The truth about the BYD Atto 3 EV rust problem

The internet is having a meltdown at the news of rusty BYD Atto 3 electric cars out there on the roads. So how bad is this corrosion? Should you scrub the brand from your shortlist?

Download the PODCAST for this report

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If you found out your new Chinese-made electric car was showing the orange halo of rust we haven’t seen on cars since the 1970s, you’d be anywhere from concerned to downright furious.

The forums certainly are, so let’s do some digging and find out if you should be up in arms if you find that distinctive corrosive glow on your vehicle.

Roughly a billion people emailed me about this over one weekend, meaning eight or nine or maybe twelve - something like that. Two incidents appear to have caused quite the corrosion-based stir.

One dude in New Zealand managed to integrate his BYD Atto 3 with a wire rope barrier and, counterproductively, removed one of the rear doors in the process, exposing the gremlin of rust.

Another dude, Juan Perez, appears to be wrecking a months-old BYD Atto 3 and he has exposed the same rusty defect in subframe members specifically where different brackets attach.

So let us deep-dive into Chinese cars, rust and what we really need to know to understand whether or not buying an Atto 3 is a good idea or a bad one.

Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time, and here today, I’m going to give you A Brief History of Why Cars Don’t Rust Anymore. You can get a more in-depth anti-rusting car facts here >> or learn why rust-proofing is a rip-off here >>

A full cathodic galvanised body receives automated robot welding at Hyundai’s Ulsan Plant in Seoul.

Cars tended to be pretty uniformly galvanized in our market, in Europe, America and Japan, places like that, from about the mid-1980s.

The first form of galvanizing was called electroplating. This electroplating is that gold-like colouring you might see on bolts, for example, from time to time. But that tended to be expensive and consumed an enormous amount of electricity, which is why they moved by the mid-1990s to the second form of galvanizing, called ‘hot-dipped’ galvanizing. Pretty much all cars have been hot galvanized for about two decades now, which is why they just don't rust away anymore.

It's kind of like paint in that it encapsulates the steel and deprives it of access to oxygen in the air, which is what you need if you want rust. The galvanizing starts out nice and shiny, and after several years it turns that dull grey colour, which is a layer of zinc oxide that tends to be impermeable to atmospheric oxygen as well.

The third mechanism of galvanizing protection is called ‘cathodic’ protection, because the zinc is a more electrochemically active metal than the steel, so it sacrifices itself to protect the steel. You need a particular amount of zinc on the steel to protect it in this way. You need 70 grams per square meter, per side, and obviously sheet metal has two sides, so you need about 140 grams of zinc for every square meter of steel you want to protect.

The beauty of the cathodic protection part of this galvanization process is that you can galvanize some steel and then scratch it, or drill a hole in it, or you can subject it to some localised defect - but you won't get the cancer of rust spreading all the way through because of this electrochemical protection.

Chinese manufactured vehicles have started to gather a bad reputation in Australia for rust and this took place maybe 18 months to two years ago. The dude's name was (and probably still is) Timothy Rigby, who bought a rusty LDV in Queensland.

The kinds of defects being discussed online recently, they're fairly small rusty defects, and they're all underneath things like the attachment points where bolts go through the subframe to hold other components such as a door hinge or other brackets.

For most of the steel in these cars, which are quite new, you wouldn't expect any rust to be developing under the paint just yet because they've only been in service for a matter of months. What that orange halo of rust under those brackets actually means is some kind of new corrosion is taking place. Orange rust is new, compared with the dark brown section which is not the rust to be worrying about.

LDV is one of the bigger manufacturers in China and one of the bigger importers into Australia, although you should know MG and LDV are both made by the Shanghai Automotive Investment Corporation, but MG is a standalone company import operation here. Whereas LDV is independently imported by ATECO, so their philosophy of dealing with customers on a brand level is completely different, evidently.

The questions I've got about this rustiness of BYD Atto 3 is if it's just a little bit of local rust underneath these brackets due to some kind of external contamination making its way in there, then it’s trivial and unlikely to spread if it’s been subjected to adequate galvanisation.

But there’s no easy way to find this out and there’s no regulation for galvanisation. However, products you buy in Australia have to be free of defects and must be reasonably durable as per the expectations of an ordinary consumer. If I were BYD, I’d be getting out in front of this and addressing th question of whether its vehicles are sufficiently galvanised.

Obviously, this is a condensed version of the video report above, so watch that in full if you need to investigate this issue further - which you should if you’re considering buying a Chinese car in 2023 or 2024 >>.

Here’s also my report on whether buying an MG is a safe bet in Australia >> They’re a popular brand now, so do your research.

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