You’ve probably heard of BYD.
A middling player in the auto industry just a few years ago, the Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer surpassed Tesla last year to become the world’s top-selling E.V. brand and is expected to pull even with the world’s biggest carmakers, Toyota and Volkswagen, by 2030.
Yet most Americans have never even seen a BYD, and probably won’t anytime soon.
BYD, which stands for “Build Your Dreams,” is essentially banned from American roads by tariffs imposed to protect U.S. automakers that double the price of imported Chinese plug-ins. Erecting tariff walls may buy the domestic auto industry some time, but it ultimately won’t insulate American manufacturers from BYD or the bigger threat that it represents.
The company embodies a Chinese industrial model that is leaving America in the dust. This model, which combines government financial support, methodical long-term planning and aggressive innovation, has already enabled China to achieve global dominance in a range of high-tech industries, from batteries to robotics to drones. Losing those markets to Chinese companies was bad enough. If the same happens in auto manufacturing, the impact would be far worse for America, due to the industry’s size and its economic, political and strategic importance.
The success of BYD and several other upstart Chinese car brands should be a warning for U.S. auto manufacturing and our industrial sector as a whole. We need the courage to recognize how badly we are falling behind, shake off complacency and adopt an urgent government-led effort — think of a “Manhattan Project,” but for cars — to restore U.S. competitiveness.
When I opened my automotive business in Beijing in 1992, cars produced by China’s then-fledgling auto industry were terrible. Shoddily designed and made from cheap materials, they were quick to break down, befitting the country’s reputation at the time as a factory for inferior knockoffs. BYD, a battery manufacturer that began making cars in 2003, was no exception. For years, its cars were notorious in China as clunkers.
Those days are long gone. I’ve driven nearly every BYD model and they are now as good as other top brands like Tesla in terms of design, features, advanced technologies and overall quality. The company’s Blade Battery is among the safest and most cost-efficient in the world, so good that Toyota and Tesla have used it in some of their cars. Most worrying for its competitors, BYDs are affordable: Its least expensive models sell in China for under $10,000, a third of the price of the most affordable electric vehicles available in the U.S. market.
