Thai YouTube star Jo Chirawatt recently took two of the best-selling electric cars in Thailand for a test drive. One was Tesla's Model 3. The other was the Atto 3, made by Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD.
The Atto 3 marked "the iPhone moment" for EVs, Chirawatt told his nearly 900 000 YouTube followers, suggesting it would set off a hype cycle that would transform a novelty purchase into a mainstream luxury. For most of the world, previous generations of EVs were aspirational purchases.
From Bangkok to Tel Aviv, BYD - which stands for "Build Your Dreams" - has been pushing to make EVs mass-market. The Chinese car company, which has also sold low-priced petrol-powered cars for more than a decade, has this year surpassed Tesla to become the top-selling EV brand in the world.
At the Shanghai auto show in April, the company's biggest bid yet to capture the global market for affordable EVs was unveiled in the tiniest package, with the lowest price tag: a compact battery-powered hatchback called the Seagull that sells for just over $11 000 (R200 000).
"The Seagull was the shot heard around the world when it comes to affordability of electric vehicles," said Bill Russo, founder and chief executive of the Shanghai-based advisory firm Automobility.
This year has marked a moment of arrival not just for BYD but for the much-maligned Chinese auto sector as a whole.
The country exported 1.07 million cars in the first quarter of this year, according to China's Association of Automobile Manufacturers - overtaking Japan to become the world's top automotive exporter.
One out of every four of those cars was electric. BYD models are now the top-selling electric vehicles in Thailand, Israel, New Zealand and Singapore.
In Thailand, the Atto 3 accounted for nearly 40 percent of the local EV market in the first quarter of this year. Now, BYD has its sights on becoming one of the top sellers of EVs in India, where it has an assembly plant.
But being a newcomer has drawbacks. In target markets like Australia, people on social media question the longevity and long-term reliability of the low-priced models. In 2022 J.D. Power surveys, BYD lagged its foreign rivals on multiple metrics, including dependability and performance.
And BYD didn't grow on its own. Over more than a decade, the company has received billions of dollars in support from the Chinese government.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk "likes to think he can make the EV affordable for everyone - he's been talking about a $25 000 (R455 000) electric vehicle for years, but he doesn't have one right now," said Russo, of Automobility.
"BYD has an $11 000 electric vehicle, and it will be available this year. If anyone is democratising the EV, it's Wang Chuanfu, and he's the one who should be called the Henry Ford of the 21st century."
Wang, a chemist, founded BYD in 1995 to make batteries for early laptops and cellphones like the Motorola Razr. Twenty years ago, Wang bought a failed car company with the idea of making batteries for those, too.
Analysts have described Wang as just as relentless and ambitious as Musk. During a factory tour in 2008, according to Fortune magazine, Wang told David Sokol, an executive at Warren Buffett's investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, that in an effort to make recyclable batteries, BYD had developed nontoxic battery fluid.
Then, to prove it, Wang poured it into a glass - and drank it. Sokol didn't partake. But a few months later, Buffett invested $230 million (R4.1 billion).
At Tesla, Musk focused on making EVs into a flashy aspirational purchase. But at BYD, Wang doubled down on the company's battery technology. He insisted that BYD's batteries had become so efficient that if the cars didn't work out, the company could make batteries for competitors. Today, BYD sells its batteries to both Tesla and Ford.
"BYD has always built its own chips and made its own batteries and engineered them themselves," said Le, of Sino Auto Insights.
All of Tesla's big announcements revolve around the company taking ownership of the engineering of some component, Le said. "In effect, they're saying they want to be BYD."
When asked to name Tesla's biggest competition during an earnings call earlier this year, Musk answered, "Some company out of China."
Buffett's longtime business partner Charlie Munger said in February that BYD was "so far ahead of Tesla . . . it's ridiculous."
Tesla ignited a wave of interest in EVs in China in 2019 when it opened its Shanghai Gigafactory, intensifying competition among dozens of Chinese EV companies as sales surpassed government targets.
During the pandemic, while most of the world's carmakers faced major supply-chain disruptions, BYD and Tesla were able to keep exporting. Last year, more than a third of the world's EVs were exported from China, up from one-quarter the year before, according to the International Energy Agency.
As tensions between Beijing and Washington increase and both sides move to shore up the growth of their domestic tech industries, Chinese-made EVs face multiple hurdles getting into the US market. These include high import tariffs and a tax credit up to $7 500 (R136 500) for drivers who buy an EV that was assembled in North America.
On a recent earnings call, Wang said the company's expansion strategy, for now, required avoiding "automobile powerhouse countries" like the United States, Germany, Japan and South Korea, where the "political risks are relatively high."
Analysts say the high tariffs won't keep Chinese brands out of the US market for long. Tesla announced in March that it would open its next Gigafactory in Mexico, and Chinese EV makers could follow, potentially circumventing US curbs on Chinese imports by manufacturing in North America.
"From the beginning, the Chinese automakers all wanted to go to the US, but they found it was difficult," said Steven Dyer, a former Ford executive and managing director at the Shanghai-based consultancy AlixPartners. "Eventually, you'll see a lot of Chinese-brand vehicles in the US, it's just a matter of time - but they'll go where it's easier first."
The Washington Post