Unfortunate.
Are they paying people in China to buy their cars or something? I'm in Portugal right now, where both BYD cars and Tesla cars are omnipresent. The difference between the two vehicles couldn't be more profound. The Teslas look SO cheap and shitty. They're substantially more expensive as well.
What happened to the law with the door handle
20Million cars per year wen?
Current products get a reprieve.
I'm VERY sceptical about these figures. Tesla's fudged stats includes all Tesla China 'wholesale' sales, including exports from its Shanghai plant whereas BYD's export numbers are excluded in the comparison. Actual Tesla sales for Jan 2026 in China appear to be 18,485 a drop of 45% from Jan 2024.It jumped to 38,206 in Feb, allegedly up 42.7% YOY in a EV market that shrank 35% due to the end of sales tax discounts in Dec 2025 and Chinese New Year holidays. Both the Jan and Feb figures raise questions for me. Where did the huge number 40k+ of Jan 2026 exports go? I can't see on global figures or markets where Tesla sales rose enough to absorb these 40k+ vehicles. The Feb figures strike me as odd. Tesla effectively claims to have doubled its China EV market share in a month to 13.7% after years of decline and in a period where its dealers were closed for 10 days for CNY holidays. Unlikely.
I don’t believe this at all
BYD sales is down and yet the graph shows they're still selling 3x more than Tesla.
Goes into effect Jan 1, 2027.
I'll add that as the SpaceX / xAI IPO draws closer, the PR fluff from all Musk companies as well as dubious stats are massively increasing. Musk desperately needs this $1.5 trillion IPO to succeed to consolidate his personal wealth and to pay back his Middle East funders. I'll also add that numerous Tesla China execs resigned in early 2026 as well as key global execs, in sales and finance. Senior Execs don't leave successful, growing companies. They do flee Enron-like ponzi schemes.
And Tesla models are more expensive than byd. Everyone knows the luxury brand doubles total market share in these conditions. Har har 😁
BYD's sales did decline in China in Jan-Feb 2026, in part due to an overall market decline as well as competition from cheaper, hungry competitors. Geely had strong growth with its new, cheaper models. BYD's exports grew strongly.
They’re talking about YoY like what is normally posted here to show the slowdown in Tesla sales.
It also states that it’s an adjusted number to account for the slowdown of Chinese new year.
BYD is losing favor in the Chinese market but that's just because other domestic brands are outcompeting them and BYD is losing on price and innovation. EV adoption YoY in China is still meteoric, and Tesla just shipped two refreshed models, so non of this is really a surprise, especially when you consider western products still carry some prestige with some of the Chinese market.
No shit. I'm directly responding to the comment above me who said they're in Portugal and have seen both products and can't believe people would buy a Tesla over a BYD. So for that person, I'm saying regardless of the percentages of growth/decline BYD is still absolutely dominating Tesla in China. They're not even playing in the same league anymore. Hell, BYD's YoY decline is like twice Tesla's total sales for this period even after their growth Not that we'd easily know that from just reading this article BTW because the article only give you Tesla's YoY numbers while hiding BYD's in a fucking graphic. And also to answer that person, yes Tesla is paying customers to buy their cars in the form of 7 year/0% financing. Bottom line, Tesla is now just competing with Xiaomi to be the biggest of the "everyone else" players and Xiaomi looks poised to surpass them fairly soon as their YoY growth during this period was higher.
Jan-Feb 2025 = 33,703 + 26,777 = 60480 Jan-Feb 2026 = 18,485 + 38,206 = 56691 Net change: -3789 (-6.26%) So... they're still down through the first two months of the year, and January/Feb 2025 sales were considered bad. This isn't exactly good news for the company. They've certainly been moving inventory around. However, it makes sense that they'd see increased sales in February on account of weaker sales in January; so in other words, they may have increased exports in January this year versus last year. It's possible Chinese Lunar New Year being mid February in 2026, whereas it was early February last year caused a spike in sales prior to the holiday. That would have been realized in January last year, but February this year. Reasons being that Chinese workers get their year end bonuses before the lunar new year, and if they want a new car, they'll do it before everything shuts down for 2 weeks. Especially if they want a new car to take a road trip.
What does that mean? The best I could find is that the "adjustment" is just combining January and February sales on account that Lunar New Year being somewhere in that period has such a huge impact on a single month's sales. In other words, you should always combine Jan/Feb and compare those months to previous years. Whether that 38206 February sales is Jan+Feb, or just Feb is hard to say. I imagine it's just February, and the article writer is a doofus.
Wholesale sales: Jan-Feb 2025: 63,238 + 30,688 = 93926 Jan-Feb 2026: 69,129 + 58,599 = 127728 Net change: +33802 (+36%) Now... what "wholesale sales" actually means, I'm still not sure. For all we know, this just includes every vehicle that was exported, whether it sold through to a customer or not. The main difference between 2025 and 2026, and something I've pointed out back when the January numbers came out, is that Tesla shut down model Y production in China for 3 weeks between the last week of January through mid February for re-tooling for the refresh. Model 3 production seems to have been shutdown for one week as well. They supposedly shutdown all 3 of their factories' model Y production in Q1 last year. I don't feel like double checking the dates of all 3 plants right now. I've said many times that this would likely result in a boost in production and sales in Q1 2026. On account of that production delay in 2025, it may have delayed some sales into Q2 2025, whereas that shouldn't happen this year. Q1 '26 results may be slightly better than Q1 '25, but those gains will likely be given back in Q2 '26 versus Q2 '25.
😄 yeah right
"Wholesale" includes exports. There's no evidence for an increase in sales outside China serviced by Tesla China that shows growth in actual sales. Most Asia Pacific sales are heavily down YOY.
Except that Geely is eating BYDs lunch in China. And in fact so are VW and Toyota. You should be way more concerned about BYDs catastrophic crash.
did BYD's sales have a short-term fall due to the osborne effect? Are BYD customers holding off purchases waiting for the Blade 2 batteries? (I am wondering if its taking time to scale blade 2 batteries?)
And my clarification was due to how YoY is normally posted here for Tesla losing sales, even though in actual unit sales numbers they were still killing the competition. Look through months of back posts to confirm what I’m talking about. My gripe is that it’s ok to post YoY until it goes against the narrative.
I didn’t write that as some conspiratorial thing, just wanted to point out that it did state that in the article.
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