BYD's Rapid Pivot to Electric Cars

There is perhaps no better example of China’s rapid transformation towards electric mobility than BYD. The carmaker successfully pivoted from international combustion vehicles to what’s known as “new energy vehicles” in China, i.e. battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. As our chart shows, the company did so at breakneck speed, ramping up production of its electric passenger vehicles at a pace European or American legacy carmakers can only dream of.

Since 2018, BYD grew its sales of (partially) electric passenger vehicles from little more than 200,000 cars per year to more than 3 million in 2023, all while gradually phasing out production of gasoline-powered cars, the last of which rolled off the assembly line in March 2022. Considering that completed phase-out, it's even more noteworthy that BYD surpassed Volkswagen as the best-selling car brand in China last year.

In August 2023, BYD celebrated the production of its five millionth new energy vehicle. After it took the company 13 years to produce one million vehicles, it took just 18 months to produce the next two million plug-in EVs and less than a year to build the final two million to reach that milestone. By the end of 2023, BYD had sold more than 6 million plug-in electric vehicles and it looks likely to reach 10 million in cumulative sales this year.