BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal

On another level, it would be game over without them. For example, US shipyards would simply stop existing without protection. There is no management strategy or measure they could implement that could compete with Asian shipyards.

If tariffs are so bad for America why do other countries have tariffs on American cars?

tarriffs are visible protective regulation, China protects its domestic markets through different type of regulations for decades.

still don't understand why this is going to hurt US car manufacturers. Have the Japanese auto imports improved the US auto industry past 40+ years? Is Ford or GM more competitive? The US automakers are highly competitive in large vehicle/truck segments, protected under the Chicken Tax past 60+ years, but they barely have any presence left in small, cheaper segments dominated by the Japanese and Koreans. Farley recently said Ford has shifted its focus from affordable, mass-market cars because it couldn't compete against the Japanese/Koreans.

Just not convinced that allowing autos from another auto industry built on forced joint venture/tech transfer, illegal (export/local content) subsidies, or otherwise benefited tremendously from the very same rent-seeking policies themselves past 15 years is solving the real problem.

In a vacuum, I don't hate the idea of paying people to switch to EV's who can do it, but the problem is especially in America, those benefits are going not to working class people who really need new cars (and who's cars are the most environmentally problematic) but to solidly upper-middle class buyers of incredibly large and impractical EV's which are either sports cars or suburban panzers, that rip through tires and consume vast amounts of lithium for their enormous battery packs, and beat the shit out of our already deteriorating roads.

Additionally we're finding that EV's have a major, probably unsolvable issue: they age much, much faster than ICE vehicles in one particular area: the battery. EV's have the same problem as cellphones effectively; their cells deteriorate with use, and unlike used ICE vehicles for which parts are widely available and usually cheap, it's not even remotely economically feasible to repair this issue. Replacing a battery costs so much you might as well just replace the entire car.

Also noticing that a lot of the rideshare/taxis are going EV quickly. I'm guessing the much lower maintenance and service requirements are outweighing any "range" issues, plus the trade-in value is irrelevant with warranties covering the batteries etc.

BYD can outwait the adjustments of the US car industry to a new reality, in the same way that the Japanese did back in the 80s.

Last time, the US did it by screwing the union workers of the rust belt, while also giving up on passenger cars and moving to SUV/trucks, but this time it's a complete change in technology and the US (and Japan to an extent) is having trouble reorienting its manufacturing and supply chains to support the change.

If Ford can't sell an EV version of an F-150, then it has a real problem, because the rest of the world is not staying on ICE technology.

Artificial trade barriers don't last.

The reason BYD is killing it is because they can offer their cars at a price point unavailable to the US. The reason for that price point is because China is producing some of the cheapest batteries in the world.

BYD cannot build their cars in the US because the core part they need to make them cheap is the batteries. CATL makes the batteries that BYD uses and they aren't going to setup shop in the US. A lot of what makes CATLs batteries cheap is because China has a raw materials trade pipeline that's now superior than what's available in the US.

All of this goes back to tariffs.

By putting insane tariffs on all imports the US has effectively isolated itself from the rest of the world. Manufacturing will defacto be more expensive in the US because a significant portion of any incoming raw resources will get an automatic 25% tax.

The US does have it's own raw resources, but they aren't fully developed. Prior to 2024, we were heavily reliant on imports for a lot of our manufacturing. Shaking up the entire market for stupid reasons has destroyed manufacturing in the US. It'll take decades to repair and rebuild.

The steep tariffs against china that Trump did in his first term against solar, steel, and batteries were maintained by Biden. In term 2 Trump ramped those up to 11.

I’m quite sure advanced semiconductor fabs are considered a strategic necessity by China regardless of restrictions. Further, China is now getting the H200 chip…

> Tesla has rare earth free alternatives. There is no urgent need for them right now but they can switch if necessary.

There are also plenty of rare earth extraction projects coming online outside of China!

Tesla was saved by a DOE loan [1]. Tesla was kept afloat with carbon tax credits. Yes, the Big Three got bailouts in 2008. And now, most importantly, import barriers are the only thing keeping Tesla afloat.

[1]: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/573148-dept-o...

I am curious when will other countries would actually start of defend their industries properly.

This is weak sauce.

China’s system has produced outcomes the US cannot come close to matching. In a few decades it lifted hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. It built nationwide high speed rail, dense urban transit, modern housing, and large scale infrastructure at a speed the US has not achieved since the mid 20th century. Many Chinese cities are cleaner, more connected, and more functional than American ones. Long term planning, industrial policy, and state coordination have delivered tangible improvements in daily life for a huge share of the population. Those are not propaganda achievements. They are measurable.

