Chinese EV automaker Build Your Dreams (BYD) continues demonstrating why it should be a name on your radar. The veteran company announced a significant milestone this month, sharing that its largest EV production facility in China has produced one million BYD vehicles this year for the first time ever. This stat is from one plant, not BYD’s global annual production tally. BYD is coming.
We say it all the time, but you should know the name BYD by now. BYD Auto will be celebrating 22 years of operation next month, and the OEM has been wielding all that production expertise in a big way in recent years specializing in developing and delivering a slew of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) it collectively classifies as new energy vehicles (NEVs).
We’ve told you the Chinese automaker was coming and doing so at a staggering rate. BYD has infiltrated several markets in Europe and found demand so high that it had to commission its own fleet of cargo chips to export its EVs to those markets.
With further expansions to other markets like Japan, as well as new production footprints outside of China, BYD has become an EV juggernaut and has the sales data to prove it. In November, we reported that BYD had sold a record 506,804 NEVs in November, topping its previous record of 502,657 set the month prior, marking the automaker’s second straight month crossing the 500,000 sales mark.
Those November sales, led by PHEVs (about 60% of the total), helped BYD reach its 2024 delivery goal a month ahead of schedule. To meet its growing demand, BYD has bolstered its EV production lines and recently reported another impressive milestone, building one million vehicles in less than a year.
BYD’s Xi’an production plant passes 1M EV builds in 2024
According to a WeChat post from the Xi’an Hi-tech Industries Development Zone administration committee on December 13, BYD’s largest EV production facility in China hit the one million build mark for the first time ever. The facility is located in Xi’an, in the Shaanxi province of northwest China, and has been in operation for 20 years.
BYD’s largest production facility operates four EV assembly lines simultaneously, capable of producing 4,000 to 4,400 vehicles per day. That’s more EVs than some OEMs make in a month. In 2022, the Xi’an region produced 1.02 million NEVs, and BYD’s production lines contributed 995,000, or 98% of that total.
This year, BYD has built one million NEVs at its Xi’an plant alone, and that doesn’t take into account vehicles built at its other eight EV production facilities around China including Shenzhen, Changsha, Changzhou, Hefei, Fuzhou, Jinan, Henan, and Xiangyang. Not to mention foreign production footprints in operation or under construction around the world including Brazil, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and an EV bus plant in the US.
CnEVPost points out that BYD is expecting to see its annual EV sales exceed 4 million for the first time in 2024 and has the production bandwidth to support that growing demand. Better still, the post said that BYD’s EV production in operation in Xi’an is only phase one and there are plans for a gradual expansion to a second phase, increasing its EV production capacity even further.
We may not see BYD EVs in the US anytime soon, but new models will continue to be sold all over the globe as the Chinese automaker appears determined to become the largest automaker on the planet.
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