If one thing’s certain about business, it’s that on a global scale, nobody’s immune to competition. Even with protectionist measures in certain markets helping prop up dominance there, other markets feature different forces, mistakes can still be made, and new arenas can still open up for rivals to thrive in. The latest automaker feeling some heat? Tesla, which nearly lost its title as the world’s biggest battery electric car brand by volume last year.
Last year, Tesla delivered 1,808,581 vehicles around the globe. This year? Well, despite forecasting growth, deliveries slumped slightly to 1,789,226, a decline of 1.07 percent, and the first annual decline since at least 2015. However, this isn’t a harbinger of doom for EVs on the whole. Not in the slightest. It’s simply the nature of the game.
You know who managed to get fairly close to Tesla’s annual delivery figure? Chinese automaker BYD, which shifted 1,764,991 electric cars this past year despite its only presence in America being in the bus space. For context, BYD sold 1,574,822 battery electric vehicles in 2023, meaning its annual all-electric car sales have increased by 12.07 percent.
So what’s going on here? Well, not only has the Chinese market been in a domestic automaker growth period for years now, BYD’s also seeing growing success outside of its main market, with Euro News reporting June exports up 156.22 percent year-over-year. From inroads in Europe to EV sales in Australia growing 38 percent in the first three quarters of 2024 as reported by EV Central, BYD seems to be flourishing with or without modest tariffs. Keep in mind, the tariffs that the European Union’s placed on Chinese EVs don’t even come close to the 100 percent tariffs that the United States and Canada have placed on Chinese EVs, so it’s not surprising that BYD’s chosen to play in more advantageous markets.
At the same time, Tesla is facing some issues of its own. It seems that the Cybertruck hasn’t quite seen seven figures worth of $100 reservations translate directly to a market-disrupting backlog of sold orders and is starting to build some serious inventory, to the point where Tesla’s offering free Supercharging on in-stock examples. In addition, the Model Y is going on five years before so much as a facelift, and opening up the Supercharger network in America to other EV brands substantially increases the competitiveness of rival EVs. Speaking of competitiveness, we’ve already mentioned that China is surging in homegrown EV development and sales, and that’s before we probe the possibility that some Western EV buyers might prefer their cars to come from a company with a quiet CEO, as reported by Reuters in April.
Perhaps the most telling sign of where Tesla’s faltering is in its sales breakdown, where it groups Model 3 and Model Y deliveries in one category, and all other models in a separate category. For 2024, sales of the former category slumped by 35,614 units, while sales of the latter only grew by 16,259 despite the production ramp of the much-anticipated Cybertruck. Of course, without more granular data, it’s hard to take a closer look than this, but the highest-volume models are down while lower-volume models haven’t stepped up to fill the void of units. For what it’s worth, Tesla hasn’t published year-end financial figures yet, so there’s a chance business looks better than sales figures suggest. After all, the brand is known for high historical margins on its products, and profitability is more than just a volume game.
If we can draw any potential insights on the future of the EV market from this sales data, it’s that BYD might actually overtake Tesla as the biggest BEV manufacturer in the world this year, and that the global electric vehicle market is likely diversifying from the Tesla-led state everyone assumed to be the norm. Of course, a lot can still happen in the next twelve months, nothing’s set in stone, and we could see unexpected gains and losses. Let’s just see how another year of global EV sales shakes out, shall we?
(Photo credits: Tesla, BYD)
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All pretty much normal, competition eventually catches up to everyone.
I suspect this was inevitable once everyone moved to NACS. Most of Tesla’s vehicles are mediocre at best with interior design decisions so bad they make the VW person responsible for capacitive sliders wonder what they were thinking. I’ve long maintained that the killer feature for Tesla was the Supercharger network, and that’s no longer exclusive to them. Musk’s stupidity and the Cybertruck flop (but I repeat myself) is only accelerating something that was going to happen anyway.
And somehow their stock is going to increase in value, right?
Aside from going full magat it doesn’t help that Leon refuses to update the design of any of his cars.
When Musk endorsed Trump it was 100% certain the brand was going to lose sales. Certainly not all, but definitely most (as in ALOT) of Tesla customer have been not-Trump-supporters and are upset with Musk. Which of course he knows and seems to just not care about. Oh well.
Fuck Elon Musk. That is all. I know several Tesla fans who have sold or are going to sell their car and get rivians or something else.
