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Shares in China’s electric vehicle champion BYD touched a record high on Tuesday after founder Wang Chuanfu claimed the Tesla rival could now charge its EVs as quickly as it took to fill a car with petrol.
BYD’s stock jumped 4 per cent to HK$401.40 in Hong Kong, taking its gain to 85 per cent over the past 12 months.
Wang, the company’s billionaire chief executive, said on Monday that the Shenzhen group’s new charging system for BYD’s own EV batteries could add about 470km in range in five minutes.
The claim implies that BYD has nudged ahead of rivals such as Tesla and Mercedes-Benz in fast-charging technology, although the new system is contingent on several prerequisites, including sufficient voltage at charging stations.
There is rising competition among EV and battery makers to deploy faster charging infrastructure, in part to help deal with anxiety among consumers over the driving range and charging speed of EVs compared with traditional internal combustion engine cars.
BYD initially plans to install about 4,000 chargers to support the new fast-charging technology.
China is expected to put in about 460,000 new public EV chargers this year, accounting for about two-thirds globally, and taking cumulative units to about 2.1mn, according to Chris Liu, a Shanghai-based senior analyst at the consultancy Omdia.
BYD added that two of its popular sports utility models, both priced under $40,000 in China, would be equipped with the new ultrafast charging system from April.
The latest share price bump for BYD, which counts Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway as a significant investor, comes a month after the company rocked the global automotive industry with the release of a free advanced self-driving system, dubbed God’s Eye, that it plans to install on its entire line-up of new cars.
The moves heap more pressure on a clutch of domestic rivals, as well as Elon Musk’s Tesla and Germany’s Volkswagen, which have lost market share as Chinese EV sales boomed in recent years.
For the first two months of 2025, BYD boasted about 27 per cent of Chinese EV production, with sales of more than 405,000 cars, according to data from Automobility, a Shanghai consultancy. It has an 18 per cent share of the pure battery EV segment and 56 per cent of the plug-in hybrid segment.
BYD, which is rapidly expanding globally through new factories in south-east and central Asia, Europe and South America, also accounted for about 16 per cent of more than 900,000 cars exported from China in January and February.
Additional reporting by William Sandlund and Gloria Li in Hong Kong
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