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Posted

 

Here's the 46th Bangkok International Motor Show 24 Mar-6 Apr 2025 sales chart.   What I was "kinda" surprised by was Toyota being displaced by BYD/Densa for the #1 sales spot.   I thought BYD would probably come in #2 again like the last motor show...but times are a'changing...and BYD has come out with a lot more models over the last year....more choices even to include HEV.   Then GAC AION and Deepal (electric car companies) coming in #3 and #4.   Honda then coming in #5.     

 

Toyota and Honda "might want to get their heads out of their ICEV hole" and get moving a lot faster on making BEVs.  Then again, maybe both of them have an awesome new traction battery and/or combustion engine "just around the corner" that will kill-off EVs---seems Toyota has been projecting such for years now.  (giggle, giggle)    

 

https://autolifethailand.tv/booking-motor-show-2025-46th/

image.png.1041f05f61a5444964fee5488016391a.png

 

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Posted

Guess a big factor is how the electricity is generated... if you just push the carbon further up the supply chain towards the sources, then it's a moot point. There are issues with EVs like where all the lithium and colbalt etc. is coming from, and the places much of this is mined is hardly the poster-boy for ethics and sustainable business in a green way. Hopefully, there will soon be an alternative to lithium batteries and they are heading toward solid state batteries but will take time. Also, making an EV has a bigger carbon footprint than making an ICE car... just takes time to clear the debt for an EV with using elecricity.

The transition will take time, and the tech has to mature and convince people they have nothing to worry about like poor charging/reliability in cold weather, insurance, repairs, expensive replacement batteries, or range anxiety etc. However, during the transition, then ICE cars are not going away anytime soon (unless maybe you live in a deluded Milliband eutopia fantasy land country), and I think the real near-time objective should be these e-fuels that have tiny-to-zero emissions that you can put in an ICE engine... that should be pushed and normalized.

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Posted

For those who still worry about the time it takes to recharge at a service station while travelling or have range anxiety, battery technologies are improving day by day. For instance, BYD has just launched 2 models that can add around 400km worth of charge in only 5 minutes and have a fully charged range of 700km.

 

They do require Megawatt charging, which is not widely available yet, to achieve that charging speed, but still.

 

Quote

BYD just launched the first EVs based on its new Super e-platform with ultra-fast charging. The new Han L sedan and Tang L SUV can gain nearly 250 miles range in 5 minutes, and prices start at just $30,000.

 

https://electrek.co/2025/04/09/byd-launches-first-evs-with-ultra-fast-charging-starting-at-30000/

 

Just for comparison, if I put 400km worth of petrol in my car in some service stations with slowish pumps (like one Bangchak station near my home which I often use) it can take me up to five minutes - especially if there's someone in front of me in the queue and/or they're slow taking the money. And a full tank in my car only gives me 500 - 600km of range depending on what mix of urban and motorway driving I'm doing.

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Posted
2 hours ago, GroveHillWanderer said:

For instance, BYD has just launched 2 models that can add around 400km worth of charge in only 5 minutes and have a fully charged range of 700km.

Come back when they have the charger to support this, not just one but so you can actually count on them when you travel around Thailand. Don't get me wrong, I am not against BEV's, I think they are the best thing since sliced bread. But it will take some time to get this superfast chargers installed. 

Posted
34 minutes ago, CHdiver said:

Come back when they have the charger to support this, not just one but so you can actually count on them when you travel around Thailand. Don't get me wrong, I am not against BEV's, I think they are the best thing since sliced bread. But it will take some time to get this superfast chargers installed. 

 

I clearly stated that the Megawatt chargers are not widely available yet. And this is the ICE vs EV thread, so it's about general trends, not only what's available in Thailand. There's another thread for that and I deliberately didn't post in that thread because this info isn't really relevant to Thailand (yet).

 

But in any event, it's a chicken and egg situation. When there were not enough vehicles around that could take advantage of them, obviously no-one would go to the bother of installing them. Now that those vehicles are starting to appear, Megawatt chargers will gradually follow.

 

In addition, as the previous article alludes to and this other article makes clear, you can also 'double up' to get better speeds with existing fast chargers. 

 

Quote

BYD recognizes that most chargers won't be able to max out the "Super E" platform's charging capabilities, too, so it includes two charging ports for simultaneous fast charging.

 

BYD's Five-Minute Fast-Charging EV Is Even Cheaper Than We Thought

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Posted

More evidence that EV's are more reliable than ICE.


In this case a recent 2025 study from the renowned German motorway breakdown repair service of the car association ADAC.
They've looked into 2 groups of 2 till 4 year old ICE and EVs and compared the type of breakdown and how many per 1000 incidents.

