My Tesla long range gets about 60% of advertised range in real world conditions. I'm talking stop signs every block, mountains you need to drive across, insanely hot days, i.e. the real world.
I knew that would be the case, but I really wish there was a crackdown on this. Advertised range should be the mean of the distribution, not the max.
In fact EV manufacturers should be required to publish the distribution and they should have to pay a KL divergence penalty on it that will be distributed to EV buyers as rebates. It would also require the courts to learn about KL divergence, which I would really love to happen. We need countries run by engineers, not clowns.
> Advertised range should be the mean of the distribution, not the max.
Distribution of what? Assuming you mean the distribution of driving range achieved 'in the real world', how would that work before a car is sold? How often would it have to be updated in their advertising material? Over what sort of area would the distribution be calculated? How would anyone know if the advertised range of two different cars was even comparable?
Whilst the standardised tests could be improved, they are still the best way to compare products.
> should have to pay a KL divergence penalty on it that will be distributed to EV buyers as rebates
I get about 15% more range than advertised, should I have to pay a penalty for this?
There are many variables and scenarios, yes.
This, however, is not an excuse not to provide some more data points that help people estimate what they are really getting...
Anyway Tesla has data from all their cars, they could use that.
This really sounds like 'but think about a poor car vendor!'. And a poor car vendor definitely can't build at least 10 pre-production cars, run them with both a lightest and heaviest loads and different patterns and calculate the mean and use it instead of the one with the maximum distance with a minimal load, right?
“That kind of drop” makes it sound like they’re doing something wrong. The EPA test is done at 55, so it makes sense that you get the same number under the same conditions of the test. And since energy usage is exponential vs speed, anything faster will show fast. If they live in hilly and curvy, add that to the math and you’ll find that it’s more likely that you’re the odd ball and will be asked “how slow are you driving to get that kind of mileage” instead.
Don’t know where you live but it’s rare for traffic to move at 55 in many places. Either in city 25-45 or 65+ highway.
It is totally legal and fine to drive the EPA 55mph in places where traffic normally moves at 70, but must also recognize that when semis have to go around those vehicles, they cause ripples through traffic every time and increase risk of collisions for everyone.
I don't get a 40% drop in range even when it's -20 out. I lose about 25 miles range off the top iff the car was cold soaked before I leave, and then I lose about 20% range steady state.
Pretty normal for most EVs to vastly overstate range. Rivian is the exception in my experience. But yes they’re very sensitive to terrain and temperature even if they aren’t exaggerating range.
Why do apologists always resort to “are you holding it wrong”?
This person is using their ev as a car, the same way they would use any other car in their possention. Evs are presented as ice car replacements but when their lack of ability as ice car replacements is pointed out the response is “well maybe you shouldn’t do that. WELL MAYBE THEYRE NOT ICE REPLACEMENTS /rant
Sure, they're so far up in Germans automakers asses, they don't know it any other way.
One of the reasons i quit my 20 year+ membership with them.
I mean - have some bias? Fine with me, i can read between the lines. Come up with ridiculous crap and reasons to favour domestic brands? There is a line, at least for me and many others that do know when they're intentionally ignoring, downrating, downplaying etc. etc. etc.
Another example? German IT magazine "c't" by heise recently featured a test (4/2026, page 16ff.), in cooperation with ADAC, about subscriptions in electric vehicles - actually one thing where Tesla shines (it's a flat 10€ per month, other countries get a 99$ a year deal) - others don't even bother listing prices until you order, for example.
With no single word that test mentioned Tesla (yet, priding themselves having queried 16 brands for information) - only in the final table overview, there indeed is one column for them.
The bias is showing, it's ridiculous and they can, as far as i'm concerned, go the way of the dodo.
My car is 605km in CLTC and 492km in WLTP. And it runs for about 450km before battery totally die, so I have to charge for every about 400~420km. A bit cold and totally no hill here in Shanghai.
So for 900km CLTC, I think it will go like at least 600~650km easily.
Some of the reviews have been able to get as much as 80% of the rated range under ideal conditions.
The CLTC doesn't measure actual highway usage well at all. If you drive a lot on highways and use the air conditioning you could be closer to 60% of rated range.
Recently, because of BYD’s fast-charging technology, I started paying attention to charging speed. Charging to 80% is actually not very difficult, so manufacturers usually like to highlight that number since it’s easier to make it fast. The difficult part is after 80%. Normally, a different charging mode is needed, and the speed has to be reduced. So charging from 80% to nearly 100% usually takes almost as long as charging from low battery to 80%. Only BYD’s selling point is that it can charge up to 97% much faster than other manufacturers.
(xiaomi cars are not bad but they are also famous for marketing skills)
That’s wild with that range (560 miles) it probably gets atleast 300 miles in the worst case scenario. That’s game over for ICE. What a dream. I wish we could have them in the US but my patriotism also tells me that would be the death of almost all US auto companies.
> I wish we could have them in the US but my patriotism also tells me that would be the death of almost all US auto companies.
As an American it is not clear to me that I should care about US auto companies. I care about US auto workers but if they are working at a factory in the US owned by a non-US company making that company's cars that seems like it can take care of the workers.
Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Kia, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Nissan, Subaru, and Mazda all build cars in the US with US workers. Why not add some Chinese companies?
If there is a good reason to keep the big American companies around pass a law that makes any new non-US auto plants here be a joint venture with a big American company, with the American company having a minority ownership and getting a license to make their own version in their own factories of the cars made in the joint venture factory.
My Japanese Toyota has a greater US/Canada parts content percentage than an American Chevrolet, and the former is assembled in the US while the latter is assembled in Mexico. The only advantage US companies seem to have is nostalgia.
The only way the US is going to get better at manufacturing is to learn/steal from the best - which is China now. It was Japan a few decades ago and we made a GM/Toyota joint factory (NUMMI).
Toyota makes a lot of stuff in the US, and US automakers make a lot of stuff overseas. You can't really go by the nationality of the automaker anymore.
That said, there are a lot of reasons (environmental, regulatory, govt subsidies) why US companies can't imitate Chinese companies.
