By James Titcomb 

Mayfair’s Berkeley Street is a mecca for luxury car gazers, dotted with showrooms displaying Ferraris, Bentleys and McLarens behind giant windows. Halfway down, across the road from the Rolls Royce boutique, sits a lesser-known name.

Last year the Chinese car company BYD opened its own glitzy showroom on the site formerly occupied by Jaguar Land Rover. The Telegraph has the story.

BYD’s cars cost a fraction of the others on Berkeley Street, but its presence among the world’s most desirable vehicles sends a message: it believes it can compete.

This week, it had the proof. BYD revealed that it had sold 526,409 electric vehicles in the last three months of 2023, overtaking Tesla and ending the Elon Musk-run company’s eight-year reign as the world’s best-selling electric vehicle manufacturer.

It was a milestone moment. After BYD surpassed Tesla, clips circulated online of a 2011 interview in which Musk mocked the Chinese company, chuckling dismissively when asked if they could compete (Tesla’s chief has now acknowledged them as a serious rival).

But as far as BYD’s billionaire founder Wang Chuanfu is concerned, it is just the start. The company, China’s dominant carmaker, is now plotting to take on the rest of the world, seeking to become one of only a handful of Chinese consumer companies to become a recognised global leader. 

In August, Wang said the company would help “demolish the old [Western] legends and achieve new, world-class brands”. Its aggressively priced electric vehicles are gradually appearing on British and European streets.

BYD’s ascent has been rapid, but it is far from a newcomer. In the early Nineties, Wang, a chemistry graduate working as a Chinese government researcher, spotted an opportunity to develop new types of batteries being pioneered by Japanese firms, but with much cheaper Chinese labour costs. BYD, which he founded in 1995, soon became one of the world’s biggest producers of batteries for mobile phones, a business that made Wang a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

In 2003, the company bought out a struggling domestic car manufacturer in a bid to explore nascent electric vehicle technology, a move that shareholders revolted against. At the time, Chinese cars were seen as cheap, ugly and unreliable, and BYD’s early efforts were no different: “Have you seen their car?” Musk joked in 2011. 

Read the full story here.