Why BYD priced its Pakistan launch under the hybrid competition

A power-sector executive walks into the auto industry

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation against the one he recently had with the CEO of Indus Motor. His read of the automotive sector is that electric vehicles are Pakistan’s future, that the Tesla wave already feels like old news in Dubai, and that BYD turning up in showrooms across the world has now arrived in Pakistan through Mega Motor Company. He brings on Danish Khaliq, VP of sales and strategy at MMC, to explain what the bet actually looks like.

Danish’s path to the auto sector is not the conventional one. He graduated from LUMS in mathematics in 2005 — “not a very popular major” — joined British Petroleum and then ENI in oil and gas, won a Fulbright scholarship within a year, and went to Columbia for a master’s in operations research. He describes it as a mix between engineering, mathematics, and business, the kind of program where he took classes across schools. He came back to Pakistan in 2008, rejoined ENI, did a stint with Engro on the first attempt at launching LNG, and then drifted into the power sector through a USAID-backed program rehabilitating publicly held generation assets.

He spent close to a decade in Canada, first at the Ontario Ministry of Energy and then in consulting, working largely on power but with a 20 percent allowance for other things — including a project as an expert witness on a bridge project. He returned to Pakistan at the end of 2021. “I made the decision that I wanted to move back. I think that was a much bolder move,” he tells Muzamil. The role at Hubco’s new ventures division landed shortly after.

How an EV pitch survived inside a power company

Muzamil wants to know how a power company arrived at electric vehicles in the first place. Danish frames it as a value-chain extension rather than a pivot. “We were looking at diversifying away from power,” he says. “When I started looking at this, I started looking at the entire energy value chain. On one end was power generation, which we were already in. On the other end, from a demand side, I looked at electric vehicles as generating that demand.”

The internal pitch, in his telling, was that the company’s DNA — electricity, electrification, power generation — could stretch into a completely different aspect of the same chain. EVs touch multiple technology stacks, with batteries at the backbone. He walked through buses, two-wheelers, three-wheelers, and four-wheelers before landing on the segment, and then on the partner. The partner was BYD.

The timing benefited from two market shifts. The first was a broadening of OEMs in Pakistan beyond the three Japanese incumbents. Korean and then Chinese manufacturers came in over the past several years and, with some uneven results, normalized the idea that a Chinese-built car could be a quality product. “That was actually done for us by other people,” Danish says. The second shift was BYD itself becoming, in his words, “anecdotally called the Tesla killer in multiple circles. And we like saying that.”

What BYD’s culture looks like from the inside

Muzamil pushes Danish on what BYD is actually like to work with — what kind of culture is producing the cars people who have travelled to China keep describing as mind-numbing. Danish identifies two things. The first is that it is a young team, which translates into how aggressively they move. The second is the scale of R&D. He recounts attending a conference at BYD a couple of months earlier where the company stated that it employs at least 100,000 engineers.

“That translates into consistent and constant research and development,” he says. “They want to be the number one auto manufacturer in the world. They have very aggressive targets, and that translates into how we are approaching the market.” He frames the working relationship as one driven by lagan — that Urdu word for committed dedication — both in how BYD operates internally and in what they expect from him as a local partner.

The fuel-import math

Muzamil moves from the bottom-up consumer question to the top-down national one. Pakistan imports roughly fifteen billion dollars of oil a year. Every three to five years the country runs into a balance-of-payments crisis. Reducing the single largest import line item by replacing petrol vehicles is, on its face, a logical national priority. He asks Danish whether that math actually holds.

Danish takes the question on directly. “Our fuel import bill is anywhere between fourteen to sixteen billion dollars right now,” he says. “Sixty to eighty percent of that goes directly to the transportation sector.” He notes that Pakistan has moved off oil for power generation, so the import bill now mostly reflects transport demand.

