If you can’t be first to something, be a fast follower. The Nissan Leaf was the first mass-produced electric car for sale in the United States, but it’s fast-follower Tesla that’s worth all the money. The Model Y has been around for a while, and many companies have tried to copy it with mixed success, but it might finally have a true competitor, at least in China.
That’s right, The Morning Dump is going to talk about the YU7 from Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. The company has already proven it can build a car with the extremely popular SU7. Now it’s showing it can design an SUV that’s competitive with the Model Y at an even more competitive price. Just don’t ship too many at once! That’s the advice from an expert on shipping following the sinking of another car carrier.
This comes as Elon Musk’s breakup with the Trump Administration means it’s unlikely he’ll have any sway to help save the tax credit. You know who might? Car dealers. Specifically, Carvana and Carmax are trying to get the Senate to kill the killing of the EV tax credit. One automaker that’s probably a little less impacted by the change is Toyota, which is currently kicking butt thanks to hybrids.
The Xiaomi YU7 Will Cost Just $35,300, Compared To $36,760 For A Model Y
Let’s assume that, tariffs aside, the politics of Elon Musk and his connection to President Trump are currently meaningless to Chinese consumers. That means that the issues they’ll judge a car on are the usual ones: Design, cost, performance, prestige, et cetera. Unlike Europe or the United States, it gives us a much clearer view of how well Tesla’s products will perform. So far, sales are down this year in China, both due to a factory switchover and some new competition.
There are cars like the Geely Star Wish, which Tesla simply has no car to compete with, and homegrown hybrids and EREVs from BYD that, again, show where Tesla lacks a fighter. The one place where Tesla has long ruled is in the mid-sized crossover space, thanks to its wildly popular Model Y. While there are a lot of cars roughly in that bracket, including the BYD Sealion 7, there’s nothing that’s quite had the verve of a Model Y.
That’s changing this week, as four different Model Y competitors launch almost simultaneously. While many of these are interesting, the one that I care about is the YU7.
As you’ll remember, Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi made waves with the SU7, a sporty sedan in the mold of a Model S that captured the imagination (and wallets) of the country. Even Ford CEO Jim Farley was kind of obsessed with his. But Chinese consumers, like all consumers, enjoy an SUV, and the reveal of the YU7 showed that Xiaomi may have an answer for the Model Y.
Now it looks like the company is going for the jugular, per Nikkei Asia:
Xiaomi’s Hong Kong-listed shares opened 8% higher at an all-time intraday high of 61.45 Hong Kong dollars before investors pared back some of the gains. It closed up 3.6%, achieving a record closing price of HK$58.95. The company’s shares are up more than 70% this year, giving it a market capitalization of HK$1.53 trillion ($194.9 billion).
On Thursday evening, Xiaomi Chairman and CEO Lei Jun announced that the new SUV, called the YU7, will start at 253,500 yuan ($35,300). That is lower than the 263,500 yuan price tag for Tesla’s popular SUV, the Model Y.
Within the first hour, Xiaomi received 289,000 pre-orders for the YU7, according to a social media post by the company. It later said 240,000 orders were confirmed.
CMB International, a Chinese brokerage, said in a report on Friday that the starting price was “largely in line” with what market watchers anticipated, but that the scale of the pre-orders “exceeded expectations.”
Why people like the YU7 is that it looks great, comes loaded with technology, is from a local Chinese automaker, and seems to just be fresher than even the refreshed Model Y. It’ll also have a longer driving range and more space.
Car Shipping Disasters Have Cost $1.8 Billion
There have been three massive car shipping disasters in as many years and, while we can’t quite say the most recent one was precisely due to the shipping of electric cars, that does seem to be a constant in all these major fires.
Earlier this month, the Morning Midas was carrying a load of cars from China to Mexico, including hundreds of electric cars, when something started a fire. The ship eventually sank and, while thankfully no lives were lost, the total cost of the accident is going to be about $560 million. WHy does this keep happening?
Automotive News spoke to a marine risk consultant who said what we’re all sort of thinking:
When it comes to shipping EVs, there’s always the risk of fire, explosion or thermal runaway, Capt. Randall Lund, senior marine risk consultant at Allianz Commercial, told Automotive News. Even if an EV is not the cause of a fire, it increases the chance of a fire turning disastrous. And if a fire starts, there’s not much that the ship’s crew can do.
“They are not professional firefighters,” Lund said.