 

And the car models that reach the minimum statistical quota of above 7,000 car registrations per group are in this study primarily European, US and Korean. No Chinese like MG or BYD yet. I can only think of only one EV, the Renault Dacia Spring, imported from China, known in China as Dongfeng Nano Box. It got a no 3 rating [2.9 incidents] within the category of budget cars.

 

 

Unfortunately the road infrastructure context of Germany is not comparable to Thailand.
Germany has quite an extensive motorway network, where on some stretches there is no speed limit.

The climate is different, cold in winter and summers are less hot and humid than Thailand.

 

This is the main takeaway:

image.png.57b8a318a8847e8b5506772f3efa72ae.png

 

Number of Incidents with 12V battery are almost the same between ICE/EV. 
EV's have slightly more incidents with tyres.
Do higher motorway speeds in Germany make things for EVs worse than Thailand?

 

These findings are in line with what I hear from an EV repair shop in Thailand. As tyre incidents are not picked up by EV repair shops,
I hear them saying that after the 12V battery the AC onboard charger [or CCU in Kia/Hyundai] is the most frequent component that needs repair or replacement. Kia/Hyundai EV's and Neta V seem to be notorious. I That's why the Ioniq scores very badly in this German study.

 

Besides the German EV's like VW IDx, Tesla model 3 score exceptionally very low incident numbers [0.n].

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Posted

 

A 25 April 2025 article.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/04/25/auto-evs-trump-china-electric/

 

 

Trump is trashing electric vehicles. China is building cars the world wants.

China dominates global EV sales, while U.S. consumers risk getting stuck on an island of outdated technology.

Updated
April 25, 2025 at 9:00 a.m. EDTyesterday at 9:00 a.m. EDT
 
10 min
 
(Illustration by Anna Lefkowitz/The Washington Post; iStock)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://s3.amazonaws.com/arc-authors/washpost/2c17522a-fa2b-45f6-919e-fab15fdeda9f.png&h=196&w=196

Michael Bickford was excited to get behind the wheel of a Ford F-150 Lightning, but after experiencing the dismal state of the U.S. charging network on a recent road trip, the Portland, Maine, retiree reconsidered.

 

“I had planned to go fully electric, but I gave up on that when the realities of how difficult that would be here set in,” said Bickford, who is sticking with his hybrid. After pulling his name off the list for the plug-in pickup, he’s holding out for the day the United States catches up to China. He’s in for a long wait.

 

China is leapfrogging the United States with the availability of more advanced, cheaper electric vehicles, while President Donald Trump is cutting subsidies and making other moves that could leave the U.S. behind. The president’s antipathy toward plug-ins, combined with the U.S. domestic auto industry’s slow rollout of new clean-energy vehicles, is frustrating U.S. motorists who hunger for clean transportation.

 
 

“You read about the cars and charging systems they are making in China and think to yourself, ‘Geez, why don’t we have that here?’” Bickford said.

 

Trump has declared that the Biden administration’s support for electric cars was a Marxist “hoax” that hurt U.S. autoworkers. He is freezing billions of dollars of spending on electric vehicle infrastructure, ripping out charging stations in government buildings, and reversing regulations that incentivize automakers to focus on plug-in innovation. Subsidies for factories that make batteries and other parts have been blocked, triggering a wave of canceled projects. Tax breaks of $7,500 for purchasing plug-ins are targeted for elimination, although Congress will be required to act on the president’s request.

 

Amid the president’s trade war, meanwhile, Chinese electric cars are unlikely to roll into the United States anytime soon.

 
 

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, an oil executive before his nomination, said in a speech last month that the administration’s plan is “to reverse the destructive mandates, forcing everyone to buy EVs that have been wreaking havoc on our auto industry and forcing higher prices and reduced choices on consumers.”

 

He and Trump argue the policy reversals will usher in a renaissance for U.S. automakers, now free to focus on the gas cars that still generate the bulk of their profits.

 

But the policy will also ensure the U.S. remains behind in the global EV race. Of the more than 17 million EVs sold in 2024 around the world, according to the China Passenger Car Association and research firm Rho Motion, 76 percent of those cars were made by Chinese companies.

 

The same U.S. auto companies that for years complained vocally about aggressive government actions aimed at speeding the transition to EVs now worry damage from federal abandonment of the transition will be long-lasting.

 

“We are all going to EVs globally. It is just a question of when,” said Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a former chief global economist at Ford. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the industry group representing all the major U.S. vehicle manufacturers, urged Trump in a November letter to preserve the tax breaks for EV buyers and emissions rules that push automakers to innovate and sell electric models. Plug-in technology is advancing so rapidly, with longer battery ranges and expanding charging networks, that analysts expect consumer preference for the cars to eventually overtake that of gas vehicles.

