- BYD sold more electric cars than Tesla in the last quarter of 2023.
- Tesla still sold the most for the full year, but the sorpasso has already happened
- BYD is growing at a much faster rate than Tesla in electric sales, almost twice as fast as Tesla
New year, new breakthrough. Specifically, that of BYD, the king of Chinese electric cars, to Tesla. Following the figures released yesterday by the US manufacturer, with 484,000 cars sold (and another 10,000 produced), the year starts with the news that it is no longer the manufacturer that has sold the most electric cars.
In its place, at least in the last quarter of 2023, and we will have to see what happens from now on, is BYD. The Chinese manufacturer sold just over 526,000 cars in that same quarter, and thus consolidated a trend that had already been developing in recent times. The Chinese threat is real and has already dethroned, albeit for a quarter, an entire Tesla.
The first quarter in history in which BYD leads the electric market.
Tesla, with this latest figure, closes its year with 1.81 million cars sold, 38% more than in 2022, thus meeting the target set for this fiscal year. However, Musk, in one of his moments of euphoria, proclaimed that with the sales at the beginning of the year he could reach two million units sold, something that finally did not happen.
In any case, in the annual calculation it continues to lead in the purely electric market. Its 1.81 million units leave it with a certain margin over BYD, which closed 2023 with 1.57 million electric cars… although it also sold another 1.44 million hybrid vehicles.
As if this victory of BYD in the last quarter and in the sum of electric and hybrid, which it already achieved in 2022, were not enough, its growth rate is considerably higher than that of Tesla. If Musk’s company has grown by 38% in this last year, BYD has grown by 72%, almost double.
That said, another factor that plays in favor of Tesla is that the average price of its cars is much higher than BYD’s, creating a simile to what we have been seeing for years in mobile telephony: Samsung leads in market share, but Apple earns much more … and that’s without talking about profits.
On the other hand, the latest arrival of Tesla, which launches models in dribs and drabs, is a type of car that, due to its dimensions, design and price, will surely have a large community of loyalists who will consider it a cult vehicle, but it is unlikely to achieve massive sales. Of course, we are talking about the Cybertruck.
It is something similar to what has happened to the Model X: neither its gullwing doors have achieved significant sales for a brand that accounts for 95% of its sales between the Model 3 and Model Y. Musk estimates that from 2025 it will achieve about 250,000 annual sales, 13% of its total sales. We shall see.
We will also see what 2024 holds for BYD, which for the time being is arriving in a more than convincing way. Also to Spain, where it landed a few months ago with three spectacular electric cars.
In its home country, BYD is already the largest car manufacturer. And it managed to position itself as the tenth largest global manufacturer at the beginning of 2023. And once again, the question is hanging over whether we will see a Chinese phenomenon in the motor industry similar to the one we saw in mobile telephony, where many fell by the wayside (HTC, LG, Siemens, BlackBerry, Nokia…) and were replaced by a flood of Chinese brands that have cannibalized the entire market with the permission of Apple and Samsung.