BYD Sales Surge To 500,000 Vehicles A Month! – CleanTechnica

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In mid-September, I wrote the article “BYD Closer to Becoming #1 Automaker in World Than I Thought.” However, the company seems to just keep speeding up the timeline. In August, BYD had 373,083 vehicle sales (all “new energy vehicles” — either full battery electrics or plugin hybrids). In September, that number rose to 419,426. In October, as we just found out, BYD vehicle sales reached 502,657! That’s half a million sales in one month. It’s also about the same as the company’s January sales plus its March sales.

BYD vehicle sales have increased every month since March. And its October sales total was 66.5% higher than October 2023’s sales total.

Looking across the first 10 months of the year, BYD reached 3,250,532 sales, up 36.5% from the 2,381,471 of the first 10 months of 2023. What that also shows us is the growth has accelerated recently — 66.5% growth year over year in October is much larger growth than 36.5% growth over the first 10 months of the year.

We’ll have to look around at global vehicle sales of major legacy automakers in the coming days to see where BYD landed on the October top 10 list.

Notably, all of those numbers above concern BYD’s total vehicle deliveries — passenger vehicles and commercial vehicles (including buses). The passenger vehicle total also reached the half-a-million mark, though — 500,526 passenger vehicles were delivered

Looking at the split between full electrics (BEVs) and plugin hybrids (PHEVs), there were 189,614 BEVs delivered compared to 310,912 PHEVs. Across the first 10 months of the year combined, 1,359,193 passenger BEVs were sold and 1,877,734 passenger PHEV sales. The growth year over year for those powertrains was 12% for BEVs and 62% for PHEVs.

For all of BYD’s expansion into markets outside of China, just 31,192 of the company’s more than half a million October sales were in non-China markets. There’s still a long way to go for BYD to reach significant volumes outside of China, but it’s gotten started now. One presumes it will be able to lead the way in global, non-China EV sales in coming years. The company seems to have a strong foothold in several new markets. As production and exports ramp up, that 31,192 total will be wiped out real quick. Either way, it’ll be fun.

BYD, if you average its 3,250,532 sales across the first 10 months of the year, has gotten to 325,053 sales of plugin vehicle deliveries per month this year. Compare that to Tesla, which gotten to 143,739 sales a month looking at the first 9 months of the year. In fact, if we use that average across the first 9 months of 2024, Tesla is already below the 189,614 BEV sales BYD scored in October — well below. Is BYD now the world’s BEV best seller? We’ll wait until the end of the quarter to check on that.

BYD is flying, and there’s no sign of that ending yet. How high can the company go in 2024 and 2025?