The Chinese car company BYD has said it aims to be the world’s biggest automaker within the next five years.

Targeting Toyota’s long-held top spot, BYD’s founder and chair, Wang Chuanfu said he was confident it could overtake global rivals through rapid advances in battery technology and fast charging, as well as growing production overseas, including Europe.

“BYD will truly become the number one automaker globally in terms of ​scale in five years,” he said at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Shenzhen.

Overnight the company announced plans to spend nearly £1.8bn in Europe to develop infrastructure for five-minute “flash charging” of its cars.

The company, based in southern China, overtook Tesla last year as the world’s biggest EV maker by sales. In May it sold more than 160,000 vehicles abroad, up 80% from the year before. It aims to sell 1.5m vehicles overseas this year, up more than 40% from last year’s 1.05m.

In 2025, Toyota retained its crown as the world’s top-selling carmaker with 11.3m vehicles, while BYD sold 4.8m.

The company’s top international executive, Stella Li, separately told reporters in London that the company would start assembling cars at its new plant in Hungary in the fourth quarter of this year.

She also said BYD had paused work on a plant ‌in Turkey while it focused on production in the EU, where locally assembled cars will help it beat tariffs Brussels introduced on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) two years ago.

“Hungary is the number one priority right now,” she told Reuters. “The ​second priority will be to focus on finding a second [production] ⁠facility in Europe.”

BYD in Hungary recently faced allegations that EU employment laws were being breached, as it races to build its first European factory using Chinese migrant workers.

It is also facing claims that excavated soil from the site of the factory in Szeged was dumped on to surrounding farmland, potentially contaminating it; local authorities ordered the destruction of affected crops.

Earlier this week a spokesperson for Csongrád-Csanád county confirmed that authorities had placed sanctions on three companies involved in the factory’s construction and imposed a fine on at least one of them. However, the findings of the investigation had not yet been made public, said China Labour Watch, which conducted the investigation into workers.

BYD is also facing pressure in the US where the Pentagon overnight added it to a list of “Chinese military companies” deemed a national security risk to the US. Many of these businesses are competing directly with big US companies.

China responded on Wednesday by saying it believed its addition to the US list “lacks factual basis”.