What a lot of people don't understand is that provincial governments in China do not have the ability to tax their citizens, but they are required to provide a host of social services. So what they do is start for profit companies, and use the profits of these companies to fund the state. This is the giant octopus of state owned companies in China. The same is also true of the central government, which does have the power to tax, but in practice is unable to collect income taxes from the vast majority of the population, which is why China's tax share of GDP is so abnormally low and the government is constantly cash-starved. Here, too, what happens is the government starts for profit companies whose revenue goes to the state. Sometimes a holding company is owned by the central government, but there are satellite ownership structures owned by provincial governments, with portions of these sold off to private investors.
Of course many of these state owned companies lose money, but they are subsidized by the central government in a hidden way, which is that state owned banks lend them money which is routinely forgiven, or stealth forgiven via artificially low lending rates and constantly rolling over loans. Effectively it is impossible for these companies to go bankrupt, which is why you ocassionally get huge scandals when the government allowed some real estate companies to go bankrupt in the past. People didn't think such a thing was possible.
So due to the quirks of taxation in China -- basically no one pays income tax -- the government is strongly aligned with for-profit businesses, as these are crucial to funding government operations. That could be anything from a cigarette company owned by a province to an airline, beer maker, construction companies, basically everything. Local officials sit on the board and have outsized ownership stakes, and profits go into the coffers of local and central governments as well as the personal bank accounts of officials.
As it is illegal to be a member of a non-government controlled union in China, the same officials can ensure harmonious labor relations. They also don't need to worry too much about environmental regulations because when the government inspectors arrive to check on the government steel mill, there is a strong incentive to make sure that this, too, is harmonious. And the state owned banks ensure cheap credit is available without too many questions asked.
This is how you can get enormous for profit companies in China that are not in any real danger from market competition, or from government regulation, or from labor strife, or from environmental regulations. Even energy consumption is subsidized.
But what you don't get is high levels of efficiency or labor productivity. This is the middle income trap that China is currently in, and it's not really a model that nations in the west can follow.
As a single example, let's look at China's largest steel maker, China Baowu Steel Group, since the parent brought up steel production and the need to "learn from the best". Baowu is a holding company 100% owned by the central government, but it owns child companies that are owned mostly by various provinces.
In terms of labor productivity, they produce about 550 tons of steel per worker per year (130 million tons of steel and 237,000 workers).
Let's compare that to, say, Nucor Steel in the US, which produces about 1000 tons of steep per worker. Or SSAB in Scandinavia which produces about 600 tons of steel per worker using non-fossil fuel processes. And both of these are under much stricter environmental regulations, and have real unions they need to deal with, and do not get the benefit of borrowing unlimited funds at interest rates that are well below the rate of inflation, and whose loans are routinely forgiven.
Nucor recycles steel, i.e. they don't do full steel making life cycle. They reheat leftovers, not farm to table. SSAB behind but closer to industry lead, like SKR POSCO or JP Nippon Steel. Useful comparison is Bao steel (not baowu) who built green field / automated mill and does 900+ tons on full life cycle steel, i.e. parity/better than POSCO or Nippon. But really the point is plenty of asian manufacturing examples for US to learn tier1 productivity.
On some SOE efficiency, Baowu conglomerate who absorbed sick state players to consolidate, their productivity basically running average of acquisitions due to corporate structure. SKR has their chaebols and Japan their Keirestus for functionally same SOE cleanup / receivership. That's more stability maintenance, which US does via zombie pork barrel job infusions.
I know, it's crazy. I am sure there are political/economic/historical reasons, but the central government does not share tax revenue with the provinces, putting the provincial government in a really tight spot.
Also, the inability of the central government to collect income taxes is something people in the West can't wrap their heads around.
So China uses the income from it's competitive sectors to fund developing technologies. This seems like the ideal way to thrive. All this is centrally owned and controlled and without taxing the people.
This is communism with the efficiency of the interwar USSR era. It seems the humility, altruism and spirituality of the Chinese culture don't let the system fall due to corruption and inefficiency, yet. Amazing. I am curious to see what will happen in a few decades.
In some sense, it's a nice problem to have -- sure you need to massively raise taxes, but you are only collecting 9% of GDP in taxes, so it's just a matter of getting up to the norm for advanced economies. It's not like your spending is out of control and you have to cut tons of social services to balance the budget.
But, it's still a political problem, because people don't like paying more in taxes anymore than they like social spending cuts.
However this decision to raise revenue through the corporate sector rather than taxing households introduces a host of problems by aligning the financial interests of corporations with the state.
So downstream of this taxation issue are many ripples.
The profits of auto manufacturing are distributed to US stock holders. The same won’t be true for foreign companies. For very large industries, this is a large amount of capital either staying or leaving the US.
Also, it’s unlikely that the low prices could be maintained while also paying US labor and US safety standards. If they can then it means we’ve lost our competitive edge completely in the manufacturing sector. At that point we’d be reliant on foreign companies to operate locally here.
Allocating a large amount of capital to losing/less competitive companies is quite the antithesis of what the USA's capitalism was about. Protecting the big ones comes at the cost of unfair competition to new competitors that could take over them. Tesla is the only auto company from the US who managed it, and in a short amount of time is also falling into the same complacency trap.
Why is it ok nowadays to artificially prop up these companies? It has only led to the stagnation of US auto manufacturers, as it's expected when competition is curtailed.
The same can be seen happening in Germany and its auto manufacturers, they are on the same trend albeit slower, in my opinion they have one last shot to turn it around before being out-competed and requiring the state to continuously protect and sustain them as the USA has done.
I'm extremely unsympathetic to US auto manufacturers. They have fumbled every time they possible could my entire life. They deserved to go under from 2008.
Let companies that actually want to innovate rise from the ashes.
I would be OK if we tariff or effectively ban Chinese EVs (as is the case now) for a little while to give our auto industry time to retool and catch up. The current situation with a ban but no long term EV adoption plan in place is just incredibly short sighted. We could end up like certain developing nations that has an indigenous auto industry that are nothing more than glorified assembler of foreign cars or the American consumer continues to buy cars that are more expensive and less performant to use and operate while making all of us vulnerable to oil price shocks.
So instead of being able to buy a 10K BYD car, Americans have to buy 30k cars that are inferior in many aspects.
