Investment Strategies / Mechanical Investing
No. of Recommendations: 5
No. of Recommendations: 2
Hybrids have always made more sense to me. You get the quick range add of an ICE with way better fuel efficiency from the energy regeneration.
No. of Recommendations: 13
Hybrids have always made more sense to me. You get the quick range add of an ICE with way better fuel efficiency from the energy regeneration.
It's easy to see the attraction of going all electric - with hybrids, you have all the cost of the ICE, all the maintenance, and much less virtue signalling points.
But for real-world adoption, hybrids get most of the CO2, pollution, noise and fuel cost advantages, at a much lower cost, without sacrificing range.
The hybrid (Audi A3 etron, an upscale VW Golf) that I owned for 6 years did about 60% of its kms on electricity and 40% on gas, despite having only 40km of battery-powered range, and I never had to worry about overall range (in fact, being a hybrid gave it MORE range than an ICE car with the same gas enging and fuel reservoir, because of the regeneration on hills and stops).
To get this back to Berkshire, I think the market size for hybrid cars is probably a lot bigger, once you get past wealthy first adopters for whom all-electric is obviously more attractive. You get a lot more fossil fuel savings for the same quantity of batteries, at much lower cost. I'm not disputing that all-electric is the future, but for the next 5-10-15 years, I think BYD may be better positioned than Tesla, with the capacity to make both.
dtb
No. of Recommendations: 3
“To get this back to Berkshire, I think the market size for hybrid cars is probably a lot bigger…”
That’s where me and most of my 50 something cronies fall, although most Tesla owners I know are quite pleased. Currently, I’d strongly consider a hybrid but not EV. My golf buddy recently bought a 2nd vehicle for trips, a new Honda Accord hybrid and he gets nearly 50mpg. I hope to wear out my old Toyota SUV for another couple years (2008 260K miles)!
Amazing that Charlie saw the potential in BYD in 2008 and really went to bat for our investment. Wow, have they ever delivered, on many levels! Hybrids with 1300 mile range-amazing!
No. of Recommendations: 2
Amazing that Charlie saw the potential in BYD in 2008 and really went to bat for our investment. Wow, have they ever delivered, on many levels! Hybrids with 1300 mile range-amazing!
I dug ever so shallowly into this and learned that the BYD Hybrid reportedly gets 81 mpg, and so has a 16 gallon gas tank giving it 1300 mile range.
And it is pretty inexpensive.
Sandy Munro, a non-Tesla automotive guy who likes Tesla and its tech pretty well rates BYD as likely to be the biggest automaker in the world in 10 years, and rather explicitly thought it would beat out Tesla on that time scale.
R:)
No. of Recommendations: 9
Sandy Munro, a non-Tesla automotive guy who likes Tesla and its tech pretty well rates BYD as likely to be the biggest automaker in the world in 10 years, and rather explicitly thought it would beat out Tesla on that time scale.
Interesting that you mention time scale. I think Musk is probably right about most of these things, including the fact that hybrids will only be a transitional phase. The question is, though, how long will that transition last? If it's a few years, then it's a waste of time and energy to get involved in hybrids - go straight to the ultimate solution, perfect it, make it as cheap as possible, and you will win - the Tesla strategy. But if it's a 20-year transition, that doesn't work as well.
Musk is notoriously too optimistic about how fast his vision of the world will work out, and I think this is perhaps another example of that, where the time scale of the transition ends up giving hybrids a much bigger role than he thought. Tesla has clearly staked its claim on a fast roll-out of an all-electric future, whereas BYD can do well with fast or slow.
dtb
No. of Recommendations: 14
