BYD Sells 82,678 BEVs in August!
BYD continues to sell more and more electric vehicles. This week it released its August sales — only on Twitter, it seems — and the results are as compelling as ever. The company had 82,678 full electric vehicle (BEV) sales and another 91,299 plugin hybrid (PHEV) sales, which Jose Pontes kindly informed me is what “DM” stands for in the following graphic.
For comparison with the current world #1 in BEV sales, Tesla, if you average out its sales last quarter, you can say that Tesla sold 84,898 vehicles a month. That would put BYD’s 82,678 BEV sales at nearly the same level.
Unfortunately, when it comes to models, we don’t see the BEV–PHEV split here, but it’s notable that the fully electric — and stunning — Han led the way with 26,003 sales in August. On an annual basis, that would be ~310,000 sales!
The thing about BYD, though, is that it has several great mass-market models. The Song had 42,500 sales; the Qin had 39,512 sales; the Yuan had 18,265 sales; the hot new (and affordable) Dolphin had 23,469 sales; and the Tang had 10,815 sales.
That’s quite a series of results. BYD may not have caught up to Tesla yet in BEV sales, especially since Tesla’s production capacity is increasing throughout the quarter, but it sure is right on Tesla’s tail.
And if you want to count BYD’s plugin hybrid models (which Jose points out have fairly big batteries with decent electric range, unlike some PHEV models available in the USA), BYD is far in the lead in terms of plugin vehicle unit sales.