BYD's founder smashed its first car prototype before building a best-selling brand
BYD's first car design, codenamed 316, looked so poor that dealers refused it, and founder Wang Chuanfu destroyed the prototype himself, writing off 100 million yuan. Two decades later the battery maker's car arm displaced Volkswagen as China's top-selling brand and then passed Tesla to become the largest electric carmaker in the world.
BYD started in 1995 making batteries. In January 2003 Wang bought a struggling small carmaker, Xi'an Qinchuan, from the state defence firm Norinco for a 77 percent stake, mainly for its hard-to-get production licence; shareholders were annoyed that the plan had not been disclosed when the company raised money months earlier. After the 316 fiasco, the F3 saloon went into production in April 2005 at about 10,000 dollars. It resembled a Toyota Corolla but cost less and sold more than 63,000 in its first year.
Early growth relied on reverse engineering and tight cost control, and critics called several models near copies of Toyota and Mercedes designs; Wang said BYD used only unpatented technology. Rapid expansion then backfired. In 2010 dealers pulled out in major cities, and output of 517,000 fell short even of a reduced target, forcing three years of work on quality and dealer relations.
Electric ambitions ran throughout. Wang had studied an electric car powered by golf-cart batteries back in 1997. In 2008 BYD presented the F3DM at Geneva as the first production plug-in hybrid, though only 100 had sold by 2011, and the e6 battery car followed in 2009. Wang set goals of leading China's market by 2015 and the world by 2025, seeing electric cars as a way to leapfrog petrol technology. A joint venture with Daimler created the Denza brand in 2010, and BYD bought a bus maker in Hunan the year before.
Sales took off after 2020 as China embraced new energy vehicles. BYD stopped making purely petrol cars in 2022, and its battery arm, FinDreams, ranks second worldwide behind CATL, specialising in lithium iron phosphate cells such as the Blade battery. In 2025 China still took nearly 77 percent of its sales.
Source: BYD Auto
