Asia Tech Wire (July 4) -- Chinese electric car maker BYD announced the launch of its Thailand plant on Thursday.

This is BYD's first electric vehicle plant in Southeast Asia, from which the 8 millionth new energy vehicle rolled off the assembly line on Thursday.

The first model to roll off the line at the Thai plant was the BYD Dolphin, the company said.

The BYD Thailand plant has an annual capacity of 150,000 units, and the project took 16 months from the start of construction to operation.

Liu Xueliang, general manager of BYD's Asia-Pacific Automotive Sales Division, said BYD currently has 115 sales outlets in Thailand.