Tesla Loses Its EV Crown to BYD as Sales Keep Dropping

Unlike Elon Musk with its list of broken promises, the statistics don’t lie. Tesla has lost the title of the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer to Chinese automaker BYD. The signs have been there for a while, with BYD beating Tesla’s sales in Europe multiple times over the course of 2025. It’s now official globally.

Despite being blocked from entering the US market, BYD’s seemingly unstoppable rise continues as its electric vehicle sales increased last year by 28% to 2.25 million. In contrast, Tesla today announced that it will deliver 1.64 million vehicles in 2025, its second consecutive annual decline and a 16% year-over-year decline for the fourth quarter. It’s not just the Chinese brand that is ahead of Tesla in the electric vehicle race; this is a marked change.

Last week, BYD said that in 2025 it had sold 4.6 million “new energy vehicles” (which include both full electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids) globally, of which more than 1 million were exported cars. Its exports of passenger vehicles increased by more than 145 percent year-on-year.

The news comes after a frankly disastrous year for Tesla, which saw the hot-selling Model Y, crucial to both Elon Musk and his automaker, receive a half-hearted refresh that tanked, failing to reverse sales woes. It was also a year that revealed how few people bought the much-maligned Cybertruck; in March, another recall revealed that the company had apparently sold fewer than 50,000 electric vans since deliveries to customers began 14 months earlier. Musk had told investors that Tesla would sell 250,000 Cybertrucks per year.

With Tesla sales declining in the United States and plummeting in Europe, Musk turned to U.S. President Donald Trump for help. Trump obliged by turning the South Lawn of the White House into a makeshift showroom for Tesla, saying he would buy a sleek Model S Plaid himself. But in June, it was reported that Trump might sell the car after publicly falling out with Musk.

Last month, electric vehicle news site Electrek reported that Musk’s SpaceX had purchased tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Cybertrucks that Tesla supposedly cannot sell. (You can see the vans all lined up at SpaceX in this video.) If true, the move would significantly bolster Tesla’s financial performance in the fourth quarter of 2025, providing at least some reprieve for the automaker after the U.S. ended its electric vehicle tax credits at the end of the third quarter.

Musk recently claimed that moving away from electric vehicles would secure the company’s future, as well as a $1 trillion pay package for him. Tesla is banking on robotaxis and the production of legions of Optimus robots to catch up. The problem is that, despite Musk’s promise to deliver 1 million humanoid robots in the next decade, images (comedies) continue to emerge of remote-controlled machines.