An All Electric Car Ahead of Everyone's Time

If you didn’t see it in the paper, BYD Co. the world’s second largest lithium-ion battery maker, is introducing a car in Detroit that runs exclusively on batteries, and, (and this is where it gets fun), a backup gasoline powered engine that recharges the batteries!!

Why is that a big deal. Simple. You can buy a generator at Home Depot for not much money relative to a car. If you use it to put electricity in your car to run the electrically driven vehicle, you’re NOT using a gasoline engine to actually power the car. What difference does that make? Try this. The Chevy Volt, a GM product, which if GM still exists, will launch in ……..2010 is anticipated to have an MSRP of $40,000. The F3DM from BYD is looking at an MSRP of $22,000. That’s 45% less. You want to know why?

By running the car exclusively on electricity with a backup generator for the battery, not the drive train, the car, has 210 primary engine parts because it’s mostly, wait for it, electric motors. A typical V6 gasoline powered engine typically has over 800 parts with another 500+ parts in the transmission (not counting nuts and bolts, everyone). My math might be rusty, but, that looks like over 1000 (yes, one thousand) less parts. If you’ve ever bought a DIY anything (shop at IKEA or build something for your kids), you can certainly relate to the potential time savings of 1000 parts. That’s 80% less.

Did I mention that BYD is in China and has 130,000 employees and that Warren Buffett is a major shareholder? Maybe this explains why our laptops keep getting cheaper while our cars keep getting more expensive.

Whether this powerhouse battery company/fledgling car company can out-compete the big dogs of the auto world is still to be seen. But, at the least, they will have proven that by starting from a different set of assumptions, truly significant changes can be found. WSJ article