
Citizens always have a choice. The cost can be terrible, but there’s always a choice
What is that “choice”? Surely you aren’t like those yokels in the south that think a “militia” running in the woods can take on the the US military or even a decent SWAT force
You're presuming that if they had a choice, they wouldn't accept it.
The reality is that chinese goverment is - overall - delivering results. People will accept things that bring good outcomes.
There's also upsides from the surveilence and the way things are done in China which makes it way more resilient from outside influence and disruptive bad actors.
Now I don't want the same things in my country, but it suits China to some extent.
China still has capital controls, so the RMB cannot be a world currency when you can't freely move it in and out of China.
doesn't change the fact that their next 'plan' will likely include expanding yuan influnce across the world.
How much more surveillance and lack of privacy is there than the US? The US also has
- surveilled cities and less dense places through doorbell cams - surveilled digital communications - social credit scores (try getting a bank account if you've opted out of things like lexisnexis etc)
Data Centre builds are being managed by the tech bro companies aren't they? Don't they follow a much different set of rules than 'public' construction? (for better and worse).
It’s a purposeful hamstringing of EV so the GOP’s oil and gas supporters can make 3-5 more years of money.
China's low level of corruption wins again
Unfortunately, a corrupt autocracy with a strategy seems more likely to win the capitalist arms race than a wealthy but feckless democracy. It’s only slightly ironic that said autocracy calls itself communist.
Functioning democracies are inherently authoritarian. The simplistic, textbook definition of dictatorship, which in the West is generally used to define the foreign other, has no basis in reality.
This vision holds because it presupposes that the only thing people care about is political freedom, when in reality there can only ever be one political class and political freedom is largely about some other political class trying to take control because the current system doesn't favour them in some way.
Western democracies, at their worst, have a largely permanent political class who is elected every year under the pretext of democratic legitimacy. Eastern dictatorshpis, at their best, have a government that is continuously rotated to ensure competent implementation gaining legitimacy from delivery.
Both are contextual and the position along the autocracy axis largely depends on implementation. Whether people can actually vote is irrelevant (Europe is generally one of the worst examples of this, elections constantly, most election produce governments that polls under 20% within months...it is very strange that people call this democracy).
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The Chinese are selling their EVs all over the world.
There are credible American auto enthusiasts that have got these cars and have been using them in the. US.
The superiority of Chinese EVs isn’t propaganda.
The gas pumps maybe are just a ruse but we know they are operating in China since unlike the US auto industry the Chinese one is incredibly competitive so if BYD was lying about their gas pumps the nearly 100 other competitors would have called them out
Put political freedom aside. Does China not have massive high speed train networks, the best EVs on the planet, the most renewable energy growth on the planet and a competitive domestic AI industry, and hugely more engineering graduates per year than the US?
Their trajectory is incredible, and I don't see what burying ones head in the sand does to help the US or Europe or the democratic societies of the world get/stay ahead.
It's how Europe falls behind, you mean.
Why do they always get left out of the comparisons? Because they're so far behind anything it would be an insult to include them?
Europe is third since the 2000s. The pushed the Euro to try to limit it (and from the mouth of someone who was present when they pushed, it was also caused by the black Wednesday of 92, the attacks on currencies increased, and the cost to rebuff them too).
And yes, basically, no one should include europe in the comparison until US oil fields are depleted, and even then at best it would be a race for the second place. You can't compete without gas and oil or a huge manufacturing lead, and europe don't have any, and only have specific subset of manufacturing (basically sensors, electronics, avionics, optics, and handmade clothing) that isn't workforce-intensive, nor resource-intensive.
Maybe, but BMW are at least trying. https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/electric-cars/electric-3-...
At least the Chinese tech will be available to European consumers, nothing says insecure like pretending a competitor doesn't exist.
I think this is probably because Europe is considered part of "the West".
you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind
though in 3.5 months they are gonna ban EU consumers from buying cheap things directly from AliExpress and groom July 1st you will have to pay 3EUR for each ordered item, including that 1EUR screen protector, because it's much better when you can feed some useless middleman than saving money, thanks EU!
> you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind
With that logic, every programmer on this site should spend as much time as possible on Facebook. This will make their salary equal to that of a Meta employee!
Consuming something is not the same as being able to produce it.
For the majority of Americans, “the US falling behind” is not something they care about. The principal thing they care about is not whether the whole is ruined but whether they have an appropriate portion.
An American would prefer that a field make 1 unit of rice if everyone got 1/n units. This is different from cultures where the preference is that you maximize your wellbeing (older America) so that if someone could figure out how to make the field make 10 units of rice, it’s okay if he makes 8 units and everyone else gets 2/n units.
The modern American cultural optimum aims to minimize |x_i - x_j| while growth cultures attempt to maximize x_i. An ironic reversal of roles.
