BYD sales soar as Tesla continues to struggle in Europe
46 comments
·April 1, 2025IshKebab
No mystery. They're cheaper, they don't come with Musk's politics, nor his dumb decisions (no rain sensor, no stalks etc.).
ra
Giant glass roof with no internal cover is the worst design decision. In Australia it's unbearable on the hottest days. We bought one of their clip on roof shades, but the clips grtadually broke or got lost.
kmac_
Musk's policies are just a small part of the problem. The novelty has worn off, reliability metrics have arrived (last place in the EV category), and service horror stories are common. Chinese companies have started a wide campaign, but I still see more Teslas than Chinese no-names. People don't trust that they will remain on the market and believe they will disappear sooner or later. In the case of a company car fleet, it is advised to buy a single Chinese car just to test the waters. Skoda, VW, and Toyotas rule.
branko_d
> Chinese no-names
Sorry, but that's just short sighted. Did you actually sit in a Chinese car, or at least seen any with your own eyes? I can tell you that ZEEKR, Changan, Exeed, Li Auto, BYD, Jac and others are well known and well respected in certain markets. In our harsh and cold climate, Chinese brands don't seem to be any less reliable than the Japanese, Korean and European brands that were historically used here.
hiccuphippo
Do they come with Chinese politics?
IshKebab
Yeah kind of. People are pretty used to buying stuff from China at this point so it's probably not as much of a driver. It's not recent history.
Still I think people would prefer Western made electric cars if they were competitive with Chinese ones.
clan
Yes. But that still seems more palatable. Go figure.
For better or worse; that is the current perception.
mulderc
I don't know much about BYD cars but from what I can tell they sound to just be better cars than what Tesla puts out.
rgmerk
They also have a much broader range of vehicles than Tesla. Even if they could, they’d never sell a BYD Seagull in the USA, but small cheap cars are still a huge market in Asia and Europe.
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t1234s
Recently in europe on vacation I noticed the the majority of electric cars were VW ID models then Tesla. I did manage to see two BYD vehicles.
rsynnott
Yeah, they’re kind of conflating two things. BYD is way up globally, Tesla is way down in Europe. But that doesn’t mean that BYD is taking over Europe; the European market is increasingly dominated by VW AG and BMW.
It’s also kind of regional; if you’d visited Ireland, say, you’d probably assume Hyundai was either the largest or second-largest, but Europe-wide it’s not that big. There are European markets (notably the UK, which still ends up in many European stats for this) where BYD is a big deal.
rcMgD2BwE72F
>BYD is way up globally
Way more up on plugins than BEV, though.
eckesicle
EV popularity varies a lot from country to country.
Stockholm is jokingly referred to as Teslatown these days.
In the UK it’s pretty mixed between Tesla, VW, Kia, BYD, and BMW.
France like their Peugeots …
In Italy last year I saw one EV in the whole time I was there … (although it’s supposedly 5% of new car sales)
Symbiote
According to this site, which claims to be tracking European EV registrations, you'd expect to see VW, but BYD isn't in the top 8.
Tesla is so low for this quarter I suspect the data isn't yet there.
https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Brands/Bar/All-time-by-Qu...
Edit: Yes, I think this site isn't ready for Q1 2025. Look back in a few days maybe.
rcMgD2BwE72F
There a few European countries that publish daily details cars registration numbers. Here's Tesla in Norway: https://eu-evs.com/brands/TESLA/NO/Models-Daily
Looks like delivery of their most popular model took off once they've finished retooling the production lines (March 11).
They seem to prioritize specific countries, NO being the first maybe?
The big question now is: how long would it take to compensate for the weeks with near zero deliveries at the start of Q1?
numpad0
Why would BYD sell better than Nissan Leaf? I mean, iPhone revolutionized phone, because it had fewer parts and offered massively better experiences.
I don't see how that would be the case with Chinese EVs, or Tesla, even.
stubish
A comparable BYD is about 20% cheaper than the Leaf in Australia. And that is after the Leaf's recent price drop attempting to close the gap.
oblio
I'm going to watch with interest how long Tesla can flight gravity.
Tesla will probably be kicked out of China by the local brands. Chinese brands are hyper competitive and either make their own batteries or have strong partnerships with Chinese battery giants. Their software stacks are frequently good and the manufacturing quality can be really good (to no one's surprise, China makes half of what the world uses).
Tesla will probably be kicked out of Europe by Chinese and European brands. Even the European brands are starting to slowly launch cheaper models where Tesla isn't going. I doubt Tesla will launch a sub 20k€ car soon (or ever).
That basically leaves only the US as a big market. I doubt that's enough to sustain a trillion dollar valuation.
Note: I don't believe in Tesla robotaxis or robots doing anything economically relevant within the next 10 years.
ChrisArchitect
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tharne
[flagged]
dgacmu
You're misinterpreting the article, which admittedly has a confusing headline.
(1) Tesla sales have crashed in Europe.
(2) BYD sales are up globally, with the largest gain in China. Most of those sales are not in the EU; the EU has imposed high tariffs on Chinese autos.