While all crews receive basic firefighting training, it’s very broad, and EV fires generally require firefighting expertise, Lund said. Most crews aren’t even aware where EVs are stored on the vessel.
[…]
The industry needs to work with automakers to help them “understand that maybe they can’t ship 400 EVs at one time,” or that “cargo ships require additional spacing,” Lund said.
This seems like a fixable problem.
Carmax And Carvana Want To Keep The EV Tax Credit
There have been a lot of automakers pleading to keep the tax credit, arguing that the companies were incentivized to build electric cars by previous generations and that not doing so will risk competitiveness with China. Now, some major dealer groups are becoming involved, again from Automotive News:
Carmax, Carvana and other auto retailers are urging the Senate to preserve electric vehicle incentives in the budget bill, arguing that abruptly axing the tax credits would threaten dealerships that have invested in EV sales and service.
Automakers have required many dealerships to make large investments in EV infrastructure, including on-site chargers and service bay equipment.
“Dealerships like ours have invested billions of dollars as small businesses to serve our communities, to improve EV education, and offer exceptional service,” dealers said in the June 26 letter. “We need a stable and consistent market for our dealerships to plan, invest, and grow.”
The dealers said tax credits for new and used clean vehicles, the Advanced Manufacturing Production Tax Credit meant to incentivize battery production, the Alternative Fuel Vehicle Refueling Property Credit and others “must continue, even in a reduced form, for at least the next several years.”
The retailers are also opposed to a new fee for registering EVs meant to counter the fact that they don’t contribute to road building via the gas tax
Toyota Hits Another Record, Because Hybrids
I promise an update is coming on our cross-country trip, which was a surprising success. I just got home late last night and traveled home from the airport in a Toyota Highlander. Was it a hybrid? Of course, it was a hybrid. They’re all hybrids now, basically.
That’s helping propel Toyota to even bigger sales.
Toyota Motor Corp.’s sales reached a third straight monthly record in May on strong demand for hybrid vehicles in the US, Japan and China, even as global automakers braced for big losses triggered by President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imported cars.
Toyota’s global sales — including subsidiaries Daihatsu Motor Co. and Hino Motors Ltd. — reached 955,532 vehicles last month, up 8% from a year earlier, the company said Friday. Worldwide production came in at 906,984 units.
Toyota and its Lexus brand vehicle sales rose more than 4% in Japan, 7% in China and 11% in North America.
The world’s biggest carmaker will raise the prices next month of some vehicles it sells in the US by more than $200, as part of a regular revision based on factors that include market conditions and competition, a spokesperson said last week.
I’m thinking people will pay the extra $200.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
It feels like I was on that trip for 10 months, so it’s nice to be “Home Again” as Michael Kiwanuka points out above.
The Big Question
What’s the best example of a car (or any product, really) that came out second, but absolutely killed it?
Doo Dads and Chex Mix!
I always assumed that Nabisco just cut off Doo Dad’s supply of Chex cereal and stole their idea. Doo Dads had peanuts in them and were better in MHO.
TBQ: Windows Phone, notably the 8.1+ iterations. WP7 wasn’t bad, but 8 was even better. Then it changed back to Windows Mobile which was still good, but lost some of the charm and uniqueness.
If Nokia (HMD) made a 5G Windows Mobile phone I’d still use it.
I was a big fan of Window Phones Had a bunch of Nokia WP over about a 5 years span. I would buy them used after about a year, use them for awhile and then move on to something else.
I was going to say the Prius vs Insight but the Prius really launched 2 years earlier in Japan so….
Pretty sure that’s a Ferrari, dude. 😉
With McLaren headlights.
Never mind what it looks like.
Is it comfortable on bumpy French roads?
And does it understeer like a two tonne Tesla when it gets off the autoroute?
Hydrox cookies preceded Oreos. Clark Savage Jr. (Doc Savage) and his Arctic Fortress of Solitude preceded Clark (Superman) Kent and his same named place.
Yum Hydrox.
Vastly superior.
Also Hi Ho crackers came out before Ritz crackers.
Hi Ho crackers and Hydrox were both invented by Sunshine Biscuits — Oreos and Ritz were National Biscuit Company imitations..Actualy the cast of charcters make the Ford, Leyland, Durant era of the car industry seem straightforward.
Fun fact; Graham Crackers were originally promoted as a food to suppress sexual desire, which explains why they serve them in elementary schools, I guess.
Oh, Betamax and VHS.
