Tesla loses ground as Chinese EVs dominate global markets
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Maybe making a dumb triangular truck that nobody wanted wasn't such a good idea after all. I imagine the BYD cars have such mod cons as rain sensors that work and indicator stalks too.
I'm baffled by the multiple levels of irony if you could go into Mexico and buy an EV that you can then use in the US. That would make even Elon's head twist off.
If they aren't sold in the US why the automatic assumption that they conform to US automotive legislation?
Not sure what it's like today but historically crash standards in Mexico did not exist. Toyota for the longest time was selling 20+y/o models as brand new. The crash tests of those were startling. It may have improved in the last few years though.
Now that US soft-power is waning (800b from EU + 500b from Germany alone for militech) the floodgates might open and it will way surpass the Tesla. Maybe even some partnership between BMW/VW/Daimler with BYD can come out of it - imagine that.
So it was to protect EU car manufacturers (which are still struggling a bit with EVs).
I don't think it was US "soft-power". However, the EU may impose tariffs on US produced cars as part of the coming trade-war, which may hurt Tesla in future (or maybe not as they also produce Tesla cars in Germany).
Presumably it didn't have evidence Tesla is receiving unfair help from the Chinese state. It had such evidence for other manufacturers. Also, Tesla has a factory in the EU. Soon, the Chinese manufacturers will have factories too.
Also just had a look and Tesla has indeed been burdened with a tariff of 7.8% (for vehicles built in China), compared to 17% of BYD, 18% Geely and 20% to 35% for other companies.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
Also Flexbus running Chinese buses.
https://www.gneenev.com/product/electric-cars-ev/484.html
In the US best selling Tesla is Model Y, but even without the brand damage I'm not sure that type of design/price is going to do well in the UK, and Cybertruck is not well suited to UK's narrower roads (esp. in city).
Most non-luxury foreign cars available for sale in the U.S. are actually assembled in factories in Mexico or the United States.
If Ford wanted to sell cars to the E.U. (competitively), they'd design smaller models and manufacture them in Europe. If BYD wants to sell cars in the U.S., they'll built out a plant in Mexico.
Convinced me that car really is a tablet with wheels.
And it's not about the features per se. Lots of cars have the features, but no car is able to integrated them in a package thats actually useable.
The software on the other hand... I would love per-key profiles (like the polestar) and buttons doing the thing they're labeled for when using CarPlay - but I _hope_ these things can be updated OTA. The UI and responsiveness is really quick however, especially compared to the P2 which feels woefully underpowered with constant UI lags.
Terrible software seems to be par for the course in cars.
Imagine a situation where you have a new 800V infrastructure already applied to cybertruck and decide to update the Model Y with just “minor” adjustments. Which means that both M3 and MY will get 800V/48V when? 2/3 years minimum.
It recalls me a Nokia moment.
Meanwhile China is running.
Also, not sure what the whole 800v hype is about. I rent EVs for roadtrips and Tesla's are basically the fastest charging ones with current architecture, haven't had a need for 800v since at the cell level the charging speed is already maxed out.
Re: the Y, even though they won't sell because some hand gestures and behaviors, they did almost every complaint people have about the old model Y.
And there exist countries outside Tesla‘s supercharger network.
It’s clearly better, but far from key factor. Efficiency usually dictates overall trip duration.
Change it to who?
Their price to earnings is like 100x. The entire market cap is built by Elon's non-stop hyping of FSD / Robo-Taxi / etc. We gunna resurrect Billy Mays here to do the marketing?
The entire executive office is just dumping their Tesla stock, they know the company has no value and if they get rid of Musk it's probably a nail in the coffin for the stock price.
Not a good long term strategy.
Maybe that‘s the reason for Musk‘s turn into politics.
Use his power as long as it exists
Market cap is defined by whatever stock buyers decide to justify their purchase. If people keep buying the stock to get it to the moon because of whatever hype, what else matters?
... and we would probably have been spared Trump
OK, what false claims did crypto make to justify its valuation? What false claims did tulips make?
What if a large part of the stock market is more people gambling or FOMO herd mentality rather than calculated choices? You don't have to justify stock valuations the same way you can't rationalize peoples' behavior and that's what stock values reflect. Just stay way from high risk meme stocks.
>Tesla’s stock price massively benefited
You mean the investors have benefited. Which is why they invested in Tesla stock to begin with.
You stop the seller from pumping up the stock price based on lies.
It's already significantly off its peak, and Musk is now so unpopular because of his political interventions that people are firebombing Tesla dealerships and vandalizing the cars. I can't really see how that's going to be good marketing.
The people who should worry about the marketing problem here are the Democrats. They're directly funding this violence and vandalism via their NGO network, don't seem to be condemning it and it's their inverted rhetoric claiming Republicans are Nazis that has now created a left-wing street army physically attacking anyone who supports the opposition: exactly the tactics used in the Weimar Republic. Irony is surely dead.
Also, a lot of the people getting vandalized or pressured to inconveniently sell their car at a loss are Democrats themselves, many of whom will certainly be wondering why they're supporting the team that would directly attack innocent people in such horrible ways.
