Shadowing Practice: Engineers Tore Down a BYD — What They Found Should Terrify Britain's Carmakers - Learn English Speaking with Video
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In 2023, Japan's largest publishing house bought a Chinese car, rolled it into a workshop and took the whole thing apart, down to the last bolt.
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Every part photographed, weighed and measured.
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Then it printed what it found in a 350 -page book, priced at around $6 ,400 a copy,
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and sold it to the people who could afford it, the engineers at Toyota, Honda and Nissan.
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Not because the car was bad
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because the people who invented modern car manufacturing could not fully explain how it had been built
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so cheaply and they needed to
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that car was a BYD seal it is sitting in showrooms from Croydon to Glasgow right now from a brand
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that sold more than 51 ,000 cars in Britain last year
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more than Tesla in a country where most people could not
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have told you what the letters stood for three years ago
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it may well be on your street already whether you have noticed or not.
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So what did the Japanese find when they opened one up?
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And the question almost nobody in Britain is asking, is this car cheap to make or cheap to own?
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Because those are two very different promises and only one of them shows up in a teardown.
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Everything in this video comes from published sources.
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The teardown findings come from Nikkei, the Japanese publisher whose engineers physically took a BYD seal apart and printed what they found.
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The cost analysis comes from UBS, the Swiss investment bank,
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which ran its own independent teardown of the same car to work out what it really costs to build.
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More engineering analysis comes from Caresoft Global, an American consultancy that has taken apart BYD's cheapest car for clients in Japan and America.
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British prices and warranties come from BYD's own published figures.
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Crash data comes from Euro NCAP and insurance and owner data from British sources.
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Where something crosses from fact into my interpretation, I will tell you.
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Start with who spent the money, because that tells you how seriously to take everything else.
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Nikkei is the same group behind
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Japan's biggest financial newspaper.
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It is not a car magazine.
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It is what the Japanese business establishment reads over breakfast
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and it decided that a Chinese saloon was worth a complete engineering teardown.
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That decision alone tells you where the Japanese car industry thought the threat was coming from.
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The body, the battery pack, the drive unit, the wiring, the interior, every piece photographed and measured as it came off and explained,
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with repair guidance, in that 350 -page manual.
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And the preface did not hedge.
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It described BYD as the Chinese manufacturer that will lead the world of electric vehicles in the future.
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That is not a Chinese marketing department talking.
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That is Japan's most respected business publisher writing about a rival.
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The first thing that struck the engineers was how few parts were inside the car.
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That sounds like a small thing.
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It is not.
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Every part in a car is something to design, something to buy, something to ship,
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something to fit on the production line and eventually something that can fail on you.
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Cut the number of parts and you cut the cost at every one of those steps at once.
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It compounds.
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And what they found was that BYD was not trimming here and there.
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It was systematically combining components that almost every other carmaker still buys separately.
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On BYD's compact SUV, the Atto 3, the kind you see on the school run in Leeds or Bristol,
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engineers found eight major components folded into one integrated drive unit.
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The motor, the gearbox, the power electronics and more.
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Pieces that used to arrive as separate boxes from separate suppliers combined into one.
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Less weight, simpler assembly, fewer joints to fail on the line.
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And it did not stop at combining parts.
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BYD took those combined parts and shared them across several models so one design serves three or four cars instead of one.
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To a factory accountant, that is close to everything.
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You order in bigger volumes, you approve one supplier once, you stock one part number.
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Multiply that across a whole car and the savings stack up line by line.
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No single dramatic breakthrough, just a thousand small disciplined decisions.
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And it was not one publisher chasing a headline.
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In October 2024, the Japanese government's
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Regional Trade Bureau for Central Japan hosted something that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.
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In an old gymnasium in Gifu, just outside Nagoya, in the heart of Japan's car country,
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it laid out more than 90 ,000 parts stripped from 16 foreign electric cars.
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BYD, NIO, Tesla all pulled apart and set out on long tables like specimens in a museum.
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around 70 japanese parts makers the companies behind the parts in your corolla
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and your yaris sent their people to walk the aisles one
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of them the head of a department at a japanese parts maker summed up the mood in a sentence
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he was surprised he said at how few parts byd and tesla used
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think about
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that room these are the people who spent the 1980s teaching the rest of the world how to build a reliable car.
