What you think of when you hear “EV” says a lot about what type of nerd you are:

Shoutout to all the legends dropping feedback on our recent run of hardware breakdowns 🥹 you know who you are

I think there’s a little bit of hardware nerd in every software nerd. Our twisted twin.

Today’s is a banger - you’ll leave understanding why, seemingly out of nowhere, you’re probably seeing more of these than Teslas in the last few years.

— Tom

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Inside: what to automate, what still needs human review, and how to quantify the hours you claw back.

Most tools tell you what to fix. Viktor fixes it - audits your ad spend and pauses the waste, groups duplicate bugs into scoped Linear tickets and opens the fix as a PR, builds the revenue dashboard and ships the link.

One AI employee in Slack or Teams, across 3,200+ tools. 50,000+ teams have made the hire. SOC 2 compliant.

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The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

BYD beat Tesla in quarterly EV deliveries for the first time in Q4 2023 (526,409 vs 484,507).

Then they took the full year clean in 2025:

2.26 million EVs sold, up 28%, against Tesla's 1.64 million, down 8%.

But most explanations of BYD start in the wrong decade.

To really understand we need to go back.

Before any of the following existing:

In 1995, BYD was a 20-person battery workshop in Shenzhen, hand-building lithium-ion cells.

Founder Wang Chuanfu couldn't afford the automated production lines Sony and Sanyo were running in Japan.

So he built manual jigs instead.

Basically cheap tools that let low-cost labour produce the same quality a robot would.

It meant that BYD reportedly could build battery cells for $1.30 each.

That same cell would cost Sony or Sanyo $4.90.

3 decades later, that same instinct, own the production rather than outsourcing it, is why BYD builds:

Crack open a BYD Seal (their rival to the Tesla Model 3) and you’ll learn something crazy.

Roughly 75% of BYD’s parts were made in-house.

A Tesla Model 3 (built in china) was 46% in-house.

BYD built a cost structure so low it could start a price war with Tesla (often 15% cheaper for comparable models)… while maintaining an operating margin (4.8%) more than 3x Tesla’s (1.4%)… while still growing profitably.

Here’s how they pulled it off. Buckle up.

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

BYD doesn't buy its batteries.

It designs them + builds them

It even mines the lithium that goes into them.

The Blade Battery, BYD's flagship cell, uses lithium iron phosphate chemistry instead of the nickel-cobalt-manganese mix most rivals rely on.

So what.

Well It’s far cheaper, more thermally stable, and most importantly entirely BYD's own patented design.

Power semiconductors are the same story.

BYD Semiconductor, founded in 2004, now controls 28.9% of China's power-module market. 2x the market share of it’s next competitor, Infineon at 14.5%.

Motors, too.

Since January 2024, BYD builds and operates its own car-carrier ships, with the 9,200-vehicle BYD Shenzhen, currently the largest car carrier in the world.

Since inception, BYD has obsessed over owning as much of the stack as possible to preserve control and quality.

With assets as large as carrier ships to as small as windshield wiper fluid.

Wang Chuanfu wasn't a car guy. But he was a metallurgist (new word unlocked: scientist who studies metals), with an education from the Beijing General Research Institute of Nonferrous Metals.

Japan's battery makers ran automated production lines that cost 10s of millions of dollars.

BYD couldn't afford that, so it didn't try.

Engineers broke each automated step into a manual one. No matter how small, or complex, BYD would reverse engineer it.

Step-by-step they built cheap custom jigs that let low-cost labour hit the same tolerances a robot would.

HBS even wrote a whole case study around this in 2006, before BYD had sold a single car, arguing that they were primed to enter the automotive industry.

Owning your supply chain is only leverage if you use it at scale.

In February 2023, BYD launched the Qin Plus DM-i "Champion Edition" at RMB 99,800 (~$15K USD).

The first plug-in hybrid ever priced under the RMB 100,000 floor. It took 32,000 orders in its 1st week and effectively opened China's EV price war.

BYD kept cutting.

Over 100 model trims repriced over the next 12 months.

Cuts of up to 34% across 22 models by 2025.

BYD knew they were the only ones who could survive, since their cost base starts where everyone else's margin ends.

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

A rare thing, an actual interview with Wang Chuanfu himself, not a profile written about him. He's notoriously press-shy, so direct quotes from him are genuinely scarce.

Probably the closest you'll ever get to hearing the strategy in his own words.

The analyst deep-dive that actually quantifies the vertical integration moat instead of just asserting it.

This ones the finance/trading nerds who self-selected earlier.

BYD's own live demo, and one of the most-shared pieces of BYD content that exists. A nail through a charged cell, no smoke, no fire.

An extension of drinking battery fluid, and an iconic example of Wang’s "safety theatre" marketing playbook.

And it’s only 65 seconds.

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