These two statements are operating independently of each other; it is not the case that BYD sales are what have caused Tesla to crash in Europe, and this is not what the article says. However, the headline puts these two facts in close juxtaposition, inviting an incorrect conclusion on quick skim.
Drawing from other sources, BYD sold only about 83,000 cars in the EU in 2024, though they are projecting to double that in 2025. So it may be that BYD will be part of _future_ Tesla sales drops, but these are likely due to price/quality more than politics.
tharne
Wow, you're right. I read the article quickly and did not catch the fact that those were two related, but not totally causally linked statements. My bad. I still find it odd that Europe and others are reacting to bad behavior on the part of the U.S. by drawing closer to even less trustworthy business partners.
Symbiote
Europeans are buying not-Tesla, with the reduction in Tesla sales becoming an increase spread across all other EV manufacturers.
EVs are not only produced in the USA and China, but in the EU, UK, Korea and Japan.
dgacmu
I think Tesla is a special case given Musk's close relationship / enabling of Trump. The chairman of BYD does not appear to have succumbed to billionaire brain yet. Shifting from Tesla to BYD, were it to happen, is fairly different from shifting from, say, Cisco to Huawei, as the CEO of Cisco isn't literally dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the US president's campaigns. And in general, I think we're seeing "less tesla" and "more of all of the alternatives", whether those alternatives are EU-based or elsewhere.
Finally, most of what we're seeing with Tesla sales is _individual_ purchasing decisions, not strategic moves by governments... yet. We'll see, of course.
rsynnott
> by drawing closer to even less trustworthy business partners.
_Is_ China less trustworthy, though? I mean, it hasn’t threatened to invade bits of Europe, so there’s that.
FWIW, I don’t think that US brands other than Tesla are seeing hits of the same size (though, with the exception of Ford, they’re kind of rounding errors anyway, and Ford isn’t relevant in the EV market). Tesla has special problems; no other US car manufacturer CEO, or for that matter Chinese car manufacturer CEO, has recently been prancing around on TV doing Nazi salutes, and no other US car manufacturer CEO is part of Trump’s government. I’m not sure that Americans understand the degree to which Trump is disliked in Europe, particularly in Western Europe where most of the market for electric cars is.
kweingar
BYD cars are much more affordable than Teslas. It's not all about politics.
tharne
> BYD cars are much more affordable than Teslas. It's not all about politics.
Yes, things can have more than one cause, but the article mentions political motivations several times.
addicted
Also, the last new Tesla model not including the Cybertruck has been many years ago.
ninth_ant
You make this claim as if it’s entirely about how folks feel about nations. Might be for some people.
But unless the CEO of BYD has been trying to actively undermine European elections… perhaps this is more about Telsa specifically and the relative value proposition of BYD vehicles at their lower price point.
jfax
Except China actually keeps their ultra wealthy in line.
tharne
I would argue that the CCP and the Maga crew employ a handful of similar tactics against the ultra wealthy in their respective countries. If you play ball and kiss the ring, things generally go ok for you. If you criticize them publicly or loudly, they do their best to make you wish you hadn't.
oytis
Cause ultra-wealthy are not the top of Chinese society? In a socialist society the wealthy are only wealthy by Party's grace - should they decide to revert Deng Xiaoping reforms, and all their wealth will evaporate, and they will be lucky if not with their owners.
The real elites in China are CCP officials - no one can keep them in line, in any case no one keep in line Xi Jinping himself.
badgersnake
Try not buying things from China and see how far you get.
mattmanser
The article isn't clear, perhaps deliberately. But they mean that BYD is doing well globally, while Tesla sales are plummeting in Europe. Not that BYD made massive gains in specifically the EU market.
People aren't turning specifically to BYD, they're turning to anything but Tesla.
wg0
[flagged]
echoangle
Maybe the problem is the polemic tone of the comment.
Read the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
wg0
Thanks. I'll replace stupid with not wise enough.
sam-cop-vimes
While the BYD offering looks attractive on the surface, it doesn't make sense for the Europeans to eagerly start adopting Chinese brands instead of American brands. Any country one becomes overly dependent on is a threat to one's sovereignty. The lesson has to be learnt from this change in American politics.
surgical_fire
Not sure you are aware, but there are quite a few European car brands.
They might be relatively unknown to you, but they absolutely exist, I'll let you know.
Before replying too quickly to the headline, please note that it's another case of "bad headline-itis" that is conflating two things that the article DOESN'T say.
(1) Tesla sales have crashed in Europe.
(2) BYD sales are up globally, with the largest gain in China. Most of those sales are not in the EU; the EU has imposed high tariffs on Chinese autos.
These two statements are operating independently of each other; it is not the case that BYD sales are what have caused Tesla to crash in Europe, and this is not what the article says. However, the headline puts these two facts in close juxtaposition, inviting an incorrect conclusion on quick skim. Grr, headline writer, grr.
Drawing from other sources, BYD sold only about 83,000 cars in the EU in 2024, though they are projecting to double that in 2025. So it may be that BYD will be part of _future_ Tesla sales drops, but these are likely due to price/quality more than politics.
(Re-posting this at the top level because the comment I replied to got flagged)