$45,000 SUV with smartphone’s ease shows China’s ambitions

Bloomberg

A $45,000 electric SUV using facial recognition to unlock doors, Amazon’s Alexa to entertain and a 49-inch screen across the dashboard may be a harbinger of driving’s future. It also shows what China’s doing to grab that business now as the government pushes gas guzzlers off its roads.
Byton, a Nanjing-based company started by former BMW AG executives, became the first Chinese
automaker to hold a large-scale unveiling at CES in Las Vegas. XPeng Motors, backed by funding from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., is set to unveil a production model on Tuesday. That’s on the heels of launches by new entrants such as NIO, backed by Asia’s biggest technology company, Tencent Holdings and WM Motor Technology Co.
China’s drive to curb pollution and reduce dependence on imported oil, coupled with generous government subsidies, is spawning dozens of new-energy automobile startups in what’s already the world’s biggest market for vehicles. The fledgling carmakers now have the task of luring customers from Tesla Inc. and giants such as Volkswagen AG and Toyota Motor Corp., which have about $100 billion combined in cash, equivalents and short-term investments to fight back.
“China is the world’s fastest-growing and biggest EV market, but at the same time, it’s short of global players and companies producing products that can compete with the best premium players in the world,” Daniel Kirchert, Byton’s chief operating officer and co-founder, said at the launch event.
China already leads globally in EV sales, passing the US in 2015. Sales of new-energy vehicles—including EVs, plug-in hybrids, and fuel-cell vehicles—may have topped 700,000 units in 2017 on their way to 1 million this year, said Xu Haidong, assistant secretary-general of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. Almost all those cars are Chinese brands. The government has set a sales target of 7 million vehicles by 2025.
While Volkswagen and Toyota finalise their China EV strategies, mainland customers can buy NIO’s ES8, with a range of as many as 311 miles on a single charge, for $69,000. That’s little more than half the 836,000 yuan cost of Tesla’s Model X SUV in China.
The newest competitor is Byton, formerly known as Future Mobility Corp. Its first model will be available for sale next year starting at $45,000, compared with a $35,000 base price for Tesla’s Model 3. Byton will complete its Nanjing factory in late 2018 and start production a year later.
Byton “is vying to become a global company created in China,” said Bill Russo, founder and CEO of Automobility Ltd.