BYD Is The 1st Company To Sell 3 Million Plugin Vehicles In A Year

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BYD Beats Its 3 Million Vehicle Sales Target For 2023

I wrote earlier today about BYD shooting past Tesla to become the #1 best selling BEV producer in the world. That’s such a momentous milestone that it deserved its own story. Now, though, let’s look into BYD’s year a bit more!

First of all, note that BYD was targeting 3 million vehicle sales in 2023, and it just surpassed that target. It had 3,023,679 electric vehicle sales in 2023. All of those are plugin vehicles. BYD stopped producing non-plugin vehicles a long time back, in April 2022. As far as how those plugin sales were split in 2023, 52% were full electrics (BEVs) and 48% were plugin hybrids. In the 4th quarter, 55% were BEVs and 45% were plugin hybrids, showing a trend toward full electrics.

Maybe the most impressive figure, and the one that could sting the most for hardcore Tesla fans, BYD’s sales grew by 62% in 2023! (That’s well above the 50% growth target Tesla has been targeting but was unable to hit in 2023.)

Above, you can see the rapid rise in BYD’s quarterly sales compared to Tesla’s impressive (but now less impressive) quarterly sales growth. Going further back and showing the data by month, CarNewsChina has created a good chart showing BYD’s rapid rise in sales in the past few years:

The model breakdown is something we’ll have more info on in a bit, but if you look at out January–October sales update on the top 20 plugin vehicle models in China, you can see that BYD held the top two spots (but with those models dominated by plugin hybrid sales, then took the #4 and #5 spots with full electric models (the Yuan Plus and Dolphin) after the Tesla Model Y slipped into #3, and then grabbed the #9 spot (with a mixed BEV/PHEV model) and #10 spot (again with a full BEV model, the Seagull). Clearly, BYD knows how to move vehicles in the Chinese market.

The BYD Yuan Plus is known as the BYD Atto 3 in many foreign markets where Tesla exports the car. Through October, the Yuan Plus/Atto 3 was the 5th best selling plugin model in the world (behind two Teslas and two BYDs that are primarily sold as PHEVs) and the fully electric Dolphin grabbed 6th.

With 7 models in the world plugin vehicle top 20 ranking, it was only a matter of time before BYD took the #1 spot from Tesla in the BEV market. As reported previously, it had long ago nabbed the #1 title in terms of all plugin vehicles, and it seems there’s no looking back from there.

One thing that makes BYD really stand out is the large spread of different electric vehicle models it now offers and its frequent release of new models. Additionally, it seems to be constantly bringing models to new markets. There’s no other company with such a big platter of plugin vehicle options. And we are sure to get introduced to several new BEV models from BYD in 2024.

Again, though, perhaps nothing explains BYD’s success more than showing pictures of the various BYD models, which are all highly competitive at their price points:

Congratulations to BYD for being the first to sell 3 million plugin vehicles in a single year. That’s no small achievement, and it benefits the whole world from the pollution those plugin vehicles are preventing.