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FORTUNE.COM // SEPTEMBER 2019
company as BYD Division 6.
As we speak, Lian teases me with word
that, later that afternoon, BYD will announce
something big. The news breaks a few hours
later: BYD and Toyota will team up to build
Toyota-branded electric cars that will hit the
Chinese market by 2025. This is just the latest
electric-vehicle deal BYD has struck with a
foreign automaker; for the past five years, in
a joint venture with Daimler AG, the Ger-
man owner of Mercedes-Benz, BYD has been
building electric cars sold in China under a
brand called Denza.
BYD, though, isn’t content to be just the
back-office builder of foreign brands’ Chinese
EVs. It wants to become an aspirational global
electric-car brand itself. That’s why, in 2016,
Lian hired, from a VW-owned design studio
in Italy, Wolfgang Egger, who previously had
been design chief at Audi.
I meet Egger in his shiny new domain, the
lobby showroom of a design studio that BYD
built for him. Unlike Lian, who dresses plainly,
Egger is all Euro style: He sports brown suede
shoes, fashionably skinny blue chinos, a white
dress shirt, and a well-cut windowpane sport
coat whose blue hues accentuate his eyes.
When I ask where he had it fitted, he flashes a
grin and offers an of-course response: “Italy.”
Bolting VW for BYD was, Egger says, a no-
brainer. “To create a future EV brand was, for
me, very fascinating,” he says, adding: “A cherry
was missing on my cake.” Since Egger arrived,
BYD has moved to open a satellite design
studio in Los Angeles, not far from Lancaster,
Calif., where the company makes electric buses
for the U.S., and it has expanded its global
design staff from 120 to 200, with plans to en-
large it to 300. Among Egger’s top hires are the
former head of exterior design for Ferrari and
the former head of Mercedes-Benz’s Advanced
Design Studio in Como, Italy. They came, he
says, for the same reason he did: “You can have
your playground like this as a designer to real-
ize things and to influence the future.”
When Egger got to BYD, its cars had,
he says, “a volume-brand design” devoid of
“emotional feeling.” He hopes to create a global
brand that “has a little bit, let’s say, German
technology feeling, Italian sports car emotional
feeling, and Chinese culture.” His key Chinese
culture element is the dragon, a symbol of
strength and good fortune. He has designed
BYD’s new electric cars with myriad aesthetic
nods to the dragon, particularly in their front.
He hopes the headlights evoke a “dragon’s
eyes,” the grille a “dragon’s mouth,” and the
chrome or lighting accents between them a
“dragon’s mustache.”
It all sounds a little dreamy—until Egger
explains that this design wouldn’t be possible
in a combustion car. The dragon’s eyes—the
headlights—are visually accentuated in the
BYD design because the hood slopes down to
them steeply and tightly. That wouldn’t work in
a car with an engine because the engine would
require both a higher front profile and air-
intake vents. At BYD, he says, “the combustion
is the follower. The EV is the leader now.”If BYD represents the Chinese electric-car
industry’s establishment, Nio epitomizes the
upstarts. The five-year-old company, which
went public on the New York Stock Exchange
last year, fashions itself as China’s homegrown
Tesla. In at least one important sense, the price
tags, that comparison is apt. Nio says it sells
the most-expensive mass-production cars—
electric or otherwise—built in China without
the involvement of an automaker from outside
the country. With all the options, its original
and still most-expensive model, an SUV called
the ES8, has a sticker price of about $76,400.
William Li, the Internet entrepreneur who
founded Nio, has aimed essentially to out-
Tesla Tesla at China cost. The premise: “We
can sell the same performance but at half theOuyang Minggao,
a professor at Bei-
jing’s elite Tsinghua
University, has
spent more than
a quarter century
helping create and
guide China’s
electric-car boom.