3 ms·
You're misinterpreting the article, which admittedly has a confusing headline. (1) Tesla sales have crashed in Europe. (2) BYD sales are up globally, with the
by dgacmu 2y ago
You're misinterpreting the article, which admittedly has a confusing headline.
(1) Tesla sales have crashed in Europe.
(2) BYD sales are up globally, with the largest gain in China. Most of those sales are not in the EU; the EU has imposed high tariffs on Chinese autos.
These two statements are operating independently of each other; it is not the case that BYD sales are what have caused Tesla to crash in Europe, and this is not what the article says. However, the headline puts these two facts in close juxtaposition, inviting an incorrect conclusion on quick skim.
Drawing from other sources, BYD sold only about 83,000 cars in the EU in 2024, though they are projecting to double that in 2025. So it may be that BYD will be part of _future_ Tesla sales drops, but these are likely due to price/quality more than politics.
- tharne 2y agoWow, you're right. I read the article quickly and did not catch the fact that those were two related, but not totally causally linked statements. My bad. I still find it odd that Europe and others are reacting to bad behavior on the part of the U.S. by drawing closer to even less trustworthy business partners.
- dgacmu 2y agoI think Tesla is a special case given Musk's close relationship / enabling of Trump. The chairman of BYD does not appear to have succumbed to billionaire brain yet. Shifting from Tesla to BYD, were it to happen, is fairly different from shifting from, say, Cisco to Huawei, as the CEO of Cisco isn't literally dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the US president's campaigns. And in general, I think we're seeing "less tesla" and "more of all of the alternatives", whether those alternatives are EU-based or elsewhere. Finally, most of what we're seeing with Tesla sales is _individual_ purchasing decisions, not strategic moves by governments... yet. We'll see, of course.
- Symbiote 2y agoEuropeans are buying not-Tesla, with the reduction in Tesla sales becoming an increase spread across all other EV manufacturers. EVs are not only produced in the USA and China, but in the EU, UK, Korea and Japan.
- rsynnott 2y ago> by drawing closer to even less trustworthy business partners. _Is_ China less trustworthy, though? I mean, it hasn’t threatened to invade bits of Europe, so there’s that. FWIW, I don’t think that US brands other than Tesla are seeing hits of the same size (though, with the exception of Ford, they’re kind of rounding errors anyway, and Ford isn’t relevant in the EV market). Tesla has special problems; no other US car manufacturer CEO, or for that matter Chinese car manufacturer CEO, has recently been prancing around on TV doing Nazi salutes, and no other US car manufacturer CEO is part of Trump’s government. I’m not sure that Americans understand the degree to which Trump is disliked in Europe, particularly in Western Europe where most of the market for electric cars is.