FEM for short. If I am looking at electrics, I am looking at the Ionic 5 and the MustangE. Tesla is dead to me and has been since Fwad turned Twitter into his own fascist megaphone.
FEM. Well done.
BYD is one of the few brands from China that I am interested about, they are having good sales in Mexico, they are targeting 100k units to be sold during 2025 on par with Kia that was a great success when they entered the market, similar strategy (good pricing, low interest rates, dealerships opening everywhere). Now Kia is more expensive compared to Nissan and others.
Anecdotal, but I know several EV owners who were Tesla owners only because of the Supercharger network. Now that other automakers can access the Supercharger network, many have jumped to other makes that don’t have the same quirks as Tesla’s cars (notably, getting away from the “everything in a single screen” issue).
BYD makes simpler EVs that are more easily/cheaply repaired. And cheaper to purchase. Why is this any surprise?
The sweet spot, IMO, is to build a mostly-analogue EV with the complexity of a 1990s era car. Switches, buttons, and knobs for all functions. Rollup windows. No CANBUS, no touch screens, no software lockouts(all software should be open source and freely available). LiFePO4 battery, ideally made with a single string of high AH cells. Everything in the car should be accessible including the battery, and repairable with basic tools. The most tech-laden parts would be in the motor, inverter, charger, BMS, and DC-DC converter, all of which should be easily swappable with bolt-on replacements that are plug and play. It should be designed in a way that a functionally illiterate low-level mechanic with an 8th grade education should be able to repair most things on it, drunk.
The cars would last nearly forever that way. China’s cheap EVs are closer to the above ideal than anything sold in the USA. Anything less than this is a waste of the technology and the energy/resources that go into making it.
Make the chassis/body aluminum too, so it won’t rust. Otherwise it will still be a disposable car in the midwest.
My 25 year old honda insight still looks great. 🙂
Of course. Include replaceable body panels, and a monocoque stout enough that it won’t fatigue for centuries. The 1st gen Insight did this, and shows the way.
I like to envision something sized similarly to a Mitsubishi Mirage in width, but a little lower, and a few feet longer, in sedan-hatchback form so that all occupants have enough room to stretch out, able to comfortably seat 5, while giving great storage/utility with fold-down back seats(can it fit a refrigerator or dresser on its back? Can someone comfortably sleep in it?). Ultra-streamlined with a Cd value in the mid 0.1X range and a frontal area no larger than 2.0 m^2. With a 35 kWh pack, the entire car could weigh under 2,500 lbs while passing safety regulations(if only barely), and wouldn’t cost much to mass produce, possibly selling at a small profit for under $25,000. It would approach 250 miles range at 70 mph on the highway, and because of its small pack, charge in well under 15 minutes from empty.
That’s the sort of EV we need, and I think in the US, it would sell well. Especially with a $7,500 tax incentive, but still stand on its own merits without one.
Then build a fun, lower, narrower two-seater on the same platform with even less mass, less overall drag, less features, and more horsepower/torque at a similar price point.
Honestly the new prius fits it pretty well, and looks great. I just wish it were aluminum and had a manual transmission like the Insight did. If it had both those features, I would have sold half my cars to purchase one.
The new Prius has twice as much drag and 300+ more lbs of extra crap than it should.
This is pure fantasy. You’ll have digital communication between BMS and driver user interface for cost optimization if nothing else, and at that point, you might as well just embrace CANBUS.
I’m thinking less about saving on MSRP, and more about making sure it can be economically repaired when it is 30 years old with 500,000 miles on the odo, reliably serving for decades more, and not ending up in a landfill.
Driver-user interface? That should be simply the go-pedal and steering wheel. If your electric car is more complicated than a cheap e-bike or a golf cart, you’re doing it very, very wrong. Done right, EVs could easily last for millions of miles on the regular, with a few battery pack replacements along the way.
The arrangement you propose isn’t available on any means of electric transportation beyond a basic golf cart design that hasn’t needed to change in 40 years. From scooter, ebike, to electric locomotive, they all use a digital bus for communication between UI & motor / cells. I’m not sure why cars would turn out any different.
It’s not just a digital connection is cheaper, they’re more reliable overall. You need far fewer individual wires to implement the same functionality. Those physical wire connections are the most failure prone part of the system.
The UI needs to tell the user the state of the battery pack, it’s charge, it’s temperature, any error codes from the BMS. The UI needs to control climate control systems, which in any modern EV are also closely integrated with the battery for efficiency purposes.
