BYD flying high while Tesla flounders — BYD’s Sealion 7

China’s BYD enjoyed a strong start to 2025, with sales up 58% in the first quarter versus the same period of last year.

The nation’s best-selling car brand delivered 371 419 passenger vehicles in March, bringing the total for the first three months of the year to 986 098 units, data released on Tuesday shows. Of those, 416 388 were pure electric vehicles. BYD stopped making combustion engine cars in 2022 and now only produces EVs and hybrids.

The numbers will likely be in stark contrast to US rival Tesla, which only makes EVs and whose first-quarter sales may be as low as 340 000, according to some analyst estimates, or possibly around the 377 000 mark.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s involvement in American and global politics is hurting the EV brand, leading to a sharp sales slump across Europe and the US. In China, where Tesla has a large factory on the outskirts of Shanghai, Musk’s car maker is more being hurt by intense competition from homegrown competitors like BYD.

Over the course of the past month, BYD, chaired and run by founder Wang Chuanfu, has delivered a series of product releases that have generated a huge amount of buzz, including smart driving technology for most of its models at no extra cost and an ultra-fast charging system that can add 400km of range in just five minutes.

BYD’s shares are up around 45% this year while Tesla’s have fallen by 36%, also wiping billions of dollars off Musk’s personal fortune.

$100-billion revenue

Shenzhen-headquartered BYD has set a goal of selling around 5.5 million vehicles this year, 800 000 of which it forecasts may be exports. That signals the Chinese car maker’s ambition to keep going global despite tariffs from the EU and the US. BYD currently doesn’t sell passenger cars in the US due to the high levies imposed on made-in-China cars there and a ban on smart driving EV technology.

Last week, BYD unveiled record net income and full-year revenue that topped US$100-billion, leapfrogging Tesla on that measure in the process.