BYD Wants To Be World's Biggest Car Maker

So they say, if you want to be a successful car manufacturer, you must have steel in your DNA, gasoline in your blood, a history reaching back generations, and an annual output of at least 5m to stay profitable. And even then it’s not a slam dunk, as we are painfully aware.

Wang Chuanfu proves them all wrong.

In 1995, he left his job as a researcher and started making rechargeable batteries. He landed Nokia as his biggest customer and was off to the races. His company BYD is now the world’s largest mobile phone battery producer, taking up about a 30 percent share of the market.

In 2003 Wang surprised everybody by entering the car industry in China. There is no shortage of auto makers in the Middle Kingdom, the official count is over 100. Wang thought his battery know-how would give him an edge in building electric cars, which surely would be the future. So he started building cars for his batteries.

And his cars took off. Last year, BYD sold 400,000 cars, this year, the plan is to double output to 800,000 cars. Ironically, it’s a conventionally powered car that drives BYD’s sales. The ICE-propelled BYD F3 has topped the sedan charts for many months. It’s a roomy B-class, Corolla-sized model that sells for around $9500 US, “about the price of an early 1990s-era Toyota Corolla,” as Popular Mechanics can’t help to remark. Some can’t help to remark that the F3 looks like a mirror image of the Corolla. Some Chinese customers are said to replace the BYD badge with one by Toyota, and nobody can tell the difference.

And what about the electrics? Only a few hundred electric dreams were sold in 2009.

ICE propelled, BYD’s stock went into the stratosphere, and Wang Chuanfu became the richest person in China, if the Forbes China list 2009 has it right. Warren Buffet, who plunked down $232m for a 10 percent stake in BYD, also didn’t to too bad. In one year, Buffet was looking at a 500 percent return. On paper.

Wang Chuanfu wants more. He wants to be China’s biggest auto producer by 2015 – and no less than the world’s biggest car maker no later than 2025, writes China Daily. If his dreams become reality, then Volkswagen and Toyota can play tag team for a few years, only to be toppled by a Chinese upstart who eats in the company canteen, lives in a BYD-owned apartment complex with other engineers. The only luxuries of the austere billionaire are a Mercedes and a Lexus. Which he owns strictly for research purposes: He likes taking their engines apart to see how they work.

At NAIAS, BYD announced it wants to bring its electric E6 crossover vehicle to the U.S. by the end of the year. BYD says the E6 can go from zero to 60 mph in less than 14 seconds, achieve a top speed of 140 miles per hour and will have a range of 205 miles. Supposedly, the E6 carries the coveted title of “the world’s first production plug-in hybrid crossover.”

BYD also has its sights on Europe. An announcement will be made at the Geneva motor show in March, reports Autocar. BYD already has production facilities in Romania and Hungary supplying cars to countries outside the European Union. Support sites exist in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Holland and Russia.