Can China’s electric-car start-up Byton beat Elon Musk’s Tesla?
- Byton sees deliveries beginning at the end of 2019, about the same time that Tesla’s Shanghai plant should start production
Tesla Motors chief executive Elon Musk showed up at a muddy Shanghai industrial suburb earlier this week for the groundbreaking ceremony of the electric carmaker’s first plant in China.
By the end of this year, the first locally assembled Model 3 cars should start rolling off its production line. These vehicles would incur fewer taxes and be more competitive in pricing, reducing the edge that domestic Chinese electric car brands had over the Palo Alto-based company, which has to ship its vehicles from the US to China.
The day after Musk’s appearance in China, one of his would-be competitors stood on stage more than 10,000 kilometres away at the CES trade show in Las Vegas to unveil its first production model. Byton, which has its headquarters in Nanjing, was showing an electric sport utility vehicle named M-Byte.
“What we are trying to offer is not just another electric car model, but a smart device,” Daniel Kirchert, Byton’s co-founder and president, said in an interview on Tuesday when asked to compare the Chinese start-up with Tesla.
While Chinese electric-vehicle start-ups like Byton are striving to topple Tesla, they would probably not have come into existence in the first place if not for Musk, whose ability to upend a decades-old automotive hierarchy in just a few years captured the imagination of China’s leadership.