EV POWER PLAYERS
POWER GRID
This year’s five biggest EV influencers
WORDS PAUL HORRELL
WANG CHUANFU
Founder, chair and CEO, BYD
A chemist who in 1995 founded BYD as a battery company. It now powers a fifth of the world’s mobile phones, and it’s also huge in battery buffered grid smoothing. BYD builds electric trains, buses (hundreds of them running in London, under Alexander Dennis bodies) and of course cars. It has 600,000 employees of which a slightly staggering 50,000 are engineers.
BYD sold half a million pure electric cars in 2022. It’s the first company to build cell-to-pack batteries, made without using cobalt.