It would be easier to just pay fired American Auto workers directly over protecting inefficient auto companies. I have no sympathy for Ford who keeps making the F-350 or whatever bigger and more expensive every single year. Nobody needs a $90,000 truck
The only way to get American auto manufacturers to step up their game is completion. Worked when the Japanese cars came, American car quality improved dramatically in response because it had to.
Even Ford has fallen out heavily from just 20 years ago. It used to be much more common to see the Ford badge in Europe when the Ka, Fiesta, Focus line-up was around.
Thinking now the only times I see the Ford badge are on work vehicles like vans or the odd Mustang Mach-E (well, not literally the Ford badge but the Mustang one).
I haven't seen (or at least noticed) any of the new cars in the Ford line-up in Sweden: Puma, Capri, Kuga, Bronco, etc.
And the quality's back through the floor again. How many recalls have the domestic slovenly-built Big Three had to put up with in the last ~6 years? Ford alone is showing just how bad the UAW's building on the factory floor.
The amount of trim and garbage I've had to take our domestic-built Ford Escape back in for service and factory bodge fixes for is staggeringly high. Meanwhile, my Mexican-built Fusion? Rock solid.
I wouldn't encourage that and I don't think it will be necessary. In Europe, most Chinese brands aren't selling exactly well, while domestic manufacturers really sped up their timelines and pushed for competitive pricing, so generally I don't think there's much of a demand for Chinese EVs, except for the genuinely nice brands, like XPeng and Nio.
There's also the issue, it that in most places in Europe outside of Scandinavia, the charger infrastructure is lacking, and regular people are quite rightly averse of getting an EV if you step out of the tech bubble.
I have a friend who's a high-level manager in automotive retail, and he said he thinks Chinese EVs will be like Chinese smartphones - yes they are nice, and cheaper, but still the market looks like 70% of it is controlled by Apple/Samsung, and the rest of the manufacturers fight over what's left
I don't know about EVs specifically, but there seems to be demand in Europe for Chinese PHEVs: "Chinese automakers nearly double Europe market share to 8% in February as PHEVs drive growth" [1].
I mean it's a bit hard to take away hard data from just monthly sales across the whole of Europe. 10% is a lot, but far from overwhelming, and individual popular models can create big changes in overall stats.
For example, the Brits love their SUVs, and the Jaecoo undercut the market, so that particular model has been selling very well.
I think we should wait and see for stats to stabilize over time. Chinese smartphones did something similar - initially they were way better for way cheaper, but other manufactures adapted, so they failed to grab huge chunks of the market.
The report uses the number of newly registered vehicles AFAIU and correlates them to the total % of Chinese vehicles sold, so that's not really the monthly sales but the general trend, no?
Market cap amounts to 10% as an absolute figure but that isn't what I find most important from reading that article - it is the trend I find intriguing, which doubles or triples by each year, so if such or similar trend continues, Chinese manufacturers will penetrate into the market substantially more.
They innovate at much higher pace at much lower price points and at pretty high quality as the evidence we have so far suggests. So IMO it's going to be hell of a ride for European manufacturers to adapt - they need to start moving faster and deliver at much lower cost. This means complete restructuring which I find hard to believe it will happen any time soon.
Well, I wouldn't extrapolate much from this. Look at what happened to entry level EVs - brands like BYD and MG undercut VW, Kia and others, and their cars came fully loaded with extras missing from Western models.
In response VW and co. dropped prices, so Chinese cars are not that much cheaper again.
Just to understand where I'm coming from - if the Chinese would put out a better car for less money, I would buy it in a heartbeat. But from listening to reviews, as well expert opinion, you don't get better stuff for the same money just by buying Chinese
The charging infrastructure has changed a lot in the last few years. You can very comfortably travel all the way across Europe without even thinking about where to charge. There is a Tesla Supercharger every 50 miles or even less all the way from the Netherlands via Germany to Austria. And the same via Belgium to the South of France. And that's only Tesla, you also have Ionity building chargers, and Fastned, and you see more and more chargers at Shell and BP petrol stations.
It's been pretty great the past 3 years at least, just last summer I drove from Stockholm -> North Italy and had no anxiety about finding chargers on our way.
Here in spain i suddenly see a lot of them (chinese brands) and not in a bader meinhof way. They are advertising more and i see a lot more on the streets. I was picked up from the station by a BYD. Not sure about the numbers, but something is definitely happening.
The current gen SU7 is already available with an 830km CLTC range but doesn't actually get that range in real world driving.
This is about 9% better, so you could take the current real-world range and increase it by 9% and probably get a decent estimate for the normal driving condition range.
You will not get 560 miles of range out of this vehicle. The typical use is probably closer to your initial worst case guess at around 350-400 miles if I had to guess. Worst case scenario would be even worse than that. The numbers are good, but they're not in a completely different league
They are in a completely different league when you account for the other full half of the story you missed:
"The company claims 5C supercharging capability, with a 10% to 80% charge completing in about 11 minutes."
Assume your worst case of 350 miles, 80% of that is 280 miles. Getting to 280 miles of no-exaggeration-real-world range in 11 minutes is actually game changing.
An 11 minute break after each chunk of 280 real miles of continuous driving does not feel like an interruption on a road-trip. 33 minutes every 200 miles definitely does.
11 minutes once per week to cover 5 days of 30 real miles of each-way commute is a forgettable amount of time.
It is in a completely different league as soon as you get 250 miles+ in the worst case scenario. I have an EV and 300 miles per charge is amazing. No American companies offer this right now.
Rivian's R1* max battery offers an EPA over 400, anecdotal experience has taught me it's actually around 325-350 on the highway with heating/AC, but still.
I believe they'd be able to sell their vehicles in the US if they were willing to build it here (or Mexico/Canada due to USMA).
If that were the case they wouldn't have the cheap Chinese labor and I doubt the Chinese government would continue to subsidize US build vehicles for the US market.
It'd still be a compelling vehicle but it wouldn't be starting at $33k.
There's a non-zero possibility of that actually happening. It's already happening in Europe. Trump has mentioned the idea of a JV with Chinese companies. It is possible for this to happen in the upcoming Trump-Xi meeting. Chinese companies have started pursuing more foreign investments as a way to avoid "involution" -- fierce and unprofitable domestic competition. Their profit margins when going aboard is considerably better than at home. Maybe it won't be $33k but it might be $45k, which for a car with those kinds of specs, it would be a steal. China's EV advantage doesn't come just from labor costs but also from vertical integration of the entire supply chain. The mining stage is pretty low margin but China does it because it enables the next stage, which is batteries where profits are better, and then you get to even more profitable stage with cars, etc.