China’s downsides are also real. Political dissent is not protected. Surveillance is pervasive. Ethnic repression, especially in Xinjiang, is severe. There is no internal mechanism to safely challenge the regime when it abuses power. Prosperity is conditional on alignment. When the state decides someone or some group is a problem, there is no lawful way to resist.

Now look honestly at the US. The US has political freedoms China does not. Speech, courts, elections, civil society, and the ability to oppose the state without being erased are real advantages. That matters enormously. But the US also has a long record of extreme violence and moral failure. It slaughtered millions abroad in wars like Vietnam and Iraq, often based on lies. It overthrew governments, backed death squads, enforced sanctions that killed civilians, and built a mass incarceration system that destroyed entire communities. At home, it tolerates deep inequality, decaying infrastructure, and political paralysis. It cannot build basic transit or housing at scale, and millions live worse materially than citizens of far poorer countries.

So if the standard is “this regime has blood on its hands,” then the US fails that test as well. If the standard is “this regime produces good outcomes for its people,” China clearly succeeds in ways the US does not. If the standard is “this regime allows its citizens to challenge power and correct abuse,” the US is better.

That is the real comparison. Different systems optimize for different things and fail in different ways. One is not a moral fairy tale and the other is not a cartoon villain.

That’s why “buying anything from China is supporting evil” is not a serious ethical framework. Global trade does not map cleanly onto endorsement, and the same logic would implicate participation in much of the modern world, including the US led order that produced enormous suffering of its own. A coherent position is to argue for strategic decoupling or limits on state coupled firms. A black and white call for regime destruction or moral purity ignores both China’s real achievements and the US’s very real crimes.

Once you include the full ledger, the issue is not good versus evil. It’s tradeoffs between flawed systems, not a simple moral referendum.

Hello Greenland. Hello tariffs. Hello humongous incarceration rate of millions of people, particularly of one ethnicity.

Does anyone feel otherwise? Is the net carbon and environmental footprint really lower over the entire lifecycle per car for an EV? Not today

> The filing by Berkshire’s energy subsidiary recorded the value of its BYD investment as zero as of the end of March, down from $415 million at the end of 2024.

> Buffett’s company began investing in Shenzhen-based BYD in 2008, when it paid $230 million for about 225 million shares, equivalent to a 10% stake at the time.

> It began selling those shares in 2022 after BYD’s share price had risen more than twentyfold.

Warren Buffett’s fund exits BYD after a 17-year investment that grew over 20-fold in value - https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/investing/warren-buffet-berks... - September 22nd, 2025

But in practice, wouldn't such an event on X large Chinese company have a cascade effect on stock values of all other Chinese companies?

This in no way addresses the accusation that Teslas valuation is built on nothing. BYD also has self driving software. So what exactly does Tesla have that is not cars and batteries?

The ludicrous humanoid robots with dubious use cases? That’s not it either because the stock was absurdly high before that was a thing.

I have never seen a better example of how arbitrary and irrational markets are than Teslas valuation.

If your hypothetical happens, yes. China has been working hard to turn domestic investment away from housing. A trustworthy domestic stock market is key.

See TikTok as an example.

There's been a lot written about China's "Fiscal Federalism"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01475...

https://www.investasian.com/stock-market/hong-kong-brokerage...

If you just want to invest money, there is real estate or investing in a family member’s business. Pensions and other institutions in need of safe (in aggregate) investments won’t go near the SSE yet.

China is doing more things right but still has a long way to go on other things.

From the NA vehicle POV it doesn't look healthy. Stocks of the major auto makers have done well this year, while product gets more and more expensive and limited. Barely seems possible to buy anything but a F150like anymore.

Maybe that's why they behave differently?

Tesla is also not very transparent so it's hard to cite statistics but a recent study found that Tesla had the highest rate of fatal accidents of any brand in the US

https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study

There is still the law suite about FSD and the old hardware.

There is still Elon the hitler Musk Oligarch who wielded a chainsaw.

There were plenty of FSD videos last year and the year before showing that FSD is working. The question is still, is it working good enough, and what will be the business of a robotaxi.

The Taxi market overall is not that big, competition is hard and the most critical thing is peak demand.

In parallel random people believe tesla will wipe out the whole taxi industry + private cars tomorrow. Ignoring competition and everything else.

Aaand as an edit: When it finally works, people will tell you "told you so look at it, FSD works" yeah really? Of course it works but it was promised from Musk that 2020 all these Teslas will drive autonomsly. Its 2026

The way this will change is Chinese companies opening factories in the EU. BYD is opening one in Szeged, Hungary soon.

