I heard this on NPR this morning driving into work.
The Chinese are rolling out their first mass market electric car.
A Chinese auto maker plans to unveil the country's first homegrown electric vehicle for the mass market, at least a year ahead of similar efforts around the world.
On Monday, BYD Co. plans to show reporters in Shenzhen the new F3DM, which runs off batteries that can be charged from a regular electrical outlet. BYD began marketing the F3DM this month to cab operators and other potential fleet customers, and plans to have it in showrooms by the end of this month, said Henry Li, a senior company executive. BYD plans to sell the car in the U.S. market as early as the second half of 2010.
You can read the full article here BYD to Introduce China's First Electric Car - WSJ
Apparently they're ahead of everyone by 1-2 years.
Is anybody really surprised? The thing that kills me is it should have been us. If there had been any real research in the last 8-10 years, and given that GM HAD an electric car to build on, why didn't WE sink money into battery research years ago?
Because the company making this didn't start as a car company - they started as a BATTERY company.
BYD, which also specialises in making rechargeable batteries, only started making cars in 2003 when it bought a bankrupt state-owned auto company.
(AFP: China's first mass market electric car - about halfway through the article)
And this, exactly this kind of thing, that lightbulb that goes on when developing something else, is why we need a manufacturing base, even if it has to be protected and helped along by government.
WE don't HAVE any battery manufacturers, do we? Batteries are one of those things that we've outsourced, because they're not important. We don't make phone batteries, rechargable batteries, or much of anything like that.
We only make BIG things. But from the little things come the big things. That little cheap phone battery uses similar technology as the big rechargeable CAR battery.
Think of all the things that were developed in the 20th century from industries looking for a better way to make something, a faster way, a new feature they could add to an existing product. That's what drove a lot of the improvements - improvements that WE held patents on, that WE built, that WE got royalties for.
No more. We don't do R&D. It doesn't pay off fast enough. WE don't make peon consumer goods. We don't need those types of jobs.
But we do. We surely do.