BONUS: BYD vs Volkswagen: The Juggernauts Collide In Europe

In the agricultural flatlands of southern Hungary, the soil tells a story. For generations, these fields produced paprika and wheat. Today, excavators carve the foundations of an industrial revolution.

Trenches now stretch across the landscape—not for irrigation, but for the utility infrastructure of a battery plant that will consume as much water as a town of 50,000 people. The land, once sold for a pittance, has been revalued at seventeen times its purchase price to accommodate the Chinese guest.

Eight hundred kilometres northwest, in the exhausted industrial heart of Wolfsburg, Germany, a different excavation proceeds. Production workers at Volkswagen face the incomprehensible: the company announced the permanent shutdown of its Dresden plant, as the final car rolled off the production lines in December, marking the first factory closure in its 88-year history. The crown jewel of German manufacturing shutters domestic factories.

These twin excavations—one rising near Budapest, the other crumbling in Wolfsburg—reveal how electric vehicles reshape the automotive industry. The European automotive sector, long the engine of continental prosperity, faces an existential reckoning. China's undisputed champion, BYD, has a lot of say in how this all turns out.

Welcome back to a bonus edition of the podcast. My name is Martyn Lee and over the last few weeks I’ve been looking into the future of Chinese-made, or European-made but Chinese-funded EVs. I’ll have a look at some of the big names over the course of the coming months, but today we’ll start at the top – BYD.  A reminder you can get the podcasts ad-free supporting my work on Patreon.