China's BYD overtakes Tesla as world's top EV seller

China's BYD has overtaken Elon Musk's Tesla as the world's biggest seller of electric vehicles (EVs), marking the first time it has outpaced its American rival in annual sales.

Tesla car sales dropped by nearly 9% in 2025 to 1.64 million vehicles sold worldwide, the carmaker said on Friday - its second consecutive year of falling car deliveries.

Those figures placed Tesla behind BYD, which said on Thursday that sales of its battery-powered cars rose last year by almost 28% to more than 2.25 million.

The US firm has faced a tough year with a mixed reception to new offerings, unease over Musk's political activities and intensifying competition from Chinese rivals.

Tesla's car sales fell 16% during the last three months of 2025. The drop was partly due to the repeal of a government subsidy that had helped knock as much as $7,500 (£5,570) off the price of certain battery electric, plug-in hybrid or fuel cell vehicles.

Wall Street analysts have recently lowered their Tesla sales estimates for 2026, signalling an increasingly gloomy outlook.

Chinese firms such as Geely, MG, and BYD - now the country's largest electric car company - have put pressure on Western rivals by pricing their vehicles below established brands.

In October, Tesla responded by launching lower-priced versions of its two best selling models in the US in a bid to boost sales.

Musk, who is already the world's richest man, is tasked with significantly boosting Tesla's sales and stock market value over the next decade to secure a record-breaking pay package. The deal, which was approved by shareholders in November, could see him getting a payout of as much as $1tn (£740bn).

China is now mostly urban vs rural so it’s many vs few of middle class urban in special economic zones vs the fewer renaming peasants.

China’s population is predominantly urban, with around 67% living in urban areas and 33% in rural areas as of 2024

Key Figures (circa 2024):

Total Population: ~1.41 billion

Urban Population: ~943.5 million (approx. 67%)

Rural Population: ~464.8 million (approx. 33%)

Of those urban population 600+ million have PPP that’s parallel purchasing power of the average European.

Cars , condos or apartments, tech toys like smart phones and 65” LED tv’s the young of China party and they are all forward looking they see the 21st century as their’s they simply don’t care if it’s one party or not as long as they get to take part in it.

Shanghai is by far the most modern city I have been in it blows any European city away and makes NYC which was home and I dearly love look like a early 20th century relic. High speed rail everywhere, clean fast efficient metros and busses plus AI robotaxis means it’s super easy to get around. Take a trip when you get out of the airport especially at night it’s like stepping into Tokyo but on a scale that dwarfs Tokyo CBD district.

Simple.fact is America better get past partisan politics and start competing with the industrial, tech and infrastructure.giant or we will be left behind it is that simple.

I am in the oil and gas industry and also the power industry specificity solar so I have spent much time in China the largest producers or high tech panels bar none and also Russia for that matter I speak Russian it was my required foreign language in university as a undergraduate. I learned it specifically to do geology in that market and they paid me handsomely for it. Moscow is baller but nothing compared to modern China again it’s a 19th century city by comparison. Same for my beloved NYC the subways are all 19th and very early 20th century relics. To get from JFK to midtown you have to take the Airtrain then transfer to the NYC metro system with luggage and with all the underclasses. In Shanghai you get on a maglev that does 268 mph as smooth as butter and it whisks you in 8 min to the ultra modern clean main station where you then get on well maintained metros to all over the megacity or get a robotaxi directly to your swanky hotel.

Yeah this.

https://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/shanghai/getting-around.htm

As for China they easily have a billion their cities are teaming with the mass of humanity. Like I said visit Shanghai or Beijing or port giant of Tianjin, Shenzhen/ Hong Kong metropolis is also a prime example of masses of double digit millions closer to triple digit millions in most of those MSA areas.

China is a one party state that is run by engineers and scientists not lawyer’s and liberal arts retards they have special economic zones which are effectively cronie capitalist megazones as long as the party gets their cut they fully back the market. Again one party two China is the mantra. They are limiting the numbers of people who can leave the rural because of the flow of mass humanity to their booming mega cities not in spite of it.

