Whether it’s bad or catastrophic is up in the air depending on the extent to which the global economy is genuinely less oil-intensive than in the past, the efficacy of the strategic reserves (all due to be gone bar China by end of July, but now perhaps never quite fully depleting), how much markets have actually reallocated, and the extent to which tech has really been able to drive substitution.

My best guess is that it’s still going to be dire, but not quite global depression territory. For example, container throughputs are way down
https://www.rwi-essen.de/en/pr..., freight rates have gone up massively eg doubled for Shanghai-US, etc

We can adapt to maritime chokepoints, but it doesn’t eliminate the damage, it just redistributes it
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.134...

But they need to demonstrate convincing delivery, which US OEMs have been shit on, because CATL, Gotion and BYD are all on the cusp of mass production of sodium chemistries.

Also, I'm guessing the 20 years claim relates strictly to stationary industrial storage applications with a lot of deep cycling, but even then it seems short, when you consider an LFP in a car can manage 3000 to 6000 full cycles, and sodium is supposed to be massively better than that.

What are you *talking* about? Of course BYD is going to try to increase market share, but they are not going to own any large fraction of the charger market, because, to repeat, they are building 3000 chargers and there are 1,000,000 already deployed. And if *you* were able to do the big picture thinking you think I can’t do because you idiotically assume I’m conservative, you’d understand that the rest of the market is also not standing still, and know that about 150k new public chargers are added each and every year, so BYD are never going to get close to owning a large fraction. You’d also understand that there’s somewhere between 8 and 11 *million* private chargers across Europe as well, so the dependence on BYD charging you are oh-so-concerned about is even more misplaced.

If you want to pride yourself on your unusual ability to carry about geopolitical analysis, you’ll need to do much better than just waving your hands in the air and bleating about the long term, you have to demonstrate that some kind of credible path to dominance of the European charging market exists for BYD, and you have signally failed to do that.

Hats off to you for that response!

Just to be clear for everyone, I’m not denying that there is indeed a risk of thermal runaway with Li batteries; it’s just not associated with rapid charging. Thermal runaway is a rare event with NMC and a very rare event with LFP (and rarer still with sodium chemistries).

I think your response is (1) odd, because you write as though I had somewhere said that flash charging was primarily for road trips when I had said it was primarily for halo benefits of helping consumers believe charging wasn’t an issue and (2) extremely US-centric, and thus really makes little sense in the context of a Chinese-origin ex-US OEM deploying flash chargers in Europe The economics and culture are very different in Europe in many different ways.

You then go on to describe a scenario in which you drive your Kia Niro on a road trip the same way I had just described driving my car on a road trip, ie charging while stopped, not stopping to charge. It was all quite confused, tbh.

I happen to think you’re also wrong about many of the specific claims you make, and right about many others. But mainly it felt like your post was only vaguely connected to either my post or the original story, because as ever, US-defaultism is rife everywhere. It’s quite disrespectful, tbh. This was a post about BYD deploying flash chargers in Europe, and you’ve attempted to describe what they’re doing in terms of the US market, which they cannot even operate in.

So what? Satnav doesn’t use the internet.

Huh? How did you conclude that from what I said?

I keep saying to you that the model is “charge when stopped”, not “stop to charge”. EV drivers don’t need to fill up to 100% each time they plug in, or make special stops just to plug in, we can and do just plug in when it suits us.

Adding 200 miles of range while we’re out on a four or five hour hike is going to be more than good enough.

You yourself are the edge case. Most humans, most Canadians, most rural Canadians, and most visitors to Alma do not lead the life you lead, or anything like it.

You’re arguing a counsel of perfection as a reason not to take a completely feasible step that would be one of the single highest impact things you could do to reduce the harm you cause to others.

It might be hard for BYD to manufacture or install, but it’s easy to use.

Have you seen one being used? Here’s an example: https://youtube.com/shorts/MEO...

Looks simple to use to me, no different really from any other. The overhead pulley system has the obvious benefits for consumers of making sure the cables aren’t dirty from lying on the ground, and making the cables easier to plug in by taking some of the weight.

My car can only charge at a puny 120kW and it’s been fine for me. I think the point of these Flash chargers is to act as a halo, addressing consumer concerns that risk slowing the S-curve, even though most consumers won’t buy a car that can use the tech. People are irrational but also amenable to being persuaded by symbology, and this is that.

I double-dare you to find a single documented instance of battery thermal runaway leading to a fire during a rapid charge. Just one. Bear in mind there have been hundreds of millions of fast charge sessions around the world in the last five years.

Don’t you ever want to live in the real world, with an accurate understanding of the frequency of bad events?

OK, we let you have your go at summarizing BYD’s strategy, and you got it very badly wrong. Now what?

The “if you make it back out alive” is such a tell: you live such a frightened little life. Scared of shadows everywhere, but inconsistently. I’ll bet you used a Chinese electronic device that you own in the past few days. Quite likely the very device you used to post your oh-so-sincere concerns right here.

Just pay with contactless. Life doesn’t need to be pointlessly difficult, you know

They are battery-buffered, you nitwit. At most, you’re talking about 500kW per charger, and if somehow each of the 3000 sites were drawing 500kW simultaneously, that would amount to 1.5GW of draw, which is three-fifths of fuck-all in the context of the scale of draw for the continent as a whole. And obviously, you can’t just look at draw, you have to look at benefit too, this adds meaningful capacity and supports electrification of materially more ground transport. So we save a large amount of primary energy.