Murmurs of BYD overtaking Tesla first surfaced a few years ago when the Musk-owned EV maker felt its first sales hiccup.
Chinese carmaker BYD has managed to overtake Telsa as the world’s largest seller of electric vehicles (EVs) – despite growing at its slowest pace in five years.
BYD sold nearly 2.26m battery EVs in 2025, up nearly 28pc from 2024. On average, that comes to more than 560,000 vehicles per quarter.
Compared to that, Tesla delivered a little more than 418,000 EVs in the quarter past, coming to around 1.63m for the whole year. The annual figure marks an 8.6pc drop in total deliveries from 2024, which, reports suggest, is the company’s biggest annual drop in sales ever.
Tesla also saw a steep quarterly sales drop of more than 15.8pc from the previous quarter when US vehicle buyers were rushing to purchase EVs before a several-thousand-dollar tax credit expired on 1 October.
BYD was able to overtake Tesla even though its EVs are not up for sale in the US, while China is Tesla’s second-largest market after the US.
Tesla deliveries had grown by nearly 50pc annually at some time. However, the company reported its first drop in annual sales – amounting to 1pc – in 2024.
Though this snowballed in the first half of 2025 as Tesla faced increasing competition from automakers including BYD, Volkswagen and BMW, coupled with the backlash owner Elon Musk faced as a result of his political activities. The early months of 2025 saw several protests at Tesla dealerships, including some which resulted in vandalism.
Meanwhile BYD grew steadily, marking a 62pc rise in sales in 2023. A year earlier, BYD knocked Tesla off its pedestal as the world’s leading manufacturer of battery electric vehicles.
According to BYD, sales outside of China climbed to a record 1m vehicles in 2025 – up 150pc from 2024. While Tesla registrations are declining in major European markets with France noting a 37pc drop and Sweden noting a 70pc drop in 2025. The company, however, had a more positive year in Norway.
Earlier this year, the American EV maker signed a $16.5bn deal with Samsung for its A16 semiconductor chips. Musk commented that the deal would assist Tesla in “maximising manufacturing efficiency”.
Musk’s other ventures have seen some positive progress in recent months, with SpaceX successfully deploying the first round of its mock satellites into space.
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