Maybe a ball-peen hammer, but graham crackers?
ah too bad we won’t see the xiaomi or byd in the US probably for a very long time.
We could send them all out teslas and they could do likewise with the BYD and Xiaomi? Please?
Regarding the Xiaomi… One thing I would like to see is how well it holds up after a few winters in the rust belt.
And while I’m no fan of Elon Musk, as far as I can tell, Teslas hold up well even after a few winters in the rust belt.
I have yet to see a rusty Tesla.
“What’s the best example of a car (or any product, really) that came out second, but absolutely killed it?”
My first thought is 4 door SUVs… the Ford Explorer vs the Jeep XJ Cherokee.
The Cherokee was first, but Ford did a great job with the Explorer and quickly outsold the Jeep not long after it went on sale in 1991.
Not sure if the Explorer counts though given the 4 door Nissan Pathfinder came out in 1989 and the 4 door Toyota 4 Runner came out in 1990.
I think that modern vehicle production would include sufficient rust exclusion. Maybe it’s less robust than Teslas. Maybe not. It doesn’t strike me that these cars would be like the low-budget 80s equivalents from Korea. These guys are playing on the big stage now. But hey, GM and Ford had some crazy rusters not too long ago.
Smallish 4 door SUVs were introduced by the Japanese manufacturers to beat the chicken tax. Americans followed suit. Prior to that, the Suburbans and Travelalls weren’t off-road SUV-type vehicles.
The Rambler Marlin debuted in 1965 model year. The Dodge Charger debuted the 1966 model year.
I’d say nearly any product that 3M has touched. Their entire industry is based on just making more effective versions of current products.
The Macintosh was sort of a pared-down Lisa, both of which followed the Xerox Star.
The Mac did well. On a similar path, Windows 1.0, 2.11, 386, 3.0, 3.11, 95, … they’ll get there eventually.
Maybe they failed to account for the cargo turning to gold on the next sunrise? 😉
Oh yeah, they’re gonna love that. Shipping companies are big fans of lower density in transport.
I realize this may not be completely apples-to-apples (pun entirely intended, as you’ll see in a moment), but Blackberry got everyone hooked on smartphones, then Apple came in and ate their lunch. Actually, Apple is probably the best example of this in pretty much any market segment they exist in. They’re rarely the first, but they love to take other people’s ideas, polish the hell out of them, and make loads of money off it.
Yeah, Apple certainly is the king of taking emerging or less popular tech and making a ton of money. I can’t think of anything they’ve made that is the first of its kind, but almost all of their products become ubiquitous.
The Newton? Apple got well out in front of itself on that one. Pioneering though.
The Dauphin DTR-1 came out 3 years before the Newton. I really liked my Dauphin, bit the Newton was far superior.
The newton had two problems, the most important being was the it was the Pepsi guy’s project, and it wasn’t Unix basted, and everything at Apple after the return of Jobs was Unix.
The prototypes and differential inheritance was massively cool , having too little memory and being essentially self modifying made debugging impossible. The Dauphin was like running an early version of Microsoft word where any thing more complicated than a text file was saved as a snapshot of the program state.
I did a killer demo on the Dauphin by managing to load the Mosaic browser onto it and putting it to sleep, then walking into a meeting with it in an enormous inside pocket in my jacket. Nobody ever wondered where the hell the computer came from. When it suddenly appeared and I just started using running of a local cache. I did it once on the subway and I might as well been been showing off a three headed dog singing Beatles songs.
That Dauphin made me a lot of money from doing demos.
I’d never heard of these. Fascinating. We often didn’t get some American tech up here in the GWN. Thanks for the info!
Still have one here somewhere I think the pen might be broken though.
As Hugh pointed out, the Newton was not the first. But it was an exception to Apple making a tech ubiquitous. Although it did get a Simpsons reference, so it made a bit of splash.
“Eat up Martha”
Uh, I’m thinking The Autopian referencing an Automotive News article about the sunk boat is problematic.
That maritime safety expert spouts “understand that maybe they can’t ship 400 EVs at one time”
The problem? The boat that sunk had very few EVs. To quote the NY Times “70 electric vehicles, 681 hybrids, and more than 2,000 conventional vehicles, according to the US Coast Guard”. The Coast Guard stated 3,084 vehicles. So 2,333 gas cars. So less than 2.2% of the freaking cars on that boat were EV’s.
How about spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) with that stupid uninformed quote. They imply the ship had 400 EV’s when it had a grand total of 70. That “expert” sure is implying that the fire was caused by the EVs. There is absolutely no proof of that yet.
