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.