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And there they were, leaning over folding tables, taking notes on a Chinese SUV.
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The unsettling part was not that BYD had invented something new.
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It was that it had done what
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Japan used to be famous for, patient and methodical cost -cutting, and done it better.
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And it was not staying in Japan.
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In Detroit, CareSoft Global took apart BYD's cheapest car, the little Seagull hatchback, the car sold in Britain as the Dolphin Surf.
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The man running that company had been a chief engineer at General Motors and had spent 45 years in the industry.
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His verdict was that the Seagull was a huge problem for American car makers.
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A bargain basement price and still a quality product.
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Ford's own chief executive, Jim Farley, has said publicly that the Chinese are ahead.
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And Andy Palmer, the British engineer who led the development of the Nissan Leaf and went on to run
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Aston Martin, has been warning the industry about China for years.
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So this is no longer one book from one publisher that you can shrug off.
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Japan, America and the people who built
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Britain's own car industry arriving at the same conclusion from different directions.
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So how big is the gap?
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The sharpest number came from UBS.
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The bank's analysts took a seal apart to work out what it genuinely costs to build
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and concluded that BYD has a lasting cost advantage of around 25 % over the established
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Western car makers.
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And their verdict on the car itself was blunt.
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Compared with the mass -market electric cars from the legacy brands, they said, the BYD seal is the better and much cheaper car.
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And here is the part that should really worry the competition.
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UBS estimated that BYD still makes a healthy profit on it, a gross margin of around 16%,
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which the bank said was similar to what carmakers make on ordinary mass -market petrol cars.
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In other words, the seal is not cheap because BYD is losing money to win customers.
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It is cheap because BYD can build it for less and still make money.
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Where does that come from?
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Integration.
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And not just in the drive unit, in the whole company.
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BYD does not design its cars and then go shopping for the pieces.
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It makes its own batteries, it makes its own motors, it makes its own semiconductor chips,
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the small controllers almost every other car maker has to buy in from outside.
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Almost the entire car is made under one roof, and it does it at enormous scale.
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In November 2024, BYD became the first company in the world to build 10 million electric and plug -in hybrid cars,
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and it now builds more than 4 million cars a year.
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Spread the cost of a shared design across 4 million cars and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable for anyone competing against it,
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which, in Britain, now means every badge on your street that is not Chinese.
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Right, quick one before the half of this that actually reaches your driveway.
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If any of this is useful, hit the like button
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because it puts this in front of somebody who is about
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to sign for one of these without knowing what they are signing up to
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and type the badge you drive in the comments one word
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so everyone can see who is here subscribe if you have not
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because this channel follows exactly this all year now the battery
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and this is where it gets interesting
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if you are the sort of person who keeps a car for years
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which in britain is most people most electric cars carry their battery cells inside a sealed pack
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and then bolt
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that pack into the floor a box inside a bigger box
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byd throws out the middle layer its blade battery uses long
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flat cells built directly into the structure of the car the floor of the car
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and the battery are in effect the same thing byd says this makes the body far stiffer
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and protects you better in a crash
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and the seal did earn a full five stars from euro ncap with 89 for adult occupants and 87 for children.
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The battery chemistry deserves credit too.
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BYD's blade cells use lithium -ion phosphate with no cobalt in them at all.
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It is generally regarded as one of the more stable battery chemistries, less prone to overheating than some of the alternatives,
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and it tends to cope well with being charged.. over
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and over for years on paper it is clever careful engineering
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and i am not dismissing it but here is the thing the teardown flagged
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and it does not appear on the spec sheet
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when the cells are bonded into the structure they are much harder to remove
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when the battery reaches the end of its life the design
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that makes the car efficient to build is the same design that makes it awkward to take apart when it is old.
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That is a trade -off, but it is your trade -off, not BYD's.
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And there is a second edge to it.
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When the battery is part of the structure, a hard impact that damages the floor can damage the battery itself.
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A structural battery is far harder to repair than a pack you can unbolt and replace.
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In the worst cases, damage that a petrol car would shrug off can write off the whole vehicle.
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This channel showed you how that works in the video on the scratch
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that wrote off a 50 000 pound car it is the same physics
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and british insurers have noticed the seal sits in insurance groups
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in the high 40s up to 50 on some versions near the very top of the scale
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which tells you what the people pricing the risk expect to repair to cost now back to
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that integrated drive unit because this is where your money is everything
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Everything so far was about what BYD saves.