 

It all puts an industry crucial to the U.S. economy in a precarious place, with analysts warning there is only so long U.S. auto giants can rely on tariffs to wall consumers off from Chinese offerings. Europe has already bent to consumer demand, with drivers eagerly buying up reliable EVs with sticker prices as low as $20,000 from red-hot Chinese EV makers like BYD, short for “Build Your Dreams.” Last month, BYD announced it had fulfilled a dream of many motorists by unveiling electric cars that could be fully charged in five minutes.

 

The starting price of the new fast-charging BYD cars sold in China is under $28,600, more than 10 percent cheaper than a Tesla Model 3 there.

 

“If those products were to come to the U.S., the auto industry here would be in deep trouble,” said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, a market research firm that advises automakers. They could lure masses of motorists who right now have no interest in going electric, he said.

 

Electric vehicles, including plug-in hybrids, now account for 19 percent of all cars sold worldwide, up from just 4 percent five years ago. Chinese models account for 17 of the 20 top-selling plug-ins globally, according to CleanTechnica. The only U.S. company that ranks on that list is Tesla, and it is fast losing market share. Tesla vehicle deliveries plunged 13 percent the first quarter this year.

 

In Brazil, where Ford has stopped making cars altogether, its former factory is now owned by BYD, which dominates the country’s fledgling but fast-growing EV market. Sales of EVs in Brazil grew 85 percent in 2024. A local lawmaker wants to change the name of the street where the factory sits from Henry Ford Avenue to BYD Avenue. BYD and other Chinese EV companies are steadily growing their market share in Europe, with BYD building a plant in Hungary and other Chinese brands eyeing factories in Poland and Spain.

 

“We’re on an island, vulnerable and not playing offense anymore,” Michael Dunne, a prominent auto industry consultant, said at a recent Washington gathering of energy and Western auto officials hosted by SAFE, a nonprofit focused on U.S. energy security. “We cannot remain on this island here in North America and just hope for the best.”

Detroit executives, criticized for years for focusing on gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks, are now trying to catch up while navigating the shifting winds from Washington.

 

Soon after the president signed an order directing a pivot away from EVs, Ford CEO Jim Farley was warning shareholders that the company needs to urgently lean in on electric. He highlighted in a call how motorists around the world are rapidly shifting to EVs and markets where American vehicles were long king are now being “dominated by the Chinese.”

 

Farley himself had a Xiaomi electric car delivered from Shanghai to Chicago and drove it for months, telling a podcaster in October how he marvels at this vehicle that was designed and manufactured by a cellphone company.

 

He said Ford is retooling its strategy around EVs with a moonshot-like effort to replicate the Chinese model of innovating cheap, high-tech vehicles in a division walled off from the company’s legacy production lines.

 

General Motors says it is racing to develop a breakthrough in battery technology that would reposition it as a major player in the EV race.

Both Ford and GM did not answer detailed questions from The Washington Post. But the companies have consistently said they need to see more U.S. consumer EV demand to expand their offerings. And consumers here often won’t consider them because the U.S. charging network is so bad.

 

Federal investment in U.S. charging infrastructure has been frozen altogether by Trump after the Biden administration was able to deliver only a couple hundred of the half-million chargers it promised by 2030. Tens of thousands of planned chargers may never get installed. China already has nearly 20 public chargers for every one in the United States, and Europe has four times as many chargers as the U.S.

 

Hughes-Cromwick, now a fellow at the center-left think tank Third Way, said her own driving experience underscores what a heavy lift it will be to catch up to China. She said navigating her Ford Mach-E plug-in from Michigan to New Jersey recently was a white-knuckle experience. She repeatedly encountered broken chargers and had to call for help when the plug got stuck in her car at one stop.

At a Walmart in Ohio, she was driving circles around the parking lot looking for the charging station her car’s software identified as available, only to learn from a greeter in the store that it had been removed. Hughes-Cromwick had just 20 miles of range left on her battery. She barely made it to a functioning station.

 

“It was unbelievable how bad it was,” she said. “It was a rough start to the trip.”

Hughes-Cromwick said the auto manufacturers can fix the charger shortage by following the lead of Tesla, which built its own charging network to conform with the cars it makes. That’s the model used in China, where the car companies operate like government-backed start-ups. But that’s expensive. Tesla lost money for 18 years before making a profit. Sustaining such losses is more difficult for publicly traded, legacy automakers, who face pressure from shareholders to grow quarterly profits.

 

Meanwhile, Trump’s freeze on subsidies is causing companies to abandon plans to build factories making EV components in the U.S. after the administration froze subsidies. Scrapped projects include billion-dollar battery factories in Georgia and Arizona.

 

Even some fans of the president’s industrial policies are unnerved.

