A week before Obama spoke to Congress last month, there was this little article about BYD.

Obama urged us to become a technology leader in green automobiles, hybrid cars, and batteries. Obama said America can lead the way.

As I heard him say that, I was thinking about BYD. I've never heard of this company before I read this article.

Check out this portrait of the CEO. It is so staid and serious and old fashion but Mr Wang Chuanfu struck me more as a visionary.

BYD makes lithium ion batteries. The ones we rely on in all our gadgets. The same battery technology required for electric and hybrid cars. A few years ago Chuanfu's battery company bought a car company because he saw something.

He recognized that trying to beat established companies at making cars was foolish. It was too hard to catch up. As he put it, "who can beat the Swiss at making a Swiss watch?"

No, what he saw was a wide open playing field for electric cars because the giants left the door open for decades. As we dragged our heals resisting the future, the future has become more and more obvious. And that future represents a huge opportunity for new companies like BYD.

I have say, I see a lot of merit in his analysis. While we futz around trying to urge our auto companies to lead, someone else can just do it. And I suspect they will.

Maybe a few years down the road, we will all have heard of BYD.

Technology Levels Playing Field in Race to Market Electric Car

By NORIHIKO SHIROUZU

JANUARY 12, 2009

Wall Street Journal

The first of BYD's electric cars, the F3DM, is more of a purely electric car than the gasoline-electric hybrids on the road today. It can go about 50 to 60 miles exclusively on electricity when fully charged.

By contrast, Toyota Motor Corp.'s Prius is essentially a gasoline-fueled car with an electric engine that propels the car at low speeds and assists the gasoline engine when accelerating. The F3DM is similar in design to General Motors Corp.'s Chevy Volt. But it is being launched two years earlier than the Volt and one year ahead of Toyota's plug-in hybrid, which is due out for late 2009.

Mr. Wang, the 42-year-old Chinese entrepreneur, compares the simplicity of building electric cars to the simplicity of a digital watch. "Anyone can design and produce digital watches, but it's virtually impossible for a newcomer to match the precision of a Swiss wristwatch," Mr. Wang says.

Indeed, BYD's all-electric e6, has just two motors (45 parts each), one powering the front axle and the other the rear, and two gearboxes (60 parts each) to go with each of the motors. That means the whole system has 210 primary parts, excluding nuts and bolts. In comparison, BYD's F6, a gasoline-fueled vehicle, has a total of 1,400 powertrain parts: a V6 engine composed of 840 parts and a transmission with 560 parts.