It makes sense. Batteries are the high cost item for electric vehicles which will also impact performance. It seems easier to build the rest of the car once you get the batteries right than vice versa.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Analysts attribute much of BYD's success to its cost-cutting efforts: During its initial stages of growth, it stripped back the manufacturing process of cars to rely on cheap manual labor as much as possible, rather than capital-intensive machines.

A recent teardown by investment bank UBS of BYD's Seal -- a pure electric sedan that is the Chinese maker's closest peer to Tesla's Model 3 -- revealed that 75% of the components were made in-house.

BYD remains competitive because its high vertical integration model cannot be easily copied by other Chinese automakers, said Wu Hui, deputy dean of China Yiwei Institute of Economics, a think tank focused on EVs.

In written comments to Nikkei Asia, BYD said its success is a result of the company's "long term investment in technology and unwavering commitment to new energy vehicles in the past two decades," as well as its self-production of core components that ensures its "strong risk resistance capabilities."

At the Las Vegas CES early this year, Carlos Tavares, CEO of Stellantis, the Euro-American car conglomerate, said it cost European automakers 40% more to build an EV in Europe versus Chinese carmakers in China.

"Chinese makers, including BYD, are putting out new cars at a fast pace, and we can't catch up," an employee at a Japanese automaker's product planning division, who asked not to be named, told Nikkei.

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