It's unlikely Musk would care even if Tesla really suffered. His biographies make it clear enough. Getting rich has never been what motivated him, and he owns private companies that are basically terrorism-proof. They spin off enough money to sustain his often rather spartan lifestyle in any case. All these attacks will do is build sympathy for him, for the right, and radicalize them still further.
The US does not.
The only reason the US might win at car manufacturing will be if there are sufficient tariffs or other trade barriers. In a free market, China will win.
I'm not defending our tariff strategy, but afaik this is actually the point being made that the US imports with low/no tariffs while US exports are tariffed in many countries.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
> Doesn't the US have a point about an asymmetry in tariffs, such as the EU's 10% tariff on cars compared to the US's 2.5% tariff?
> Tariff structures vary between economies, with some EU tariffs higher than those of the US and many others lower. Both the EU and the US have equally low tariffs overall.
> While the EU applies a 10% Most Favored Nation (MFN) tariff on cars, it's important to note that the US imposes a 25% tariff on pickup trucks—the largest segment of the US auto market, accounting for about one-third of all vehicle sales. In fact, the best-selling vehicle in the US is a pickup truck, the Ford F-150.
> The EU remains open to balanced negotiations that foster a level playing field for both sides.
Our adversaries have never had a better opportunity to jump in as heroes. Or even just, not assholes.
Destruction of soft power directly by the tool in charge.
US influence around the world went poof in a matter of weeks. Xi and Putin couldn't have planned it better.
Buying domestic has been a sucker's game in the US since at least Reagan. Occasionally a domestic vehicle might be cheap, but it hasn't been a "good deal" in my lifetime.
I'd be interested to read more about this claim, if you have a link/source.
Regardless, we desperately need to de-carbonize our transportation sector. If China is the only country willing to put the dollars in to actually do that, then they deserve to reap the benefits of the new energy economy they helped build. Economics of the cars themselves aside, any effort put in to minimizing the costs of climate change will pay for itself by the end of the century.
European and American car makers have also gotten enormous support from their governments, except in other forms, like for example VW not being bankrupted to hell by the German government during Diesel gate for example.
Every government can be expected to help local industry where reasonable, because that is in many ways what the constituents/electorate actually wants/needs.
What sentences do people get when they kill other people? Granted, VW never put a gun to anyone's head and pulled the trigger, but their increased emissions have had an effect in reduced lifespan of citizens breathing across the major markets, collective health issues which should carry more than a slap on the wrist.
>Every government can be expected to help local industry where reasonable, because that is in many ways what the constituents/electorate actually wants/needs.
Sure, but then let's stop singling out China as if only they're doing it and not western governments too.
First, I believe that focussing on health outcomes misses the mark a bit in this case; I see the main problem in the actions that were taken to intentionally and maliciously circumvent the regulations much more so than the actual harm from the emissions (because the excess was not multiple orders of magnitude, and estimates on the effects pale completely compared with general road fatalities too).
Second: There is a very adjacent historical precedent for this: Leaded gas. In the 1920s alone, 17 workers died from poisoning while producing fuel additives; by the 1940s, industry consortiums had the suppression of critical science down to an art (by publicly discrediting scientist, pressuring institutions and using law-fare).
You could make a strong ethical case in my opinion that a lot of people responsible for this should not just have been stripped of related profits, but actually put in front of a firing squad (millions died!). Absolutely nothing was done.
In the case of VW, on the other hand, they paid roughly a year of profits (double digit revenue percentage) and the CEO at least lost his job (not holding my breath for a criminal conviction though, which would've been very obviously deserved in my view).
It is missing the forest for the trees. The core fact is that chinese manufacturing pays workers an average $25k/year ($15k before purchasing power adjusting!!) for a 49h week. Are american workers (or other westerners) willing to work for that? No. Are consumers actually willing to pay the difference? Probably also no.
I'm not saying that there are no problems with the above in China, but thats not where their manufacturing dominance comes from. On the other hand, their government did make a bunch of good decisions and they did provide a lot of the necessary prerequisites for local industry to thrive.
But longer term, rising wages are gonna affect them in the same way that they did US industry 60 years ago, and Japanese manufacturing 30 years ago. We have less local manufacturing now because we grew so rich and that is not the worst problem to have.
This is kind of what chinese assembly is looking like these days - robots and high tech https://youtu.be/gjbwq5vp0C4?t=12
That was Geely and there's some video of BYD here https://youtu.be/Bd_bx6a4hgE
Deeper problem for what?
I don't think that automation changes the whole picture as much as you might think.
Sure, the wage component of product cost is gonna decrease, but you still need people to build, upgrade, maintain and operate those assembly lines, and cheaper wages there still mean lower costs. Which is why EU car manufacturers also moved a lot of their production eastward (Slovenia, Hungary, etc.) despite very high automation.
And China is anything but a free market. In a truly free market, most Chinese carmakers wouldn't even exist. They mostly exist because Western carmakers were forced to form China dominated joint-ventures, share technology and ownership in order to enter the Chinese market.
