Bullets:
China’s BYD has already surged past Tesla in most markets where Chinese cars are allowed to be sold.The company’s new models take aim at traditional gas-burning vehicles.“Megawatt Charging” allows for electric vehicles to add over 250 miles of new range in under five minutes, which is faster than filling up at the pump.Chinese brands offer a wider range of models, with superior features and higher quality than cars from legacy manufacturers at far higher prices.Tariffs and import bans were used to deny China access to most Western markets. But Chinese firms are opening plants around the world to get around the tariffs and restrictions.
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This is a transcript, for the YouTube video found here:
Report:
Good morning.
Chinese electric vehicles are taking over global markets, anywhere they are allowed to be sold. And how that is happening is very unlike the 1970’s and 1980’s, when Japanese brands came out of nowhere and killed Detroit. Japan focused on building smaller cars, that cost less. Japanese carmakers figured, correctly, that there was a huge consumer market that was underserved by GM, Ford, Chrysler, and the German and Italian car companies.
But today, Chinese brands are going after the same markets that made Toyota and Nissan rich, and are building cars that cost less, and are superior in quality besides. Chinese car companies offer far more models to choose from, can be built faster and more affordably.
And there are two other problems for Western carmakers that are probably fatal to them: Chinese electric vehicles are breaking through to buyers of traditional gas-burning cars, because of cost, and now because of convenience. That’s problem one. The second is that tariffs and import bans are falling apart, because Chinese companies are setting up manufacturing plants across the world, and thereby get around the tariffs entirely.
We’re looking today at BYD, who is gobbling up market share in Europe. The legacy carmakers like VW, BMW, and Mercedes are trying to catch up to China in EV’s, instead of the other way around, and BYD is way ahead. The company’s plan is to have all their European sales served by its new facilities in Hungary.
So the strategy of using steep levies to deny Chinese carmakers access to the European market had a couple of problems anyway. First, is that the factories that turn out Chinese models are just more productive and efficient, and brands from Europe or the United States don’t have models that can compete with China on price, even after the tariffs go on. And then there’s this, which is that BYD and others will just open plants in Europe and make them irrelevant anyhow.
Next we have the problem that BYD and the other Chinese brands pose, to buyers of traditional fuel-burning cars. This is from Inside EV’s, and they came over to see what BYD is doing in fast charging, and conclude that it has changed everything. The number one complaint from buyers who are deciding between gas-powered vehicles and electric cars, is the charging problem. It just takes too long. So the engineers at BYD got busy on how to make the battery charging process take just five minutes, the same as what it takes to fill up a car with gas.
Megawatt Charging is what BYD came up with, and it delivers 1,000 kw of power at 1,000 volts, which is twice as powerful as those on offer in the US market. The newest BYD models gain 250 miles, 400 kilometers of range, in five minutes. The report goes deeply into how it all works, and what BYD learned early on is that they had to build an entirely new architecture for the cars, the whole system needed to be built from scratch. “Multi-physics challenges” existed in electrical, magnetic, mechanical and thermal systems.
BYD though is probably the most vertically integrated major company in the world today, everything they do is in-house, and so this entire system is proprietary to BYD, and only to BYD. And they held the costs down—the price ranges from $29,000 to $40,000 are still far below the average costs of new cars from anywhere else.
China has functional monopolies on the supply chains and manufacturing on batteries already, and those now extend to the charging piles for their EV systems. Those had to be re-invented, too, and BYD made the charging guns themselves far easier to handle besides.
For the demonstration, they began with a BYD Han L sedan with a battery at 13%. After 90 seconds, it was at 30%, and after 150 seconds was at 40%. At the five-minute mark, it was over 60%. So in those five minutes, the car gained 262 miles, 421km, of driving range.
BYD sales in Europe have tripled year over year, to over 9,000 cars sold in a single month, and over 11,000 new car sales if we add in the other countries there. Tesla is moving just as fast in the other direction, dropping over a third year over year, and now they’re behind BYD.
So Tesla is already in big trouble in Europe. Now that Chinese engineers have broken the fast charging problem, and setting up factories to get past the tariff and import bans, the other European carmakers need to be worried too.
Be good.
**Resources and links:**China’s Made-in-Europe EVs pose new threat to region’s automakershttps://www.autonews.com/automakers/why-byd-chery-other-chinese-auto-firms-will-build-cars-europe/Best Chinese Cars Under $20,000https://autobuy.com.co/best-chinese-cars-under-20000/%E2%80%98This Is Game-Changing’: BYD Brings EV Production, Megawatt Charging To europehttps://insideevs.com/news/771756/byd-iaa-megawatt-europe-seal/BYD%E2%80%99s 5-Minute EV Fast Charging: We Tried It. It’s A game-changerhttps://insideevs.com/news/758625/byd-megawatt-charging-demo-china/Wall Street Journal, China’s BYD Logged Sales Surge in Europe Last monthhttps://www.wsj.com/business/autos/chinas-byd-logged-sales-surge-in-europe-last-month-f3409fd0This Wild Chart Reveals Who Really Runs China’s Car markethttps://www.carscoops.com/2025/09/chart-with-chinese-car-brands-will-make-your-head-spin/
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