BYD's European Plant Offensive Intensifies Even as Battery Bottleneck Chains New SUV Orders

Chinese EV leader BYD faces battery supply bottlenecks for its popular SUVs while accelerating European expansion by acquiring idle plants from Stellantis and others to dodge tariffs.

BYD is sprinting in two directions at once — snapping up bargain European factory space while scrambling to unclog a battery supply line that has snarled the launch of its most anticipated SUV. The tension between a surging export business and a home-market capacity squeeze is defining the Chinese EV giant’s current chapter.

The battery constraint centres on the second-generation Blade battery, which powers both the flagship Great Tang SUV and the Song Ultra. Pre-orders for the Great Tang exceeded 100,000 within days of opening, forcing BYD to push the delivery start from May to 8 June. CEO Wang Chuanfu has been blunt about the bottleneck: production lines simply cannot keep up. The Song Ultra added another 60,000 orders in its first month, heaping further pressure on supply chains. The old Tang series is already feeling the fallout — April sales of just 791 units, a collapse of nearly 85% year-on-year. Shares have slid roughly 15% over the past 30 days, closing at 96.45 Hong Kong dollars.

Yet while domestic headaches mount, BYD’s European ambitions are accelerating. Executive Vice President Stella Li confirmed at the Financial Times’ “Future of the Car” conference in London that the company is in talks with Stellantis and other European manufacturers to acquire idle plants. “We are not only talking to Stellantis, but also to other companies,” Li said. The condition is clear: BYD wants full control. “It is very difficult to cooperate with someone and have to ask for permission. We prefer to run everything ourselves.” She also described Stellantis’ Maserati luxury brand as “very interesting,” though Stellantis declined to comment.

The logic is straightforward. Producing inside the EU sidesteps the bloc’s tariffs of up to 35% on Chinese-built EVs, introduced in 2024. Europe’s automakers are running at barely half capacity; Stellantis’ Cassino plant built just 2,916 cars in the first quarter of 2026, a 37.4% drop, operating only five or six days a month. Stellantis recently took a multibillion-euro writedown on its EV business, leaving factories ripe for a low-cost handover.

BYD is not starting from scratch. Test production is already under way at a new plant in Szeged, Hungary, with a planned annual capacity of 300,000 vehicles and up to €4 billion in investment. A second factory in Manisa, Turkey, is slated for 2027; output from both sites will enter the EU tariff-free thanks to the customs union. The export push is already showing results: first-quarter registrations in the EU, EFTA and the UK surged more than 155% year-on-year, and BYD is the best-selling EV brand in the UK so far this year. In Brazil, it overtook Volkswagen, General Motors and Hyundai in April to lead overall sales.

Domestically, BYD shipped roughly 314,000 battery-electric cars in April — a 15.7% decline from a year earlier. JPMorgan estimates the company’s internal target is 3.5 million to 4 million vehicles in China for the full year, a growth of up to 13%. That ambition now hinges on whether the battery bottleneck loosens in time to turn record orders into delivered revenue. Investors are watching closely: concrete European acquisition deals could restore the confidence that recent delivery delays have eroded.