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Everything from here is about who pays for it later.
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And the answer is not BYD.
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Folding eight components into one unit is a genuine achievement on the production line.
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Lower cost, lower weight, fewer joints to leak or rattle.
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On day one, as a new car, that is a good story.
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The trouble only shows up later, on your drive, after the warranty runs out.
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When parts are separate, a failure is often a small, contained repair at any decent garage.
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A sensor dies, you replace the sensor.
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But when eight things are combined into one sealed unit, a fault in any one of them can mean replacing the whole assembly
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because there is nothing left to open up and fix on its own.
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Think about what that means in practice.
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A seal on its second owner, five or six years old, the warranty finished, and something in that drive unit starts playing up.
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Maybe a temperature sensor.
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Maybe a position sensor on the motor.
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On a conventional car, a routine job.
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On this design, you could be looking at a whole unit.
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And what does a replacement drive unit for a seal cost in Britain, from a dealer or an independent, six years from now?
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Nobody knows.
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Not the dealer, not the insurer, not the independent garage that has been fixing Fords for 30 years.
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That is the honest answer.
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These cars have not been on British roads long enough to find out.
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And that uncertainty does not sit with the manufacturer.
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It sits with you, or with whoever buys the car from you.
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Then there is the question of where you live.
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BYD's network in Britain has grown fast, to around 125 sites by the end of last year.
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That is real progress for a brand this new.
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But it is concentrated around the cities and big towns, and it is still a fraction of what the established brands have built over decades.
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If you live in London, Manchester or Birmingham, you are fine.
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If you live in the Highlands, in mid -Wales or at the far end of Cornwall,
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the nearest authorised BYD service point may be a very long drive away.
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And that matters more on this car than on most, because its design, the integrated modules and the battery that is part of the floor,
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depends heavily on the manufacturer's own diagnostic equipment, software and trained technicians.
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An independent garage can plug into the standard diagnostic port.
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It cannot necessarily get into the deeper layers of the battery management system without BYD's own tools and access.
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That wall is coming down as the independent trade catches up, but today it is there.
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And then there is the used market, which is where cheap -to -make and cheap -to -own finally collide.
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A new seal starts at £45 ,730.
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Used ones are already being advertised from around £28 ,500.
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As this channel covered in the video on Chinese car values, Chinese brands have been among the fastest depreciating cars in Britain,
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and price cuts on new stock only push used values down further.
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In owner satisfaction, the picture is mixed too.
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In Auto Express's owner survey, the BYD brand's result was described as disappointing.
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The cars impressed the engineers on the bench.
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The ownership experience is still being proven on the road.
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Now, to understand why this teardown rattled the Japanese so badly, you need to know who BYD used to be.
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Go back to 1995 in Shenzhen.
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A chemist called Wang Chuanfu borrows money from a relative and starts a company with around 20 employees.
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not a car company a battery company making rechargeable cells for mobile phones
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and the way he competed was almost embarrassingly simple the japanese giants
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that ruled batteries sony
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and sanyo made their cells with expensive automated machinery wang could not afford any of
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that so he studied how their batteries were made and rebuilt the process using people where the machines should have been.
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People called it primitive.
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It worked.
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His batteries came in at a fraction of the Japanese price.
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BYD did not build its first car until 2003, when it bought a struggling state -owned carmaker and started making petrol saloons.
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And how did it learn to build them?
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Much the same way.
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Its first big seller, the F3, looked remarkably like a Toyota Corolla.
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The company, being carefully taken apart on that Japanese workbench,
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had spent its own youth learning from the cars of the very engineers who were now studying it.
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And the timing carries a hard kind of irony.
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In 2003, the same Japanese publisher put out a long study of China's car industry and concluded that
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China was about 10 years behind Japan.
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10 years!
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Remember that the next time somebody tells you the Chinese are a decade behind.
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In 2008, Warren Buffett quietly bought a stake in BYD when almost nobody outside
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China was paying attention.
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By last year, BYD was building far more fully electric cars than Tesla. In 2023,
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it became the first Chinese carmaker ever to exhibit at Japan's
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biggest motor show on the home turf of the giants it once learned from.
