This news has been expected for a little while, and the comparison is not exactly apples to apples, but still . . .
Elon Musk’s Tesla has been toppled as the world’s best-selling electric vehicle manufacturer after it was overtaken by China’s BYD.
Tesla delivered a record 484,507 cars in the third quarter of 2023, it said on Tuesday, a 20pc rise on the same period a year earlier.
However, it was beaten for the first time by BYD, which on Monday revealed deliveries of 526,409 for the same period.
Tesla has been the world’s biggest electric vehicle manufacturer since 2015 when sales of its high-powered cars overtook the Nissan Leaf.
However, China has since become the world’s biggest market for battery-powered cars and domestic giants such as BYD have invested heavily in producing affordable vehicles.
BYD, which has pledged to “demolish” Western incumbents, has recently expanded beyond China by selling cars in the UK and Europe.
Mercantilism is what it is. And because mercantilism is what it is, Elon Musk might want to ponder the wisdom of having roughly half of Tesla’s car production based in China.
From Bloomberg (December 15), a possibly related story:
More Chinese agencies and government-backed firms across the country have ordered staff to stop bringing iPhones and other foreign devices to work, setting in motion an unprecedented prohibition that’s likely to block Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. from parts of the world’s biggest mobile market.
Multiple state firms and government departments across at least eight provinces — including the prosperous coast — instructed employees in the past month or two to start carrying local brands, according to people familiar with the matter. That’s a major step-up from around September, when a small number of agencies in Beijing and Tianjin began telling staff to leave foreign devices at home, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential orders.
Electric vehicles (EVs) are the gift that keeps on giving for Beijing, if not for Western motorists, Western automakers, or Western geopolitical interests. Most EVs (for now, anyway) offer an inferior experience for most (but, to be clear, certainly not all) Western drivers when compared with traditional cars, especially when backing infrastructure (especially for charging, although Tesla’s network is good and getting better) and price are taken into consideration. On top of this, the mandated displacement of the internal-combustion engine is destroying the advantages of incumbency enjoyed by Western carmakers, which, up until recently, were focused — strange as it may seem — on what consumers actually wanted to buy. And then there’s the small matter of China’s domination of the EV supply chain.
Back to the Daily Telegraph:
BYD, which stands for Build Your Dreams, has said entering the US is not under consideration.
However, it launched sales in the UK in March and last month announced plans to open its first European plant in Hungary.
It comes despite the EU opening an investigation into what it called a “flood” of cheap Chinese electric cars boosted by state subsidies. The probe could result in higher tariffs for imports.
The U.S. tariff currently stands at 27.5 percent, the EU’s at 10 percent.
Chinese car manufacturers may well pose a major threat (thanks mainly to EV mandates in the West and state aid in China) to their European counterparts (among which, please note, are the European subsidiaries of U.S. carmakers), and that could have troubling implications, both economically and politically, in Europe. Nevertheless, given that the makers of EU’s climate policy insist that climate change is an existential danger, and given their claim that the coerced, rapid introduction of EVs is an essential element in the strategy to head off that danger, how strange that economic and political worries might lead them to consider hiking tariffs on the cheap EVs that might, according to their logic, help save the planet.
It’s almost as if they know that forcing EVs on consumers at the current planned pace is not going to make much difference to the climate.
Spoiler: It’s not.
But will the EU’s leaders or their clown clones in London be prepared to admit that?