Just a dumb estimate. I'm just making an uneducated guess on what the car would cost if it was assembled using American labor with Chinese parts. I honestly don't know what the actual price would be. It's very possible for it to be 33K.
nah. electric is and always was a political fantasy. Perhaps its day will come, electric cars are here to stay and will find their niche, but the car manufacturers are reluctantly admitting that so is ICE. Electric cars can't compete on the figures, electricity is expensive, at service stations it's exorbitant. The electricity infrastructure is woefully inadequete to handle the large numbers needed. Not to mention enviromental benefits are not that huge either.
My EV costs 1/4 pence per mile in fuel compared to my diesel - money saved.
I charge at home meaning I no longer have to visit a petrol station once a week - time saved.
It’s faster than my diesel. It preheats automatically so more time saved scraping ice off my windows every winter.
The national grid in the UK is actually running lower demand than it did 20 years ago due to efficiency improvements, and nighttime charging controlled by my power company means they can balance it as they need - so infrastructure is fine.
The environmental benefits mean that my car was break-even on carbon emissions after roughly 15k miles.
This is mind bogglingly delusional while people are staring at spiking oil prices... and even when oil prices were at record lows it cost 5x to fill up my wife's ICE car as it did to charge my EV.
Interesting that they prominently feature Lidar as an upgrade over whatever Tesla has. Sheds some light on the whole drama with lidar vs camera in self-driving.
Was anyone able to discern from this (or official sources) what the actual battery capacity, and estimated efficiency / consumption is under ideal conditions?
(e.g. 100 kWh, 400 miles -> 10 kWh / 100 miles or 4 miles / kWh)
PRC EVs are less subsidized per vehicle than US. The context is PRC subsidies structurally drive down manufacturing costs vs US subsidies remains largely sunk cost pork barrel job programs. An unsubsidized PRC car is still going to be significantly cheaper than a subsidized US car in same tier.
Chinese taxpayer subsidize a sector they find important, so what? Good for us consumers, especially the non Chinese ones that don't even get to see the bill in their taxes.
US automakers too have received plenty of subsidies, bailouts, tax credits, manufacturing credits, etc, etc.
You shouldn't care. Just like how a VC is willing to sponsor a startup to sell their products at a loss, you should be milking that as much as possible as a logical consumer.
I’m having trouble getting what you are trying to convey here because Tesla has also been heavily subsidized by the US government. Have you ever ridden an EV from China? Because I have myself many times and really want to know what your complaints here are?
US media has been telling me China is bad, I as someone born and grew up in China also know China did bad things, but what is it exactly that made you hostile to things related to China?
China can and will execute executives of companies if their products are shown to be dangerous and embarrass the state.
So on the one hand while a certain level of disregard for safety is built into Chinese production, there are lines even Chinese manufacturers won't cross.
The range is Chinese CLTC range, which is a more generous rating than the US range ratings.
It's an impressive range number, but don't try to compare it directly to range numbers for other EVs.
The current gen SU7 is available with an 830km CLTC range. If you drive one on real roads, you will not get 830km of range. :)
The US ranges are also way overestimated.
My Tesla long range gets about 60% of advertised range in real world conditions. I'm talking stop signs every block, mountains you need to drive across, insanely hot days, i.e. the real world.
I knew that would be the case, but I really wish there was a crackdown on this. Advertised range should be the mean of the distribution, not the max.
In fact EV manufacturers should be required to publish the distribution and they should have to pay a KL divergence penalty on it that will be distributed to EV buyers as rebates. It would also require the courts to learn about KL divergence, which I would really love to happen. We need countries run by engineers, not clowns.
> Advertised range should be the mean of the distribution, not the max.
Distribution of what? Assuming you mean the distribution of driving range achieved 'in the real world', how would that work before a car is sold? How often would it have to be updated in their advertising material? Over what sort of area would the distribution be calculated? How would anyone know if the advertised range of two different cars was even comparable?
Whilst the standardised tests could be improved, they are still the best way to compare products.
> should have to pay a KL divergence penalty on it that will be distributed to EV buyers as rebates
I get about 15% more range than advertised, should I have to pay a penalty for this?
There are many variables and scenarios, yes. This, however, is not an excuse not to provide some more data points that help people estimate what they are really getting...
Anyway Tesla has data from all their cars, they could use that.
I think we now have the mathematical tools to compute that correctly, given some vehicle parameters. This is not rocket science !
Yes factor all of those things in
This really sounds like 'but think about a poor car vendor!'. And a poor car vendor definitely can't build at least 10 pre-production cars, run them with both a lightest and heaviest loads and different patterns and calculate the mean and use it instead of the one with the maximum distance with a minimal load, right?
> The US ranges are also way overestimated.
The same car measured under CLTC would have an even higher rated range.
A Chinese car rated under American regs would see a lower rated range.
You don't get real mileage out of the declared Tesla ones either.
Yep, I get 240 mile range on my 330 mile range Model Y.
How fast are you driving to get that kind of drop? That's a lot worse than what I experience. I find I get the EPA range driving 55 in the summer.
“That kind of drop” makes it sound like they’re doing something wrong. The EPA test is done at 55, so it makes sense that you get the same number under the same conditions of the test. And since energy usage is exponential vs speed, anything faster will show fast. If they live in hilly and curvy, add that to the math and you’ll find that it’s more likely that you’re the odd ball and will be asked “how slow are you driving to get that kind of mileage” instead.
Don’t know where you live but it’s rare for traffic to move at 55 in many places. Either in city 25-45 or 65+ highway.
It is totally legal and fine to drive the EPA 55mph in places where traffic normally moves at 70, but must also recognize that when semis have to go around those vehicles, they cause ripples through traffic every time and increase risk of collisions for everyone.
If you live anywhere will hills, wind, or cold weather you'll experience this
I don't get a 40% drop in range even when it's -20 out. I lose about 25 miles range off the top iff the car was cold soaked before I leave, and then I lose about 20% range steady state.
