BYD Overtakes Tesla | Elon Musk Tesla Sales are not as good as BYD

Sales are not as good as BYD, Elon Musk Tesla BYD Overtakes Tesla Car

Entering 2024, various car companies have unveiled their 2023 performance reports. BYD easily surpassed Tesla with an advantage of over a million vehicles, becoming the global champion in new energy vehicle sales.

Sales data shows that in the entire year of 2023, Tesla delivered a total of 1.8086 million vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 38%; BYD sold a total of 3.0244 million vehicles throughout the year, with a year-on-year growth of 61.9%.

BYD's achievement has attracted widespread attention. A user on the X platform (formerly Twitter) posted a detailed comparison of the sales and other data of the two car companies. In response, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said, "Tesla is an artificial intelligence/robotics company, although many people see it as a car company."

Interestingly, after the sales data was released, many media outlets dug up a video from over a decade ago in which Musk mocked BYD, mocking Musk for being "slapped in the face" by reality.

In 2011, during an interview with Bloomberg, Musk was asked about BYD, and he laughed at the question, asking the host, "Have you seen their cars?" He stated that BYD was not Tesla's competitor because its cars were not attractive enough, its technology was not strong enough, and he emphasized that BYD's development focus should be on ensuring survival.

However, as early as May of last year, Musk had already changed his tune. On X, he stated that the interview "was from many years ago," and now BYD has strong competitiveness, with the possibility that most of the world's top ten car companies in the future may come from China.

In fact, as early as 2022, BYD had already taken back the crown of global new energy vehicle sales from Tesla.

In 2022, BYD's total annual sales reached 1.869 million vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 152.5%; Tesla's total annual sales were 1.31 million vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 40%.

From 2015 to 2018, BYD had always been the champion in global new energy vehicle sales. In 2019, with the start of Tesla's Shanghai Super Factory and the delivery of Model 3 in the Chinese market, Tesla defeated BYD for the first time and remained the sales champion for three years.

For many years, BYD and Tesla have been in a "you chase me" situation. In 2023, BYD surpassed Tesla, attracting unprecedented attention, largely due to the significant gap between the two, reaching as much as 1.2 million vehicles.

It is worth noting that many analysts and institutions still choose to compare the two from the perspective of pure electric vehicles. In the fourth quarter of 2023, BYD also surpassed Tesla, becoming the world's largest pure electric vehicle manufacturer.

In 2023, BYD sold a total of 1.5748 million units of pure electric vehicle models, about 230,000 units less than Tesla. Still, looking at the fourth quarter, BYD's pure electric vehicle sales were 526,400 units, while Tesla's fourth-quarter delivery volume was 484,500 units.