Chinese electric start-up Byton will begin initial production of its M-Byte SUV this summer, ahead of volume manufacturing by the end of 2019 - but will do without company co-founder Carsten Breitfeld.
The former BMW i-division boss is set to step down as Byton CEO for a new, undisclosed role within the start-up industry.
“Carsten helped build a strong Byton brand and bring in the right people to take our start-up to the next level,” Byton co-founder and CEO Dr. Daniel Kirchert. “Now we are focusing on our main goal to achieve the on-time-start-of-production of the first Byton series production model in 2019 with our strong team and partners.
“Thanks to our founding team and all employees we’re well on track and looking forward to delivering the M-Byte this year to customers in China, followed by the US and Europe in 2020.”
The production version of the M-Byte will be built at the company’s Nanjing facility, which is on schedule to open within the next three months. The car will then debut in the Chinese market towards the end of the year, ahead of the introduction of the K-Byte saloon in 2022.
Byton will appoint a new CTO shortly, as it prepares to close its final round of investment funding. It recently secured £385 million to help it take on established players such as Tesla.
Byton's chief vehicle engineer is Irishman David Twohig, who formerly worked for the Renault-Nissan Alliance and won the Mundy Award for Engineering at the 2018 Autocar Awards for his work on the Alpine A110. We caught up with Twohig at the Pebble Beach Concours event to find out more about Byton’s ambitious plans.
Where is Byton in terms of products?
“Getting close. Launch is committed for China in 2019, we’ll do North America a few months later and we’ll be in Europe at the back end of 2020. The plant at Nanjing is going ahead at a speed I’ve never seen in 26 years in the car industry. We’ll be building the first off-tool prototypes early next year.”
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I can't think of any Chinese
I can't think of any Chinese product, made by a Chinese company, that is classed as a quality product. ALL quality products around the world are made in Europe or the US (and a few tech goods in South Korea). If Byton want this taken seriously, then they should shift production to a country where the labour force are paid according to their skill. China is full of cheap goods produced by cheap labour - which reflects their cheap abilities. Before posting this, I went to Google and asked: 'Does china make anything high quality?'. The answer is still no (I wanted to see if anything had changed in the past year). There are plenty of US and European companies who SAY they have their high-quality product made in China, but still no high-quality, Chinese product by a Chinese company.
That bloke wrote:
I'd think the average Chimese person is a far higher quality person than you. You're the cheap one.
Yeah but
no one cars about the nature of vehicles any longer whether it's fwd/rwd, saloon or otherwise, what I've learned is that what really counts is the exterior/interior styling and the image. And with SUV's all the rage it's time for the new generation of car makers to "get in there" and create a new name for themselves after all if people will buy a nissan juke they will but pretty much anything on offer.