Tesla + BYD Nearly 40% Of BEV Sales Globally

As usual, José Pontes recently published his monthly report on world EV sales. There’s an enormous amount of interesting stats and takeaways in each of those reports, and you can only highlight and feature so many things. While it’s clear looking at the tables that Tesla and BYD lead the industry, a comment from a reader (Mazter) emphasized to me that this really warrants a special callout.

Just two companies — Tesla and BYD — dominate EV production and sales leadership. Even as the EV industry grows at a rapid clip in China, Europe, and the US (a bit), it is these two companies pulling much of the weight. This is still far beyond the brand leadership or dominance in the broader auto industry, and it is pushing Tesla and BYD more and more into a top ranking overall (if the trends continue).

If you just straight up took Tesla and BYD out of the equation, the BEV market would almost be half of what it is today. But truthfully, they are also inspiring many of the advancements in electric vehicle technology and capability, and have been for more than a decade. So are making the competition better year after year with their leadership. So, one has to wonder if the BEV market would be half as big, or even smaller than that, if it wasn’t for BYD and Tesla.

Mazter’s comment was: “Can’t help thinking that the last but 2 paragraph buried the lede.

“‘Looking just at BEVs, there were 442,994 registrations in January, or 67% of total plugin sales. Both Tesla and BYD started in the same positions they held in 2022, but more importantly, both increased their market shares in January, with the former jumping from 18.2% to 22.8% and the latter from 12.6% to 16.1%. These two are really in a different galaxy…'”

With Tesla at about 23% market share and BYD at about 16% market share, about 2 out of every 5 new BEVs in the world are a BYD or a Tesla.

So, congratulations and thanks to BYD and Tesla for continuously driving the industry forward. At the same time, it would be good to see these percentages drop rather than increase. We need more automakers to ramp up to the same kind of scale Tesla and BYD are ramping up to. Though, on the flip side, BYD and Tesla just keep sprinting forward, so it’s hard to see when more of the industry will really catch up. Tesla is working on plans to bring a lower-cost, higher-volume series of cars to market that will probably propel the company forward exponentially. BYD, meanwhile, is beginning massive global expansion, getting its electric cars into markets in South America, Africa, Australia, Europe, and maybe even the United States. With little to no competition in many developing markets, one can see BYD becoming more of a global juggernaut as it retains high market share in a rapidly growing BEV market.

What are your predictions for 2023? 2025? 2030? Where will BYD and Tesla BEV market share be in those years?