China's fasting growing electric car manufacture, BYD, has brought a 50 vehicle fleet to the UK where they will be trialed and test. Greentomatecars, one of London's largest minicab services will be trying out the new e6 that gets a range of about 186 miles on a single charge. Johnny Goldstone, a managing director at Greentomate hopes that they are able to make the e6 as popular as they did the Prius back in 2006. BYD trials e6 electric vehicles in UK | Next Green Car
Between this and the electric bus fleet in the US, BYD is pushing hard for EVs, you won't be laughing for long, that's for sure. 186 mile range in a mass produced EV that isn't for the rich folks, that's pretty amazing! In fact, they brought over 11 of these cars to the US earlier this year.
About $35k for that kinda range is pretty good. Combined with the huge price reductions on the EVs currently on the market and EVs will be reasonably affordable soon, even without the tax credits.
Compare Side-by-Side gives it 122 mile range on the EPA test which is actually quite impressive, even more than the 40 kwh Tesla-powered Rav4 EV (CA compliance car). However, it looks extremely inefficient if you look at the MPGe values. It's even less efficient than the defunct Coda (Compare Side-by-Side). I haven't really followed the status of the E6 in the US. Googling for "byd e6" in the us turns up a bunch of stuff like fleet only sales.
Not only limited to fleet sales in the U.S. those fleet sales are doing poorly. The BYD battery chemistry isn't the latest and greatest - which is kind of surprising considering BYD makes tons of battery chemistries.
wow, the fuel economy numbers are horrendous. I'm wondering if they just aren't trying that hard, or are using older tech to keep the price low, or is there some trade off I'm not aware of (get more miles when using the older chemistry??)
My main concern is crash worthiness. The gasoline versions of these cars were banned from Europe for miserably failing the most basic crash tests.
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That's my concern too and probably the reason why they're not officially releasing them. My other concern would be longer term reliability and dealer back up. If these cars have been nailed together with low quality control then they'll gain a poor reputation and have a job getting it back. Maybe they're testing the water and ironing out the issues first before releasing gen2 in Europe? The minicab company is one of London's most popular and started out using Prius when hybrids were quite rare here. A year or two of taxi use in London will quickly highlight any issues the cars have. If BYD issue plans for release of this car in 3 years time, then the trials were a success. If they don't, they weren't. But we can mock the cars but they do look quite sleek an if prove crash worthy and reliable and with a usable range of 130 miles (or 180 in ideal circumstances), then they might be a success.
Chinese BYD e6 electric car could come to the United States as a taxi | Digital Trends I'm sure they will comply with regulations which are fairly strict in the US. Since these are fleet sales only in the US, there won't be a problem with needing sales. It looks like byd is just testing the waters here, and looking for experience. Yep a 60kwh pack is hard to make efficient at a low price point .
