In late 2011 a fresh-faced Elon Musk could not contain a chuckle at the idea that Tesla could ever be challenged by Chinese carmaker BYD: “Have you seen their car?”
“I don’t think it is particularly attractive,” he explained on television then. “The technology is not very strong. And BYD, as a company, has pretty severe problems on their home turf.”
A decade on, the Shenzhen-based company led by Wang Chuanfu has claimed Tesla’s crown as the biggest producer of battery-powered cars. In the fourth quarter of 2023, BYD, which was founded in 1995 and counts Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway as a shareholder, sold a record 526,000 battery-only EVs to Tesla’s 484,000.
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