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China EV war: how BYD grew from Elon Musk’s ridicule to Berkshire Hathaway’s ‘ridiculous’ US$98 billion success in 12 years
- BYD delivered 1.86 million fully electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in 2022, outselling Tesla’s 1.3 million by 42 per cent
- BYD’s shares have soared 40-fold since Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger first decided to back the carmaker in 2008
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In the second instalment of a four-part series, Xue Yujie, Daniel Ren, and Pearl Liu look at how Shenzhen’s BYD used its dominance and innovations in battery packs to become the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles in a little more than a decade.
Elon Musk laughed out loud when he was asked about potential competition with BYD, which had brought a battery-powered car to market in southern China three years before Tesla.
The object of Musk’s ridicule was the e6, a compact car tested to run 370 kilometres (230 miles) on a single charge, which took more than eight seconds to go from standstill to 97 kilometres per hour (60 miles per hour).
“Have you seen their car?” the Tesla chief executive said during an interview on Bloomberg Television, barely hiding his mirth. “I don’t think they make a good product. I don’t think it’s particularly attractive, the technology is not very strong.”
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