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It's worse than that. Two years of declining sales at Tesla.[1] Mostly for ordinary car manufacturer reasons. Tesla hasn't had a new model in years other than the Cybertruck, which was a dud. Prices are still too high.

Electric cars still cost more than gas cars in the US. This seems to be a US-only problem. Electric cars are doing fine in the rest of the world. A majority of new cars in China are electric.

Here's the BYD Dolphin Surf. Costs US$11,000 in Europe.[2] It's apparently a fairly good car. BYD has a whole range of cars, from super-cheap subcompact to supercar. BYD sold over 4 million cars in 2024. Tesla was around 1.7 million and dropping.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/02/tesla-faces-second-straigh...

[2] https://electrek.co/2025/06/30/byd-adds-range-to-most-afford...

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To add to this, Tesla has had barely any battery progress on range and charge rate since 2018.

Here’s Model Y’s charging curve - https://evkx.net/models/tesla/model_y/model_y_long_range/cha... at 30% you’re below 150 kw

Meanwhile here’s a competitor - Kia EV6 https://evkx.net/models/kia/ev6/ev6_long_range_awd/chargingc... keeping above 150 kw at around 70%

You got the Audi Q6 with more range, more comfort - massaging seats, screens everywhere, fancy lights.

7 years with barely any progress.

Then there’s the design - Model X has never head a meaningful exterior design refresh.

Model S hasn’t had one in years since the nose design refresh.

> since 2018

2018 is the first year Musk’s drug abuse is documented to [1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-e826a9e...

It has been downhill since then, hasn't it.

> To add to this, Tesla has had barely any battery progress on range and charge rate since 2018.

A real concern is that no US battery manufacturer is working on manufacturing solid state batteries at scale. There are a few small US startups, but companies in China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea are spending many billions of dollars on this. Prologium now claims to have shipped 2.4 million units (cells, probably) from their first manufacturing facility. That's not a huge number of cells, but a year ago there were just lab samples. Mercedes is testing these and has some cars driving around with them. About 2x the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, reportedly. Safer, and 5 minute charging if you can find a powerful enough charger.

Tesla isn't even rumored to be doing anything in this space.

(While there's a lot of talk about Mercedes' 670 miles on a charge, what's probably going to sell are cars that have maybe 300 miles of range, are cheaper and weigh less. With 5 minute charging, there's less reason to lug a huge battery around.)

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/prologium-next-generation-lit...

It's 22k in Europe (20k euro). That story is about a new 11k variant released in China, it just mentions that a variant is available in Europe too.

It's a good car and good price but freely translating Chinese prices to EU prices exaggerates slightly.

> Here's the BYD Dolphin Surf. Costs US$11,000 in Europe.[2]

It costs the equivalent of $11k in China. It costs 19k EUR in Europe (some of this is tariffs, but they're likely also just taking advantage of how limited the sub-20k EV market is in Europe right now, and I'd expect that they have room to drop this once the VW 20k car launches).

It's worth saying that the price gouging by BYD has reached the point where their own government is publicly scolding them and telling them to stop, so I'm not sure if BYD is a model of anything we want to be following.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chinas...

I think you're also glossing over the impact of Musk's disastrous foray into politics, his Tweeting, and his Nazi salutes.

I've never heard of pricing a product too low called "price gouging" before.

Well, it can be tought as self gauging. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Dumping would be the economic term for flooding a market with underpriced goods in order to drive out domestic competitors. I don't know if that's what they're doing, but it does seem plausible, though it's hard to imagine that Tesla's prices would be competitive either way.

In Chinas case the term would be overcapacity since it applies to the whole sector not just BYD.

Hopefully, they'll work harder to export. Global light vehicle sales are ~90M units/year, there must be a market somewhere for these BEVs where they can at least break even, and as long as they can break even they can continue to ramp manufacturing capacity.

There are on-going EU-China talks about this topic, but currently looks like a wait-and-see approach till after the Trump 90 day deadline.

Other than that idk.

The solution would be to increase wages/less working hours/less financial repression in China so that they can buy the cars they produce...

Why? China should print as many EVs as they can for the world. Protectionism should be expected in countries with domestic auto industries, but most of the world does not produce light autos yet needs them. The solution is not more demand in China, but more supply to crowd combustion vehicles out of annual global vehicle sales.

Agreed, but the Chinese want something of somewhat equal value in return nontheless. And the Chinese appetite for Sri Lankan treasuries might be limited.

They also at least need to pay for inputs and if it is only crude oil.

I'm not sure that applies in this case either, as dumping is selling abroad below cost but charging a fair price in your own domestic market. This case seems to be the opposite - trying to win the domestic market by selling at a loss, and hoping that they can make enough profit on the export market to survive. Presumably this strategy only works if all the domestic competition goes bust before you.

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