When BYD first debuted its wares at Detroit last year, its display was in the basement. But this year, benefiting from the fact that other companies have downsized their displays and Nissan and Suzuki withdrew from the show entirely, BYD was given a spot on the main floor, nestled between GM, Ford, Mazda, Subaru, and Brilliance, the other Chinese automaker at this year’s show. Zhou and his colleagues arrived here on January 1, and for the next several days toured twenty car dealerships in the Detroit area, learning about American sales techniques and service plans for the U.S. market.

Compared with the delicate balancing act that America’s beleaguered automakers must perform at the show—acknowledging past missteps while projecting confidence about their viability and capacity to innovate—BYD’s task is relatively simple: get a foot in the door and offer a glimpse of products to come. But BYD still has much to learn from its competitors and their polished displays. When I stopped by, the all-electric e6, the jewel of BYD’s fleet, had no signs or information screens describing the car’s features, and the doors were locked, so visitors couldn’t climb inside. Most people were drawn instead to the F0, a tiny red four-door that gets 56 mpg on a three-cycle engine, and costs just $6,000. Never mind that the F0 won’t even be available in America. Visitors clustered around it, intrigued by the site of an authentic Chinese car, snapping pictures of each other at the wheel.

What’s more, because Chinese manufacturers are better known for making cheap products than for green, technologically advanced ones, many visitors were clearly skeptical about BYD’s quality. A few visitors seemed determined to expose shortcomings. Zhou showed me where one person had manhandled and broken one of the cars’ rear windshield wipers. Another had opened and slammed a door of the F0 sedan over and over, perhaps testing its strength. “I can understand the reason, but so many times?!” Zhou asked. “Maybe ten is okay, but 20?”

Two men originally from Hong Kong who had driven down from Toronto, snickered just out of Zhou’s earshot as they ran their hands across the interior and rapped their knuckles against the dashboard and console.

“Every car company starts off crappy,” one of them, Patrick Lui, commented. (Indeed. Hyundai, once dismissed for the same reasons, won top honors this year, with its Genesis luxury sedan named the show’s car of the year.) But Lui conceded that BYD has already made demonstrable progress: “In a year’s time, they’ve made amazing strides. Last year, it was like a plastic model glued together.”

“They just have to come up with their own style instead of copying from everybody else,” said Lui’s friend, Andy Lee.

“They are the first company to introduce a fully electric car,” Liu pointed out. “We’ll see how that goes, see if it doesn’t burn up, burst into flames.”