BYD dealer Rêver to build electric commercial vehicles in Thailand
According to the local newspaper The Nation, the Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer BYD and Rêver Bus and Truck recently signed a letter of intent to this effect. However, no details on the timetable for the factory and its production capacity have been provided yet.
BYD itself began constructing an electric car factory in Thailand in March 2023. However, in contrast to the Rêver production facility, the factory in Rayong province will produce passenger cars and will have an annual capacity of 150,000 electric cars. Establishing a passenger car production base in Thailand is “one of BYD’s key initiatives” to accelerate its expansion into the Asia-Pacific market, said Liu Xueliang, General Manager of the company’s Asia-Pacific Automotive Sales Division, at the groundbreaking ceremony last year.
Thailand is already an important production centre for the automotive industry in Southeast Asia – around 2.5 million cars are built there every year. The government increasingly wants to push ahead in the growing e-mobility sector and wants EVs to account for 30 per cent of total production by 2030.
As a result, numerous companies in the car and battery sector have already been lured by subsidies. At the beginning of March, BMW broke ground for a new production facility for high-voltage batteries at its Rayong plant to build a purely electric model in addition to combustion engines and plug-in hybrids.
In addition, many companies from China have also decided to invest there due to Thailand’s subsidy policy. These include the SAIC brand MG, GAC Aion, Neta and Great Wall on the vehicle side and SVOLT, Gotion High-Tech and Eve Energy on the battery side. In March, it was also announced that Thailand is negotiating with Kia and Tesla to build factories.
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