Again the USA better put party politics aside and put engineers and scientists in charge of building out the much needed infrastructure of the 21st century.

As for EVs China leads the way because they are dense, urban and petroleum poor they import most of it but they have huge deserts and lots of windy mountains and not afraid of 1 million volt DC lines to send that power to the cities in the east.

They also are building 150 new nukes on top of that. The nukes alone take care of their light duty vehicles total miles per year. The average Chinese light duty vehicle drives 10,000 km a year mostly due to the fact that they have high density cities there’s somewhere between 350 and 500 million light duty Vehicles expected to be in China and the very near future their numbers look very similar to ours

Here is the math for the USA to do the same.

[Electrifying all US light-duty vehicles with energy efficiency similar to a Tesla Model 3 would require approximately 825 TWh of electricity annually, which could be supplied by about 117 1-gigawatt reactors operating at a typical capacity factor.]

Total Miles Traveled and Efficiency The total annual miles traveled by US light-duty vehicles is approximately 3.3 trillion miles. An average Tesla Model 3 efficiency is about 250 Wh/mile

3.3X10^12 miles/year} X 250 Wh/mile =8.25 X 10^14 Wh/year

This is 825 TWh/yr

A 1 gigawatt (GW) reactor (operating at 100% capacity) produces 1 GW X 8,760 hours/year = 8,760 GWh/year. Assuming a realistic average capacity factor of 90% for a nuclear plant:

Energy per reactor =8.76 TWh/year X 0.90 = 7.884 TWh/year

825/7.884= 117 reactors

This is a completely doable number the United States has 92 reactors as it is of course not everyone would drive a model 3 but it gives you the idea what a five passengers sedan driven by the average person would use

For giggle I ran the math for semi trucks using the Tesla Semi which does 82,000# full up loads at 1.7 kWh per mile PepsiCo has over a year of real.world data backing that up now in hilly California at that.

To electrify all US semi-trucks, approximately 300 to 500 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity would be needed annually, requiring the equivalent output of roughly 34 to 57 1-gigawatt (GW) nuclear reactors.

France has more than this in a country 20,000 sq miles SMALLER than Texas.

The total annual distance traveled by all US semi-trucks is approximately 300 billion miles per year (or 300,000,000,000 miles/year). To power these trucks using a Tesla Semi’s average efficiency, approximately 510 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity would be required annually. This amount of electricity could be generated by approximately 58 continuously operating 1-gigawatt (GW) nuclear reactors

Nukes are forever energy it is that simple.

Moving rail by freight train is almost four times more efficient as moving it by a semi truck they’re already been prototypes for they repowered a conventional diesel electric by putting a battery tender behind it and piping in high voltage DC directly to the motors didn’t even have to take the diesel engine off it still remains there so you can use it as a diesel hybrid 9.1 megawatt hour Box Car allows you to pull a thousand Revenue tons for 150 miles

BYD has a 14.5 megawatt hour 20 foot iso box system . Three of those would fit in a standard 60’ American lenght box car. That’s 43.5 megawatt hours in a standard USA box car things get interesting then. 43.5 MWh sends a 1000 Tonne class 1 train 717 miles. With a single tender car supplying that range you could sacrifice one or two.revenue cars and double or triple that range.

The average class one locomotive in Freight Service averages 150 miles per day total range that’s why it was chosen for that size battery box of course there’s longer distance runs like Chicago to LA those have 700 miles per day. Drivers and engineers need rest and crews are swapped along such a long route it would be easy to uncouple the locomotive and it’s single tender car and swap it with a new tender and loco plus fresh crew once every 24 hours with another minimum Four Man Crew since the feds live at 12 hours for the engineers behind the controls of a train.

This of course solves the problem of the vast American flyover country that’s too expensive to Electrify no need to Electrify when you can just use a single battery box car and drop it off once a day at a marshalling yard that’s hooked up to the power grid preferably charged by nukes that are on site

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