Pretty normal for most EVs to vastly overstate range. Rivian is the exception in my experience. But yes they’re very sensitive to terrain and temperature even if they aren’t exaggerating range.
Why do apologists always resort to “are you holding it wrong”?
This person is using their ev as a car, the same way they would use any other car in their possention. Evs are presented as ice car replacements but when their lack of ability as ice car replacements is pointed out the response is “well maybe you shouldn’t do that. WELL MAYBE THEYRE NOT ICE REPLACEMENTS /rant
Asking how fast they're going is a reasonable question. If they're driving over 75mph, a 40% range drop is not surprising.
An ICE car comes nowhere near it's EPA rated mpg ratings at over 75mph either.
AAA rates Tesla Y better than most.
https://www.aaa.asn.au/2025/12/new-test-results-to-help-ev-b...
AAA is the Australian Automobile Association
Well and according to ADAC (German Motorists Association), Tesla isn't even in the Top10
https://www.adac.de/rund-ums-fahrzeug/elektromobilitaet/elek...
Sure, they're so far up in Germans automakers asses, they don't know it any other way.
One of the reasons i quit my 20 year+ membership with them.
I mean - have some bias? Fine with me, i can read between the lines. Come up with ridiculous crap and reasons to favour domestic brands? There is a line, at least for me and many others that do know when they're intentionally ignoring, downrating, downplaying etc. etc. etc.
Another example? German IT magazine "c't" by heise recently featured a test (4/2026, page 16ff.), in cooperation with ADAC, about subscriptions in electric vehicles - actually one thing where Tesla shines (it's a flat 10€ per month, other countries get a 99$ a year deal) - others don't even bother listing prices until you order, for example.
With no single word that test mentioned Tesla (yet, priding themselves having queried 16 brands for information) - only in the final table overview, there indeed is one column for them.
The bias is showing, it's ridiculous and they can, as far as i'm concerned, go the way of the dodo.
Are you saying that the numbers published in that article are fake?
If they aren’t fake, it’s pretty obvious why Tesla doesn’t get much of a mention.
Sorry you just make some accusations based on vibes.
There are also Corean Cars in the Top 10, which makes sense as the Australian Article also rates them quite good.
Do you have any real criticism on their standardized range test?
The Tesla would have higher CLTC rated mileage too.
My point is that you can’t compare ratings done to different standards.
Chinese CLTC exaggerates real world range a lot more than any other major measure.
what will you get?
My car is 605km in CLTC and 492km in WLTP. And it runs for about 450km before battery totally die, so I have to charge for every about 400~420km. A bit cold and totally no hill here in Shanghai.
So for 900km CLTC, I think it will go like at least 600~650km easily.
Some of the reviews have been able to get as much as 80% of the rated range under ideal conditions.
The CLTC doesn't measure actual highway usage well at all. If you drive a lot on highways and use the air conditioning you could be closer to 60% of rated range.
Article says that'll be about 400 miles in the real world.
~30% less. So about 600km. Still a very good number.
300-400 miles depending on conditions
That's still phenomenal imho.
Recently, because of BYD’s fast-charging technology, I started paying attention to charging speed. Charging to 80% is actually not very difficult, so manufacturers usually like to highlight that number since it’s easier to make it fast. The difficult part is after 80%. Normally, a different charging mode is needed, and the speed has to be reduced. So charging from 80% to nearly 100% usually takes almost as long as charging from low battery to 80%. Only BYD’s selling point is that it can charge up to 97% much faster than other manufacturers.
(xiaomi cars are not bad but they are also famous for marketing skills)
Is that 97% really just the 80% of the full battery capacity?
That’s wild with that range (560 miles) it probably gets atleast 300 miles in the worst case scenario. That’s game over for ICE. What a dream. I wish we could have them in the US but my patriotism also tells me that would be the death of almost all US auto companies.
> I wish we could have them in the US but my patriotism also tells me that would be the death of almost all US auto companies.
As an American it is not clear to me that I should care about US auto companies. I care about US auto workers but if they are working at a factory in the US owned by a non-US company making that company's cars that seems like it can take care of the workers.
Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Kia, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Nissan, Subaru, and Mazda all build cars in the US with US workers. Why not add some Chinese companies?
If there is a good reason to keep the big American companies around pass a law that makes any new non-US auto plants here be a joint venture with a big American company, with the American company having a minority ownership and getting a license to make their own version in their own factories of the cars made in the joint venture factory.
My Japanese Toyota has a greater US/Canada parts content percentage than an American Chevrolet, and the former is assembled in the US while the latter is assembled in Mexico. The only advantage US companies seem to have is nostalgia.
The only way the US is going to get better at manufacturing is to learn/steal from the best - which is China now. It was Japan a few decades ago and we made a GM/Toyota joint factory (NUMMI).
Toyota makes a lot of stuff in the US, and US automakers make a lot of stuff overseas. You can't really go by the nationality of the automaker anymore.
That said, there are a lot of reasons (environmental, regulatory, govt subsidies) why US companies can't imitate Chinese companies.
What a lot of people don't understand is that provincial governments in China do not have the ability to tax their citizens, but they are required to provide a host of social services. So what they do is start for profit companies, and use the profits of these companies to fund the state. This is the giant octopus of state owned companies in China. The same is also true of the central government, which does have the power to tax, but in practice is unable to collect income taxes from the vast majority of the population, which is why China's tax share of GDP is so abnormally low and the government is constantly cash-starved. Here, too, what happens is the government starts for profit companies whose revenue goes to the state. Sometimes a holding company is owned by the central government, but there are satellite ownership structures owned by provincial governments, with portions of these sold off to private investors.
Of course many of these state owned companies lose money, but they are subsidized by the central government in a hidden way, which is that state owned banks lend them money which is routinely forgiven, or stealth forgiven via artificially low lending rates and constantly rolling over loans. Effectively it is impossible for these companies to go bankrupt, which is why you ocassionally get huge scandals when the government allowed some real estate companies to go bankrupt in the past. People didn't think such a thing was possible.
