Your Polestar 2 battery is based on battery technology that is 5+ years old. Right now you can buy a BYD car in China that charges at up to 1500kW - close to 10x the peak charging rate of a Polestar 2.
Things like crash, fire, egress, homologation and pedestrian impact, long term service… these are things western mfgs obsess over, and BYD doesn’t give a shit about.
You can buy BYD vehicles without airbags.
They’re Chinese market vehicles.
It’s like DJI drones, they work, and they cheap, some are even decent performance on paper, but they aren’t “real” in a sense that serious users would demand.
It’s OK if a BYD is bricked with a bad OTA. It’s less OK for the auto industry in the rest of the world.
It’s taken Tesla a LONG time to figure out building computers is easy, and cars are hard. Same for BYD.
DJI is bad example as they are pretty much only consumer drone you'd ever wanna buy. It absolutely decimates competition. It's more like Tesla.
Not sure what you trying to say about BYD. I don't like them as cars, my friends do indeed have reliability issues and early ones are super uncomfortable. Latest ones are tacky with crappy software. IMO there's a lot of hype about them for some unknown reason. You can get vastly better deals over here.
Yeah, when I take a road trip I genuinely enjoy the cadence of charging. 5-10 minutes every two hours, just enough to go to the bathroom or walk around. I get to my destination not materially later, and feeling far more relaxed than when I was doing death marches in a gas car.
This is such a euphemism to pretend that you’d like to wait two hours at a refueling station.
Anyone who’s ever driven between Seattle and Portland and seen the e16b charging lots of people sleeping in their cars knows there is a whole different side to your rosey picture.
EV owners are still internalizing their range anxiety into a benefit.
I get it; I like EVs for their around town purpose, but man it’s almost fantasy to sell it as “5-10 minutes every two hours”.
"This is such a euphemism to pretend that you’d like to wait two hours at a refueling station."
There is virtually no EV sold on the market today that takes two hours to charge to 80% at a HVDC charger.
"I get it; I like EVs for their around town purpose, but man it’s almost fantasy to sell it as “5-10 minutes every two hours”."
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 takes about 20 minutes to go from 10% SOC to 80% SOC in about 18 min with an 800v charger. That equates to about 3 hours of driving on the highway.
So when you say it’s got a 350 mile range, but then make the point you only need to charge to 40% that you would be fine with a single vehicle that had a 140mile range?
I swear buying an EV in 2026 breaks brains. The push back has been so bad because the mfgs pushed the single car lie… but the people that jumped in now need to defend their $60,000 purchases.
I get it, but please don’t think you guys are sneaky about it. We all know what it is.
“5-10 minutes every two hours” … lol, that’s good when you’re going from LA to San Diego. If I had to stop every two hours on a road trip I’d get a train ticket, it would feel a lot faster.
> This is such a euphemism to pretend that you’d like to wait two hours at a refueling station.
What? I said no such thing. I would hate to wait two hours at a refueling station.
> it’s almost fantasy to sell it as “5-10 minutes every two hours”.
I guess I live in fantasy land then.
Maybe the non-Tesla charging story is crap, but I made conscious choices not to participate in that circus.
I have no range anxiety. I point the car where I want to go, it tells me where to charge and for how long, and it’s earned my trust over many road trips. It hasn’t been wrong yet.
uphills + cold/hot climates, the ranges won't be able to compete with ICE. its basic physics. cold uphill still reduces charging speed, available power, and range, while sustained heat accelerates degradation. Thermal-management systems mitigate those weaknesses by consuming energy and adding cost, weight, and complexity.
meanwhile ICE has gotten ridiculously clean and efficient over the years it is more efficient at the shaft does not settle total-system efficiency, cost, weight, resource use, grid losses, battery production, or suitability for every operating env. Comparing an engine with a motor while ignoring the battery and electricity supply chain is silly
I still do not trust that sitting on a pile of lithium batteries is safe. NMC does not mean non flammable or consequence free. LFP cells can still enter thermal runaway, release toxic gases, reignite, and require difficult firefighting procedures. They also generally trade energy density and cold-weather performance for that improved safety. Also the speed charging ? That dramatically reduces the stability and lifespan of the batteries. Ton of used EVs not being sold because the battery replacement is somewhere between 40~60% of the car's value.
we had ICE for over a century now, its just like a software that gets continuous updates ICE systems are highly optimized, repairable, energy-dense, fast to refuel, and supported by enormous infrastructure. EVs are improving faster partly because they still have major weaknesses to solve. A steeper improvement curve does not prove that the present technology is superior for every use case neither is using the latest javascript framework.
Could you ELI5 these basic physics? I've heard many people make claims like this but there's never any physics that actually follows. I've had most of an undergraduate curriculum of physics, so if it's beyond basic, then don't be afraid to refer to those physical ideas.
> meanwhile ICE has gotten ridiculously clean and efficient over the years it is more efficient at the shaft does not settle total-system efficiency, cost, weight, resource use, grid losses, battery production, or suitability for every operating env
Is 30% "ridiculously clean and efficient"? 35%? I'm not sure I can agree with that at all.
Battery production? That's ridiculously efficient. For a very small amount weight, there's an insane amount of Wh that get shuttled through that material, which can then be recycled into even more kWh of storage than went into the recycling process, due to the continual improvement in battery production efficiency.
Meanwhile, every single gallon of gas results in 20 pounds of CO2 emissions. Fracking oil requires disposing of 2-10 gallons of dirty waste water for every gallon of gas. That's a massive amount of waste for only 20-50 vehicle miles.
> The latest battery chemistries perform incredibly well in cold and hot climates.
Oh? Show me a model of EV that has it is going to lower capacity battery heating and cooling systems.
I’m an automotive EE… I can’t name any. I’m working on things that will go in 2032 vehicles. Surprise, most are ICE, but of the EV vehicles the battery protection systems are becoming more rugged, not less.
Sodium batteries loose only 10% or capacity and doesn't need pre-heating when charging. Latest Chinese LFPs perform well in cold too (I don't know exact deets and tbf they don't do great job publishing them other than marketing fluff). Also added ripple preheating that Tesla has.
I'm surprised they didn't flag and downvote you. There seems to be a certain crowd that seems view EV as sort of a panacea without considering the true realities which involve experience and research to know they are far from replacing ICE
If ICE is the only vehicle for you, because of religious reasons, thats okay. There are large and small countries ( China, Norway) that have majority EV cars and continue to grow. There are 120+ other countries that are buying EVs. Even in US, there are a few people who have bought EVs and realized it works for them.
A person who really needs an ICE car would encourage others to buy EVs because it would reduce oil demand, and with demand destruction, considerably lower oil prices. With lowered demand, Saudi Arabia can supply a barrel for $5 - $10/barrel from Ghawar Field. Which means a gas-head who commutes every day from Yukon, Canada to Guadalajara, Mexico has a significantly lower gas bill.
The only people who wants everyone to buy ICE are fossil fuel shills.
I finally met someone who plans to downgrade from EV to ICE. He does 100k km per year, running multiple businesses. Lives 120km outside Dublin. Biggest issue seems to be wait at public charge stations. IMO he needs to get long range EV and get better chargers at home/work. But oh well, I'm not going to stop him if he's going to get luxury sports cars instead lol.
China cold tests their EVs in Harbin and Mohe, where “cold” means -40 (F or C doesn’t matter, it’s the same). They lose some range, and indoor charging garages are more common (for better charging performance), but the tech has gotten good enough that even harbiners (a small city of 20 million people) are adopting EVs at a rapid clip.