As my revered colleagues at China Car Times rightly remark, “March is the first full month of car sales after the Chinese New Year where the majority of dealerships are closed for around two weeks, thus stunting growth of that month, but March is always a very busy month with many customers flush with cash after the New Year.” That’s why everybody who knows the Chinese car industry has a sharp eye on the March numbers. And that’s why everybody gasped when total vehicle sales in China climbed 55.79 percent from March a year earlier. Something else happened. A revolution.
For the first time in recorded history, a privately held company removed a state-owned joint venture from the podium of China’s largest auto makers. And it wasn’t even a car maker. It was an alleged battery maker, BYD. The March rankings are as follows:
- Shanghai VW
- Shanghai GM
- BYD
- FAW-VW
- Beijing Hyundai
- Dongfeng Nissan
- FAW-Toyota
- Geely
- Chery
- Chang’an Ford
BYD sold 68,129 cars in March alone, which is a 99.3 percent increase over the same Month in the previous year.
All that with BYD’s famous electric cars? Electric cars, my eye. Their top seller is the ICE powered (powered by a Mitsubishi Orion engine, to be precise) F3. It is so much a Corolla look-alike that Wikipedia boasts under the “Maintenance” heading: “Many of the BYD F3 body parts are interchangeable with the Toyota Corolla platform.”
BYD Auto was founded in 2003, and they have a sales goal of 800,000 vehicles this year, up from 400,000 in 2009. If they keep this up, their goal of becoming world’s largest automaker by 2025 might not be as ludicrous as it seemed.
Considering BYD probably engineered the F3 by tearing a Corolla down to its smallest bits, you’d think Toyota would want a piece of that payday.
I fully realize that “BYIP” doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue.