BYD’s SkyRail to Nowhere Marks a Rare Misstep for EV Juggernaut

Wang Chuanfu, the founder of BYD Co., has tried his hand at many things: producing batteries, making electronics and most recently, what BYD is famous for, electric vehicles. But for more than a decade, he’s also been attempting to build out another enterprise — a monorail network to solve the problems of congestion and carbon emissions at the same time.

Launched in 2016, BYD’s SkyRail system was billed as green transportation for the future. The Shenzhen-based company has spent nearly $1 billion and assigned more than 1,000 engineers to develop it. Wang said in an interview in 2017 that SkyRail could be deployed to more than 200 cities across China, envisioning a market worth trillions of yuan.