That’s a rather tall argument given that the US is currently experiencing historic income inequality [1].
[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/exploding-wealth-inequality-u...
America is also, fundamentally, a divided country where people disagree over basic things (such as the distribution of rice) and there is a massive industry dedicated to amplifying that division.
On almost every topic, the discussion will turn to what that other evil part of society is doing to disrupt the good guys. If people are arguing about how to house people or stop crime (both basic issues), you will never move from these topics.
Most visible example is public infrastructure, middle-income countries in SE Asia have better infrastructure than the US (and most of Europe)...this makes no sense within the prevailing political/economic/social context in the West, it should just be totally impossible.
Maybe. Agree that zero-sum thinking sucks. You gotta grow the pie. But. You also have to share the big pie.
In your example, the current crisis can be represented as:
A field exists and produces 1 unit.
A financial entity buys the field and applies unsustainable methods to increase production 100 units, keep 99.5 of them, distributes 0.5/n. People are pissed that they’re getting half of what they used to despite incredible productivity. The people elect a leader to fix the situation. The leader confronts the financial entity, and returns to the people with 4 units in their pocket and excuses.
America has a genuinely crazy side.
No other country in the world has anything like the Republicans in the US, who are the only major political party in the world to oppose the existence of man made climate change.
There may be political parties in the rest of the world that say that the cost of tackling climate change is too high, but they don’t dispute the factual reality of it.
The Republicans were in this position between about 2008 and 2014 when their leaders were McCain and Romney, but Romney’s lack of insanity inspired a massive backlash within the crazy part of American society that then made Donald Trump their primary winner in 2016 as a repudiation to the not completely insane Republican leadership.
I know HN loves to pretend that the Republicans and the Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, but this can be shown to be objectively false by comparing to political parties abroad. Democrats are a normal European center left to center right party with all the flaws that brings with them.
The Republicans are now a party of insanity.
>Just taking an existing fast charger with 150- or 350-kW capacity and swapping in the latest and greatest 1,500-kW chargers wouldn’t get anyone faster speeds. The system would need all new “pipes”—grid capacity—to actually move that much current.
The grid doesn't necessarily mean "pipes" or power lines. You don't build a pipeline to every gas station. Mobile charging robots work pretty well in China.
Also I guess they could put a large battery at the charging station so it can take say a steady 200kw from the grid and be able to kick out 1500kw for ten minutes occasionally. That could also charge from cheap off peak electricity.
More importantly, the US has banned these cars in America to give protection to american manufacturers.
to be clear Biden banned them
super stupid
now absolutely no reason for American "manufacturers" to innovate on features or price
because they know there will never be competition
meanwhile the highly educated and extremely savvy prime minister of Canada is now allowing those imports
I wonder if any from Canada can make it down here, they should have same safety standards, is there a huge fee for individuals to import vs corporations?
It’s highly impractical to import cars less than 25 years old into the US for anything beyond “show & display” licensing, and that’s only for select models.
Modifying them to meet US safety standards and then getting them approved is arduous and expensive, especially if there’s no comparable US model to emulate / borrow parts.
What are the requirements of vehicles that drive across the border, like if a Canadian family is holidaying in Buffalo?
If they're driving a BYD, do they get stopped at the border?
What if they sold their BYD to a US family? Can it be registered and insured? I'd guess not, therefore it wouldn't get bought by a US resident in the first place.
Border-crosser here: Many Canadian-model-only vehicles are driven in the US by tourists and the like - you can bring it in for up to the year temporarily.
https://www.cbp.gov/trade/basic-import-export/importing-car
> Nonresidents may import a vehicle duty-free for personal use up to (1) one year if the vehicle is imported in conjunction with the owner's arrival. Vehicles imported under this provision that do not conform to U.S. safety and emission standards must be exported within one year and may not be sold in the U.S. There is no exemption or extension of the export requirements.
To actually legally permanently import the vehicle, you have to go through the rest of the onerous CBP requirements, validate safety standards, etc, etc - and that's when it becomes a true screwball and it'll never happen. But yes, I guarantee you'll see some BYDs running up and down the Northeast, and very likely spot them around Florida as snowbirds drag them down with them still. I think I'm even more likely in my position to see a BYD with red Ontario diplomat plates, now that I think about it...
My favorite oddball I've seen the most of is the Chevy Orlando MPV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Orlando
It happens all the time that a government regulates foreign industries while giving domestic ones relatively free reign. Canada has no car manufacturers. Europe has no Facebooks or Apples. The US doesn't make diesel cars.
Canada might not own car manufacturers but they do have factories that build cars for GM, Ford, etc, and these are important to their economy. I thought some were sold in the US even?
Chinese companies aren’t exactly building factories in Canada to sell to NAFTA, but I guess Carney figures it’s worthwhile overall?
Many are made in Canada [1]. I remember traveling to Quebec in the early 2000s and being surprised to see more people driving Fords than back home in the US.
