Posted on 02/17/2024 9:44:12 PM PST by Red Badger
China's BYD is leaving rivals behind in both China's and global EV markets. Image: BYD
BYD overtook Tesla to become the world’s largest supplier of battery-powered electric vehicles in the fourth quarter of 2023, by a substantial margin of 526,000 to 484,000 units sold. But in China, the race for market dominance isn’t nearly as close.
Indeed, Volkswagen, BMW, Toyota, Honda, Nissan and several Chinese companies outpace Tesla in the overall Chinese auto market.
American and European politicians who are fond of ranting about China’s closed markets should take note that Chinese consumers appreciate German and Japanese quality like almost everybody else. They also admire Tesla but are not fanatic about it.
In January 2024, BYD’s share of the Chinese market for battery electric vehicles was 26.2%, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association cited by CarNewsChina. Tesla’s share was 10.6%.
Volkswagen ranked sixth with 4.2%. China’s Wuling, Aion and Changan outranked Volkswagen, while Zeekr, Geely, Nio and Leap rounded out the top ten.
Sources: China Passenger Car Association data; Asia Times chart.
In the Chinese auto market as a whole, Volkswagen was the best-selling brand with a market share of 10.3%. BYD ranked second at 9.4% and Toyota third at 7.0%. Changan slightly outsold Honda, which had 6.4% of the market.
BMW ranked eighth at 3.4% and Nissan tenth at 2.9%. Geely, Wuling and Chery completed the top ten. Tesla’s share was only 2.0%.
Sources: China Passenger Car Association data; Asia Times chart. Five of the ten best-selling car models in January were foreign, including the Tesla Model Y, which ranked sixth. The Changan CS75 Plus was the most popular, followed by the Volkswagen Lavida, BYD Song Plus, Nissan Sylphy and Aito Wenjie M7.
The BYD Qin Plus and Seagull were also in the Top Ten, as were the Volkswagen Sagitar and Honda CR-V. The list was compiled by CarNewsChina, which cited Chinese auto websites Dongchedi and Yiche.
Sources: CarNewsChina, Dongchedi & Yiche data: Asia Times chart. In 2023, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) accounted for only 5.9% of the Volkswagen Group’s sales in China but that will change. Deliveries were up 72.3% year-on-year in the fourth quarter, following the start of operations at the company’s new EV factory in Hefei.
By 2030, Volkswagen China plans to increase the share of new energy vehicles – including both BEVs and hybrids – in its product mix to 40%. This will put more pressure on Tesla, which doesn’t make hybrids.
BYD makes almost as many hybrids as it does BEVs, so its electric vehicle output is actually about twice that of Tesla’s – not slightly larger as commonly reported. Moreover, BMW’s joint venture with Brilliance China Automotive is expanding EV and battery production in Shenyang.
Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Mazda, which is an affiliate of Toyota, make and sell EVs (mostly hybrids) in China through joint ventures. Toyota works with FAW and GAC, Honda and Nissan with Dongfeng, and Mazda with Changan and FAW.
Last November, it was announced that the new Mazda CX-50 sold in China by Changan Mazda Automobile incorporates the Toyota Hybrid System.
Honda and Nissan also have joint R&D projects with Tsinghua University while engineers from FAW, GAC and BYD participate in projects at Toyota’s Intelligent ElectroMobility R&D Center, which promotes the development of battery-powered, hybrid, plug-in hybrid and fuel cell EVs in China.
The Chinese government wants sales of these New Energy Vehicles, which accounted for 32% of new car sales in China last year, to reach 45% of new car sales by 2027. German and Japanese automakers have said they aim to maintain their market rankings as China advances toward that target.
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They’re too late to the party. DV is dying as I type this and they’re going to suffer greatly.
What is it with people who are all in on this asinine pell mell rush towards a cliff to jump off with the "technology"? I have to conclude it is a mass psychosis of some kind.
I concede there are some very narrow ownership parameters where an EV makes sense for a few people, but those generally involve people who are not using their car to drive more than a limited number of miles each day.
Just the other day, I saw where Sacramento is going to mandate no new gas stations can be built in that city unless EV charging in equal capacity is installed as well.
There is an Engineer from Australia with an excellent, informative, and entertaining YouTube channel on cars in general, but his specialty is highlighting, from a common sense perspective, why EV technology is not going to survive its current iteration:
LINK: MGUY Australia YouTube Channel
In the case of this stupid California, and he posted a graphic of why this endeavor by a California municipality is completely stupid and unworkable, as displayed in this graphic below that shows what kind of electric infrastructure would be required to make an EV Charging bank of stations that would be comparable to the standard 20 pump gas station that is often seen near interstates in the USA.
