Tesla vs BYD

Count only cars that run on a battery alone, and the gap is wide: in the three months to September BYD sold 762,478 of them, Tesla delivered 486,532. That is 1.6 BYD electric cars for every Tesla, and it does not include the 538,691 plug-in hybrids BYD sold in the same quarter. Tesla makes no hybrids at all.

The two companies are built differently. BYD makes most of what goes into its cars itself, from the Blade battery to the electronics, and still runs a large business building parts and assembling phones for other brands. In 2025 it sold 4.6 million new-energy vehicles, about half of them battery-electric, and shipped 1.05 million of them abroad. Tesla delivered 1,636,129 cars in 2025, every one of them battery-electric, and employs about a sixth of BYD's roughly 870,000 people.

Tesla's second business is the one to watch. In the same quarter it deployed 13.7 GWh of home and grid batteries; for the whole of 2025 the figure was 46.7 GWh. BYD is in that market too and delivered more than 60 GWh of storage systems in 2025, so the battery race runs alongside the car race.

What the sales figures cannot tell you is who earns more per car. Tesla reports its automotive revenue and margin every quarter, so after its results on 21 October that number is simple arithmetic. BYD reports revenue and profit for the whole group, cars and electronics together, so a like-for-like figure per car does not exist in its filings. The honest comparison stops at the cars sold.