THE DREAM TEAM

Chinese firm BYD is a multi-sector manufacturing giant with huge global ambitions for its cars. As its UK launch gains pace, Vicky Parrott reveals what you need to know

- Vicky Parrott

Here's a good pub quiz question: who was the world's biggest manufacturer of plug-in cars in 2022? What would you guess? Tesla's the obvious one. Maybe the Volkswagen Group or Stellantis? H Well, you'd be looking at the wrong side of the planet. BYD, or Build Your Dreams, is a Chinese manufacturer based in Shenzhen. It produces batteries, solar panels, forklift trucks, trains, buses, cars and more, and it's recently burst onto the European car market, including the UK. Last year, it made 1.85 million plug-in cars.

BYD is no small deal, then. It was established in 1995 chiefly as a battery producer, while the automotive arm - BYD Auto Co Ltd - arrived in 2003. At the end of 2022, it produced one in every five phone batteries around the globe, was the second-largest producer of high-voltage vehicle batteries, had registered 28,000 patents and employed 600,000 people globally across six continents, 70 countries and 400 cities.

The caveat about that 1.85 million battery car sales figure is that this includes plug-in hybrids. A total of 911,141 BYD sales in 2022 were BEVs, and 946,238 were PHEVs. Tesla still dominates BEV sales, with 1.3 million sold globally last year, but that may change in 2023 despite BYD not being in North America (the second-largest car market after China). Not yet, anyway...

And who provides the batteries for the Tesla Model Y in the American maker's Grünheide factory in Germany? Yup: BYD.