Bright spark creates a buzz

A Chinese car and battery maker has stolen a march on other major manufacturers by unveiling a new range of electric vehicles that it hopes will move it into pole position.

The corporate headquarters of BYD, which stands for Biyadi Qiche, but which the company likes to translate into English as "Build Your Dreams", are housed in a hexagonal building, similar to the Pentagon, in Shenzhen, China.

In this vast plant that manufactures rechargeable batteries and electric cars, workers in jumpsuits zip around the factory on electric-powered golf carts, or in some of the new cars that the company hopes will help it to dominate the world market for environmentally sustainable transport. With 160,000 employees and rising, including 10,000 engineers, BYD has global ambitions and is a new kind of Chinese company. In fact, the car maker flies in the face of the popular image of Chinese firms as low-cost producers lacking innovation but rich in cash, and hampered by old-fashioned business models.

Occasionally a big, blue diesel-powered lorry lumbers into view and it seems a strange sight, like spotting a long extinct dinosaur. Viewed from behind the wheel of a five-seat e6, the battery-powered saloon that BYD hopes will start its "green-tech" revolution, the lorry is indeed an ancient relic. The smooth passage of the car through the campus-like BYD headquarters, where 40,000 people work, is emblematic of why the US investment wizard Warren Buffett spent US$250 million (Dh918m) to buy a 10 per cent stake in the company.

"We can manufacture the entire car ourselves, the chassis, the electronics, everything except for the glass and the tyres," says Edward Zhou, the senior vice president of BYD's overseas operations. There is a suggestion in this comment that China's tyre makers and glass factories had better be careful. Trying out one of BYD's cars myself, I made the classic error that many electric car drivers do at first: I tried to start it when it was already running, the engine was so quiet I didn't realise it was ticking over. The faux pas left Mr Zhou with a slightly anxious expression.

At present, the lithium ion batteries the motors use are expensive, making electric cars costly. But China is a master at bringing down prices - remember how much flat-screen TVs used to cost before China started making them? Wang Chuanfu, the founder of BYD and China's richest man, has become adept at bringing down the cost of batteries. A chemist by training who was working in research for the government, Mr Wang borrowed some money from his relatives in 1995, rented a small factory and the then 29-year-old began making rechargeable batteries.

He grew up in dire poverty, with his farmer parents both dying while he was young, and like many of the entrepreneurs building China's boom in the past three decades, Mr Wang is a man with a mission. He is a modest figure, who still eats in the company canteen and lives with his wife and two children at the BYD-owned complex on the campus, where all the other employees are housed. Very early on, Mr Wang cottoned on to the fact that China's vast labour supply was a cheaper option than installing expensive high-tech manufacturing machinery.

He is also focused on building a domestic brand that Chinese people really want to buy, rather than one that is just cheap. He also wants to build models that will sell abroad. Last year, the online business portal Hurun Report's rich list put his personal wealth at $5.1 billion, making him the wealthiest man in China. His executives swell with pride in the corporate museum as they tell of how he made batteries cheaper than Sony and Sanyo to become one of the biggest mobile phone battery manufacturers in the world.

The museum has cases full of batteries and also the BYD-designed handsets branded as Motorola, Sony, Samsung and Nokia, all side by side. While consumers pay to buy different brands, BYD makes batteries for everyone, and a large number of handsets. There is innovation everywhere. For example, BYD has developed its own way of manufacturing physical vapour deposition (PVD) coatings that make plastic look like metal.

BYD does conventional vehicles as well, and is China's fourth-largest car maker, selling 450,000 vehicles there last year, a 180 per cent increase from a year earlier. "The F3 was the bestselling car in China last year," says Mr Zhou, patting the snazzy saloon in the car section of the museum. This year, BYD hopes to sell 800,000 vehicles in China and become the nation's largest car maker by 2015, and the world's biggest by 2025.

When it came to making its first electric cars, BYD's background as a battery maker helped it launch a new model. All it needed to do was put a chassis and a roof around the batteries it had already developed. This is where the e6 model came from, the focal point of the group's dreams of dominating the electric car market. So far BYD is leading the electric car sector globally, stealing a march on GM, Nissan and Toyota.

A prototype public charging station is located on campus, the petrol pump of the future - without fossil fuel. All the electricity provided at the station comes from solar power. Mr Wang certainly puts his money where his mouth is when it comes to investing in green technology, and his interest in environmental sustainability comes from a pragmatic belief that it is the way of the future. In late January, BYD said it would invest 22.5bn yuan (Dh12.10bn) over five years to build China's largest solar-powered battery plant in Shaanxi province. It will have capacity to produce batteries with a total of 5,000 megawatts worth of power.

Near the on-campus charging station is a zero-emission house, and Mr Wang likes to hold meetings there. It is a comfortable dwelling, not too lavish, and the message it gives is that the future will be sustainable, without too many frills. That is very much the overall message of the BYD group. @Email:[e-mail]