So due to the quirks of taxation in China -- basically no one pays income tax -- the government is strongly aligned with for-profit businesses, as these are crucial to funding government operations. That could be anything from a cigarette company owned by a province to an airline, beer maker, construction companies, basically everything. Local officials sit on the board and have outsized ownership stakes, and profits go into the coffers of local and central governments as well as the personal bank accounts of officials.
As it is illegal to be a member of a non-government controlled union in China, the same officials can ensure harmonious labor relations. They also don't need to worry too much about environmental regulations because when the government inspectors arrive to check on the government steel mill, there is a strong incentive to make sure that this, too, is harmonious. And the state owned banks ensure cheap credit is available without too many questions asked.
This is how you can get enormous for profit companies in China that are not in any real danger from market competition, or from government regulation, or from labor strife, or from environmental regulations. Even energy consumption is subsidized.
But what you don't get is high levels of efficiency or labor productivity. This is the middle income trap that China is currently in, and it's not really a model that nations in the west can follow.
As a single example, let's look at China's largest steel maker, China Baowu Steel Group, since the parent brought up steel production and the need to "learn from the best". Baowu is a holding company 100% owned by the central government, but it owns child companies that are owned mostly by various provinces.
In terms of labor productivity, they produce about 550 tons of steel per worker per year (130 million tons of steel and 237,000 workers).
Let's compare that to, say, Nucor Steel in the US, which produces about 1000 tons of steep per worker. Or SSAB in Scandinavia which produces about 600 tons of steel per worker using non-fossil fuel processes. And both of these are under much stricter environmental regulations, and have real unions they need to deal with, and do not get the benefit of borrowing unlimited funds at interest rates that are well below the rate of inflation, and whose loans are routinely forgiven.
> single example
Nucor recycles steel, i.e. they don't do full steel making life cycle. They reheat leftovers, not farm to table. SSAB behind but closer to industry lead, like SKR POSCO or JP Nippon Steel. Useful comparison is Bao steel (not baowu) who built green field / automated mill and does 900+ tons on full life cycle steel, i.e. parity/better than POSCO or Nippon. But really the point is plenty of asian manufacturing examples for US to learn tier1 productivity.
On some SOE efficiency, Baowu conglomerate who absorbed sick state players to consolidate, their productivity basically running average of acquisitions due to corporate structure. SKR has their chaebols and Japan their Keirestus for functionally same SOE cleanup / receivership. That's more stability maintenance, which US does via zombie pork barrel job infusions.
Thanks for your comment!
I thought that Chinese local governments receive central government tax revenue shares and sell/develop land property as main income source.
May I ask where you got some of the information from (e.g. re ownership and taxation structure in China)? Any sources?
They do not.
I know, it's crazy. I am sure there are political/economic/historical reasons, but the central government does not share tax revenue with the provinces, putting the provincial government in a really tight spot.
Also, the inability of the central government to collect income taxes is something people in the West can't wrap their heads around.
For information about this, look at: https://china.ucsd.edu/_files/2023-report_shih_local-governm...
https://rhg.com/research/the-myth-of-chinas-fiscal-space/
So China uses the income from it's competitive sectors to fund developing technologies. This seems like the ideal way to thrive. All this is centrally owned and controlled and without taxing the people.
This is communism with the efficiency of the interwar USSR era. It seems the humility, altruism and spirituality of the Chinese culture don't let the system fall due to corruption and inefficiency, yet. Amazing. I am curious to see what will happen in a few decades.
Super interesting! Do you have any sources
Here is an academic paper describing China's dependence on corporate taxes:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28051/w280...
Here is a good explainer of the revenue issues and why China can't seem to collect taxes from households:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMaWegICQHA
In some sense, it's a nice problem to have -- sure you need to massively raise taxes, but you are only collecting 9% of GDP in taxes, so it's just a matter of getting up to the norm for advanced economies. It's not like your spending is out of control and you have to cut tons of social services to balance the budget.
But, it's still a political problem, because people don't like paying more in taxes anymore than they like social spending cuts.
However this decision to raise revenue through the corporate sector rather than taxing households introduces a host of problems by aligning the financial interests of corporations with the state.
So downstream of this taxation issue are many ripples.
They will scream national security.
While kidnapping foreign head of states, threatening allies and launching wars in the middle east.
The profits of auto manufacturing are distributed to US stock holders. The same won’t be true for foreign companies. For very large industries, this is a large amount of capital either staying or leaving the US.
Also, it’s unlikely that the low prices could be maintained while also paying US labor and US safety standards. If they can then it means we’ve lost our competitive edge completely in the manufacturing sector. At that point we’d be reliant on foreign companies to operate locally here.
Yes but quality of life gets better for Americans because they can get a superior product at a cheaper price.
Protectionism is how you end up with a country like North Korea on the extreme end.
Allocating a large amount of capital to losing/less competitive companies is quite the antithesis of what the USA's capitalism was about. Protecting the big ones comes at the cost of unfair competition to new competitors that could take over them. Tesla is the only auto company from the US who managed it, and in a short amount of time is also falling into the same complacency trap.
Why is it ok nowadays to artificially prop up these companies? It has only led to the stagnation of US auto manufacturers, as it's expected when competition is curtailed.
The same can be seen happening in Germany and its auto manufacturers, they are on the same trend albeit slower, in my opinion they have one last shot to turn it around before being out-competed and requiring the state to continuously protect and sustain them as the USA has done.
I'm extremely unsympathetic to US auto manufacturers. They have fumbled every time they possible could my entire life. They deserved to go under from 2008.
Let companies that actually want to innovate rise from the ashes.
I would be OK if we tariff or effectively ban Chinese EVs (as is the case now) for a little while to give our auto industry time to retool and catch up. The current situation with a ban but no long term EV adoption plan in place is just incredibly short sighted. We could end up like certain developing nations that has an indigenous auto industry that are nothing more than glorified assembler of foreign cars or the American consumer continues to buy cars that are more expensive and less performant to use and operate while making all of us vulnerable to oil price shocks.
Ok.
So instead of being able to buy a 10K BYD car, Americans have to buy 30k cars that are inferior in many aspects.
It would be easier to just pay fired American Auto workers directly over protecting inefficient auto companies. I have no sympathy for Ford who keeps making the F-350 or whatever bigger and more expensive every single year. Nobody needs a $90,000 truck
Customers keep buying those trucks though. Why wouldn't you sell a product to a market that continues to purchase?
