Ok, so we heard that BYD is moving onto the home appliance market. Now, BYD takes development to a whole new level We hear that they will build whole homes! No drywall comments, please, these are environmentally friendly homes. China’s electric car manufacturer BYD Auto teamed up with California’s KB Home to build new energy homes in Lancaster, California. The first-phase construction of the project has recently been completed, Gasgoo says.
Five new energy homes were built in the first phase in Lancaster, and all five have received an Energy Star from the EPA. The houses combine solar, battery technology and LED lighting.
Of course, the new energy homes come with a jack to charge BYD’s F3DM plug-in electric hybrid and its e6 all-electric cars, which BYD testmarkets in Lancaster. A new building phase has started a week ago. Lancaster will soon be the most plugged-in city in California.
Some numbers would be nice here, instead of just gushing.
How much do these panels add to the cost of the home?
How much power to they generate?
… and so on.
BTW, from the linked article, I see that they have actually built _five_ homes like this.
It would be interesting to see what kinds of innovation Toyota or Honda would bring to the manufactured housing industry.
Stick-built homes are pretty much hand crafted, and in relatively low volumes. Toyota and Honda have tried to enter the aviation business with less than stellar success. Manufactured homes, that Toyonda may be good at, are still too much like trailers to be taken seriously.
nikita, houses suffer from the same inconsistent quality that Detroit suffered from in the 70s. If you want a home built right, you have to go to the building site every day and demand corrections any time construction deviates from the blueprints. A steel frame house kit with consistent assembly quality control and low maintenance cost could command a slight price premium over inconsistent quality and “builder’s grade” parts. Imagine never having to inspect for structural defects or having to worry about rot or termites. Imagine not having to replace cheap faucets that fall apart in a few years. I’d buy a house built like a Toyota or a Honda.
Toyota Throws More Weight Behind Its Homes Unit: Steel-Frame Houses
Get Renewed Push, Tie-In to Electric Cars” By John Murphy
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121496449430221935.html
July 2, 2008; Page B6
“In March 2010, a report by the Government Accountability Office stated that the Energy Star program had accepted 15 out of 20 bogus products submitted for approval. The Energy Star program had also qualified four businesses as Energy Star partners, failing to catch the fact that information on the companies, products and staff were all fictitious.”
Still, I trust* Energy Star picks.
* I don’t, actually.
Lancaster is a desert exurb of Los Angeles. While not quite the epicenter of forclosures, I cant see much demand for new housing there anytime soon. Also with 60-80 mile one-way commutes, in much more extreme temperatures than LA proper, how useful are those plug-in cars going to be anyway?
“No drywall comments, please, these are environmentally friendly homes.”
OK, no drywall, just cadmium, lead, and melamine.
Whenever upstart foreigners are highlighted in the American media, they are greeted with a strange combination of contempt and dismissiveness. Right now BYD is equated with tainted toys (which were procured under the auspices of ‘quality’ American corporate QC). That makes as much sense as equating GM to recalled American lettuce. Go back a decade or two and it was cool for Detroit acolytes to see Hyundai as knockoff crap. Go back a bit further and we saw Japanese cars as crap. Our derision shifts every few years to the next target. We downplay whatever success the others have achieved, and we’re not very good at history anyway. Unfortunately the glib mentality and comments really serve to feed our narcissism, and it allows us to continue to indulge in essentially bad economic policy.
You could continue to see things made in ______ foreign place as inherently and permanently inferior. Yet ‘them’ foreigners are constantly competing and improving and moving up the food chain, while we’ve hollowed out our economy by continually outsourcing, resulting in lowered living standards for everyone except the very wealthy.
Doesn’t really matter though, as a lot of you will continue to indulge in this mindset. It could make you feel better, but it also detracts from an honest appraisal of our own issues.
This will be interesting to watch.
My father and and brother are both in home construction, and it is one of the most corrupt and protected industries there is. Everyone complains about the endless paperwork required to build, but most of it was pushed in by a bought and paid for politician to protect local builders, installers, and suppliers. There is a reason home quality and construction efficiency has not improved like other industries – local zoning and construction laws are designed to protect the status quo.
In my experience, which covers most of the Midwest and Texas, small to midsize American towns are incredibly corrupt, with only a few well connected brokers and builders able to get the choice pieces of land or building permits. Everyone else has their paperwork stalled and receives hypercritical inspections whose only purpose is to delay things until the you go broke or sell the project in disgust. Steel home construction in the past has been virtually impossible due to absurd and outdated laws pushed by lumber companies.
Manufactured homes, that Toyonda may be good at, are still too much like trailers to be taken seriously. et ‘them’ foreigners are constantly competing and improving and moving up the food chain, while we’ve hollowed out our economy by continually outsourcing, resulting in lowered living standards for everyone except the very wealthy.
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