Chinese electric car manufacturer and beneficiary of Warren Buffet’s $230 million investment, announced that it’s e6 electric crossover will be priced at $35,000 when it comes to the US while it’s F3DM plug-in hybrid sedan (pictured above) will start at $28,000.

BYD’s VP of Marketing and Public Relations, Michael Austin, recently stated that BYD expects to sell, “Tens of thousands” of each of these plug vehicles to the US market before 2013. He also went on to state that BYD expected to have between five and 20 showrooms in the US before the end of 2011.

BYD, the Chinese electric car company, has seen sluggish sales such that you think that someone who had invested $230 million in them would be getting a little nervous. That does not seem to be the case for Prophet of Omaha, Warren Buffet.

Buffet recently gave an interview to Reuters in which stated that he expects that environmentally friendly cars will provide him with a “sizable profit” in approximately five years. This, despite BYD stock having dropped substantially since the initial surge it received after Buffet’s big investment. It closed today at HK$42.6, a long way down from the HK$ 84 peak it hit after Buffet’s $250 million injection.

Buffet pointed to BYD’s upcoming green buses and long-term electric vehicle plans as his route to environmentally friendly economic gains. The first half of 2010 saw a strong start for BYD but the third and fourth quarters saw sales and expectations cut.

Will Buffet once again predict the future accurately, or will the Prophet of Omaha meet his match with this sizable investment in a Chinese electric car company?

The Chinese government has drafted a new plan which, if put into effect, would force foreign companies to share key eco-friendly car technologies in order for them to be permitted to sell their vehicles in China.

This news comes while China is already the source of a great deal of grumbling from foreign automakers that they are using their massive market to skew business in their favor. This new requirement would be the most extreme example of this type of strong-arming yet.

If the report that came with this proposal is to be believed, enforcing such a technology requirement would catapult China to the forefront of the eco-auto industry by letting them produce more affordable and competitive hybrid and electric cars by 2020.

Build Your Dream (BYD), has repealed its decision to push it’s electric vehicle launch in North America back. It has now been reset to its original launch time of next year.

The announcement that BYD’s electric vehicles would be back on schedule could have to do with the increasingly competitive electric car market. Most recently, the announcement of the Nissan Leaf with its 100-mile range and low price tag, has added to the mix of low price, long range electric vehicles coming into the US market in 2010.

The Chinese automaker has a few a aces up its sleeve coming into the electric vehicle market in that its backed by the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet, and specializes in battery technology.

The first BYD all-electric vehicle expected to his the US market will be a five seat e6 crossover. Due to the BYD’s experience in battery technology, it is expected to an impressive range of 186 miles. While the cost is expected to be around $40,000, don’t expect to be picking one up anytime soon. Initial launch will see only a few hundred vehicles spread through select markets as well as to government agencies, utilities and some eco-friendly celebrities.

Warren Buffet, who purchased a 10 percent stake in BYD last fall, appeared on the cover of Fortune Magazine this week alongside a BYD E6 electric car. The green cover is titled “Buffett’s Electric Car” with a subhead of “If the Oracle’s plugging in, shouldn’t you?”

The feature article looks at the history of the Chinese company, BYD, and its founder Wang Chuan-Fu leading up to the investment by Buffet as well as the future plans for BYD’s aggressive expansion into the electric vehicle market.
BYD began in 1995 with $300,000 that Wang, then a manufacturer of rechargeable batteries, borrowed. Five years later BYD would be the world’s largest producer of cell phone batteries. By 2003, BYD got into car manufacturing and started building low-cost electric cars.

You have to love the attention getting antics of a company like BYD and a CEO like Wang Chuan-Fu. He knows how to work the press and he proved it at the Detroit Auto Show last January when he illegally drove around the showroom floor in one of BYD’s prototype hybrids.

Now Wang Chuan-Fu has caught our attention again, this time by drinking the fluid from one of BYD’s batteries. The stunt was designed to draw attention to the lack of toxicity of their new batteries.

With batteries likely to play an ever-larger role in the vehicles of the future and their inherent toxicity a growing environmental concern, it’s great to see BYD investing in safer batteries.

BYD (Build Your Dreams) is a Chinese automaker that also produces 65% of the world’s nickel-cadmium batteries and 30% of the world’s lithium-ion mobile phone batteries.