BYD Says Fuel Cars Are Dead. Both Sides Are Lying About Why.
Stella Li did not hedge. Asked what future remained for combustion cars, BYD's executive vice president said there was none in China and that Europe was only a few years behind.
You can dismiss that as salesmanship. You cannot dismiss the money behind it so easily.
BYD stopped building petrol-only cars in 2022. It is adding factories abroad, pouring money into charging, expanding its shipping capacity and betting the company on electrified drivetrains. Even its hybrids tell the same story: the engine is no longer the star. It is the backup singer.
That matters more than another argument about whether EVs are "better." Companies can bluff in interviews. Factories are a much more expensive bluff.
But the EV victory lap has become almost as dishonest as the petrol nostalgia it replaced. One camp pretends batteries win every spreadsheet. The other pretends combustion would still dominate if governments simply got out of the way.
Both stories are convenient. Neither survives contact with the numbers.
Luxury has a much nastier problem than batteries
Premium carmakers spent decades teaching buyers that price followed engineering superiority. The faster car, the smoother drivetrain, the quieter cabin and the more sophisticated chassis lived higher up the price list. The badge came after the machine had earned it.
Electric drivetrains have blown a hole in that hierarchy.
A mass-market EV can now be brutally quick, nearly silent and mechanically smooth without needing a heroic engine department or an eight-speed gearbox tuned by monks. None of that makes a cheap EV a better luxury car than a Bentley, Porsche or Mercedes. It does something more dangerous: it makes several old luxury advantages cheap.
Acceleration, smooth power delivery and silence used to be expensive. Much of that now comes baked into the drivetrain.
So the premium brands have to earn their margin somewhere else: materials, chassis tuning, software, service and design. Things customers can still feel after the traffic light turns green.
Luxury is not dying. The excuses are.
And that is why the threat from Chinese EV makers is bigger than "they sell cheap cars." They are attacking the part of the price ladder where incumbents once enjoyed scarcity. Once a buyer discovers that a much cheaper car can match some of the sensations previously reserved for the expensive one, heritage has to work harder.
A badge can carry a premium. It cannot carry an engineering gap that has disappeared.
The cheap-to-run argument is missing the biggest bill
EV advocates love the fuel calculator. Electricity is cheaper, maintenance is lower, so the case appears closed.
Except the car itself is usually the biggest expense, and cars lose value.
In China, the IEA estimated that three-year-old EVs retained about 46% of their original value in 2024, compared with roughly 55% for the wider used-car market. By late 2025, average residual values for battery-electric and plug-in-hybrid cars had slipped further.
That can wipe out years of energy savings.
The reason is not mysterious. EV technology is moving fast, manufacturers keep cutting prices, batteries improve, charging speeds jump and another model arrives six months later making last year's car look old. The vehicle may be mechanically fine. The market has already marked it down.
Calling this "planned obsolescence" goes too far because it assumes intent. Economic obsolescence is enough. A car does not need to break to punish its owner. It only needs the new one to get much better, much faster.
Repair costs complicate the picture again. Battery assessment, parts availability and accident repair can make an EV more expensive to insure or write off even while it is cheaper to charge.
So stop comparing petrol with electricity. Compare ownership with ownership: purchase price, financing, energy, insurance, maintenance, repair risk and resale value.
Sometimes the EV crushes the combustion car. Sometimes it doesn't. The industry's favourite spreadsheet tends to stop just before the awkward column.
Petrol cars have a problem their owners cannot fix
Combustion defenders point to the obvious advantage: infrastructure.
Petrol stations are everywhere, and the repair network already knows the technology. A fifteen-year-old Toyota can be repaired in places where the nearest fast charger is still a rumour.
All true today.
The mistake is assuming today's support network is a permanent law of nature.
China's EV fleet displaced roughly one million barrels a day of oil demand in 2025, according to the IEA. Sinopec is adding charging infrastructure while pushing more of its refining output toward chemical feedstocks. PetroChina is doing its own version of the same pivot.
These companies are not environmental charities. They sell hydrocarbons. When they start building around a future in which road transport consumes less fuel, it deserves more attention than another online argument about range anxiety.
The shift will be slow because hundreds of millions of combustion cars keep the old network profitable. Petrol stations will not disappear because somebody on Weibo declared victory. Mechanics will not forget engines next Thursday.
Capital can still move before infrastructure dies.
A new charger gets built instead of another pump, while engineering graduates train on high-voltage systems. Dealers improve finance on the models that move faster, and oil companies spend their next yuan chasing chemicals rather than another litre of road fuel.
Nobody has to "kill" the combustion car. The surrounding economy can simply become less interested in it.
China absolutely put its thumb on the scale
EV evangelists have a problem with China: policy mattered enormously.
China did not create the world's largest EV market by standing back and admiring free-market Darwinism. Cities restricted ordinary licence plates while EVs received preferential treatment. Subsidies and trade-in incentives favoured electrified cars, and industrial policy pushed capital into batteries, charging and manufacturing.
The transition was engineered.
That is not the confession combustion fans think it is.
Governments have shaped car markets since car markets existed. Fuel taxes shape them. Emissions rules shape them. Roads, parking policy and vehicle standards shape them. China was simply more aggressive and more coherent than most countries about the outcome it wanted.
Then the shove started compounding. Chinese manufacturers got scale, costs came down, and the cars improved enough to travel.
A subsidy can help build a factory. It cannot force a Brazilian, British or Thai customer to keep buying a bad car once the subsidy is somewhere else.
State policy can create an advantage. It still has to survive export markets, competitors and consumers who do not care about Beijing's industrial plan.
Calling China's EV boom an immaculate market verdict is equally absurd. Policy mattered enormously.
China tilted the field. Chinese carmakers then learned to play it frighteningly well.
The combustion engine is heading for a more interesting afterlife
The cleanest analogy is the quartz watch.
Quartz did not make mechanical watches disappear. It destroyed the argument that you needed a complicated mechanical watch to know the time accurately. Mechanical watches survived by becoming something else: jewellery, craft, status, obsession.
Combustion cars can follow the same path.
The sounds, gear changes and mechanical rituals enthusiasts love are valuable precisely because they are experiences. Nobody needs to pretend an exhaust note is efficient or a manual gearbox is technologically superior. That misses the point. A mechanical watch is worse at telling time than a £20 Casio and can still be worth £20,000.
So yes, there will be combustion cars long after the EV wins most new-car sales. There will be collectors, track cars, rural use cases and places where charging remains lousy. Plug-in hybrids may also hang around far longer than the purists expect because they solve an annoyingly practical problem: people like electric driving but hate giving up liquid-fuel backup before they trust the charging network.
The engine can survive for decades after it loses its claim to be the default answer. Both tribes keep missing that distinction.
BYD is probably too confident about timing. It may also be right about direction.
The EV camp should stop pretending every battery car is already the rational financial choice. Combustion defenders need to admit that today's petrol network does not guarantee tomorrow's economics. China's transition, meanwhile, was neither pure consumer choice nor pure government coercion. It was industrial policy backed by industrial competence.
The combustion engine will not be murdered. It will be promoted to hobby.
And by the time people agree that happened, the factories, dealers and oil companies will have made the decision years earlier.