BYD BEV Sales Up 34% While PHEV Sales Down 23% — Charts

BYD has released its August 2025 sales data, and it’s not as dramatically positive as it has been over the course of the rest of the year. Though, it is quite interesting. (Note that the charts below are much better viewed on a computer, not a phone. Also, counter to how I normally do it, I’m embedding the interactive charts right below the static charts in each case this time.)

BYD’s full electric vehicle (BEV) sales were actually up significantly year over year. They were 34.4% higher in August 2025 than in August 2024. Looking across the first eight months of the year, they were up 39.4% in 2025 compared to 2024. Not enormous growth, but not too shabby. However …

That just barely makes up for BYD’s plugin hybrid vehicle (PHEV) sales being down year over year in August. The company’s PHEV sales dropped 22.7% compared to August 2024. Looking across the first eight months of the year, they were still up, by 8.4%, in 2025 compared to 2024. So, we can’t say BYD’s PHEV sales are collapsing yet. And, in all likelihood, they will rebound and rise again in coming months. But we will see. Perhaps the Chinese PHEV market is getting a little saturated at the moment and overseas PHEV sales aren’t significant enough to make up for that.

The net result from those two opposing trends in August is that BYD’s overall passenger vehicle sales (all plugin vehicles, of course) were up a meager 0.2% year over year. It’s growth, but is it growth? It’s certainly not the super exciting hypergrowth we had been seeing from the company.

Looking across the first eight months of the year, passenger vehicle sales were up 21.9% comparing 2025 to 2024. So, the full-year 2025 trend still looks very positive. What will happen in coming months? We’ll see. Though, for probably the best take on that, I recommend the following article from Larry Evans: “BYD 2025 1H Financial Report: Largely as I Anticipated, with a Few Notable Developments.” Also, longer term, this is a big one: “BYD’s Opportunity to Establish Brand Preference in the Developing World.”