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And then it put the seal on sale to Japanese drivers in the home market of the companies whose cars
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it had studied.
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Toyota, meanwhile, has reportedly taken apart several BYD models of its own to learn from them.
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Britain remembers what a well -made 1990s Japanese car was.
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A Corolla or a Civic that was still fundamentally sound at 200 ,000 miles.
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That reputation took decades of real roads to build.
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The question with BYD is whether the engineering that impressed the teardown teams becomes that kind of proven,
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durable reputation, or whether it stays impressive on the bench and never gets properly tested by 15 British winters.
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And that is the honest limit of the whole exercise.
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A teardown can tell you how a car is built.
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It can count the parts, weigh the pieces, and estimate the cost almost to the last pound.
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What it cannot tell you is how that car behaves at 150 ,000 miles after a decade of salted roads, potholes and cold wet winters.
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Or what it costs to fix when something finally lets go.
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Those answers only come from time on the road.
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And these cars have not been on British roads long enough to give them up.
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The owners are the ones who will find out.
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So let me give you the practical read, because that is why you are here.
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First, if you are looking at a BYD, find your nearest authorised service centre.
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Not the showroom, the service centre.
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Where will the car actually go when it needs work?
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If it is more than an hour from home, factor that into the cost of owning it.
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Not a deal -breaker, but real.
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Second, understand how you are paying.
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A great many of these cars in Britain are on PCP deals, or salary sacrifice and company car schemes,
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cards, helped by the low tax on electric company cars.
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If you are leasing and handing it back, most of the long -term risk in this video lands on somebody else.
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If you are buying outright, or you might want to get out early, BYD's used values in Britain are not yet established,
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and the price cuts on new cars do not help.
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Third, the warranty, which is genuinely one of the best around.
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6 years, or 93 ,750 miles on the car,
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and 8 years, or 155 ,350 miles on the battery, and the battery cover transfers to the next owner.
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If you are buying used, check exactly how much is left, for which parts, and get it in writing.
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And on a used one, ask for a battery health report.
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The battery warranty guarantees that it will keep at least 70 % of its original capacity for those eight years.
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A health check before you buy tells you how far down
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that road the car already is and whether the warranty is ever likely to be needed.
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Fourth, before you sign anything, ring your insurer and ask what a claim involving the battery structure looks like on this car.
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Not whether they will insure it.
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What happens after somebody reverses into you in a supermarket car park.
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That answer will tell you more about owning this car than any review.
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And the direction has reversed for good.
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For decades, the ideas flowed out of Japan and into everyone else's factories.
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Now, the Japanese are buying Chinese cars to take apart.
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After the seal, Nikkei bought a Zika saloon and took that apart too.
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The teachers are back at the workbench, and this time they are the ones taking notes.
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Worth remembering the next time somebody tells you the Japanese badge is automatically the safe one.
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So here is where I land.
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The engineers who opened up that seal found something that genuinely unsettled them.
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Not bad engineering, very good engineering.
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Disciplined, integrated and cost -controlled in a way the people who invented modern manufacturing recognized immediately
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because it was their own method used against them.
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UBS puts BYD's cost advantage at around a quarter.
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That took 30 years to build.
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It cannot be copied quickly, and it is why BYD went from nowhere to outselling
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Tesla in this country in a couple of years.
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On paper, the seal is a serious car.
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A good range, 5 euro end cap stars, clever battery integration, and a long warranty.
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But the questions that matter most are the ones the teardown cannot answer.
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What the drive unit costs to replace at 100 ,000 miles, out of warranty, at an independent garage.
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What the parts supply looks like in 2030 for a car that only went on sale here in 2023.
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And what happens to a structural battery after a serious knock.
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I am not telling you not to buy one.
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I am telling you to go in with your eyes open.
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If you are leasing for three years and handing it back, fair enough, sleep well.
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If you are buying outright and planning to keep it for a decade, these are the questions to have answered before you hand over the money.
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The teardown found clever engineering.
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What it could not find is the mileage you have not driven yet.
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So, straight talk on what is confirmed and what is not.
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Confirmed and on the record.
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The Nikkei teardown and its published findings.
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The UBS cost analysis.
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The Caresoft teardown and its engineers' comments the Japanese government's teardown exhibition, and BYD's British prices, warranties, and Euro NCAP rating.
