This one isn’t going to be that hard. Chinese automakers, for all the advances they’ve made in car design (and van design), have had mixed results making a big SUV design that isn’t at least a little derivative. As Jean-Luc Goddard once said ““It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.” Jaguar Land Rover disagrees, and is taking BYD to court.
The Morning Dump will yet again wade into the world of Chinese SUVs, starting with BYD’s Ti17, which sounds like a calculator I once owned. I did a TMD last month about all the extremely Defender-like SUVs that Chinese automakers were importing, and I don’t even think I mentioned this particular vehicle. There are just too many to keep track of, which should get interesting if BYD is successful.
While Britain is happy to accept a bunch of Chinese EVs and hybrids for now, it seems like demand might be curtailed a bit as the country’s government has signaled it’ll lower the requirements for zero-emission vehicles to give automakers (and the market) a chance to catch up. Will the market ever catch up to the Cybertruck? Elon Musk is arguing that the cancellation of the EV truck has nothing to do with profitability and everything to do with robot cars.
Those robot cars will require a lot of processing power, but there are only so many chips in production, and those are going to AI datacenters. And what about circuit boards? Yeah, those are feeling the crunch, too.
Oh No, Not The Baliffs
BYD seems to have no issue defending its own copyright, even when its claims are totally bogus. When it comes to the intellectual property belonging to others it’s a little sketchier — at least if you ask Jaguar Land Rover, which has taken BYD to court in The Netherlands over the design of the Ti17 which, yeah, sort of looks like a Defender, though not necessarily more than any other Chinese automaker’s clone.
I think the difference here is that BYD is one of the world’s largest automakers and thus a great first target. If BYD can’t defend the case, then everyone else is going to probably be deal with going forward. According to this article in The Sunday Times, JLR isn’t playing around:
Bailiffs acting on behalf of the JLR seized digital records from BYD’s Dutch offices in Schiedam and Hoofddorp this summer.
[…]
Prior to the raid, BYD claimed it had done everything in its power to co-operate with requests for information from JLR. Lawyers for the Chinese company attacked the British firm’s move as a “fishing expedition” and claimed that “too many files were seized”, according to local reports.
JLR’s legal advisers claimed that BYD attempted to stonewall the seizure of the digital files. The bailiffs are said to have alleged that the Chinese company’s delaying tactics were unprecedented.
The court in The Hague is allegedly friendlier to intellectual property claims than other courts, so this was maybe a good place to start this process. No word yet on if any spies were sent to try and honeypot Adrian for information, but the reverse-engineering of cars is a pretty time-honored process in the automotive industry, so it’ll be interesting to see if JLR is able to find something worse than just taking the car apart.
Britain Mulling A Drop In Zero EV Targets
It turns out getting the entire world to switch to electric cars overnight isn’t easy, though it’s not impossible for a country like Norway. The United Kingdom formerly set a requirement that automakers reach 100% zero-emissions vehicles by 2035, including a target of 33% this year.
What’s going to happen instead? Reuters is reporting that this might get slowed down a bit:
Louise Haigh, the de facto deputy prime minister, is expected to finalise the plan on Wednesday, the newspaper said. Haigh will probably approve a 2030 target of about 60% and extend flexibility until 2034, it added.
But asked about the Guardian report on Monday, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the government was still considering responses to a consultation on the matter.“No decision has been made at this point,” he told British media, calling the newspaper report “speculation”.
What Killed The Cybertruck?
Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced last week that the Cybertruck was going to die so that the Cybercab can live, then a bunch of people went out to write about how the Cybertruck was a failure.
Our buddy Mack Hogan over at InsideEVs called it one of the biggest flops in automotive history:
Tesla delivered a product that came in years behind schedule. It underdelivered on almost every key spec at a price that was far higher than promised. Its novel production method drove up costs and contributed to high-profile quality issues. Its durability testing was clearly less rigorous than truck buyers expect, and its design was more polarizing than attractive. Meanwhile, the man behind it became politically toxic to the exact buyers most likely to go electric, and lost his interest in the human-driven car business altogether.
This failure lies primarily with him. Musk’s culture of promising before thinking, and lying without shame, created the culture that built one of the most overhyped and under-baked products in modern automotive history. Its failure will be studied for decades to come as an example of executive incompetence, just like the Edsel. That much is written.
[Ed Note: Mack makes some good points in his piece (especially about the truck underdelivering in numerous areas). From an engineering standpoint, though, the Cybertruck was actually quite impressive, as Jason Cammisa made clear in one of the first reviews of the truck, and as I did when I drove it. That’s not to say the Cybertruck is not a failure; even though it’s the best selling EV pickup truck in the U.S., volumes have been well below expectations. -DT].
Musk, in the process of transforming into a corn cob, went to X to claim that there are still a bunch of reservations and that the car was a success, just not as big of a success as the next thing will be:
The Cybertruck order rate far exceeds our production rate. We will try to make as many as possible before shutting down the line in about 8 months, but will have to return deposits for a lot of people. This is not a case of Cybertruck being unprofitable, as has been misreported by legacy media, but rather that the opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck is vastly outweighed by the value of incremental Cybercab production.
Some people are upset about this on Musk’s own platform, and Grok has an answer for why this is happening in response:
Having the line already built does not remove the ongoing drain. Cybertruck still requires specialized stainless tooling, unique suppliers, continuous process engineering and floor space. Those same limited people and resources scale Cybercab more effectively. A working complex line can still lose to a simpler high-volume one on opportunity cost.
Building cars is hard.
Who Will Build The Circuit Boards?
A lot of 2022 and 2023 was devoted to talking about a shortage of semiconductors for automotive uses, which was an indirect outcome of the pandemic. That remains an issue so long as AI/data centers keep gobbling up chips, and with cars becoming more computer-like it’ll only likely get worse.
What about printed circuit boards (PCBs)? A new report cited by Automotive News points out that those are also in high demand:
PCB availability could become equally important to vehicle production. AI server production is increasing demand for sophisticated, multilayer PCBs. Major AI customers are securing the output of entire Asian PCB factories for several years. This leaves automotive suppliers potentially competing for the remaining capacity.
The cost of basic PCB materials increased by 70 percent between 2025 and 2026, AlixPartners said. “For automotive, the risk is therefore shifting from pure price inflation towards capacity access and delivery certainty,” the company said.
About 94 percent of global PCB production is concentrated in Asia, with China accounting for 60 percent, the analysis said. Geopolitical tensions or a trade dispute could create a supply issue with limited alternative capacity available elsewhere.
If building cars is hard, building cars that are computers is also pretty rough.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
I liked last week’s theme week, so let’s do it again. This time it’s all-time late night show performances. Here’s “Wolf Like Me” from TV On The Radio live in 2006. I’m open to some suggestions below.
The Big Question
What’s the best example of a car inspired by another car that’s not exactly a copy.
Top photo: BYD
TBQ: Porsche 930: rear-mounted, air-cooled turbocharged horizontally opposed six—where have we seen this before?
I kid, I kid!