Tesla valuation is not baked in anything, it's entirely hype about potential, and has absolutely nothing to do with automation, robotics, AI, energy. It is largely betting that Elon Musk will do well, not that Tesla will do well. It might as well just be called EM.

But there is still a lot to be desired in legacy EVs, but generally at least some of the brands are slowly moving in the right direction.

Only from 2019 or 2020 I believe they stopped making ICE.

This then flows downstream to inconsistent and patchwork government support for the transition to EVs.

The short term incentives aren't all properly aligned for car makers to fully commit to build EVs and support the supply chain to do that.

Software explains a lot, dumping explains some of it but it might not be all of it

It's basic supply and demand - the sales are tanking, and without subsidies nobody will buy them, and the car companies are realizing that.

A few models (Teslas, for example) do okay with the upper class, but the lower and middle class can't afford them, don't have anywhere to charge them, and have to drive too much to depend on them.

Even in a trendy, wealthy city like Boulder, CO which is all about saving the environment and going green there isn't nearly enough charging capacity for everybody to use EVs.

An EV is better than no car at all, but they're a downgrade from an ICE in most cases.

That's why Europe is mercifully free of Cybertrucks: they can't legally operate on roads within the EU, because they don't meet the safety requirements (one of your "little things").

ie, killing people and polluting the planet, mostly.

This is not the market size. Maybe 1% of it. India median income is $300/month. African income is less than $100/month.

You cannot sell EVs, drones and foldable phones there. But you could convince their govs to buy your fancy defense drones.

https://open.substack.com/pub/crosscurrents28/p/chinas-broke...

If you could have Chinese workers on Chinese wages in American factories none of this would have happened. But that's not allowed.

My whole life, I only heard about how much better private companies are than governments at making products. How could we be suddenly behind?

OK, Xiaomi and BYD are state-backed private companies. But what advantage does the state-backing get them, exactly? How is it better than the familiar state-backed advantages western companies have (like regulatory capture, tax breaks, tariffs, or TBTF bailouts)?

The Chinese government can subsidize them. But that's just moving zero-sum money around; it might give them a boost in cars, but it must come at a cost to semiconductors, robotics, solar energy, raw materials, defense, or other things like that.... in theory at least? So why does it feel like they're somehow subsidizing every sector at the same time?

We've been told that in the West since Reagan, when we decided to forget all the advantages of a Keynesian economy.

So the actual concept of having an industrial strategy was and is considered against all economic orthodoxy in the West.

BYD is not a "copy" of Porsche, they hired European designers, Xioamoi made mobile phones before they started making cars.

The problem of China appropriating intellectual property has been known for decades, but access to the market was considered more important. The governments and industries could have decided that the market was less important and stopped transferring technology, but they didn't.

Chinese IP has been developing on its own at an accelerated pace now.

Most of the technology in Western vehicles is using chips built in Chinese or Taiwanese fabs and if China wanted to subvert the vehicle supply chains in EU or US, I'm sure they could.

Why? Conglomerates in my own country are in a much better position to use any data they have about me in a way that harms me than China is.

This is just the reverse, actually, China isn’t afraid to go so far as to jail CEOs. There is no such thing as too big to fail in China, and all the Chinese domestic companies know it. The bailout playbook is a western thing.

It's also worth mentioning that loan subsidies play a bigger role in Chinese capital markets: Chinese industry is largely capitalized with state debt rather than private debt/equity or public markets. Zooming out, as a response to Trump's 1st term tariffs China went on a big autarky push by redirecting its citizens' and companies' deposits into a loan bazooka for the industrial sector. We are now seeing the fruits of that. The big questions have to do with (true) profitability and (true) balance sheets: can the new industries service their debts well enough for the government to hold face?

Frankly, I don’t mind it, because western companies should also engage in this behaviour, if they can. Sell physical items for cheaper than it takes to produce them! They’re doing it with services and etc. anyways, might as well do it with physical products too.

Assuming for a moment this is more true for China than for other countries. Why would the average Canadian prefer to pay more for their next car versus having a similar car subsidized by the Chinese taxpayer? Most Canadians do not work in the auto industry. Further, the protectionism practiced in the EU/US/Canada is not likely to be successful long-term, meaning those auto industries are doomed.

Best path forward is to let in competition, make the domestics stronger, and let consumers get cheaper cars in the meanwhile. Provide some additional temporary support if necessary. (This is more or less how the US absorbed Japanese and then Korean cars.)

