BYD's cheapest car costs $10,000 & charges in 5 minutes

From Electrek

BYD second-generation Seagull EV (Source: Zhang Zhuo)

BYD’s new Seagull EV is now its cheapest electric car in China with 5-minute Flash Charging, and starts at under $10,000. [I think the current Seagull sells as the BYD ATTO 1 in Australia.  It is the cheapest car here, not just the cheapest EV.]

The all-electric hatchback is BYD’s smallest, most affordable EV in China. Sold as the Dolphin Surf and Dolphin Mini in Europe, the UK, and other global markets, the Seagull is among the world’s top-selling EVs.

For its second generation, BYD upgraded it with more interior space, its new Blade Battery 2.0 and 5-minute Flash Charging technology, and a few added premium extras.

The new Seagull EV is now on sale in China, starting at just 62,900 yuan, or about $9,500. That’s with BYD’s “Super Trade-in” promotion.

Regular prices start at 65,900 yuan ($9,900), which is still less than its predecessor. The first-gen Seagull EV normally cost 69,900 yuan ($10,500) without incentives.

BYD’s new Seagull EV is available in five variants, priced from 65,900 yuan to 99,900 yuan ($9,900 to $15,000), without a trade-in.

The second-generation Seagull is 425 mm [17 inches] longer and has a 150 mm [6 inches] longer wheelbase than its predecessor. It now measures 4,205 mm long, 1,810 mm wide, and 1,570 mm high, with a 2,650 mm wheelbase. It also gains another seat thanks to the added space, with room for five passengers.

Unlike the current model, which is front-wheel-drive, the new Seagull switches to rear-wheel-drive. The setup uses a more powerful 85 kW (114 hp) or 95 kW (127 hp) electric motor, up from the 55 kW (75 hp) that its predecessor offered.

To improve the ride quality and handling, BYD upgraded the rear suspension to a multi-link independent system.

Inside, BYD overhauled the interior with its latest in-car software and technology. The setup includes a larger 15.6″ center infotainment screen, a two-spoke steering wheel, a redesigned center console with smart storage, and added physical buttons.

All variants include the DiLink 150 smart cockpit and BYD’s 140 km/h high-speed tire blowout stability system.

Buyers can upgrade to the optional DiPilot 300 system with God’s Eye B intelligent driving assistance. The upgraded system uses a roof-mounted LiDAR to offer ADAS features, including City Navigation on Autopilot (CNOA) and smart parking.

The front seats now include heating, ventilation, and massage functions. BYD added a few other premium extras, including ambient lighting, a 50W wireless phone charger, and smart storage.

With BYD’s Flash Charging tech, the new battery can charge from 10% to 70% in five minutes. A full recharge, or 10% to 97%, takes just nine minutes. Even in temperatures as low as -30°C, it takes 12 minutes to charge from 20% to 97%.

The new Seagull EV is available with two BYD Blade 2.0 LFP battery packs: 30.1 kWh and 39.2 kWh, providing CLTC ranges of 320 km (199 miles) and 420 km (261 miles), respectively.  [WLTP ranges are +-20% lower.]

After launching in China, BYD is expected to introduce the larger, upgraded version overseas, likely as the second-generation Dolphin Surf and Dolphin Mini.

Assuming this new Seagull sells for the same price as the old one, this will not only be the cheapest car in Australia, but will also be a more attractive car compared to its petrol equivalents (MG has temporarily matched the BYD ATTO 1's price with its bottom-of-the-range petrol car, but of course, petrol running costs are four or more times higher).

The existing BYD Seagull is a small car, smaller than the Suzuki Swift and the Hyundai Venue; the new one is roughly the same size.   Personally, I would have traded seat massage for range, which is low (260 km WLPT).  Yet it can be recharged in five minutes.  Five minutes!  And that would only be needed if you weren't charging at home.  It's a perfectly adequate city car.  And it is dirt cheap to buy, and even cheaper to run.

The petrol car is finished.  Worse, if you buy one now, you run the very real risk that its resale price will plunge because it is old technology which is harder to maintain and much more expensive to run.

Yes, there are still too few chargers for comfort, but as EV sales explode, more and more chargers will be built.  If the oil majors had any sense, they would be adding chargers to petrol stations everywhere.  They might make lower profits from petrol, but would profit from their chargers, and would still be able to sell all the ancillary services motorists require.

Irrecoverable overshoot

 From the Guardian

Earth on track for 'irrecoverable overshoot' of 1.5C target, scientists find

Oliver Milman

The world is heading for an “irrecoverable overshoot” of global temperature thresholds that will plunge billions of people into disastrous climate impacts because governments have stalled for so long to cut planet-heating emissions, analysis has found.

