Tesla vs BYD: Who Really Leads the Global EV Market?

BYD Surpasses Tesla in Global BEV Volume

With the year 2025 over, it has become clear that BYD (BYDDF) has overtaken Tesla (TSLA +2.11%) in its own fiefdom, BEV sales (Battery Electric Vehicles).

This was the result of a pincer movement: BYD sales of BEV grew 28% in the year, rising to 2.25 million cars globally; meanwhile, Tesla sales contracted by 9% to 1.64 million vehicles, marking the second year of contracting sales.

On the surface, this could spell trouble for Tesla, both the company and its stock, as a lot of the narrative around the company has been built around its position as the global leader of EV technology and sales.

This is especially true for the company’s valuation. Judging by Tesla’s P/E (Price/Earnings ratio) of 302, compared to the also high, but less extreme 60 P/E of BYD, a lot of Tesla market capitalization is pricing a lot of growth and future expectation that might be in question in 2026.

Why Tesla’s Vehicle Sales Contracted in 2025

The decline in Tesla sales was the most marked in Q4 2025, with only 418,227 vehicle deliveries for the quarter (434,000 vehicles produced), a 16% decline year-over-year.

A key market from where the decline came is Europe, where every single country except Norway saw a decline in sales in 2025, with the worst cases being Sweden (-66.9%), Belgium (-53.1%), Germany (-48.4%), the Netherlands (-44.5%), and France (-37.5%).

In comparison, sales in China only declined by 5% year-to-year, and sales in the USA declined by 9%.

These rather dismal results are the result of the conjunction of trends. The first one is an overview of tax incentives for EVs and green policies.

For example, France implemented new rules for its “bonus écologique” that disqualified the Chinese-made Model 3 Highland. And even Norway’s sales were boosted by an upcoming change in tax incentives that should crash EV sales as well.

Meanwhile, all EV sales in the US fell off a cliff, by 41%, as the Trump administration ended $7,500 federal tax credits. In that context, Tesla actually fared pretty well, as it gained market share in the US EV market, moving from 43.1% to 56.7%.

Another element behind Tesla’s declining sales has been the political realignment of Elon Musk behind Trump, a move widely negatively perceived by a portion of EV buyers and Tesla consumers, who tend to be more liberal politically.

While not a major issue, the ban of China on cars with retractable handles, starting in January 2027, might also make some people question an immediate purchase.

Lastly, no significant new model release since the Cybertruck release has removed the possibility of enthusiasm for a new design or the entry into a new segment of the automotive market.

Sales Number Vs Revenues

Despite the declining car sales, Tesla’s total revenues have not declined, illustrating the growing diversification of the company.

This is because other markets, like energy storage, are a growing part of the company’s business. The 45.7GWh deployed in 2025 is expected to keep growing quickly, doubling by 2027 at 86.6 GWh and up to 140.3 GWh by 2029.

So while the car sales growth is much less promising than a few years ago, the company as a whole might keep growing. And this is ignoring the potential of new products like robots or self-driving cars/robotaxis.

BYD Dominates in Hybrids

This is not to say that BYD is not an impressive company as well, with its own non-BEV-related business.

For example, the company sells even more plug-in hybrids than BEVs, and has a much larger selection of cars, from entry-level low-cost models to luxury.

Source: EV-Volumes

BYD is also active in the energy storage business; for example, in 2025, it entered into a deal for a 15.1 GWh battery storage facility with the Saudi Electricity Company (SEC).

Tesla vs BYD: Strategy, Scale, and Profitability

Swipe to scroll →

To answer the question of whether Tesla can get back its top spot in BEV sales, we must split into two  different questions:

1. Is BYD’s advantage durable?
2. Does Tesla even care to do so?

BYD Trajectory

The first answer is that BYD might have a durable advantage when it comes to conventional car sales on the global market. First, it has several much cheaper models, which boost the unit sales, even if this is ultimately less profitable.

