urbanism

There is some China bashing but it's an informative article and it was hard to know what to quote.

Based in Shenzhen, the hub of China’s electronics industry, BYD has shown how Chinese carmakers can tap the country’s dominance of electrical products. No company has benefited as much from China’s embrace of battery-electric cars and plug-in gasoline-electric cars. These vehicles together make up 40 percent of China’s car market, the world’s largest, and are expected to be more than half next year.

Like most Chinese automakers, BYD doesn’t sell its cars in America because Trump-era tariffs remain in place, but BYD does sell buses in the United States. BYD is leading China’s export push in electric cars, and is rapidly building the world’s largest car carrier ships to transport them. The first of the ships, the BYD Explorer No. 1, is on its maiden voyage from Shenzhen with 5,000 electric cars on board, and is expected to arrive in the Netherlands by Feb. 21.

[...]

China has built enough factories to make more than twice as many cars as its market can buy. That has led to a price war in China, particularly between BYD and Tesla, with discounting that has inflicted heavy losses. One of BYD’s newest models, the subcompact Seagull, starts at less than $11,000.

[...]

BYD has a lingering advantage over Tesla: Mr. Wang’s decision by 2011 to develop plug-in hybrid cars, which account for nearly half of BYD’s sales.