CT scans of BYD car parts

182 pointsposted 4 hours ago
by viasfo
(lumafield.com)

78 Comments

zakisaad

3 hours ago

This was stated about the key: "Folded into the base is a mechanical backup key, a flat metal blade in a hinged housing."

I own a BYD: this is not true. The key is not hinged; rather, the entire mechanical key pulls out when a small clip is unlatched near the top of the assembly (you can see it in the CT). I assume the circular hinge-looking mechanism in the CT is just a by product of the plastic/metal weld process.

Nonetheless: very cool tech demo!

pimlottc

2 hours ago

Having a mechanical key hidden in the electronic key fob is nothing new, it’s common on many cars.

zakisaad

an hour ago

I guess my intent was not to point out that it has a mechanical key, rather that the description of the key on the webpage was wrong (it is not hinged).

The mechanical key fallback pattern is standard across the industry for sure.

pimlottc

19 minutes ago

Ah, I misread your earlier revision's enthusiasm at the end as being about the mechanical key, not the CT scan.

defrost

an hour ago

It's entirely possible that the BYD key they scanned and the BYD key you possess are of different designs.

phinnaeus

2 hours ago

I remember playing with my parent's VW key fob as a fidget toy in the 00s. Little spring loaded switchblade style mechanical key.

cwbriscoe

2 hours ago

My 2015 Honda had that and my new car does as well.

aidenn0

an hour ago

And yet my Hyundai key fob, despite being the largest fob I've ever seen doesn't do this :/

al_borland

18 minutes ago

I wasn’t surprised by the backup key, but rather by how empty it was. I really wish key fobs were smaller. They are quite bulky in a pocket and bigger than all my actual keys combined.

delichon

2 hours ago

> The last company to vertically integrate a car from raw material to finished product at this scale was Ford. Today BYD’s system runs all the way from the lithium mine to the port.

Both BYD and Tesla claim to produce around 75% of their components. Ford is at around 25%.

Tesla is indeed smaller in scale (cars/year):

  BYD 4.6M
  Ford 4.4M
  Tesla 1.6M

pimlottc

2 hours ago

I assumed this was referring to the early days of the Ford assembly line

delichon

2 hours ago

Yes, Ford claimed up to 90% in the 1930s when they were producing up to 1.4M cars and trucks per year. (Down to less than 400K in the worst of the depression.)

foobarian

34 minutes ago

I suppose it makes sense, back then you wouldn't think there would be an existing supply chain of companies like Mopar just waiting for a car manufacturer to spin up and start buying their stuff

kevin_thibedeau

2 hours ago

They would go so far as to license components for in-source production from suppliers who couldn't meet the needed volume.

Cyph0n

an hour ago

So BYD for cars and Samsung for phones and consumer electronics more generally (from fab upwards).

In fact, I believe Samsung is the only company on the planet that can design & build a state of the art smartphone from scratch - silicon/fabrication, SoC, battery, baseband, and display.

What other high tech vertically integrated producers exist in this group?

wbl

an hour ago

IBM

Cyph0n

9 minutes ago

IBM no longer has fabs (spun off as Globalfoundries and later sold), and no longer manufactures PCs (sold to Lenovo?), but it does make mainframes I guess?

AAYALAG

43 minutes ago

The quick introduction into the supply chain is quite interesting. I see countless BYD units in Mexico, it’s curious how America has its own perception of international products, with the mass majority being informed only because of the nationally published news headlines, reality then becomes a completely different thing for each territory. Still a more in depth deconstruction of the companies operations and products would be quite the read (even better if there is no hidden ad for CT services). Still understanding the rapid expansion of the brand, specially in the overly competitive and unprofitable ev industry would be super insightful.

embedding-shape

4 hours ago

> This prismatic cell is NOT a Blade, but it does share the same chemistry.

Kind of surprised that the part that is perhaps the most "BYD" of the entire car, isn't actually the same cell that the BYD Blade batteries use, which was what I was most excited about seeing :(

serf

2 hours ago

LFP prismatics are dirt cheap, I actually thought that was cooler -- it's rare to see a car part for a specific brand that is so close to a COTS equivalent.

866-RON-0-FEZ

an hour ago

This looks like a stealth advertisement for their CT scanning business. There is nothing educational of value for the general public here.

The only reason you would do this is for competitive analysis and I assure you the other car companies have already analyzed these parts.

bendauphinee

an hour ago

Yes, that’s exactly what it is. On the other side of it though, so what, we get to look inside stuff with a cool scan. They’ve been doing these posts for several years now, and they’re all interesting.