So the market of Southern Europe, Latin America, South-East Asia, and the lowest part of the auto market in developed economies might just permanently buy a lot more BYD than Tesla, especially as batteries are now improving to the point that BEVs are no longer a luxury product.

Hybrids are also helping with customers in cold climates or concerned with range anxiety, bringing further depth to BYD’s sales network and economies of scale for car production.

Combined with the relatively recent arrival of BYD in most markets, like in Europe, the company has a lot of space to keep growing. It is also regionalizing its production with car factories in Hungary and Brazil, for example, helping bypass any local opposition and tariffs against China-made cars.

So BYD might stay the largest seller in total cars sold, even if the profit from it might be more in line with Tesla’s.

Tesla’s Strategic Shift Beyond Auto Sales

Tesla’s goals were never solely to become a top automaker, but to accelerate the trend of electrification and digitalization. And in that respect, the task is sort of done in the auto market.

To some extent, the capital-intensive business of car making is likely no longer the most attractive to Elon Musk. Instead, world domination of the self-driving markets, energy storage, and robotics seems to be the future of the company.

Meanwhile, shared manufacturing and business activities with other Musk companies, like xAI, or maybe one day even Starlink and SpaceX, might be of importance to the company’s future.

This led to this strange situation where, for Tesla, an automaker, car sales might not be the most relevant indicator anymore.

This is not to say that the release of a cheap model, or a long-awaited Tesla Semi truck, would not create a restart of growth for the company’s vehicle business. But in the end, it might be somewhat irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, and Tesla passenger cars might become just one among many of the business lines of the Tesla conglomerate.

In itself, this might explain the seemingly lack of interest of Tesla in defending its title as #1 EV brand, with a strategy focused on margins, the luxury segment, and technological prowess more pertinent for the corporation as a whole, even to the detriment of the car brand alone.

Autonomy as Tesla’s Primary Long-Term Catalyst

Besides, if self-driving cars are indeed soon to be commonplace, the brand of the robotaxi will matter a lot less, as whoever controls the self-driving technology will capture most of the auto market anyway.

Musk’s forecast about its robotaxis, if accurate, would mean that he has little to worry about the future of Tesla car sales, as the sale of purpose-built robotaxis, which are also cheaper to build in theory (2-seaters), will be like a tsunami over regular car sales.

Of course, Musk’s predictions tend to be very optimistic when it comes to timelines. For example, the company’s “We, Robot” event was even held in October 2024, and the mass arrival of robotaxis and robovans has been expected as “imminent” ever since.

So Tesla’s shareholders might want to be cautiously optimistic about the long-term direction of the company, technology-wise, but wary of short-term stock price volatility.

Source: X

Tesla (TSLA) Investment Outlook

Currently, the self-driving industry is moving away from the consensus solution of LIDAR (“laser radar”) + cameras, to camera-only. This allows for the removal of the dependency on expensive LIDARs and mimics how a human driver analyzes the road.

This shift is driven largely by the extremely quick rate of improvement in AI reasoning and so-called “edge computing”: calculating a safe driving path directly using the car’s hardware, without extra connection to an outside server.

This direction greatly benefits Tesla, which has long been the sole advocate of this strategy.

As the company collected an order of magnitude more data from its fleet, it may be the first to achieve “true” autonomous driving, beyond the “geofenced” limits imposed on solutions like Waymo (part of Google/Alphabet (GOOGL +0.96%)).

Source: ARK Invest

Until 2025, Tesla’s release of Full Self-Driving (FSD) was a perpetually “soon” then delayed announcement, stemming from unfulfilled 2018 expectations and leading to harsh criticisms.

However, this changed when Texas granted Tesla Robotaxi a permit to run a ride-hailing service in August 2025, following a test run in Austin since June. For now, a Tesla employee remains on board as a safety monitor.

It is hard to say if 2026 will be the time for fully autonomous self-driving to become the new growth engine at Tesla, but the company’s shareholders will certainly hope so.

(You can read more about Tesla in its dedicated investment report.)

Latest Tesla (TSLA) Stock News and Developments