What is BYD and why should you care?
This Chinese electrified car company has its sights on not only Tesla, but Toyota – any every other brand, too.
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I’ve just been to China with BYD, and I’m gobsmacked.
The brand took us on a tour of one of its eight factories in China – and it wasn’t a factory as you know it. The place was essentially a city.
The plant outside Zhengzhou is 10.6 square kilometres in size – nearly 1500 football fields – and pumps out at least one new vehicle per minute.
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BYD only started building cars at this plant in 2023, yet just last year it pumped out 550,000 vehicles – including the Shark 6 hybrid utes you’ve no doubt seen on the road.
The four-campus industrial park is so massive that it has its own race track, they’ve built a monorail to get around, and it has a KFC!
If that’s not enough to tell you this is a brand that is about to blow up the new car market, nothing will.
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And then there’s the product rollout plans – which should be enough to make executives from major car companies lose sleep. And in confidence, I can tell you that it is…
In 2024, the Chinese car brand and battery company – which also has offshoot marques Denza, Fangchengbao and Yangwang – sold a total of 4.27 million vehicles around the world.
That was an increase of more than 40 per cent compared to its previous year of sales. And this year, it’s on track to smash that record again.
So who or what is BYD? And why should you care? Allow us to explain.
Build Your Dreams
That was the original name for the car business part of BYD. It wasn’t always a car maker, though.
In fact, the history of BYD is steeped in battery technology. The business launched in 1994, focusing on rechargeable batteries, before exploring lithium-ion technology in 1996.
If you owned a Motorola phone in the early 2000s, there’s a chance it ran a BYD battery. I had a Razr flip phone (‘hello Moto!’) myself. And it also supplied batteries to Nokia from 2002, and it continues to be a supplier to big-name brands for all sorts of technology.
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It was 2003 when BYD made its decision to diversify into cars, and there was some serious backlash from Chinese media. At the time, the broader narrative was that battery makers should make batteries, not cars.
But that didn’t stop the bullish brand, which launched its first car - the F3 - in 2005. Dealerships told them it was too ugly, but it sold more than 10,000.
BYD put its battery knowhow into practice in 2008, launching the world’s first mass-produced plug-in hybrid vehicle, the F3DM. That got plenty of attention – it even led billionaire Warren Buffet to buy a stake in the business.
From there BYD launched a line of electric buses in 2010, before building the e6 electric taxi for public use. It tied up with Daimler at that point, and from there, its luxury aspirations were set in motion with the founding of the Denza brand – which will come to Australia later in 2025.
The brand beavered away at projects, including rail transit and building plenty of cars. Selling plenty, too.
In 2020 the business pivoted as the pandemic smashed production. BYD became the world’s biggest manufacturer of face masks that year.
While lockdowns hit, BYD continued to work on its auto business, with a joint-venture between it and Toyota, as it worked to perfect (and launch) its BYD Blade battery system in 2020, with the BYD Han debuting that tech.
That LFP battery design is known to be cheaper to produce and safer for fire prevention than NMC battery designs - despite typically offering worse efficiency and being heavier.
Now, BYD’s blade battery systems are used in the brand’s own cars, but the brand’s battery subsidiary FinDreams has had deals in place with Tesla, Ford, Kia, Hyundai and Toyota.
Big goals on a global scale
As reported by Reuters, BYD aims to sell half of all the vehicles it makes to markets outside of China by 2030. In 2024, almost 90 per cent of its 4.27 million sales were in China.
Do the maths and that means export markets like Australia are going to be a huge prospect for the business. And don’t go thinking that it means the brand will lower its targets for China. It wants to keep growing there, and elsewhere.
Execs from big brands are worried. Jim Farley, Ford chief executive, said earlier this year that there is “a global race” in electrification, and “we have to compete and win against BYD”.
There have been protectionist measures against the global grab, as you’re no doubt aware, with trade barriers and tariffs dominating the discourse in recent months.
But as Tu Le, founder of Sino Auto Insights told Reuters, BYD could work to a tally of 5 million units this year, with 80 per cent in China. By 2030, the split could be 50:50 with a total volume to 10 million – getting close to Toyota, which recorded 10.7 million sales in 2024.
BYD’s bid in Australia
The brand launched in Australia with the fully electric Atto 3, audaciously labelled as “one of the most successful new brand launches in Australian history” by Luke Todd, the boss of its distributor, EV Direct.
Atto 3 was a smash hit, selling more than 11,000 units in 2023 to become the third-best-selling EV in the country. It was the right price, size and spec to lure customers. BYD also added the Dolphin compact EV hatch, which is currently the cheapest EV on the market.
It wasn’t the most conventional new brand launch, and there were some significant teething issues for early buyers.
But that was just the start, with BYD launching the Seal electric sedan to compete with the Model 3 in early 2024, while the business’s first hybrid arrived in mid-2024 with the hugely popular Sealion 6 plug-in+petrol SUV.
At the end of last year the brand found white space in the market with its game-changing Shark 6 plug-in hybrid ute.
In 2025, BYD HQ took over operations from EV Direct a year ahead of schedule, signalling the intent that the business has in the Australian market.
To date, the brand has sold 44,620 vehicles in Australia (to end of May 2025).
That is a strong number… but for a bit of context, it’s also equivalent to what Toyota sells in two months!
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Originally published as What is BYD and why should you care?
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