People would not buy the product you’re proposing since it would be so compromised on MRSP and expected “rental car level” functionalities.
There are lots of commercially available cheap electric bikes, trikes and quads, as well as cheap Chinese electric cars without CANBUS. On a simple vehicle with minimal features, it adds problems. I’m not against digital systems where they are useful and reduce maintenance/complexity, I’m against using systems that can’t have their problems easily/quickly diagnosed/fixed without expensive proprietary tools. Electrical systems regularly have problems as they age, no matter how well designed, and it needs to be possible to locate and fix those problems that occur with minimal time/labor/tools involved with parts you can find at a local hardware store. I’ve found that many indie mechanics can’t work on CANBUS systems even when they understand how it works.
Every EV I ever built fits this ideal. It was not at all hard. And I’ve been using them without issue other than problems I caused myself(by taking things apart again to perform upgrades).
Modern electric cars, OTOH, are unrepairable nightmares that will be bricked by failure of trivial/inexpensive components that are otherwise made critical to the functioning of the vehicle due to the design choices made and software, before their most resource-intensive and expensive components reach the end of their service life. Try fixing a Tesla yourself…
You’re right. Those bikes and other products often don’t use CANBUS; they’re using another digital communication scheme like UART, I2C, or serial. If your techs aren’t able to debug CANBUS, they aren’t going to debug any of those other connections either. There’s no getting away from having to learn how to debug at the digital layer. There’s no going back.
I work in the software industry and have experience at the board design level as well. I’ve done my own car coding and tuning. If the industry was actually mandated to provide internal repair information (ala right-to-repair), I could probably do most Tesla repairs given time and tool access.
I use components that rely on an open-source, freely available software, that can communicate with a 15 year old laptop computer running a painfully outdated Windows distribution(also works on Ubuntu Linux) jus as well as it can a new PC or a smartphone, with a USB-TTL cable. Worked in seconds and never gave me an issue, entirely plug and play and fully programmable in a few mouse clicks.
New cars that you can buy are nothing like this. They should be.
Can you imagine what the KIA boys would be like if this was the case?
It wouldn’t be hard to physically lock them out. No physical key, and the contactors don’t engage to turn the car on. Locate the contactors in a place where the would-be thieves can’t get to them without spending 20+ minutes taking pieces of the car apart to do so. People will always find ways to steal cars, but it is possible to discourage thieves without expensive/complex solutions. The Kias were easily stolen in part because of their added complexity over older cars coupled with their digital bits being integrated with the mechanical components that turned the car on, not inspite of it. Thieves could steal them in seconds, which is what made them attractive targets.
I prefer keeping all the little 12V systems and features as separated from each other as possible. This way, when one of them is compromised, the rest of the car isn’t compromised with it. I don’t need or want every little thing to work with a touch screen menu, the car to nag me while I’m driving it, or to be able to turn the car on/off from 30 feet away with a smartphone I don’t even own. I definitely don’t need or want self driving or automatic braking/lane assist. Screw all that. It’s supposed to be a car that gets me around. The KISS principle should apply, and could make EVs the greatest, most engaging, driver-oriented, and most economical cars ever built.
I encourage you to bring your equivalent of an electric Ariel Atom to market. No doubt it’s just what everyone has been waiting for.
Mentioning that you don’t own a smartphone is just giving away the game. I’m sure someone who’s foregone using the most popular consumer product of the 21st century knows exactly what the public want in an automobile.
I’m well aware of the complaints of the anti-EV side of the culture war as well as working class people who are rejecting EVs outright, and have offered solutions to their complaints.
For a mass produced model, think less Arial Atom, more 1990s era Ford Crown Victoria or Gen II Prius, except all-electric, lighter, more efficient, slightly smaller in width/height, maybe with a place to plug in a smartphone to play games or music on a screen that isn’t integrated with anything but the Federally Mandated backup camera(and replaceable with something you could get at an Autozone for $20).
A basic, practical, high-performance, very reliable electric car that people of modest means can actually afford to purchase and keep using in the long term.
https://github.com/iDoka/awesome-canbus Lots of open source tools are available for canbus.
Just publish the specs of your own messages, maybe even share the tooling you use in your own development. It’s a decent standard, the problem is how open people have been with how they use it.
So basically an oversized RC car with seats.
As someone who’ve been building, racing, and wrecking them since the early 90’s I’m OK with that.