After Hong Kong failure, China’s BYD joins Singapore to launch electric taxi fleet

Chinese automobile giant BYD, which is partly owned by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, is teaming up with the Singapore government to launch the first fleet of green taxis in the Lion City, one year after it branded its two-year e-taxi trial run in Hong Kong a failure.

“We are happy to lead the government’s ongoing push to use electric power for public transport,” Liu Xueliang, Asia Pacific sales general manager for BYD told the South China Morning Post. “Singapore is Asia’s Garden City where authorities are taking efforts to improve roadside air quality and reduce reliance on petrol.”

Scores of BYD’s E6 electric cabs are expected to hit the roads of the city state on Friday, to be followed by new product lines including battery-powered sightseeing buses, the Shenzhen-based company revealed. The E6 model claims a range of about 350km and a battery that requires 90 minutes to be fully charged.

This is not the first time the world’s No 1 electric vehicle maker by sales has attempted to extend its footprint beyond mainland China through alliances with regional governments that are combating air pollution and saving energy costs. Last year, the company delivered more plug-in electric vehicles than any other global brand, including Tesla, Toyota or General Motors, but the vast of majority of sales came from mainland China.

In 2013, the first batch of 45 green cabs manufactured by BYD started running on Hong Kong’s streets. At the time, it hoped to eventually replace at least a quarter of the former British colony’s 18,138 liquid-petroleum-gas-fuelled taxis with electric models.

Two years later, Ding Haimiao, assistant to the general manager of BYD, called the trial run a “failure” in front of a panel of technology industry figures from Hong Kong because “we lost so much money from it”.