Tesla loses its electric crown to BYD as sales continue to decline

Unlike Elon Musk With a list of broken promises, the statistics don’t lie. Tesla has lost the title of the world’s largest electric car maker to Chinese automaker BYD. The signs have been around for a while, with BYD outselling Tesla in Europe several times during 2025. Now it’s official on a global basis.

Despite being banned from the US market, BYD’s seemingly unstoppable rise continues as its electric vehicle sales last year rose 28 percent to 2.25 million. In contrast, Tesla announced today that it delivered 1.64 million vehicles in 2025, the second consecutive annual decline, and a 16 percent decline year-over-year in the fourth quarter. This isn’t just a Chinese brand beating Tesla in the electric car race; It’s a remarkable transformation.

Last week, BYD reported that in 2025 it sold 4.6 million “new energy vehicles” (which include both full electric vehicles and hybrids) globally, with more than 1 million of them exported. Its exports of passenger cars specifically rose more than 145 percent year-on-year.

The news comes after a frankly disastrous year for Tesla, which saw the high-selling Model Y, crucial to both Elon Musk and his car company, get a tepid update that failed to reverse its sales woes. It was also a year that revealed the few people who bought the much-rebuked Cybertruck. In March, another recall revealed that the company had apparently sold fewer than 50,000 electric pickups since it began customer deliveries 14 months ago. Musk had told investors that Tesla would sell 250,000 Turkish cyber trucks annually.

With Tesla sales in the US declining and Europe in freefall, Musk turned to US President Donald Trump for help. Trump had to turn the South Lawn of the White House into a temporary Tesla showroom, claiming he would buy the racy Model S Plaid himself. But by June, it was reported that Trump might sell the car after his public falling out with Musk.

Just last month, electric vehicle news site Electrek reported that Musk’s company SpaceX had purchased tens of millions of dollars worth of Cybertrucks that Tesla supposedly couldn’t sell. (You can see all the pickups lined up at SpaceX in this video.) If true, the move would significantly boost Tesla’s financial performance in the fourth quarter of 2025, providing at least some relief to the automaker after the U.S. ended tax credits for electric vehicles at the end of the third quarter.

“Tesla still has tremendous assets, a well-known brand, manufacturing know-how and a strong install base,” says Andy Palmer, former Nissan chief operating officer and former Aston Martin Lagonda CEO. “The challenge is that the market has matured while the product line has not moved fast enough. People are struggling to justify spending on a Tesla while other brands, including those in China, are offering more innovative and advanced products.”