There are smaller, cheaper trucks, suvs, sedans, etc. $100k trucks make a lot of money, so Ford keeps building them.
Ford could sell 15k EVs, they just choose not to.
Why should ford be protected from Chinese car manufacturers who can make better and cheaper cars.
A 143 kWh battery pack alone costs around $10k. I don’t think they can realistically sell $15k EV trucks.
The only way to get American auto manufacturers to step up their game is completion. Worked when the Japanese cars came, American car quality improved dramatically in response because it had to.
Still no one wants American Cars outside the US, with the exception of Ford and Tesla
Even Ford has fallen out heavily from just 20 years ago. It used to be much more common to see the Ford badge in Europe when the Ka, Fiesta, Focus line-up was around.
Thinking now the only times I see the Ford badge are on work vehicles like vans or the odd Mustang Mach-E (well, not literally the Ford badge but the Mustang one).
I haven't seen (or at least noticed) any of the new cars in the Ford line-up in Sweden: Puma, Capri, Kuga, Bronco, etc.
I see more and more Douchebags driving with a Pick-Up in Germany.
Those cars doesn't fit at all into Europe, but it is what it is
Otherwise it's mainly Pumas and Vans, yeah.
And the quality's back through the floor again. How many recalls have the domestic slovenly-built Big Three had to put up with in the last ~6 years? Ford alone is showing just how bad the UAW's building on the factory floor.
The amount of trim and garbage I've had to take our domestic-built Ford Escape back in for service and factory bodge fixes for is staggeringly high. Meanwhile, my Mexican-built Fusion? Rock solid.
I wouldn't encourage that and I don't think it will be necessary. In Europe, most Chinese brands aren't selling exactly well, while domestic manufacturers really sped up their timelines and pushed for competitive pricing, so generally I don't think there's much of a demand for Chinese EVs, except for the genuinely nice brands, like XPeng and Nio.
There's also the issue, it that in most places in Europe outside of Scandinavia, the charger infrastructure is lacking, and regular people are quite rightly averse of getting an EV if you step out of the tech bubble.
I have a friend who's a high-level manager in automotive retail, and he said he thinks Chinese EVs will be like Chinese smartphones - yes they are nice, and cheaper, but still the market looks like 70% of it is controlled by Apple/Samsung, and the rest of the manufacturers fight over what's left
I don't know about EVs specifically, but there seems to be demand in Europe for Chinese PHEVs: "Chinese automakers nearly double Europe market share to 8% in February as PHEVs drive growth" [1].
[1] https://www.autonews.com/retail/sales/ane-europe-chinese-feb...
> In Europe, most Chinese brands aren't selling exactly well
https://www.carscoops.com/2026/01/chinese-car-sales-europe-2... says pretty much the opposite. Maybe more detailed analysis is provided by https://chinaevhome.com/2026/01/20/chinese-automakers-europe....
Both of them align what I personally see on the streets, more and more Chinese brands, especially BYD, MG and Geely.
I mean it's a bit hard to take away hard data from just monthly sales across the whole of Europe. 10% is a lot, but far from overwhelming, and individual popular models can create big changes in overall stats.
For example, the Brits love their SUVs, and the Jaecoo undercut the market, so that particular model has been selling very well.
I think we should wait and see for stats to stabilize over time. Chinese smartphones did something similar - initially they were way better for way cheaper, but other manufactures adapted, so they failed to grab huge chunks of the market.
The report uses the number of newly registered vehicles AFAIU and correlates them to the total % of Chinese vehicles sold, so that's not really the monthly sales but the general trend, no?
Market cap amounts to 10% as an absolute figure but that isn't what I find most important from reading that article - it is the trend I find intriguing, which doubles or triples by each year, so if such or similar trend continues, Chinese manufacturers will penetrate into the market substantially more.
They innovate at much higher pace at much lower price points and at pretty high quality as the evidence we have so far suggests. So IMO it's going to be hell of a ride for European manufacturers to adapt - they need to start moving faster and deliver at much lower cost. This means complete restructuring which I find hard to believe it will happen any time soon.
Well, I wouldn't extrapolate much from this. Look at what happened to entry level EVs - brands like BYD and MG undercut VW, Kia and others, and their cars came fully loaded with extras missing from Western models.
In response VW and co. dropped prices, so Chinese cars are not that much cheaper again.
Just to understand where I'm coming from - if the Chinese would put out a better car for less money, I would buy it in a heartbeat. But from listening to reviews, as well expert opinion, you don't get better stuff for the same money just by buying Chinese
Here's a comparison video for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1id5MpFLEw
I've heard that mechanics raised similar concenrns about the quality of rust protection as well as the thickness of steel on BYDs.
Let's wait until these cars are 5 to 10 years old.
The charging infrastructure has changed a lot in the last few years. You can very comfortably travel all the way across Europe without even thinking about where to charge. There is a Tesla Supercharger every 50 miles or even less all the way from the Netherlands via Germany to Austria. And the same via Belgium to the South of France. And that's only Tesla, you also have Ionity building chargers, and Fastned, and you see more and more chargers at Shell and BP petrol stations.
It's been pretty great the past 3 years at least, just last summer I drove from Stockholm -> North Italy and had no anxiety about finding chargers on our way.
Here in spain i suddenly see a lot of them (chinese brands) and not in a bader meinhof way. They are advertising more and i see a lot more on the streets. I was picked up from the station by a BYD. Not sure about the numbers, but something is definitely happening.
The current gen SU7 is already available with an 830km CLTC range but doesn't actually get that range in real world driving.
This is about 9% better, so you could take the current real-world range and increase it by 9% and probably get a decent estimate for the normal driving condition range.
You will not get 560 miles of range out of this vehicle. The typical use is probably closer to your initial worst case guess at around 350-400 miles if I had to guess. Worst case scenario would be even worse than that. The numbers are good, but they're not in a completely different league
They are in a completely different league when you account for the other full half of the story you missed:
"The company claims 5C supercharging capability, with a 10% to 80% charge completing in about 11 minutes."
Assume your worst case of 350 miles, 80% of that is 280 miles. Getting to 280 miles of no-exaggeration-real-world range in 11 minutes is actually game changing.