I suspect part of BYD’s strategy is to get a foothold in the North American free trade zone. Maybe they won’t be able to export to the US at first. But if I recall correctly, an import US legal principle is that laws/tariffs cannot discriminate against a single company (excluding for national security). So BYD will simply iterate toward a design that satisfies US regulators. I am not familiar with Canadian safety regulations but I would be surprised if they were dramatically different. Unless American car manufacturers can find it in their hearts to sell an affordable car, this is an existential threat.
[1] https://www.guideautoweb.com/en/articles/76684/all-the-vehic...
now now, Canada is only allowing 50K of these cars to be imported per year. This is a middle power extending a hand to a superpower in the new multipolar world, nothing more. Also BYD subsidies (and sales) in China have been dropped in the past year.
Is the tech better? Yes. Is protecting domestic auto capability from subsidies in the National Interest? Debatable. This convo always circles around to how we characterize subsidies (EV credits for Elon, direct state sponsorship by China) in a way that's always concealed just enough from the general public to stop people from asking hard questions.
> because they know there will never be competition
In the US only.
It seems to be the same small vision that lead to French cars being sold in droves in Latin America.
Biden’s banning them was not a good decision IMO.
At the same time, he was encouraging domestics manufacturers to start building their own EVs out, which opened up the possibility of unbanning, with reasonable import duties, once the American companies were competitive.
However, right now we are pushing American companies to go in the opposite direction and dismantle their EV efforts.
I think you'd have to be a bit ignorant of very recent history to think that America is some cesspool of lack of innovation in the electric car industry. They invented it, despite there being no competition at the time.
America certainly did not invent electric cars. Depending on which electric car you consider the first real one, the inventor was either French, British or German [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...
In “recent history”, America invented EVs, and there was no competition? What kind of revisionist crap is that? Or am I just misreading your comment?
I have a feeling that half the reason they're doing this is that they don't have a good idea how to increase energy efficiency.
Case in point:
2026 BMW i3 - 900km WLTP from a 108kWh battery.
2026 Denza Z9 GT - 800km WLTP from a 122kWh pack.
The former charges at a maximum of 400kW, while the latter at over twice that which saves... about 10 minutes at the charger after 450km of driving(12 vs 22 minutes approx).
Many such examples with Chinese manufacturers putting 700kg battery packs into the vehicles just to be able to say it's this and that kWh.
I don't know about anyone here but after 400km or so I'm done and want to at least stretch my legs.
This is an NMC vs LFP battery comparison.
They have different trade-offs but LFP is gradually taking over from the bottom of the market and heading up market in a classic disruptive manner.
They are heavier but cheaper and safer and better longevity.
Based on the figures here, they’re claiming around 400 miles of range added in 300 seconds (60% of the full 677 mile range); contrast this with around 100 seconds for a typical gas pump (8 gal/min) and typical efficiency (30 mpg). It suggests that you’d need around 5MW chargers to truly get to the speed of a gas pump.
On the other hand, 5 minutes is already a huge improvement over 15-30 minutes, and it’s fast enough to remove much of the friction of recharging an EV.
Really wish this kind of tech would come to North America…
5mins is really as good as it has to be. Almost everyone needs a bathroom break or gets a drink/snack after 400miles.
Its also fast enough that I don't have to plan for it. I could be running errands, note a low charge, and unless I'm in a big hurry stop for a charge.
This [0] is the actual (good) news, linked from the article.
[0] https://www.techradar.com/vehicle-tech/hybrid-electric-vehic...
Neither article really explains how they are able to charge this fast, aside from “vertical integration” and slightly increased energy density in the battery design. No real details on the charging technology itself.
Sounds like the trick is to use 1.5MW chargers. I guess that'll do it. I suppose the question is how they handel this thermally.
With 5 minute charging, suddenly conventional gas stations can be used for EVs just as they are for ICE. Nice thing about 'plugging in' as opposed to 'filling up' is that a charging car can be left completely unattended (while you go to pay, get a coffee, or whatever).
Seems that the technological barriers have been overcome, now we just need to build out the infrastructure - which could be as simple as retooling existing gas stations. No need to electrify every parking space or such like.
Yes, retooling gas stations is the way to go. Already happening in Norway where stations now show the price of kWh in addition to gas and diesel prominently on signs by the road. Charging is just a different kind of pump.
Although the thought of getting an electric car has passed through my mind on a few occasions, I'm not 100% familiar with the intricate technical details. (for some reason, the tax incentives where I live are still in favor of continuing with the small petrol car I have. Taxes are primarily a function of weight in the Netherlands, and anything besides a lightweight Dacia Spring would imply significantly higher monthly expenditure for me).
What I'm wondering w.r.t. this article is: wouldn't such fast charging shorten the battery lifespan?