He works the four-wheeler case. There are roughly four to four and a half million four-wheelers registered in Pakistan, including light commercial vehicles. If at some point 10 percent of those — about 400,000 vehicles — are electric or plug-in hybrid, the fuel import bill drops by at least 400 million dollars. “This is just right off the bat. We haven’t talked about two-wheelers, three-wheelers, buses. We have a very big HSD import that goes for trucks and buses.” Danish is careful with the framing — he is talking about units in operation, not annual sales, and he allows that getting to 400,000 might take four to six years.

Why Lahore’s smog actually moves on this

The other top-down lever is environmental. Muzamil raises the October–November Lahore smog crisis — last year past 2,000 AQI — and lists the usual culprits: crop burning, weather inversions. He pushes back at his own framing, noting that London had a smog crisis in the 1940s and Beijing’s air is now clean enough to be off the worst-ten list. Crises happen; the question is whether transport replacement makes a meaningful dent.

Danish’s answer is a “resounding yes” and he extends Muzamil’s Beijing reference himself. “In Beijing right now, if you buy a car, you cannot get registration without an auction unless you are buying an electric vehicle.” In central London, drivers pay levies to enter the city in petrol or diesel cars; electric vehicles are exempt. These are demand-side interventions that are not subsidy-driven — they disincentivize the old behavior rather than directly paying for the new one.

On the emissions math: an electric vehicle has zero tailpipe emissions on paper. Pakistan’s grid mix is not clean, but even after accounting for the dirtier portion of the grid, Danish puts the reduction at 70 to 80 percent versus a conventional engine. For plug-in hybrids, 60 to 80 percent. Muzamil notes that Pakistan’s grid has a lot of hydel and nuclear, so the effective number sits at the cleaner end of that range. Taking the 400,000-vehicle case and running it annually, Danish puts CO2 reductions at roughly five to six hundred thousand tons per year. He notes BYD globally has a “cool the earth by one degree” program that has, by their numbers, already cut 60 million tons of CO2 — the equivalent of planting a billion trees.

The 8.99 million rupee price tag

Muzamil shifts to the consumer view. Pakistanis are risk-averse car buyers. A vehicle is a serious financial decision, often resold after years with covers still on the components to preserve resale value. Brand association is heavy. The first wave of EVs in Pakistan were luxury cars, and that anchored EV in the consumer mind as a premium category. So where, exactly, did MMC price the Atto 3?

“This is where I get really excited,” Danish says. The Atto 3 is a C-class SUV launched at 8,990,000 rupees as a completely built unit, imported from China with full duties and taxes. Muzamil presses on the comparison: every new hybrid competitor is priced above 10 million. Danish confirms it without naming names: “Some of the competitors that have hybrids in this category are higher than we are priced — and they are locally assembled. In some instances, they claim to be localized, meaning they also use local parts. Imagine the opportunity when we start producing and assembling in Pakistan.”

Muzamil voices the Pakistani reflex out loud: this is exactly the dream — local production bringing affordable cars within reach — and historically the dream gets killed by a cartelized industry that simply raises prices to clear the slack. He asks how BYD is genuinely able to compete on price.

Danish gives a structural answer. “BYD was predominantly, and still is, a battery manufacturer. If 50 to 60 percent of the cost of an EV is the battery, and BYD is at the cutting edge of battery technology — the most energy-dense, the safest — then inherently you become competitive.” The second decision was strategic positioning. MMC deliberately did not want to perpetuate the EV-as-luxury misnomer. They wanted a product that could move quickly through innovator and early-adopter phases into mass adoption, and they priced for that.

Feature set plus plus

Muzamil pushes on whether the price was achieved by stripping features. Danish says the opposite. The Pakistan-spec Atto 3 received post-launch upgrades MMC negotiated with BYD and did not charge customers for. The cars launched with 17-inch rims; delivered cars came with 18-inch. The starter battery, conventionally a lead-acid unit with one-year warranty, was upgraded to lithium-ion with six-year warranty. And an automatic tailgate was added — the result of a customer at the auto show complaining the car did not have one and then being teased about it by Danish himself. “I joked with him, asked why it mattered — ‘your driver closes the door, what difference does it make?’ But the feature was added anyway.”

