Chinese BYD boasted of producing 10 million hybrids and electric vehicles

This month in the history of the Chinese automaker BYD was marked by the release of the 10 millionth car with a traction electric motor, which was the Denza Z9 sedan, recently introduced on the local market. Tellingly, BYD released its millionth car with a traction electric motor only in May 2021, so the company’s business growth rate is impressive.

Let us remember that at the end of last year, BYD managed to surpass the long-lived American company Tesla in terms of the number of electric vehicles produced, and recently it overtook the brainchild of Elon Musk in terms of revenue. BYD has long been a leader in the Chinese domestic market; now the company is actively developing the markets of Latin America, Europe, Transcaucasia and Central Asia. In ten months of this year, it managed to sell 3.25 million hybrids and electric vehicles. It stopped producing cars exclusively with internal combustion engines in March 2022. BYD began developing the first hybrid powertrain in 2003, but introduced it only in 2004. Now the company is already producing the fifth generation of hybrids, which, depending on the configuration option, are characterized by either high dynamic characteristics or fuel efficiency.

«The price war with Tesla in the Chinese market has led to the fact that now entry-level hybrid models are not that much different in price from cars with only internal combustion engines, so sales volumes of rechargeable hybrids in China are growing much faster than electric vehicles. BYD released the world’s first plug-in hybrid in 2008, and its entire history in the automotive industry dates back to 2004. True, as CnEVPost clarifies, the first-born of the brand, named 316, was so unsuccessful that after testing the first batch, dealers refused to take it for sale. The company fully began serial production of cars only in 2005, and before that, for ten years in a row, it was better known as a manufacturer of lithium batteries for electronic devices. In those years, its staff numbered 20 people, and now it exceeds 1 million, with more than 900,000 employees directly involved in the production of vehicles.

If four years ago BYD produced no more than 30,000 hybrids and electric vehicles per month, now production volumes reach 500,000 units. It is not surprising that the company began to exchange millions of produced cars one after another.