Advantage China: BYD becomes first car-maker to build six million plug-in vehicles and is set to overtake Tesla for EV sales

BYD has announced that it has become the first car-maker to build more than six-million New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) beating US car-maker Tesla who isn’t set to hit the production milestone until early 2024.

NEVs is the Chinese category of cars that consist of plug-in hybrid (PHEVs), range-extender hybrids and pure-electric cars (EVs).

BYD is now China’s largest car-maker and has now overtaken Tesla in the NEV segment where it now commands an astonishing 35 per cent of the market. 

Perhaps more amazing is BYD has only been in existence for 20 years, and only dropped making pure combustion-powered cars, to favour NEVs, in April 2022.

Tesla, meanwhile, celebrated production of its five-millionth car in September 2023 and is said to be on track to reach 6m in early 2024.

Those sales figures are impressive, but if you include non-plug-in hybrid vehicles Toyota still dominates when it comes to electrified vehicles, producing more then 15-million of them at the last count.

The six-millionth BYD car was the new Fang Cheng Bao Leopard 5 plug-in hybrid SUV that rivals the Toyota Prado in China. 

Currently, BYD says it has nine factories in China that export to 57 countries worldwide – including Australia – where it offers an all-electric line-up, for now, that includes the cut-price Dolphin hatch, Atto 3 SUV and the recently introduced Seal sedan

Thanks to the success of is export sales of EVs, BYD is said to now be gunning for Tesla when it comes to annual production of EVs.

This year BYD says it expects to deliver almost 1.75 million EVs in 2023 – a figure that sees it match the 1.8 million cars Tesla is forecast to build. Growing at a faster rate than Tesla it’s thought BYD will overtake its US competition and become the world’s largest EV maker in the second half of this decade.