It’s official: China’s BYD is outselling Tesla
BYD, China’s largest maker of electronic vehicles, surpassed $100 billion in sales last year, beating out its beleaguered American competitor Tesla.
Per an earnings release on Monday, BYD notched $107 billion in sales last year. That’s decisively above the $97.7 billion that Tesla made in 2024. And in terms of vehicles delivered, BYD shipped 4.27 million hybrid and battery electric vehicles, while Tesla shipped 1.79 million EVs.
Last year marked Tesla’s first sales decline in over a dozen years. As of this writing, shares in BYD Company ADR have risen around 5% today, bringing its stock up more than 55% since the start of the year.
News of BYD’s big year dominating China’s EV market—both in sales numbers and new innovations—comes as Tesla’s brand is being increasingly battered because of a plummeting stock price in 2025, massive recalls, and protests against company billionaire CEO Elon Musk’s over-involvement in the U.S. government.
BYD is a BFD
Aside from its record-breaking sales numbers, BYD has most recently made headlines for designing a new ultrafast charging system, an innovation that could be a game changer for the greater EV market.
Earlier this month, the company announced that its flash chargers will be able to provide power for 400 kilometers (nearly 250 miles) in five minutes, or about the same amount of time it takes to fill the gas tank of an SUV. BYD plans to roll out 4,000 of the new chargers in China, where building EV infrastructure tends to be a much faster process than it is in the United States.
Meanwhile, as climate reporter Dan Gearino writes for Inside Climate News, Tesla “is in the midst of a corporate self-destruction unlike any I’ve seen.”
The brand’s problems range from increasingly wide-scale backlash against CEO Musk—whose fund-slashing in the federal government has cut tens of thousands of jobs—to a recall last week of nearly every Cybertruck ever made.
Tesla’s woes have caused its stock to plummet 32% since the start of the year, and Tesla trade-ins recently hit an all-time high.
Despite a rough few months, Tesla’s market valuation remains impressive, landing at around $800 billion compared to BYD’s $157 billion, according to Bloomberg. And President Trump continues to implement new tariffs on Chinese imports and roll back EV subsidies.
While Tesla stock had been falling since the beginning of 2025, it has been enjoying a rebound more recently, with shares up more than 15% over the past five days, according to data from Yahoo Finance.