Inside a Chinese megafactory
All eyes are drawn through our bus’s side windows as we cross the next intersection. A completely empty six-lane road, flanked by uniform buildings and manicured nature strips, stretches towards the horizon to disappear in the mist that can be seen all over the Henan region of Central China. There’s no sign of movement or life anywhere to be seen and, with it, a sense we’ve just entered some abandoned city of a post-apocalyptic world.
The scene is eerie, perhaps in most part for the fact all this infrastructure has only existed for about a year, and that just 12 months before that, this was all, well… dirt and blueprints.
This is no area in decline – quite the opposite, really: this is BYD’s new Megafactory in Zhengzhou, China.
Inside BYD’s Zhengzhou megafactory
It’s hard to gauge or fathom quite how quickly BYD and China’s car industry at large gets things done, but invited by BYD to tour this new plant, we received some truly jaw-dropping insights.
Standing in the stamping factory – where large presses turn single pieces of metal into up to 30 complex panels every minute around us – we’re informed the facility’s first stamping was done only 12 months after clearing the site. That’s right: from dirt to a functional factory in only a year.
Set to become an end-to-end production line, the facility boasts floorspace of 10.67 square kilometres for its factories alone. However, delve into the enormous expansion and infrastructure that surrounds them – required to house and transport the odd-60,000 workers – and the total footprint grows to a staggering 130 square kilometres. That’s larger than San Francisco.
Add to this an on-site battery production facility and racetrack for testing and developing, and it all feels more like a car-building city than a factory – and it has to be, given BYD’s production targets, which are ambitious to say the least.
Following that first stamping, the factory went on to produce 200,000 vehicles in its first year, that figure sitting at 550,000 by the time we were shown around, with aspirations to hit a 1 million per year milestone. To put that final figure into perspective, that works out to about two cars completed and rolling off the production line every 30 seconds of every hour of every day for an entire year.
The future: will Chinese cars dominate our roads?
This rapid growth and expansion of BYD and other Chinese car companies isn’t just in brick-and-mortar production facilities either, with a glance at Australia’s new-car sales painting a similar picture.
BYD’s rise Down Under has been meteoric, cracking the top 10 brands for sales in multiple months of this year after only entering the market in 2022. A feat made especially impressive considering the brand only builds plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles – considered ‘new energy vehicles’.
And BYD is just one in a seemingly ever-growing list of Chinese car companies arriving in Australia and looking to carve a slice out of its new-car market pie, all backed by enormous production operations back in the homeland. Brands such as MG, LDV, Chery, GWM, Jaecoo, Geely and Haval all originate in China – and these form just a portion of what’s available today in Australia.
Add to these growing sales a recent report from the Australian Automotive Dealer Association estimating that 43 per cent of new cars on our roads will be imported from China by 2035, and a pretty clear idea of the trajectory Australia’s automotive landscape begins to emerge.