LandenLove

an hour ago

The part where they highlight the rippling in the lithium battery was interesting. They mention it can accelerate degradation over time. It's unclear if this specific example is within tolerances, but I have seen in other CT scans how dramatic the lithium rippling can become.

But overall, yeah, this is mostly an advertisement. They have other videos on their YouTube where they scan random items.

perching_aix

40 minutes ago

It's called content marketing, and there's nothing stealthy about it in particular.

londons_explore

an hour ago

Previous lumafield blog posts have been full of amazing graphics and knowledge.

But this one seems to be "state the obvious" and "recant political talking points with no new evidence".

kazinator

an hour ago

> Fourteen pins in two parallel rows carry every signal this panel produces to the rest of the vehicle. Automotive connectors are among the most common failure points in modern cars: corrosion, fretting, and thermal cycling work on these joints over years of use. One connector failure on a module this integrated takes out mirrors, windows, locks, and child safety all at once.

Pack that shit full of silicone dielectric grease, check it every year or two, and it should be good for decades.

Animats

3 hours ago

Nice.

Those are small parts, though. The interesting part is the E-axle. BYD builds a unit with an integrated motor, differential, axle, and wheel hubs. That, plus an electronics box and battery, is the power train. This simplifies vehicles considerably.

There are E-axle teardown videos. There's no big secret about how to do this. Copying this is hard for Detroit, because they have a huge investment in "engine plants". With this design, BYD doesn't need standalone engine plants.

Tesla ought to be doing this, but they're into performance, not cost. They want to put two or four motors in a car. BYD does make supercars, to show off, but their volume products are reasonably good cars with E-axles and lithium iron phosphate batteries, which work fine. (It's not clear that Tesla is even into car design at all any more, but that's another issue.)

Detroit ought to be doing this, but they insist on making electric cars that are modified gasoline cars. Ford has an electric Mustang, an electric F-150, and an electric Transit. Chrysler doesn't even make cars any more, just one minivan. GM has a good Bolt now, which they are killing to appease Trump.

bluGill

2 hours ago

GM has several EVs that are ground up designs. They look just like the ICE version but that is cosmetic, everything else is different.

AlotOfReading

2 hours ago

Now if only GM's executives could stop snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

ErroneousBosh

3 hours ago

> BYD builds a unit with an integrated motor, differential, axle, and wheel hubs

So wait, the whole axle is solid then? Like a 1960s pickup truck but with all the weight of the motor and gearbox hanging off it too?

That must give it ridiculous unsprung weight.

serf

2 hours ago

it's not really like a 'live axle' from an older truck, it's more like a de-Dion style suspension (or dead axle).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Dion_suspension

you still see these in velocipede-style vehicles commonly.

and to your point : a dead axle is an effort to reduce unsprung weight compared to a live axle; it also lets you actually use alignment as a remediation for asymmetry issues rather than just pre-delivery straightening.

sephamorr

2 hours ago

On the platforms I've worked with, the weight isn't the issue so much as the quantity of expensive and vibe sensitive parts that are unsprung.

numpad0

2 hours ago

Looks like they do in-hub motor for buses and in-differential(like everyone else) for passenger cars?

joe_mamba

3 hours ago

>This simplifies vehicles considerably.

On the contrary, this much integration makes repairs nearly impossible, meaning you might have to swap the whole unit(for a lot of $$$) when something small inside it inevitably breaks.

Check out the articles published by EVclinic that cover such cases.

Aftermarket EV repairs are already big business due to how difficult and expensive the OEMs make it.

ssl-3

2 hours ago

On the other hand: If the assembly is reliable-enough, then repair isn't normally something that needs to be pursued in the first place.

Like Honda engines on their myriad pedestrian cars. I'm sure there's exceptions, but the engines tend to be ridiculously reliable. The rest of the car often fails (due to age and/or rot and/or deferred maintenance and/or crash) and leaves a very good engine behind.

Accordingly, junkyards are full of Honda engines that work fine.

Thus, there's very few people rebuilding them. They certainly can be rebuilt, but it usually just doesn't make financial sense to strip it all down and freshen everything up.

So when an engine does fail on an otherwise-working Honda daily-driver that is actually worth repairing, then the usual move is to swap in a used motor.

---

So if it's reliable enough, and there's also critical mass, then it doesn't matter much if the BYD drivetrain unit has easily-repairable components.

