BYD Just Dethroned Tesla — The Numbers Don’t Lie
China’s EV Giant Outsold Tesla by 600,000 Cars While Growing 28%
TLDR:
BYD sold 2.26M EVs in 2025, Tesla sold 1.64M (600k+ gap)
Tesla sales down 9% YoY, BYD up 28% YoY
Elon Musk laughed at BYD in 2011, calling their tech “not very strong”
BYD now sells cars from $10k Seagull to luxury sedans
International sales up 150%, passed 1M units overseas
Tesla relies on Model 3/Y for 95% of volume
The Moment Everything Changed
In October 2011, Bloomberg asked Elon Musk about BYD as a competitor. He laughed. Literally burst out laughing.
“Have you seen their car?” Musk asked, still chuckling. “I don’t think they have a great product.”
Fast forward to January 2026: BYD just crushed Tesla in annual EV sales for the first time ever.
The Numbers That Matter
Metric Tesla 2025 BYD 2025 Change BEV Sales 1.64M 2.26M BYD +600k YoY Growth -9% +28% 37-point gap Q4 Sales 418k 420k BYD edges ahead Total Vehicles 1.64M 4.55M BYD 2.8x larger International N/A 1M+ (↑150%) BYD expanding fast
The story isn’t just that BYD won. It’s how they won.
Why This Is Different Than Any Quarterly Beat
Previous quarters saw BYD temporarily outsell Tesla. But 2025 marks the first full year where a company has outsold Tesla in pure battery-electric vehicles since... well, since Tesla became the EV leader over a decade ago.
Here’s what makes this seismic:
Product Portfolio: Tesla has 4 models (plus Cybertruck in limited volume). BYD has 20+ models spanning $10k compacts to $100k luxury SUVs.
Manufacturing Scale: BYD produced 4.55 million total vehicles (including plug-in hybrids). That’s vertical integration at work — they make batteries, chips, even the ships.
Pricing Power: The BYD Seagull starts at ~$10,000 in China. The Model 3 starts at $35,000+. This isn’t a premium vs. budget fight anymore.
Geographic Expansion: BYD’s overseas sales jumped 150% to pass 1 million units. They’re opening factories in Turkey, Hungary, and Spain. They already own manufacturing in Brazil and Thailand.
The Investment Angle
Charlie Munger called BYD the best investment Berkshire Hathaway ever made. That was after turning down Elon Musk’s pitch to invest in Tesla at the same lunch in 2008.
Warren Buffett’s right-hand man saw something in 2008 that most of Silicon Valley missed: manufacturing beats marketing in the long run.
BYD’s 2025 revenue: $107 billion. That’s larger than many Western automakers’ total revenue. And they’re still growing at 28% annually in the pure EV segment.
What This Means For The EV Race
Tesla pioneered the modern EV. They deserve credit for making electric cars desirable, for building the Supercharger network, for proving the market existed.
But pioneering a market and dominating it long-term are different games.
BYD played the long game. They didn’t need to convince people EVs were cool. They just needed to make them affordable and available everywhere.
The smartphone playbook is repeating itself. Remember when Nokia dominated? Then Samsung came in with manufacturing scale and diverse product lines. Apple kept the premium market, Samsung owned volume, and Nokia vanished.
That’s the script playing out in EVs right now.
The Bottom Line
Elon Musk stopped laughing at BYD years ago. In 2023, he admitted “their cars are highly competitive these days.”
But here’s the thing about market leadership — by the time you publicly acknowledge a competitor is strong, you’ve usually already lost significant ground.
Tesla will survive. They’ll keep the premium market, especially in North America. The Model Y was still the best-selling car globally in 2024.
But global EV dominance? That crown now belongs to BYD.
And unlike Tesla’s first-mover advantage, BYD’s advantage is harder to overcome: manufacturing efficiency at massive scale with vertical integration.
You can’t compete with that on brand alone.
What do you think? Is this China’s automotive century? Reply to this email — I read every response.