Tesla CEO Elon Musk no longer laughs at BYD. The Chinese electric-vehicle maker is handily beating Tesla in China, the world’s largest auto market, and it’s expanding internationally. Now BYD is calling upon other Chinese automakers to go global and “demolish the old legends” of the industry.
One of those legends is Ford Motor, whose executive chairman, Bill Ford Jr., believes that U.S. automakers are “not quite yet ready” to compete against Chinese rivals on electric vehicles, to which the world is turning. As he told Fareed Zakaria in June, “They developed very quickly, and they’ve developed them in large scale, and now they are exporting.”