If the Chinese tax payer is going to help me buy a new car then thanks, my own government isn't going to do that.

Why should I care that the CEO of Ford is struggling when he pays his workers so terrible? If they want another government bail it, we should just nationalize the industry and implement workplace democracy for the staff so they can be accountable to the workers + people in some fashion.

But yeah, it's sad seeing the demise of US liberalism but what do you expect when the last 50 years was naked imperialism for corporations while denying any social responsibility for the country?

(There's also anti-dumping tariffs on electric bikes from China, I wonder if it's the same lobby...)

This will usually be the case, because domestic manufacturers raise prices once tariffs (import taxes) on foreign manufacturers are imposed.

This is also why import taxes are so hard to eliminate once they're introduced: domestic manufacturers get used to the gratuitous revenue cushion, and the government gets used to the gratuitous tax cushion. Meanwhile consumers wonder why everything has gotten so expensive.

The BMW iX1 is disappointing in range, interior luxury and power. It's below an older 6 series (that I'm switching from), and much less powerful than a Model Y AWD. No idea why BMW thinks they can price it like they do. The other option was the BMW i5 Touring but it's more expensive and feels "old" already.

Isn’t it wise to prefer a nice steering feeling? Your body is, after all, going to be feeling it every time you drive.

Oh, indeed. I was attempting to be generous, but it's arguable whether they deserve that generosity.

> I would argue that the 70s were a trial run for whats happening today but instead of becoming more competitive the automakers focused on lobbying for Government help; a playbook that won’t help them today.

We're still paying for this today with the so-called "Chicken Tax" (and all of the other crash and emissions regulations) that has deprived us so many good Japanese trucks over the years.

Really there are no US made cars anywhere but the US, it's a totally isolated market with some minor imports from european luxury brands.

- The upcoming EREV (mostly electric extended range hybrid) F-150 truck? This is expected to have ~700 mile range, and of course no charging hassles. It’s main advantage over the now defunct Lightning will be towing range.

- The Chevy Corvette Stingray? Say what you want, but the high end ICE sports cars have an appeal of their own…

I believe the USA still has an edge in some areas of the market.

The Chinese are actually investing heavily in robotics and automation. They rely a lot less on cheap labor than you seem to assume. And their production is going global as well they are building manufacturing plants on most continents. They are opening plants in Europe and South America. BYD factories are state of the art.

> Opting out of vehicle data: Connectivity and performance is a core part of all Tesla vehicles and why some customers choose Tesla, allowing for advanced features and an enhanced driving experience. By default, Tesla provides this seamless experience while protecting your privacy. However, if you no longer wish for us to collect vehicle data or any other data from your Tesla vehicle, please contact us to deactivate connectivity. Please note, certain advanced features such as over-the-air updates, remote services, and interactivity with mobile applications and in-car features such as location search, Internet radio, voice commands, and web browser functionality rely on such connectivity. If you choose to opt out of vehicle data collection (with the exception of in-car Data Sharing preferences), we will not be able to know or notify you of issues applicable to your vehicle in real time. This may result in your vehicle suffering from reduced functionality, serious damage, or inoperability.

I don't know if anyone has tried this.

There are other EVs where it's easier, but it's not something typically featured in the main marketing material.

Regarding eCall (emergency) functionality, "Under EU rules you have the right to use a third party service (TPS) eCall system in addition to the standard 112-based one" and "Any TPS eCall system must: [...] allow the owner of the vehicle to choose between the 112-based eCall and the TPS service" - which also means manufacturers can't force you to use "their" TPS that probably has different privacy trade-offs.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/legal/privacy

[2] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/security-and-em...

All of this is down to the simple fact that essentially no American has ever driven a Chinese vehicle and does not know anybody who has. They are not even getting secondhand reports. This is worse than the '80s when the Japanese makers arrived in the sense that in the '80s everybody could see the quality of the Toyotas and assess quality/performance for themselves. It's much worse to not even know how good the competition is.

From a business standpoint, it's especially bad for the domestic industry because the majors actually do need to be competitive in fast-growing regions like Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It's not a viable strategy to depend on protectionism at home while ceding countries where most people live.

Subsidizing the rotten core of corrupt US automakers will not produce a new or functional industrial base. It will simply maintain the illusion of an industrial base until anything of importance needs done. But that’s basically the MO of any “mature” industry in the US.

If the 20th century was a repudiation of soviet communism vs capitalism, the 21st century seems to put capitalism on the backfoot

Next industry to be disrupted is housing, because seemingly the entire western world has is not even trying to provide housing (a necessity) to everyone.

Subsidies are dangerous in the long term