The Autopian is also just as culpable as Automotive News by highlighting that quote without doing a cursory fact check with how many EVs were on that ship. Facts matter.
Facts matter. Like EVs on fire sunk the boat. Go whine somewhere else.
There is no proof that EVs started the fire. That is the problem with the reporting. Please quote a source that confirms that EVs definitely started the fire.
Once one of these car transport ships catch on fire, they are left abandoned. That same ship with 100% gas cars would also be abandoned and left to burn and sink. It is too dangerous to fight that type of fire even for firefighters. It’s not like there are fire boats patrolling the oceans to fight a fire once one breaks out.
You know what the Coast Guard did? They evacuated the crew, and dispatched three boats. Two to monitor for pollution and clean up of any pollution released by the boat. The other was a recovery boat to try and tow the boat to shore. At no time did they attempt to stop the fire.
Your snarky response is telling. Do you think reporting there were 400 EVs on the boat when there were only 70 is fine? Do you think implying the EVs started the fire is fine? Do you think implying the EVs are the reason the ship sank is fine? I guess facts don’t matter to you. You want the narrative to meet you beliefs rather than worrying about reality.
If expressing concern about items reported as fact are wrong, is whining, I guess I’ll just keep on whining with gusto.
I mean, they stated it pretty clearly that they can’t say EVs are to blame.
It’s also fact that they can make the problem worse. At least with a fuel based fire, you can smother it with water to stop the chemical reaction.
Lithium batteries are oxidizers, they produce their own oxygen during combustion. Which either sustains or accelerates fires.
Making matters worse, if you fight those fires with sea water, it’s entirely possible that they’ll ignite later when the salt creates electrical bridges in the electronics.
They may not be THE problem in shipping, but they are A problem. Shipping methods will need revising, such as containers that can contain a thermal runaway, or specific storage areas of the ship with a firebreak to keep anything that does happen, confined to an area.
If you ship the cars with a depleted battery, do they still have the potential ( literally) for thermal runaway? They wouldn’t generate heat shorting out, it seems like they would be relatively inert.
I would be a lot more concerned about gas leaks than batteries anyway
They hold LESS energy, but you can’t deplete them entirely without damaging the cells. So they need a reasonable SoC so that they survive the journey without running to 0, cause then they’re bricked and worthless.
A gas leak is manageable, thermal runaway is called such because once the chain reaction starts, it’s incredibly hard to stop.
Fumes from a fuel leak can be vented, and liquid absorbed.
Well, I don’t know the specifics of lithium ion batteries, but I do know that if you drop a 16 inch crescent wrench on top of a fully charged 1200 amp tractor battery, and you do it just right you end up with maybe a 10 or 12 inch crescent wrench. You do the same thing with a relatively flat battery.( we would just start the tractors with the battery and since it didn’t need any electricity to keep running, there was no charging system on the tractor and we would charge the battery a couple times during the summer., that was comparatively the lap of luxury compared to that hideous pony motor. How much amperage does an EV have? 400 or 500? It couldn’t be that much with those high voltages.
You’re comparing cranking amps (power output) to kilowatt-hours (capacity). They’re two different beasts.
Plus, your tractors were likely 12v or 24v. A 12v battery putting out 1200amps is a max flow of 14.4kW of power.
An 800V architecture would only require 18 amps of flow to put out the same juice (power/watts = volts × amps). Even in the more common 400V systems, that’s still only 36amps to equal your tractor battery.
These systems can put out significantly more than that.
Naw, my use cases are measured in seconds, more than a few seconds would allow very bad things to happen.
They were two 6 volt batteries about 8x17x9 inches or so each. Last time I used them was exactly 50 years ago. You could only use them for maybe 3 seconds at a time before the cables started smoking.
Also handy for welding a broken cultivator out in the middle of a field. A cold 500 cubic inch 1940s tech diesel really doesn’t want to start.We would only turn it off for oil changes, that’s how much fut starting it was.
But that’s nothing compared to my photo flash packs. 3333 amps at 600 volts, which comes to about two million watts, but only for 1/800 of a second. Lots of hand waving about the time, because it’s dependent on running a bunch of flash tubes in parallel, but it’s 2500 joules. Used to have 4 of them.
I’m telling you, if a cable gets damaged or a switch arcs on the old units things get really exciting fast. Like a shotgun going off in the studio.