HPsquared

3 hours ago

The eternal conflict between "design for manufacture" and "design for maintenance".

justinclift

an hour ago

Apparently both can be done together, it's just that it takes a bunch more effort so most places don't bother.

mnahkies

3 hours ago

I don't have so much knowledge about EV repairs, but I got burnt by this on ICE cars already - had a car fail a regular fitness test on suspension bushes, they weren't replaceable without replacing the whole arm(s). What should've been a $40 part was being quoted as more than the cars value.

(I'm not sure if there was a way around this, there may well have been but I had other things going on and sold for scrap)

jhatax

2 hours ago

FWIW, this has been my experience since 2003 when I had to get suspension work done. Doesn’t matter if it’s a BMW or Honda, dealership or indie repair shop, the story I have heard consistently is that the bushing is part of the arm for structural integrity, stability, <reason I can’t remember, truth or crock>. Bushings typically fail faster than the arm does, and this repair is expensive ($1000+ for performance cars, not that much cheaper for Civics).

The “Design for purported Safety vs. Design for Saving Dollars” principle at work.

simplyluke

39 minutes ago

> repair is expensive ($1000+ for performance cars, not that much cheaper for Civics)

I can almost guarantee the lion's share of this is shop labor, not parts, and pressing a bushing out and back in would be more expensive after accounting for that labor than just swapping the suspension arms. This is often the piece that gets missed in these discussions of "why am I replacing this huge assembly for a tiny part", if the whole assembly is coming out to deal with that tiny part anyways and shop labor is $200/hour it's cheaper to swap the assembly a lot of the time.

Try getting any repair beyond routine maintenance done on a car in the US for under $1000 these days. Car maintenance is one of the things I'm happy to DIY in most cases because the delta on costs is massive and as someone that works on computers all day it's vaguely enjoyable to get angry at a mechanical object for a change.

cyberax

3 hours ago

Why would it be less repairable? Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable. Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades.

And once they give out, you can just replace the whole unit for maybe $2000.

numpad0

2 hours ago

EU added "cybersecurity" requirements in response to Comma.ai that means that a lot of ECUs going forward use signed messages AND often crypto key pairing against an onboard security auth box. The pairing process often require something like a scuffed up manufacturer rental Panasonic Toughbook with weird half baked apps and passwords. The car would refuse to drive or whatever if the owner wouldn't play along with that game.

joe_mamba

3 hours ago

>Power electronics are still modular and are easily swappable.

Only if someone makes and sells those power electronics to you along with the appropriate DRM tools required for calibration and pairing with the other electronics of the car. Otherwise you're shit outta luck.

>Mechanical parts are more integrated, but they so simple that they can last for decades.

Simple != decades of reliability, when the design and manufacturing quality are piss poor in the race to the bottom for cost cutting and shareholder returns. Timing chains were also supposed to last a lifetime but plenty have been recalled due to know timing chain issues from manufacturing quality.

VW and Kia/Hyundai EVs were found to use custom dimensions motor bearings that can't be bought on the open market from anywhere, so only the OEM and their dealers can get them via their supply chain.

rwmj

3 hours ago

There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.

Edit: I agree with you and upvoted your comment which I feel was unfairly downvoted. But economics are going to win here, only a tiny fraction of the user base of cars (or phones) tinkers with them.

binary132

3 hours ago

People don’t want cars they can tinker with, they want cars they can get repaired instead of replaced when something breaks….

rwmj

3 hours ago

People actually want a convenient and cheap service for getting around. All other considerations can be derived from this. If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it. Currently this is almost never the case of course, but if it happens in future, watch people switch behaviour instantly.

bcrosby95

2 hours ago

> If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it.

This is doing a lot of work but I'm going to go with a charitable interpretation. I seriously doubt that we'll ever hit a state where replacing a 2 ton vehicle is cheaper than repairing it. And if we do, I'll have to re-evaluate my charitable interpretation, because something shady is likely going on.

The crazy thing is people don't even repair things that are cheaper to repair than replace. Our countertop icemaker broke and my wife wanted to throw it out. I fixed it with 20 minutes of time and a $15 motor from Amazon.

I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive. People in large part have no idea how to repair anything they own. This mass ignorance is leading to some pretty poor market incentives.

binary132

2 hours ago

A lot of it does come down to a cost / benefit analysis where time preference is extremely overweighted due to an abundance of seemingly free credit and, shall we say, a tragic dustbowl famine of available cognitive resources.

joe_mamba

2 hours ago

>I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive.

I don't think this is true. If this is the trend you're seeing it's probably because you're sampling through people with relatively high disposable income(or who don't mind endless credit card debt), who can just afford to throw away broken things when it's just a rounding error of their income.