Under current policies, the planet will heat up by 2.7C on average by the end of the century compared with preindustrial times, the report by Climate Action Tracker (CAT) found. This is up slightly from a prediction of 2.6C in the group’s analysis conducted last year.

This level of warming smashes the 1.5C threshold that was agreed by countries a decade ago but is set to be breached in just a few years. Scientists have warned that beyond this point already harmful storms, droughts, heatwaves, flooding and other impacts will become intolerable for parts of the world and potentially trigger runaway climate change that won’t be contained.

But politicians refuse to act on climate, give in to anti-climate lobbyists, and arrest people who protest about climate on the streets.  They don't care.  They won't take the steps necessary to cut emissions.  

Car industry dinosaurs do what they like

Composite: Guardian Design; Getty/Shutterstock/Antonio Olmos

From George Monbiot at the Guardian

This is how it works. An industry puts tremendous effort into resisting change: lobbying governments, mobilising the media, pouring money into junktanks. It argues that a transition would threaten jobs, or damage the national interest, or harm poor people, while what it really fears is the cost of retooling its plants or developing new protocols. Then, when the inevitable cliff edge approaches, it whines that change is coming too soon. For reasons beyond its control, it isn’t ready, so the government must delay its plans.

This is what triggered the Dutch nitrate crisis, and the UK’s repeated “emergency” exemptions from the ban on a devastating class of pesticides. Now the same dynamic is driving the UK’s crisis over the transition to electric vehicles (EVs). The result is that, as the global climate summit, Cop31, begins, it looks as if our gift to the world will be a major, predictable and entirely avoidable increase in the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Car manufacturers could have seen this coming more than 130 years ago, when the first electric automobiles were sold. [Well, not really.  It wasn't until lithion-ion batteries were invented that EVs were made possible] For at least the past 30 years, as new electromotive technologies have progressed at speed, they plainly represented the future, and internal combustion engines, with their hard efficiency limits and vast impacts on human and planetary life, the past. Since 2010, it’s been obvious that China, which has not only seen the future but seeks to own it, would flatten our manufacturers like hedgehogs if they didn’t speed up. In 2023, the Conservative government gave automakers seven years to get their act together. And now they wring their hands and claim to be unprepared. To which the only reasonable answer is: tough.

But, unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the answer the government is giving. Instead, on Wednesday it’s expected to cut the target for zero-emission cars from 80% of new car sales by 2030 to approximately 60%. If so, this will be the latest in a series of concessions that governments have agreed since the Conservatives announced the deadline.

Both Conservative and Labour governments have permitted a series of “flexibilities” (otherwise known as loopholes). These allow companies to sell hybrid petrol-electric cars instead of purely EVs. They can also sell a lower proportion of EVs by 2030 on the promise that they’ll accelerate sales after that date. Now the government is also expected to extend the “flexibilities” to 2034, making a mockery of the promise to accelerate after 2030. One retreat after another.

Every one of these slippages has major consequences, for climate breakdown, air pollution, energy security and the cost of living (electric cars, if you can charge at home, are much cheaper to run). The transition to EVs was supposed to be the biggest of all the government’s decarbonisation measures. Now it’s in pieces.

Once again, the problem is the domination of our nominally democratic systems by money. Commercial lobbyists reach ministers long before environmentalists can. As soon as the Conservative government proposed its transition plan, manufacturers pressed to weaken it. This year, they hinted that they wouldn’t invest in future manufacturing here unless the government made further concessions. It looks to me like a legal form of blackmail.

Perfecting the art of unreadiness, the car companies help to ensure that society is also unready for the great crises – from oil supply shocks to climate breakdown – we face. The people they hire deploy an armoury of clever arguments. But while these might sway British politicians, they do nothing to persuade reality, whether that reality consists of the atmosphere or Chinese competitors.

Last month, the Chinese company BYD launched a new Seagull electric hatchback for the home market at just $10,000 (£7,500). It can be flash-charged in five minutes. And where are western manufacturers? Well, Jaguar recently unveiled its reply to Elon Musk’s ill-fated Cybertruck, an unaffordable monster that can scarcely be driven – let alone parked – on our streets. Perhaps the nearest European equivalent to the Seagull, the Volkswagon ID Polo, is much more expensive and you might not get it for months. As the website Autonext comments, “Europe’s carmakers spent 2024 and 2025 telling Brussels that the CO2 targets were unrealistic because buyers would not take small electric cars in the volumes the rules assumed. Volkswagen has now put three of them on sale and cannot build them quickly enough.” Why? Because it didn’t invest in sufficient plants.

