A colleague forwarded me a story last week about BYD’s charging network in China. The headline number was big: thousands of fast-charging stations planned for deployment. His reaction was predictable. “If they can build out infrastructure that fast, why can’t anyone else?”
The implication was that Western automakers and charging networks are simply slow or incompetent. That BYD has cracked some code the rest of the industry refuses to learn. But that reading misses the structure of what BYD is actually doing. The BYD charging network isn’t just a deployment story. It’s a vertical integration story. And vertical integration creates path dependencies that determine who can follow and who cannot.
The Assumption Behind the Speed
The belief goes like this: charging infrastructure is a commodity problem. You need capital, you need sites, you need equipment, and you need installation crews. If you have those four things, you can build as fast as anyone else. BYD is building fast because they are spending money fast. Ergo, anyone with similar resources could do the same.
This logic treats infrastructure deployment as if it exists in a vacuum. It assumes the only variable is willingness to spend. But BYD’s charging network exists because BYD owns much of the stack. They manufacture the vehicles. They manufacture the batteries. They control the battery management software. They design the charging hardware. And increasingly, they control the customer relationship through direct sales.
When you control all those layers, you can optimize across them. You can design a battery pack that charges at a specific voltage and current profile. You can write the vehicle software to communicate directly with the charger. You can place chargers where your fleet data shows actual demand. And you can do all of this without negotiating with third parties or adhering to open standards that accommodate everyone else’s engineering choices.
Where Other Networks Hit Friction
Non-vertically-integrated charging networks face a different set of constraints. Take Electrify America or EVgo in the United States. They must serve vehicles from many manufacturers, each with different charging curves, different battery chemistries, different cooling systems, and different software implementations. A Rivian and a Nissan Leaf do not charge the same way. The network operator cannot optimize the charger for one without potentially degrading the experience for the other.
This creates a lowest-common-denominator problem. The charging station must be robust enough to handle the worst-case vehicle: the one with the oldest communication protocol, the least sophisticated thermal management, the most conservative charging curve. That means more expensive hardware, more complex software, and more field support when something inevitably goes wrong.
BYD avoids this. They know exactly which vehicles will use their chargers because they built those vehicles. They can test charger and vehicle together in the same facility. When they update vehicle software, they can update charger software in parallel. When they decide to increase charging speeds, they control both sides of the handshake.
The result is that BYD’s infrastructure deployment is less constrained by compatibility. It is constrained mainly by site acquisition and capital. And in China, where BYD has relationships with local governments and state-owned enterprises, site acquisition is a significantly easier problem than it is in the United States or Europe.
The Kernel of Reality in the Excitement
The enthusiasm around BYD’s charging buildout is not baseless. They are announcing charger deployment at a pace that puts most Western networks to shame. And because BYD supports China’s national charging standard, a portion of their chargers can be used by non-BYD vehicles, which suggests the network is not purely captive.
That last point deserves scrutiny. If BYD chargers work with non-BYD vehicles, doesn’t that undermine the vertical integration argument? Not really. It means BYD supports the open charging standard (GB/T in China) alongside their own optimized fast-charging protocols. They get the benefits of vertical integration when charging their own vehicles, and they get utilization revenue from competitors when their chargers are not occupied by BYD owners.
This is rational business strategy. But it does not mean that a non-vertically-integrated company could replicate BYD’s deployment speed. BYD is optimizing for BYD vehicles first and accommodating others second. A third-party network must optimize for everyone equally, which is a fundamentally harder problem.
Why the Myth Persists
The belief that BYD’s charging network proves something about the laziness or incompetence of Western automakers persists because it fits a narrative people already believe. Legacy automakers are slow. Chinese companies are fast. The explanation must be cultural or organizational.
But the actual explanation is largely structural. BYD is not fast simply because they are Chinese. They are fast because they own most of the value chain. Tesla is similarly fast with Supercharger deployment, for a similar reason. Both companies can move quickly because they do not have to coordinate with external parties or accommodate conflicting requirements to the same degree.
Volkswagen or General Motors could theoretically build more vertically integrated charging networks. But they would first need to standardize their own vehicle architectures, consolidate their battery supply chains, and take more direct control of customer charging relationships. All of those steps require unwinding decades of supplier relationships and dealer franchise agreements. The path they are on makes deep vertical integration prohibitively expensive.
This is what path dependence means in practice. It is not that legacy automakers are incapable of doing what BYD does. It is that the sequence of decisions they made over the past several decades forecloses certain options. BYD’s ability to move fast on charging infrastructure is an artifact of decisions they made about vertical integration long before they started building chargers.
What This Means for the Industry
The BYD charging network is impressive, but it is not a model that generalizes easily. Most automakers cannot replicate it because they do not control the preconditions. They do not manufacture their own batteries at scale. They do not sell directly to consumers. They do not own the software stack.
The companies that can move fast on charging infrastructure are the ones that made vertical integration bets early: Tesla, BYD, and potentially Rivian if it survives long enough to scale. Everyone else is stuck coordinating with third-party networks, which tends to mean slower deployment, higher costs, and worse user experiences.
The lesson is not that Western automakers simply need to spend more on charging. The lesson is that charging infrastructure is downstream of vehicle architecture decisions. If you want to move fast on charging, it helps enormously to own the vehicle. BYD figured that out. Most of the industry did not. And now the sequence is largely locked in.