“BYD respects Tesla, and we also appreciate Tesla. We are good friends of Elon Musk now, and are about to provide him with batteries very soon,” said Lian Yubo, the company’s vice president for 18 years, in an interview with Chinese television channel CGTN. Today (Wednesday) to the Chinese social network Weibo.
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BYD is a Chinese corporation founded in 1995, and in 2003 established a subsidiary for the production of cars, which later became a manufacturer of electric cars only. Among its other investors is billionaire Warren Buffett. In 2020 it announced a new development: lithium-iron phosphate batteries designed in what it calls a blade configuration – that is, each battery is a narrow, long strip, 96 cm by 9 cm. According to her, this technology allows her to compress the batteries more efficiently, and most importantly – to make them safer. According to the company, its blade-shaped batteries warmed up in tests that caused physical damage to temperatures of only 30-60 degrees Celsius, compared to temperatures of 500 degrees and above for common lithium-ion batteries, which tend to ignite due to reaching these temperatures when physically damaged. Therefore, road accidents of electric cars sometimes end in fires that take whole days to turn off, until the batteries cool down.