BYD's New Energy Revolution

There is perhaps no better example of China’s rapid transformation towards electric mobility than BYD. Leveraging its experience as a battery maker, the company successfully pivoted from internal combustion vehicles to what’s known as “new energy vehicles” in China, i.e. battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. As our chart shows, the company did so at breakneck speed, ramping up production of its electric passenger vehicles at a pace European or American legacy carmakers can only dream of.

Since 2018, BYD grew its sales of (partially) electric passenger vehicles from little more than 200,000 cars per year to more than 4.5 million in 2025, all while gradually phasing out production of gasoline-powered cars, the last of which rolled off the assembly line in March 2022. Considering that phase-out, it's even more noteworthy that BYD surpassed Volkswagen as the best-selling car brand in China in 2023 and has been building on that lead ever since.

In December 2025, BYD celebrated the production of its 15 millionth new energy vehicle, 17 years after making the world's first mass-produced plug-in hybrid in 2008. After it took the company 13 years to produce one million vehicles, the latest jump from 10 to 15 million NEVs took just 13 months. In 2025, the company sold 4.5 million new energy vehicles, almost exactly half of which were battery electric vehicles and half were plug-in hybrids.