BYD Auto Co., Ltd. ("Build Your Dreams") is the automotive subsidiary of the publicly-listed Chinese multinational manufacturer BYD Company, headquartered in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China. It was founded in January 2003, following BYD Company's acquisition of Qinchuan Automobile Company in 2002. The company produces passenger cars, buses, trucks, electric bicycles, forklifts, and rechargeable batteries. The current model range of automobiles includes battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), and the company also produced petrol engine vehicles up until March 2022. In June 2022, BYD Auto announced that it had sold about 641,000 EVs in the first half of 2022, overtaking Tesla to become the largest EV manufacturer in the world. In 2022, it became the first carmaker in the world to sell a million NEVs, a term used in the Chinese market to describe most electric vehicles. As of 2021, BYD was the fourth largest plug-in electric vehicle (BEV and PHEV) company and fourth largest BEV company in the world, with 9.1% and 7% global market share respectively in 2021. The company has mainly based its sales in Mainland China, but is undertaking rapid expansion into the global market, with sales hitting over 100,000 per month in March 2022, and was expecting to sell between 1.5 million to 2 million plug-in EVs in 2022, around 3 to 4 times the volume compared to 2021. The company also has an electric battery division, FinDreams Battery, which is the world's third largest producer of electric vehicle batteries with a global market share of 12% in the first half of 2022, and a focus mainly on lithium iron phosphate batteries. BYD has established itself as an industry leader in electronics, automotives, renewable energy, and rail transit. As a global leader, BYD's zero-emission solutions, focused on energy generation and storage, are expansive and widely applicable. History BYD Co Ltd founded the wholly-owned subsidiary BYD Auto in 2003, after acquiring the Qinchuan Machinery Works from Norinco in 2002 and raising HK$1.6 billion on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The acquisition may have been made solely to acquire the passenger car production license held by the purchased company. Qinchuan had been manufacturing cars since 1987, when the company began production of the QJC7050 model. At the time of the acquisition, its QCJ7181 Flyer was in production, which from 2005 was rebadged to the "BYD Flyer." In 2008, a plug-in hybrid version of the