But if you look at lower income people(with sane spending habits and financial literacy) you'll see how they first ask around if something can be repaired before they claw money from their checking account to buy something new.

My local facebook group is full of students asking if someone can fix their macbooks for cheap as they can't afford a new one or what Apple is quoting them, which is close in cost to buying a new one.

My minimum wage gf still had her barely functional Windows 7 notebook up until a year ago because she didn't feel like spending money to buy a new one if I could just keep fixing it.

Some broke people try not to buy new things if they can, but some are broke because they can't stop buying new things.

binary132

an hour ago

well, people want to have enough money to do what they need to do, of course, so they will choose things that they can in order to minimize cost and time spent, and increase convenience. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to own things that can be repaired. Owning repairable things is also valuable. I don’t think anyone actually wants to “own nothing and be happy”. But they might be able to be coerced into it, sure.

joe_mamba

2 hours ago

>There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.

Which is why I'm so baffled how and why the EU has spent so much time and effort regulating batteries and charging ports for phones, but still ignores this massive issue of ease of repairability and right to repair of personal vehicles that has been plaguing car owners since the ICE days and is now only getting worse with EVs, that's costing us a lot more money than what's costing users to pay Apple to replace your cracked display and dead battery.

It feels like they just keep going for the lowest hanging fruits to score easy wins that don't impact local industry, while ignoring the entire forest behind them.

Jarvis, pull up on the central HUD how much the EU car industry spent on lobbying in the EU over the last 15 years.

markvdb

an hour ago

Any electric gear with the battery as its main wear part. Ebikes. Sit-on mowers. Cars.

This is about so much more than cost. Agency, autonomy, environment, efficiency, geopolitics even.

I refuse to buy drm'ed gear. The exception is second hand where I can reliably avoid the drm with little effort. At its simplest, that means never using specific drm'ed functionality. At its most complicated, that means mitm'ing an encrypted can bus.

hnav

2 hours ago

The EU is beholden to the Germans, ease of repair would wreck the profit margins of VAG, BMW and Daimler both because of reduced after-sales profits and due to cost increases to manufacturing and engineering.

XorNot

2 hours ago

The EU has scored wins there though.

The mobile phone industry turns product into landfill on a yearly or more frequent basis.

People might do a yearly model swap on a car, but the car itself stays on the road for 10-20 years.

Changing how it's built needs to be done cautiously, but also has a much longer payback period.

lowbloodsugar

3 hours ago

Most of those stories are 1/ crashes and 2/ hybrids. Again, with rare exception, manufacturers are just making gas cars with EV power trains. Tesla and BYD are making next gen transport. Are you old enough to remember when TVs broke so often that TV Repairman was a job? One day we will look back on car mechanics the same way.

I do remember the visceral joy of trying to keep a supercharged Camaro on the track, but those memories are overwhelmed by the terror of “what is that noise”. Now I drive a Tesla that accelerates faster than that Camaro, handles better, and hasn’t been to the shop once.

If I win the lottery I will buy another Camaro and a Corvette and I’ll work on them for fun, and kids will look at me the way I looked at old men who take care of antique steam engines and traction engines and take them to fairs. That sure is a lot of noise and smoke and doohickeys for very little speed and power!

jbm

2 hours ago

I own a Model 3 and I like driving it, but I scratch my head at everyone who claims there are no mechanical problems. I'm glad you didn't have any, but there are some repairs that are almost obscenely common.

In the past year, the heater failed (PTC Heater had to be replaced), and the lateral link ball joint ball joint had to be replaced. That is about CAD5000$ worth of work. There is also an issue with a wire in the rear center seatbelt that broke (but after a check, it doesn't really have any safety concerns wrt airbags so it is OK to leave as is), and the top roof glass cracked. (I also had to replace the front windshield, but that's normal in Calgary and I don't hold it against the car)

I'm not "rough handling", I have a Toyota Sienna without any of these problems. On the bright side, the battery has no problems and no imbalances so fixing it will keep the car running for years (hopefully).

I bring this up because I find it very annoying that people were painting hagiographies of these cars when they have real issues. None of the issues above should be happening. Moreover, there are no 3rd parties providing parts (supposedly because of patents).

In the end, I'll never buy another gas car again but my cute tiny car has a bigger turn radius than my Sienna. It's lost more value than my Sienna. I agree with the poster who said that it isn't even clear if Tesla is interested in cars anymore.

If BYD is also creating cars that are expensive to maintain, then hard pass. I'm ok with having legislation to fix this.

numpad0

2 hours ago

> manufacturers are just making gas cars with EV power trains. Tesla and BYD are making next gen transport.