In it, he makes the Worst case scenario (6 cars per hour, per gas pump, which REALLY underestimates it) for ICE cars and calculates that a standard 20 pump gas station could serve 120 cars a day:
To be able to charge 120 EV's a day (again, comparable to a 20 pump gas station) a charge provider would need to build 90 (NINETY!) chargers, and these would have to be the most high end variety of the kind that could charge a car in 45 minutes (such as the Tesla chargers which can supposedly charge a Tesla in 30-45 min)
That's NINETY chargers for the same throughput capacity.
From MGuy's video: "...For one, the cost of buying the equipment and installing it can be obscene. A very basic 50 kW station that many would barely consider to be fast charging can cost $50,000 per stall. Faster ones that make the drivers of the latest EVs happier can cost as much as $200k per unit. When you need to get at least four stalls to make for both capacity and redundancy, these costs approach $1 million at the low end when considering the other needed construction and power upgrades to get them all put in. Worse, it's probably necessary to put in 8 or 16 stalls (if not more) to make room for future growth... So, at the minimum, to get the same capacity to recharge EV as to refill ICE, you would have to spend $18 MILLION dollars to achieve that. Or, I suppose you could go middle of the road and get the mid-level charging stations which would cost $4.5 million dollars to build.
On top of that insanity, for the fastest chargers, it isn't hard to see EV drivers queuing up. Do you need to build an even bigger parking lot area to contain them as they wait? What will be the system to get people to a pump without having fights break out?
Never mind NONE of this even talks about the grid infrastructure needed for that one station, equivalent to the electricity demands of 1,800 average residential dwellings per day.
Don't forget to factor in the increased catastrophic depreciation of EV value over time, and the repair costs which average double, as long as you don't scratch the battery pack by grounding on a curb or getting into an accident, which can total the car.
But wait...there's more. EVs may become catastrophically expensive to insure, due to the possibility of battery damage which can total the car, or a battery fire that can take down an entire building it may be parked in. Increasingly, EVs which are prone to fires will not be allowed on ferries, be allowed to park in garages for just that reason.
But hey. We are all going to flock to buy a stylish looking Communist Chinese EV even if it contains the worst of Communist Chinese made batteries. And we will end up with EV graveyards just like they have in Communist China:
Thanks for the article. I think the poster typed per day a couple of times when he meant per hour.
I want to see a station with pumps and chargers on the same lot to observe the irritation of the EVers as they watch numerous ICE customers zip in, fill up and leave as they stagnate at the charger or in the queue waiting.
Heck, that was likely me screwing up. You are correct, that was, I think, per hour, not per day.
I cannot understand the Electric Vehicle idiocy.
When I started racing 1/12 scale cars back in the mid-70’s, I was one of the first to leave the gas powered cars and go to electric. It was awesome. No oil and messes, clean and strong torque, no maintenance, etc. I wondered why we didn’t have electric cars and they would be a great idea.
But then I looked into it and realized there may be some negatives to electrics. Imagining a “T” chart, I found that though there were some positives on the “good” side, the “bad” side started filling up really quickly. I lost interest in it until the Teslas started coming out and I spent 45 minutes talking to a Tesla salesman in the South Lake Union store (in Seattle and the heart of the Amazon complex). It seemed to have some advantages that I’d not thought of, and the government kickback was one of them.
So then I researched in ernest. I found that the negative side of the T chart exploded.
But the average TV watcher was really hearing none of that. They only got the positives. That is finally changing and more and more people are questioning the practicality of EV’s. Frankly, part of it is that more people actually own them or know someone that owns one. That can put you right off them.
BTW, my ace in the hole on information is that I dumped TV in 1997. I’m pretty much immune to the brainwashing simply because I’m not on their radar. That’s why I’m contrarian on a lot of subjects, I suspect.
We are similar in that respect. I stopped watching television around 1998, and very likely for the exact same reasons you did.
And I do much the same on issues I find important.
For example, it was important to me to understand the injustice done to General Michael Flynn, and there was so much disconnected information swirling around, that I decided to gather all the information out there I could find and put it together in a chronological and understandable format, listing the date, event, people involved, links, and a summary of each one as in the example of the first few rows shown below (Here is a link to the full PDF document I created: LINK: Timeline of the Governmental Abuse of LT. General Michael Flynn)
Boy. When I put it together like that, what dropped out was plain to see. Not unclear or confusing any more.
I had to do it that way, because I felt that it was a milestone event...and it was. And when I put it together ike
Good synopsis. FWIW, the same thing happened to me regarding Zimmerman, Rittenhouse And Juicy Smallyay.
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