I have experience with ebike batteries. Bosch in particular, with very decent 29E samsung cells, that after 70k km or so, basically halved their capacity. I imagine this effect is severily reduced with a car battery because there are a lot more than 10p, so all the wear is distributed more evenly, and 29E are very old technology.
Rule of thumb for modern EVs is to not care about the battery at all. They are expected to last longer than the car. I would doubt even faster charging significantly changes this, or if it does it’s worth the trade off to those who need it.
I believe you meant to write “10S” instead of 10p. I’m not 100% sure, but you were talking about e-bike batteries, which are often 36V, made out of 10 cells (or banks of cells) in series. The nominal voltage of most lithium chemistries is 3.6-3.7V.
EV batteries have many more cells in series, for example my car is 104S, and 800V cars have (obviously) more than 200 cells in series.
And the longevity of car batteries isn’t about wear being distributed “evenly” (a healthy battery can’t really wear “unevenly”, you always load all cells at once). EVs take care of their batteries, they cool them, heat them, balance them periodically, and they don’t actually pull that much power from them. They also keep the cells within pretty conservative voltage limits.
Indeed, I meant 10S. And what I meant by load being distributed along more cells, is that since you have many more cells, current drawn from each is lower. Which greatly prolongs the lifetime.
And hence the question I had with charging too fast. Since discharging faster clearly wears them more quickly, surely charging faster has a similar effect, since it's mostly the reversed process? A question probably easily answered with a query to a LLM.
“Number of cells” doesn’t really tell you anything about current and how it will affect the battery. The number of cells in series gives you the nominal voltage of the entire battery, and the P number (number of cells in parallel) rarely tells you anything useful — three 2000 mAh cells in parallel are equivalent to one 6000 mah cell, and both approaches are valid and used.
What you care about is actually the mass of the cells, basically the total weight of the active material. More material means higher capacity and can withstand more current.
For example, my car is 104S and that’s it, no parallel connections, but the individual cells are huge (~170 Ah each).
Cool! My only concern is that Wired has a very long and consistent history of advertising technologies that don't work quite as they say. So let's hope this is real.
Big money in US politics is the root of lots bad things happening in the country … some serious change is needed to truly achieve MAGA …
https://archive.is/Xp40l
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Absolute garbage. Just stop and think for one second what kind of power delivery is required to do this and you will quickly realize that’s it’s not feasible anywhere other than as a demo.
looks like they are aiming for 20,000 this year and already have 4,239 "In the first two months of this year alone, BYD has already completed 4,239 charging stations" https://carnewschina.com/2026/03/05/byd-unveils-blade-batter...
They claim to have rolled out 4000 fast chargers so far.
Although it also says the car that supports the max charging speed hasn’t hit the market yet so seems yet to be proven in the wild.
I'll bite. They dumped a lot of power in a small amount of time. Sounds like the perfect job for a mega capacitor to streamline deployments. Other than the successful technology, Mrs. Lincoln, what are your gripes?
Cool now at your busy "gas" station keep it working as the pile gets exhausted and you don't have the supporting grid to be able to deliver the needed power to keep it stocked with "gas".
At least not in Europe.
From what I read it's 1500 kW at 1000V or Peak use of 1.5 MW at 1000 A. That's a crazy amount of power.
You will exhaust your piles quickly, or they are enormous. So it's like "quick-charge" until we run out?
They use a buffer battery, it's quite feasible with that.
Feels like such a waste for marginal gains?
With the range as good as a modern EV the charge time already isn't a particularly that bad. I'd much prefer more chargers (so that you can combine charging with something else you were going to do anyway) than faster ones.
I tend to agree but I think the strategy here is to convert people who stubbornly cling to gas vehicles because EVs somehow defy their expectations. I have been approached many times at highway rest stops by people who are curious and slightly skeptical about the EV value proposition. They see me hanging around the vehicle for a half hour and think “ugh, no thanks” as if that’s all I do when I travel. What they’re not seeing is that I rarely use public chargers at all, because 99% of my charging is done either at home or at the charger in the parking lot at work. It’s really just road trips. Not to mention, if you’re an ICE owner hanging around long enough at a rest stops to notice that I’m hanging around, are you really that much faster on a road trip?!!
Back on topic, I am ok with losing a little efficiency in the fast charging process if it means that more people switch away from a horribly inefficient and polluting technology.
> Thousands of FLASH Charging stations have already been installed in China, and BYD has committed to a global rollout that will include an initial wave of FLASH Chargers in Europe. Further details on the plans, and how they will support the Z9GT's arrival, will be revealed in due course.
https://bydukmedia.com/en/news-articles/denza-z9gt-to-start-...
not feasible yet, keep in mind we regularly transport tons of power in the form of gasoline - an absolutely massive (literally) chain of logistics
moving and storing electricity can vastly simplify the process and work like this will mature