The main traction battery is a blade battery with an eight-year warranty. Muzamil pushes on the worst-case: if the battery costs 40 to 60 percent of the car and needs to be replaced, the entire payback math collapses. Danish clarifies the distinction between warranty and life. “The eight years is the warranty. That’s not the life of the battery. Life is calculated in life cycles. Our battery has 3,000 cycles. Three thousand multiplied by four hundred kilometers gives you 1.2 million kilometers.” After that, BYD claims battery efficiency drops to 80–85 percent — it doesn’t deplete. “This is not your phone battery. This is not another fruit-logo company’s battery.” Muzamil concedes the point: nobody in Pakistan puts 1.2 million kilometers on a car. Effectively, within the buyer’s ownership horizon, the battery is for life.

The total cost of ownership math

Danish then walks through the running-cost case. The Atto 3 has a 50 kilowatt-hour battery and 400 kilometers of range. Charging at home, fifty units at sixty rupees a unit comes to 3,000 rupees for 400 kilometers. A petrol equivalent at ten kilometers per litre and 250 rupees per litre would burn forty litres — ten thousand rupees — for the same distance. Muzamil pushes Danish to be honest about petrol economy and reframes it: his own car does 13 kilometers per litre with a light foot. Even on the more generous assumption, the EV is well under a third of the fuel cost.

Maintenance is the second lever. No engine means no engine oil, no tuning, no fluids tied to the combustion stack. Danish keeps the assumption deliberately conservative — half the maintenance cost of a petrol car — but on twenty thousand kilometers a year, he calculates total running cost for the Atto 3 at roughly 150,000 rupees, against the petrol equivalent at 384,000. The difference works out to a payback inside two to three years on the price premium, if there were one. Since BYD launched below its hybrid competition, the buyer is already ahead on day one.

The infrastructure question

Muzamil presses on stress-testing. Pakistani roads are punishing. EVs look clean and luxurious. Are they actually built for the country they’re being sold in? Danish is confident — the Atto 3 is BYD’s successful global product, not a Pakistan-only experiment — but he is more interested in what MMC controls. The company has opened four of its own dealerships in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, plus an additional care center in Lahore. All five facilities are fully company-owned. Sub-dealers will come later, deliberately, so MMC can set the service standard first.

He addresses the resale-anxiety question by pointing to corporate backing. Mega Motor Company is backed by Hubco and by Mega Conglomerate, the sponsor behind Hubco — which has shipping lines, Pioneer, and other businesses. “We are not going anywhere.” The local assembly plant is being built and will deliver its first CKD roll-off by the middle of next year.

On range anxiety, the strategy is holistic. A sister concern called Hubco Green has been set up specifically to build charging infrastructure across Pakistan — on motorways, in cities, at destinations. Partnerships are in place with PSO, Attock, and Total to embed chargers at existing OMC locations. The Atto 3 uses CCS2, the global standard. Danish recommends the government further standardize on it.

Home charging comes in two flavors: a two-kilowatt charger included with the car (slow, overnight, draws roughly the same as a 1.5-ton AC) and a seven-kilowatt wall-mounted unit installed by authorized vendors with surge protection built in for both the home and the vehicle.

The policy nazuk mor

The conversation shifts to policy, which Danish himself flagged repeatedly. He describes Pakistan’s EV policy as being at a nazuk mor — a delicate turn. The 2021 automotive policy includes concessions MMC is benefiting from. A draft new energy vehicle policy is in the final stages of approval but has not yet landed. Beyond that policy, however, the bigger lever is the national tariff policy.

Danish runs through what could change. The 50 percent customs concession on imported electric CBUs — which currently brings the slab from 50 down to 25 percent — could be repealed and the rate pushed up to 35 or 40 percent. The general customs duty on imported vehicles could come down from 50 percent toward 15 percent in phases. Most consequentially, the used-car market could open up: the current five-year-old import limit could be extended to ten years, with monthly depreciation allowances reducing duties further on older imports.

