BYD Launches ATTO 3 as Its First Passenger Car in Indian Market

Shenzhen-based new energy vehicle and battery giant BYD launched the ATTO 3, an electric SUV that is known as the Yuan Plus in China, as its first passenger car in the Indian market on October 11.

The BYD ATTO 3 is now open for reservations at a price of 50,000 Indian rupees ($608.1), while the final price has yet to be announced. The firm promised that the first batch of 500 vehicles would be delivered from January 2023.

BYD entered the Indian market in 2007, producing batteries and components for smartphone makers at a factory near the southern city of Chennai. In 2013, BYD started to produce buses with a local Indian company, launching the e6 electric vehicle model in 2021 for the local market.

“We plan to sell 15,000 BYD ATTO 3 vehicles in India next year and plan to set up a local manufacturing facility there in due course,” Ketsu Zhang, executive director of BYD, said at the launch of the e6 in India last November. He added that BYD had invested more than $200 million in India.

BYD is expanding globally, including in Norway, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, Costa Rica and Colombia and other countries. Earlier this year, the company also announced that it will start selling passenger cars in Japan from 2023, and plans to set up a factory in Thailand to produce 150,000 cars every year from 2024. BYD plans to build 30 plants in the US, Brazil and India, including its latest site in Thailand.

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India, as the fourth-largest automobile market in the world, performed very well in 2021, with sales increasing by 27% year-on-year to 3.08 million vehicles. Some analysts predict that by 2025, India will surpass Japan to become the third-largest automobile market in the world after China and the United States.

Other Chinese automakers have accelerated their entry into the Indian market in the last two years. Chinese traditional carmaker Great Wall Motor and a joint venture between China’s FAW and Japan’s Mazda launched the first batch of cars to the Indian market in 2020, while SAIC has sold MG series models in India since 2019.