“It is not good that they have taken some of these steps” to undermine EV sales and innovation, said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “Car companies are going to have to tell this administration, ‘You will be faced with half-built factories here if you don’t stop this war on clean energy vehicles.’ They will hopefully start to listen. I don’t think this administration wants its legacy to be a landscape where they have vacant plants in places like Tennessee with weeds growing in the parking lot.”

 

The U.S. is beset with finger-pointing. Industry executives and GOP lawmakers say mandates from Democratic administrations and states like California forced automakers to make ill-timed investments, before consumer demand and chargers were in place.

 

“They caused these car companies to lose tens of thousands of dollars per vehicle,” said Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). “They did everything wrong.”

 

As the industry lobbied against a phaseout of the internal combustion engine, China’s government was seeding dozens of EV companies with tens of billions of dollars.

 

“These incredibly cheap, high-quality EVs from China are impossible to match if you don’t have the U.S. government helping manufacturers make this transition,” said Ann Carlson, former chief counsel for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “The shortsightedness of the industry in not seeing the trend would be toward electrification has put them in a precarious position. Now, Trump blocking every effort to assist that transition leaves us in a very dicey place.”

 

********************************

 

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Posted

Car finance firms losing "hundreds of millions” in EV depreciation want Govt support

The BVRLA says the disparity in supply and demand for electric cars is resulting in weaker-than-expected residuals, which is costing firms millions

Car finance and leasing firms have asked the Government for financial support after the huge depreciation of EV values has led to the companies losing “hundreds of millions” of pounds – which is currently being passed onto consumers in the form of higher interest rates and car financing costs

Such an imbalance means that EV residual values have tumbled by 50 per cent in the last two years and are expected to fall by a further 28 per cent by 2030, after which solely petrol and diesel-powered cars will no longer be allowed to be sold from new.

Weak residual values?

Weak residuals have created what the BVRLA describes as mounting "financial pressure” because finance and leasing firms have long been basing their pricing models on much more optimistic residual value forecasts. As a result, the EVs they’ve been renting out to customers are worth much less now than they originally expected.

In its letter, the BVRLA stated: “This depreciation is costing fleets hundreds of millions and being passed on to new buyers in the form of higher motor finance costs.” Given that firms are now having to charge consumers in order to recoup lost cash, the BVRLA reckons that higher finance and leasing prices could result in 290,000 fewer EV registrations over the next two years.

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/366508/ev-depreciation-costing-car-finance-firms-hundreds-millions-and-theyd-bail-out

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Posted
1 hour ago, vinny41 said:

Car finance firms losing "hundreds of millions” in EV depreciation want Govt support

The BVRLA says the disparity in supply and demand for electric cars is resulting in weaker-than-expected residuals, which is costing firms millions

Car finance and leasing firms have asked the Government for financial support after the huge depreciation of EV values has led to the companies losing “hundreds of millions” of pounds – which is currently being passed onto consumers in the form of higher interest rates and car financing costs

Such an imbalance means that EV residual values have tumbled by 50 per cent in the last two years and are expected to fall by a further 28 per cent by 2030, after which solely petrol and diesel-powered cars will no longer be allowed to be sold from new.

Weak residual values?

Weak residuals have created what the BVRLA describes as mounting "financial pressure” because finance and leasing firms have long been basing their pricing models on much more optimistic residual value forecasts. As a result, the EVs they’ve been renting out to customers are worth much less now than they originally expected.

In its letter, the BVRLA stated: “This depreciation is costing fleets hundreds of millions and being passed on to new buyers in the form of higher motor finance costs.” Given that firms are now having to charge consumers in order to recoup lost cash, the BVRLA reckons that higher finance and leasing prices could result in 290,000 fewer EV registrations over the next two years.

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/366508/ev-depreciation-costing-car-finance-firms-hundreds-millions-and-theyd-bail-out

 

From that same article (your selective editing and bias is a lead weight in a sea of truth) ...

 

 

Despite this, valuation firms, such as CAP Hpi and CLD Vehicle Information Services, continue to project strong residuals for many EVs; CLD currently estimates the new electric Vauxhall Grandland will be worth 62 per cent of its initial asking price after three years – in-line with petrol-powered alternatives.

Head of forecast strategy at CAP Hpi, Dylan Setterfield told Auto Express: “We are very open about our forecasts and assumptions”.

“Three years ago, we took the view that used values for battery-electric models were unsustainably high,” Setterfield continued. “We assumed significant reductions in used values, but the resulting movement was higher, partly due to unforeseen events such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

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Posted

FUD, FUD, FUD…

Maybe if the the FUD promotion was less, the second hand value would be higher…?

Im sure that if people can see beyond the FUD they’ll see great value in ev.

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