“As an investor, and even for our global partner, what you need is consistency in policy,” Danish says. “You don’t want policies to be repealed or step back.” His Thailand reference makes the point. Thailand’s current battery EV policy is called BEV 3.5. “No points for guessing why it’s 3.5. That tells you it’s consistent. It has been around for three and a half versions.” Pure EV adoption in Thailand is now 13 to 15 percent of new car sales — more than 50,000 vehicles a year out of roughly 500,000 new cars.

Localization, exports, and a state-of-the-art plant

Muzamil asks the conventional skeptical question about Pakistani localization promises. Danish reframes it through the BYD lens. “Our product is a technology product. I don’t call it a vehicle, it’s a technology on wheels. We cannot survive if we don’t have those upgrades. BYD will expect from us as a local partner, and we as a representative of the global brand will want to follow through — because then I can’t sell the vehicle either.”

He is direct about the assembly plant. It will not be a dated facility. “If I put in a ten-year-old plant today, I’ll be obsolete in two years. My partner will come to me and say this won’t work for the new model. Why would I do that?” The decision to invest in a state-of-the-art line is, in his framing, a purely commercial one.

On what can actually be localized: seats, wire harnesses, tyres, and other vehicle parts can move quickly. Battery localization will take longer but is not blocked. He invokes Pakistan’s defense industry — “we have state-of-the-art fighter jets that we are able to in part locally manufacture and assemble. Can we not do it for cars? Of course we can.” On exports, he acknowledges Pakistan is right-hand drive, the Middle East is left-hand drive, but the conversion is doable if the volumes justify it.

The 3 to 5 million rupee EV question

Muzamil’s last set of substantive questions is about price points. He references the nine-thousand-dollar EVs visible in the Chinese market and asks whether a middle-class price point — three to five million rupees — is realistic in Pakistan.

Danish reframes the question around the customer, not the car. The current 9-million-rupee buyer is someone like Muzamil or himself — urban, able to install a home charger, with a driver who can run the car to a DC station. The 3-to-5-million-rupee buyer likely lives in an apartment, has no dedicated parking, and cannot charge overnight. “For that customer, it is absolutely necessary that you have a charging infrastructure in place. It’s not an if, it’s a when.” He cites a competitor that launched a car at that price point with only an AC charger and no DC option — and points out that anyone trying to use it for ride-hailing is finished, because seven-kilowatt AC charging takes ten to fifteen hours.

On the technology question — would a cheaper BYD car be a stripped-down older platform? — Danish is clear that it would not. “The technology doesn’t go away. The blade battery uses cell-to-body technology. That’s the technology they use whether it’s the top end or the lower end. If I’m a technology-advanced company, I’d have to take two steps back just to make a car that isn’t advanced. At some point that makes no sense for me.”

The middle-class EV exists. The economics exist. But they will arrive when the charging infrastructure has matured enough to support a buyer who cannot charge at home.

The 2050 question

The episode closes with Muzamil’s standard final question, which he asks regardless of guest: looking at Pakistan of 2050, given everything Danish has seen of the country across his time abroad and his return, what does he envision?

Danish does not take the bait. “I will approach this slightly differently, and I’ll tell you why. Business aside, we are part of a community. I want to use the word community — not country, not city. It is absolutely critical that we review our actions right now, because that 2050 you’re asking about may very well be a country or a place in a lot of difficulty. We have multiple things happening to us and with us that could account for it, including ourselves. We have to take action. It is not about what 2050 looks like. Twenty fifty doesn’t exist if we don’t do something about it right now.”

It is, in its own quiet way, the cleanest argument for the bet he’s making. The Atto 3 is not a luxury statement and it is not a hedge. It is an attempt, at a specific price point and inside a specific policy window, to move Pakistan onto a different fuel curve before the window closes.