An 11 minute break after each chunk of 280 real miles of continuous driving does not feel like an interruption on a road-trip. 33 minutes every 200 miles definitely does.
11 minutes once per week to cover 5 days of 30 real miles of each-way commute is a forgettable amount of time.
The time/mile charge ratio is actually the story.
I‘be been following this space long enough to know that when you see this line:
> The company claims
You shouldn’t ignore that important detail. The company claims a lot of things.
Let’s wait until we actually see what the production models do as measured in real tests.
That is good advice. I think it was the right opening position.
It is in a completely different league as soon as you get 250 miles+ in the worst case scenario. I have an EV and 300 miles per charge is amazing. No American companies offer this right now.
Rivian's R1* max battery offers an EPA over 400, anecdotal experience has taught me it's actually around 325-350 on the highway with heating/AC, but still.
I believe they'd be able to sell their vehicles in the US if they were willing to build it here (or Mexico/Canada due to USMA).
If that were the case they wouldn't have the cheap Chinese labor and I doubt the Chinese government would continue to subsidize US build vehicles for the US market.
It'd still be a compelling vehicle but it wouldn't be starting at $33k.
There's a non-zero possibility of that actually happening. It's already happening in Europe. Trump has mentioned the idea of a JV with Chinese companies. It is possible for this to happen in the upcoming Trump-Xi meeting. Chinese companies have started pursuing more foreign investments as a way to avoid "involution" -- fierce and unprofitable domestic competition. Their profit margins when going aboard is considerably better than at home. Maybe it won't be $33k but it might be $45k, which for a car with those kinds of specs, it would be a steal. China's EV advantage doesn't come just from labor costs but also from vertical integration of the entire supply chain. The mining stage is pretty low margin but China does it because it enables the next stage, which is batteries where profits are better, and then you get to even more profitable stage with cars, etc.
Why 45k and not 33k, if we ignore the tariff issue? It being 33k would be a good thing, 45k would miss the point.
Just a dumb estimate. I'm just making an uneducated guess on what the car would cost if it was assembled using American labor with Chinese parts. I honestly don't know what the actual price would be. It's very possible for it to be 33K.
Fair enough. I can imagine regulatory hurdles that might increase it, but could imagine a potential light touch partnership to help things along.
> If that were the case they wouldn't have the cheap Chinese labor
I don't think labour costs are much of a consideration anymore. It's 2026; robots do most of the work.
People are completely oblivious about modern auto making.
And Mexican labor at this point is cheaper than Chinese. Makes sense to me.
BYD was planning to do that, but Trump said he'd put 100-200% tariffs on Chinese cars made in Mexico and BYD cancelled those plans.
nah. electric is and always was a political fantasy. Perhaps its day will come, electric cars are here to stay and will find their niche, but the car manufacturers are reluctantly admitting that so is ICE. Electric cars can't compete on the figures, electricity is expensive, at service stations it's exorbitant. The electricity infrastructure is woefully inadequete to handle the large numbers needed. Not to mention enviromental benefits are not that huge either.
> Electric cars can't compete on the figures
My EV costs 1/4 pence per mile in fuel compared to my diesel - money saved.
I charge at home meaning I no longer have to visit a petrol station once a week - time saved.
It’s faster than my diesel. It preheats automatically so more time saved scraping ice off my windows every winter.
The national grid in the UK is actually running lower demand than it did 20 years ago due to efficiency improvements, and nighttime charging controlled by my power company means they can balance it as they need - so infrastructure is fine.
The environmental benefits mean that my car was break-even on carbon emissions after roughly 15k miles.
Seems like it competes on figures just fine.
This is mind bogglingly delusional while people are staring at spiking oil prices... and even when oil prices were at record lows it cost 5x to fill up my wife's ICE car as it did to charge my EV.
Interesting that they prominently feature Lidar as an upgrade over whatever Tesla has. Sheds some light on the whole drama with lidar vs camera in self-driving.
the sensors on my robot vacuum are an upgrade over whatever Tesla has
When you give a snake oil salesman the reign over technical decisions…
Those are generally lidar so that fits in with the above :)
Just 2D and much lower resolution and speed obviously
Tesla unnecessarily backed themselves into a corner there with Musks ego and publicly announcing no lidar stance imo
And yet FSD is the best adas so
Was anyone able to discern from this (or official sources) what the actual battery capacity, and estimated efficiency / consumption is under ideal conditions?
(e.g. 100 kWh, 400 miles -> 10 kWh / 100 miles or 4 miles / kWh)
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Insta-banned in the US for "national security", not because it's a better car than anything the US can produce. /s
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https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/02/27/elon-mu...
https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/117956/documents/...
PRC EVs are less subsidized per vehicle than US. The context is PRC subsidies structurally drive down manufacturing costs vs US subsidies remains largely sunk cost pork barrel job programs. An unsubsidized PRC car is still going to be significantly cheaper than a subsidized US car in same tier.
Current Chinese EV subsidies are on the order of 10%.
And Tesla also receives subsidies from China because of their Shanghai gigafactory.
For the Chinese customer it is not a headline, it is an actual price tag
Why do I care for the context?
Chinese taxpayer subsidize a sector they find important, so what? Good for us consumers, especially the non Chinese ones that don't even get to see the bill in their taxes.
US automakers too have received plenty of subsidies, bailouts, tax credits, manufacturing credits, etc, etc.
You shouldn't care. Just like how a VC is willing to sponsor a startup to sell their products at a loss, you should be milking that as much as possible as a logical consumer.
I’m having trouble getting what you are trying to convey here because Tesla has also been heavily subsidized by the US government. Have you ever ridden an EV from China? Because I have myself many times and really want to know what your complaints here are?
US media has been telling me China is bad, I as someone born and grew up in China also know China did bad things, but what is it exactly that made you hostile to things related to China?
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Hope you look up what Ford's Ceo had to say about Xiaomi cars. I have a feeling that you won't like it.
link it if you have a good source smh
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a62694325/ford-ceo-jim-far...
China can and will execute executives of companies if their products are shown to be dangerous and embarrass the state.
So on the one hand while a certain level of disregard for safety is built into Chinese production, there are lines even Chinese manufacturers won't cross.