For example, the tech sector spend the 2010s chasing dumb ideas like metaverse/vr, crypto, voice assistants, and so on. But it didn't lead to any shakeup or consequences for the people in charge. The same firms, investors, and executives were in power in 2020 after a decade of stagnation and failure. They are insulated from any upstart competition by strong monopolization and increasingly, capture of the state itself.
https://crazystupidtech.com/archive/chinas-ev-boom-is-bad-fo...
It's not just the Chinese. There is a lot of competition. Korean manufacturers are very successful. In Europe, Stellantis has flooded the market with cars in price segments ranging from ~22K euros and up. And VW just announced a 20K ID.1. The cheapest Tesla in Europe is 44K or so. So, there's a rather large segment of EVs priced a lot cheaper than anything Tesla has on sale that is of course selling pretty well.
And you see the same in the luxury segment where there are a lot of EVs on sale that are more expensive than what Tesla has to offer. And let's be realistic, the model S plaid is nice. But it's nothing special in terms of luxury compared to some of the more expensive models from other manufacturers.
So the EV market is a lot larger than Tesla's corner of it. Which is basically the 44K - ~100K segment. And that segment is very crowded now as well. And it's no longer a given that Tesla is the best value deal at the prices they are selling. Even if you ignore the Elon Musk negative effect on the brand.
Tesla could lower prices, announce cheaper models, etc. of course. But the fact is that the EV market is simply becoming the car market. In a few years, most new cars will be EVs with a sprinkle of hybrids for the range nervous and dwindling number of ICE cars where they are still allowed. So, the EV market is becoming a low margin, high volume, commodity market. There's nothing Tesla can do to change that. From 2026 and on-wards, every price segment will have EV options. Cost won't be an excuse anymore.
Autonomous seems to be the wild card here. It will be a while for other manufacturers to build that themselves. Though some of the Chinese manufacturers are getting pretty good at that. This is a divisive topic of course. But it seems like a bet that could pay off if they get it to work. I have my doubts that they will have that market to themselves for very long though. Same with robotics. Or grid storage. Or electric trucks. Or solar roofs. Tesla is doing cool stuff for these things but they are hardly the only ones.
Sure but Tesla competes very well in that market. Ioniq 5 for instance is in their price range, which by all accounts is an amazing car, but there are hardly any of them on the road. Whereas Model Y is literally one of the best selling cars in the world.
BYD has a few models that compare well with Tesla's Model 3 and Model y. They are the biggest of several Chinese manufacturers with hundreds of thousands of EVs built per year. BYD is actually on track to challenge Toyota as the largest vehicle manufacturer in the world in a few years. Not all of those cars will be electric of course. But still.
The Koreans are getting there as well. Kia is looking to produce some 200K EVs this year. VW is not doing well financially, but they are producing a lot of EVs at this point and are close to catching up with Tesla even in terms of EVs produced per year (for the total VW group).
The EV market is growing (~20%/y world wide), Tesla's share of it is declining. And by volume it actually stagnated last year and declined somwehat even. While others are obviously growing at its expense. The big question is if they can resume growth and what will drive that. I'd say, it's not going to get easier for them with that many competitors out there.
And who knows Toyota might actually join the party at some point. Better late than never.
Pulling a $19k Model 3 (delivered) out of the air is the only solution I can see. Musk will be forced to step aside if the sales continue to slip into Q3. They certainly will lose money on each delivery, but they will survive until the robocar tier is ready.
Impressive as the rise of Tesla and the Chinese cars are, this is a strong point for why more traditional car makers may catch up in the future.
European carmakers? The core of German industry? Stellantis? Anyone?
Same for the Koreans and Japanese. Nothing.
I get the en vogue Tesla hate, Wrestling keyfabe is fun. China going after the "industry of industries" (Drucker, 1946) is quite something though.
Ahead in what/where?
The VW id5 is quite comparable to the model Y e.g.
And I would still bet on VW in the future than Tesla.
They are held to higher standards and expectations.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/27/nx-s1-5311609/tesla-sales-eur...
Teslas also have been scoring low in reliability for years.
https://insideevs.com/news/731559/tesla-least-reliable-used-...
As far as Korea, the Hyundai Ioniq I had for six months (month to month rental by SixT) was just a better driving experience than Tesla. We rented a Tesla a few times when we were out of town.
Of course the Tesla infotainment center sucks next to CarPlay/Android Auto.
Volkswagen was founded by the Deutsche Arbeitsfront in 1937, the organized labor organization of the NSDAP.
Literal Nazis.
Don't google any other car makers.
Koreans are doing great though: Hyundai Ioniqs are now EV-only.
While Tesla sold more EVs than any other brand in Europe 2024, BMW and Volkswagen both sold more EVs in Germany than Tesla. And Mercedes sold about the same number of units as Tesla in 2024 in Germany. Porsche's Taycan looks very competitive compared to Tesla's fastest offerings -- And tesla still doesn't have "sports car".
Non-german car manufactures such as Skoda, Renault, Volvo, and Jaguar (if those last two are still "European") also sell a lot of interesting EVs.
Admittedly, I haven't seen many Stelantis branded EVs except for Fiat 500e.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/03/despite-everything-us-e...
Musk going more insane doesn't help.