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Not yet known, because nobody has had to pay for one yet, what a major drive unit repair actually costs in this country.
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And still developing, BYD's British network, its used values, and the parts picture,
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as the first big wave of these cars comes off finance and lease deals.
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Now the part where you can make this better than anything I can research.
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If you own a BYD, a Seal, a Sea Lion, an Atto 3 or a Dolphin,
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tell everyone in the comments what owning it has really been like.
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What the servicing has been like, whether you have needed anything beyond a routine service,
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and if you have dealt with the warranty, how long it took.
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And if I have got anything wrong in this video, a figure, a price, a detail, say so.
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I would rather be corrected by someone who knows than leave a mistake sitting there.
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And the Japanese did not start with BYD.
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Years earlier, the same publisher took apart a Tesla
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and an engineer from a major Japanese carmaker looked at what was inside and said three words that went around the world.
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That story is coming soon on this channel.
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Subscribe now so you do not miss it.
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Thanks for watching and I will see you there.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Engineers Tore Down a BYD — What They Found Should Terrify Britain's Carmakers”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: byd, battery, japanese, cost, seal. This video has 304 sentences and 3805 words to shadow. The speech runs for 23:29. The speaker talks at a natural 162 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| seal noun | /siːl/ | A stamp used to impress a design on a soft substance such as wax. |
| warranty noun | /ˈwɔɹ.ən.ti/ | A guarantee that a certain outcome or obligation will be fulfilled; security. |
| publisher noun | /ˈpʌblɪʃɚ/ | A person or (especially) a company who publishes, especially books. |
| tesla noun | /ˈtɛslə/ | In the International System of Units, the derived unit of magnetic flux density or magnetic inductivity. |
| repair verb | /ˈɹiːpɛɚ/ | To restore to good working order, fix, or improve damaged condition; to mend; to remedy. |
| maker noun | /ˈmeɪk.ɚ/ | Someone who makes; a person or thing that makes or produces something. |
| garage noun | /ɡəˈɹɑʒ/ | A building (or section of a building) used to store a car or cars, tools and other miscellaneous items. |
| sensor noun | /ˈsɛn.sɚ/ | A device or organ that detects certain external stimuli and responds in a distinctive manner. |
| integrate verb | /ˈɪn.tɪ.ɡɹeɪt/ | To include as a constituent part or functionality. |
| component noun | /kəmˈpoʊ.nənt/ | A smaller, self-contained part of a larger entity. Often refers to a manufactured object that is part of a larger device. |
| clever adjective | /ˈklɛv.ɚ/ | Nimble with hands or body; dexterous; skillful; adept. |
| lease noun | /liːs/ | An interest in land granting exclusive use or occupation of real estate for a limited period; a leasehold. |
| genuinely adverb | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/ | In a genuine manner; truthfully, truly. |
| badge noun | /bæd͡ʒ/ | A distinctive mark, token, sign, emblem or cognizance, worn on one’s clothing, as an insignia of some rank, or of the membership of an organization. |
| petrol noun | /ˈpɛt.ɹəl/ | A fluid consisting of a mixture of refined petroleum hydrocarbons, primarily consisting of octane, commonly used as a motor fuel. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| take apart verb | To dismantle something into its component pieces. | |
| come off verb | To become detached. | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| open up verb | To open. | |
| work out verb | /ˌwɝk ˈaʊt/ | To calculate. |
| write off verb | To reduce the book value of (an asset) to zero. | |
| catch up verb | To pick up suddenly. | |
| come down verb | To descend, fall down, collapse. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to arrive · used to be |
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | has been warning · has been fixing |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have told · have noticed · has taken |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | had been built · is made · is generally regarded |
Pronunciation to watch
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: publisher /ˈpʌblɪʃɚ/, garage /ɡəˈɹɑʒ/, reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/, integration /ˌɪn.tɪˈɡɹeɪ.ʃən/, structural /ˈstɹʌk(t͡)ʃəɹəl/
- Long words — get the stress right: genuinely /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/, reputation /ˌɹɛpjʊˈteɪʃən/, integration /ˌɪn.tɪˈɡɹeɪ.ʃən/, manufacturer /ˌmænjʊˈfæktʃəɹə/, diagnostic /ˌdaɪ.əɡˈnɑ.stɪk/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like seal, warranty, publisher.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.