The government is now considering imposing tariffs on Chinese EVs, as part of an EU scheme. If you can’t beat them and you can’t join them, block them. So much for addressing the cost-of-living crisis.

As for allowing companies to keep building hybrids rather than EVs, this solves nothing. Hybrids are almost as polluting as 100%-petrol or diesel vehicles; more expensive to run than EVs; incompatible, in most cases, with rapid chargers and destined, very soon, for the scrapheap of history. But, thanks to government policy, last year they accounted for 14% of new car sales, which means 14% of buyers were suckered. The hybrid is the perfect motif for government dithering: given a choice between two technologies, two worlds, two futures, it says yes to both.

The public information campaigns and public honesty required from the government in explaining why a rapid all-electric transition is necessary and what its implications are, as usual, are entirely missing. Public communications remain in private hands. The marketing budgets of the car companies are still used to sell ever bigger child-killing, planet-killing trucks.

An EV transition doesn’t solve all of our transport issues. We should be reducing transport demand, through a shift towards the 15-minute city model of which Paris is an exemplar. We need better and safer provision for cyclists and pedestrians. We need more investment in public transport. But if we can’t even get the end-of-pipe – or end-of-the-tailpipe – issue right, what hope is there for the rest of the system?

This is, or should be, easy politics. Tell the foot-dragging, planet-trashing car companies, the authors of their own failure, where to get off. They face a stark choice: move or get squashed.

It's almost as if governments do not care about the catastrophic consequences of constantly rising temperatures.

Have you noticed how large companies and billionaires are opposed to every attempt to make the world a better place?  Plastics, insecticides, EVs, oil, pollution.

Museum of the Palestinian genocide

 by Cathy Wilcox

Sunshine after dark: batteries take over the grid

 From Rising Renewables

This is a good summary of how batteries are eating into the main gas peaking power market in the evening, and how rapidly the battery market is growing.

 

Empathy

 

COP31: another pointless climate gabfest

COP31 has just started in Türkiye.  

 From Just Have a Think

   

A gloomy and depressing summary of the environmental and ecological disasters mankind refuses to sort out.

But there was one less gloomy section, starting at 9:30 minutes into the video.

"To have any chance of staying below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, emissions would need to immediately top out and then fall by 11% by 2030, 24% by 2035, and 37% by 2040".

If we convert that to compound rates of decline, 11% by 2030 equals ~2.9% p.a., 24% by 2035 equals ~3% p.a., and 37% by 2040 equals 3.2% per annum.  In Net-zero or real-zero, I argue that to avoid a rise of 2 degrees, we would need to cut global emissions by a compound 5% p.a., but the UN analysis suggests that 3% per annum would be enough.  And a 3% p.a. fall is easily doable, because of the plunge in the costs of solar, batteries and EVs and the consequent S-curve expansion in battery-solar electricity and EVs.  China is showing us how to de-carbonise, right now. 

We will almost certainly cut our emissions by 24% by 2035, not because politicians or CEOs actually care, but because the economics of renewables have shifted.  That doesn't mean that we should give up climate activism (or indeed environmental activism) since we need to do better than 3%, but we should set the 3% annual decline as the bare minimum all countries should aim to achieve. 

The COP process is not going to do that.  Frustration at last year's feeble COP outcomes led to frustrated participants setting up a climate "coalition of the willing" to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, which held its first meeting in Colombia in April 2026. 54 countries sent delegates, but the US, China, India and the Gulf petro states didn't attend, while many of the world's major oil producers (Australia, Nigeria, Angola, Mexico and Brazil) did attend.  How committed are they to cutting fossil fuel production?  How committed is Australia, long on talk, but still authorising new and expanded coal mines and gas fields? 

I don't see how a conference designed to phase out fossil fuels will ever succeed while major fossil fuel producers are part of the process.  It was this which stymied the COP process; the new Climate Coalition will likely be no more successful.  And China should surely be a crucial part of the climate coalition of the willing: it's the biggest emitter, the largest installer of renewables and batteries, and the biggest buyer, producer and exporter of EVs in the world.  And it is cheap Chinese solar panels, batteries and EVs, which are enabling the rest of the world to de-carbonise.

We need a "3% club".  All members would commit to cutting emissions by 3% a year and to introducing a price on carbon, whether via a cap-and-trade mechanism or a carbon tax.  Are the Climate Coalition members willing to do this?  Even though it should be relatively easy?

Meanwhile, the COP31 gabfest in Türkiye will achieve bugger all.   It's scarcely worth paying any attention to.