China's Electric-Car Showdown

Tesla, General Motors, and Volkswagen are betting big on the world’s largest market for electric vehicles. But the country’s domestic manufacturers, like BJEV, have a huge head start.

- Jeffrey Ball

INSIDE BEIJING ELECTRIC VEHICLE’S headquarters, a glass-and-steel complex on the Chinese capital’s edge, a cafeteria awaits renovation so that cooks can crank out pizza and other Western fare for the posse of foreigners the company expects to hire. “We need to have a more international feeling,” says Wang Shitao, a Chinese engineer who earned a master’s degree in Germany in energy storage before returning to his country to ply his skills in its new and booming electric-car industry. “You cannot force them to eat Chinese food all the time.”

Nor, the Chinese government has decided, can bureaucrats continue to aggressively steer Chinese electric-car buyers to domestic brands. The inescapable reality: Beijing Electric Vehicle needs a tune-up.

All but unknown outside its homeland, Beijing Electric Vehicle, or BJEV, is China’s largest maker of pure-electric vehicles and the world’s No. 2 manufacturer, behind Tesla. A decade old, BJEV owes its growth to state support.

But now the Chinese government is ratcheting back that aid. It’s slashing customer subsidies for the cheapest electric cars, which are the bulk of BJEV’s sales. And it’s opening the country’s electric-vehicle market to greater competition from the West’s better-established automakers, a move widely seen as a bid to tamp down the global trade war.

As a result, BJEV must get a lot more sophisticated, and fast. Thus its plan to hire an army of electric-car experts from abroad.