Tesla handed over 1,808,581 cars in 2023, against 1,313,851 the year before. That is growth of 38%, and in most industries it would earn a parade. Instead, the company’s announcement on the first Tuesday of January 2024 came with an asterisk the size of a Shenzhen factory.
The company put it plainly: “In 2023, vehicle deliveries grew 38 per cent YoY to 1.81 million while production grew 35 per cent YoY to 1.85 million.” Of those cars, around 1.73 million were Model 3 or Model Y; the other 68,874 were everything else, according to IANS. Tesla also said it built approximately 495,000 vehicles in the fourth quarter and delivered over 484,000.
The quarter BYD won
The asterisk is BYD. In the October-December period, the Chinese maker sold 526,409 fully electric cars to Tesla’s 484,507, and The National reported that this was the first quarter in which BYD’s battery-electric sales outnumbered Tesla’s deliveries. A better-than-expected quarter for Tesla, then, since analysts polled by StreetAccount had pencilled in 477,000, and still not the winning one.
Look under the headline and the picture is more mixed. Tesla kept its lead for the full year in battery-only cars. BYD’s 2023 total was 3,023,679 vehicles, up 62%, but 1,574,804 of those were battery-electric; the rest were plug-in hybrids, a category Tesla does not build. The National put BYD’s split at about 1.6 million battery EVs and about 1.4 million hybrids. So whether BYD “won” depends on whether you count the hybrids, which is exactly the argument each company would like to have.
Prices, targets and a Musk quip
The National noted that Tesla trimmed the prices of its Model 3 and Model Y in the US by up to 4.2 per cent on October 5, its seventh price cut of the year. Jesse Cohen, a senior analyst at Investing.com, did not think that was the end of it. “I don’t think the price cuts are over, mainly for the reason that demand is still weak,” he said.
The 1.8 million figure also met a goal Tesla had named on an October conference call. It was a lowered goal, though: in January 2023 the company had announced a sales target of two million.
Susannah Streeter of Hargreaves Lansdown, quoted by the BBC, called BYD’s surge “fresh evidence of just how competitive the EV market has become and how hard it will be for Tesla to swerve back to head the pack”. Elon Musk had already tempered expectations on that October call. “At the risk of stating the obvious, it is not possible to have a compound growth rate of 50 per cent forever, or you will exceed the mass of the known universe,” he said, before adding that he expected Tesla to grow “much faster than any other car company on Earth by far”.
The sales models differ too. Not a Tesla App pointed out that Tesla sells directly online, while BYD relies on a large dealer network at home and abroad. Tesla’s shares closed at $248.42 on the Tuesday of the delivery announcement, a market value of $778.42 billion, and the stock had risen about 130 per cent over the previous 12 months. Full fourth-quarter financial results were due on January 24.
Sources
- China's BYD overtakes Tesla in electric car sales as competition heats up (The National)
- Tesla delivers 1.81 mn cars in 2023, stays behind China's BYD (IANS, via TestDriveGuru)
- Tesla Vehicle Sales Up 38%, but BYD Emerges As New EV Leader (Not a Tesla App)