The problem with lithium packs is having that much energy, for a sustained period of time. It’s measured in minutes and hours, not fractions of a second.
Shipping rules will change. But will the existing boats change? I don’t know. These boats are expensive and live on for decades and decades. New boats will have newer systems, but the older ones? It seems like a very slow moving industry.
They are slow moving since the boats are worth so much. I estimate the replacement cost of the boat is around $300million. How? Total loss is reported at $460mill. Assuming cars are worth $50,000 each times 3084 cars means the cargo was worth $152million. The remaining loss is presumably the value of the ship.
Fortunately this may not be a long term issue. You are assuming all EVs are going to be lithium ion. With the changing battery chemistries this may become a non issue. If those EVs were using NMC batteries they have no thermal runaway properties at all. Most new chemistries seem to target minimizing or eliminating the thermal runaway issue.
Time will tell.
I assume nothing, I’m talking about current product. Not future hypotheticals.
My job is to keep my workers safe from current hazards. If chemistry changes and the hazards change, then I’ll change our safety procedures.
Rule one working with electrical stuff : one hand in your pocket
Well these battery types are actually already being deployed. This is not something for the future it is happening now. China is way ahead of adopting new more stable battery types.
BYD and Tesla use LFP Lithium-Ion batteries which are considered much more stable. The much less stable and older NMC Lithium Ion batteries used in cars like the Tesla S/X are not common in new vehicles.
China has adopted the strictest battery standards in the world that are in force in 2026. The standard requires no fire or explosion from the battery in the event of thermal runaway. CATL has made batteries that meet this standard since 2020. BYD meets the standard as well. Those two make a vast majority of EV batteries in China.
Zeekr’s Golden Battery pack (yes, that is its official name), is an LFP pack that can charged from 0-100% in 21 minutes. This is a car with 600km of range. Testing with that production car is showing little to no need for active cooling during that charge process. They also expect no degradation in the battery while charging this quickly.
The pace of new battery development AND adoption in China is absolutely stunning. I am comfortable that most if not all of the EV’s on that boat had LFP battery packs.
I work with commercial vehicles and they always operate behind the tech curve. Plus, our buses have a nominal capacity of 600-650kWh, so there’s a shitload more energy than most cars. Couple that with parking them all 4ft apart laterally and nose to tail inside parking garages, we have safety concerns.
We’re dealing with stuff like this: https://youtu.be/vvzMza39zEo?si=Df7yMM2Nhlp9hw5O
Cool! Yeah, commercial vehicles are about living a much harsher and I assume longer life than cars. They are a different beast entirely.
In the video you linked I wonder if there was no plan on what to do with those end of life EV buses? Old diesel buses probably have a pretty strong recycling chain to deal with them just like ICE cars.
The EV buses frames and such hopefully are easy to recycle, but I could see the batteries being a major headache. I hope that they can create financially viable processes to recycle those huge batteries.
I NEVER SAID THAT EV STARTED THE FIRE ONLY THAT THEY SUNK THE BOAT. LEARN TO READ!
Sigh. That has not been confirmed and probably never will. There is long a history of car boat transports catching fire and a lot sinking even before EVs existed.
While reading I found this record of recent car boat transport fires. Some sank. Some didn’t. A lot were before EVs were even a thing.
https://gcaptain.com/a-brief-look-back-at-recent-car-carrier-fires/
Jeez
Easy answer, it’s the Mustang. Barracuda came out first, but the first gen was kinda nerdy and didn’t sell well.
RE: EV Tax credits: All they need to do is convince the Senate that the tax credits help corporations and the 1% while simultaneously hurting poor people.
That’s a win-win for the Senate; those are their two favorite things.
Agreed
I saw a refreshed Model Y driving into work this morning with an “Even my dog hates Elon” sticker on it.
Dude its a refreshed Y; you knew who he was when you bought the thing.
Yeah, I’ve been enthusiastically giving the finger to every Cybertruck I see while driving, and I’m tempted to start bird-watching for refreshed MYs as well.
I have a friend who asked me about EVs before buying his (non-refreshed Model 3). Elon was known to be shitty, and this guy is very politically aware. I gave him some options that seemed like they would work for him. He bought a Tesla and almost immediately slapped a “bought this before we knew” sticker on it. Some people are plenty willing to make the purchase if they think they can still save face.
Yeah I get that. At least your friend got the old version to try to give some plausible deniability. I’d give him hell for it though.
I definitely do.