BYD, Geely, Xpeng: Germany’s Vaunted Auto Industry in Dire Straits Amid Chinese Surge

On the outskirts of Szeged, the procession of Chinese construction workers begins in the early evening. On foot or on mud-caked bicycles, dozens set out for the supermarket across from the construction site in southern Hungary. At 39 degrees Celsius, the low August sun still blazing overhead, they cross a dusty field and a newly paved road. On the street sign in front of the roundabout leading to the plant, the company behind the construction site appears in red lettering: BYD, China's largest automaker and the world's largest electric-vehicle maker. Barely a hundred meters farther on, they have set up the factory gate, roughly 20 meters wide. DER SPIEGEL relies on support from its readers. To enjoy the rest of this story, please consider signing up for a subscription to The German View, our English-language channel on Substack. The article can be found here and our Substack channel can be found here . Alternatively, you can sign up for a SPIEGEL+ subscription below. For now, mostly shuttle buses, concrete mixers and rusty gasoline-powered Hondas and Opels carrying workers pass through it. But once the factory is finished, the cars of the future will begin rolling out. The plant will be a European first for the company from the Chinese tech metropolis of Shenzhen – complete with a welding shop, a press shop, a paint facility, offices and apartments on a site roughly the size of Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld park, a former airport. The price tag will amount to around 4 billion euros – and it is meant to manufacture up to 300,000 vehicles a year.