From what I see online, Teslas, especially MS/MX, are actually quite like an EV-swapped Toyota than anything futuristic. A lot about their cars(exception being CT and Semi) are ICE-mass-market-car coded. They're car equivalents of ARM PCs in ATX form factor like NVIDIA's DGX Station, opposite to the likes of trashcan Mac Pro.

joe_mamba

3 hours ago

>Most of those stories are 1/ crashes and 2/ hybrids.

No, they're faulty coolant seals of the electric motor, wrecking the power unit.

>but those memories are overwhelmed by the terror of “what is that noise”.

I just turned up the music till the noise went away. Problem solved.

>Now I drive a Tesla that accelerates faster than that Camaro, handles better, and hasn’t been to the shop once.

Good for you, but do you know there's a whole lotta other EV brands out there? And many are not as well and reliably designed as your Tesla.

>I do remember the visceral joy of trying to keep a supercharged Camaro [...] If I win the lottery I will buy another Camaro and a Corvette and I’ll work on them for fun

Nice story, but what does all this have to do with the parent you're replying to? Did he mention ICEs anywhere?

binary132

3 hours ago

I’m very confused as to why this is downvoted but I tossed you an upvote since I do my best to work against the constant brigading I always see on this forum.

viasfo

4 hours ago

CT scans of BYD car components. BYD is fully vertically integrated at a level unseen since early 20th-century Ford.

dangus

44 minutes ago

I want to buy a Chinese car and I am annoyed that my protectionist government won’t let me. Lowering transportation cost would be the most impactful thing to my budget.

All that serves to do is ensure the American car industry falls far behind by being coddled into a lack of competition.

Toyota showed the world the Toyota Production System. What Tesla, Kia/Hyundai, and Chinese EVs have shown American automakers is how much vertical integration can be an asset, especially with the lower part counts of electric vehicles.

The model where every part is contracted out to parts manufacturers is proving to be antiquated.

yakbarber

37 minutes ago

Totally agree, this protectionism killed the Australian car industry because eventually you just can’t compete.

_3u10

3 hours ago

All you need to know is that BYD cars are good enough that the US had to effectively ban them.

tedggh

2 hours ago

I don’t think BYD would be a hit in the US as they are in Europe. It’s an entirely different market. They may be relatively successful just not to the point of taking an important market share, they would probably be like Mazda. Many of the subsides for Chinese EV ended this year too, and they are now realizing price alone is not a differentiator. So even if BYD eventually makes it to the US, they will be priced close to other brands like KIA and Tesla, but without the advantage of the brand and strong local presence. So no, there’s no concerns with BYD and we may see them sooner than later in the US.

gravelc

2 hours ago

BYD only entered the Australian car market in 2022.

They are now the 2nd biggest seller after Toyota (https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/insight/byd-overtakes-rivals-...).

They are also priced much lower than KIA and Tesla.

FWIW I now own a GWM Cannon Αlpha PHEV pickup. Have also owned a Jeep Wrangler - the tech, build quality and reliability is not even on the same planet.

I can't imagine how the US manufacturers would compete with the Chinese ones on a level playing field. Not from the US, but it's hard to see how any administration would allow that. Would be the end of the local industry.

w10-1

an hour ago

> It’s an entirely different market

One without cheap cars or EV's, even though that's what people want and need now.

beloch

2 hours ago

It's worse than that. Trump's tariffs have knee-capped North American auto companies right when they needed to be upping their game. The auto sector is tightly integrated across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. Or was... Now there's tariff's on every part and frame that crosses a border. The American plan seems to be to put up a wall and force Americans to buy domestic while nobody else in the world buys American cars.

_3u10

33 minutes ago

The lada and movkvisch of car brands with people willing to cross the wall to buy BYD in Mexico

kyrra

3 hours ago

Potentially predicated on anti-dumping rules.

_carbyau_

20 minutes ago

I am torn on this. Anti-dumping is one thing, and yet disruption was an overused keyword for a long time in Silicon valley.

1. Huge scale subsidies like this are effectively a manufacturing attack. This is mean at the level of international politics and yet the world recently seems to be waking up to the idea they were handing over every practice of manufacture to China.

2. On the other hand, while the Chinese car companies are finding their footing they have not yet perfected the bullshit tiered marketing approaches that see relatively cheap to manufacture features gated to "high-equipment level" cars.

For example, now even the cheapest cars can have 360 degree parking cameras. Of course, the Chinese engineering level remains to be seen but many would argue this is competition in the market.