BYD Overtakes Tesla in Global EV Race as Chinese Robotaxi Firms Surge Ahead

BYD has caught up with Tesla in the global EV race. Here's how.

In mid-2022, when BYD executive Lian Yubo was asked to compare Chinese manufacturing with Tesla's technology, he remarked that Elon Musk was an example that all Chinese carmakers could learn from. "Tesla is a very successful company no matter what. BYD respects Tesla and we admire Tesla," he said in an interview on Chinese state media. Yet just three years later, Tesla's technological lead over its Chinese rivals has narrowed dramatically. It is fighting to stay ahead in the world's largest car market, its sales are falling in many other countries and its efforts to develop fully self-driving vehicles are running into regulatory roadblocks. Having once scoffed at the idea that BYD could ever be a competitor to Tesla, Musk returned from a visit to China last year with a sombre assessment for his senior management. "He had seen the BYD factories, the cost and their tech," says one former Tesla executive, adding that Musk believed China was winning the electric vehicle race. As Tesla's sales decline following Musk's forays into US politics and amid a lack of new models, BYD has overtaken it to become the world's largest manufacturer of EVs. Its annual revenues surpassed $100 billion for the first time in 2024. Now, the industry's shift towards autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence is writing a new chapter in what has become not just a rivalry between the world's top two EV makers, but a central pillar of US-China technological competition. "In the west, Tesla still owns EVs, they still have a clear lead on software-defined vehicles and everyone is still trying to catch up to that," says Barclays analyst Dan Levy. "China is a different situation. Tesla's lead from a tech perspective is not nearly as clear, if there's any lead at all." Until recently, the main advantage Chinese EV manufacturers had over Tesla was that their products were significantly cheaper. But in February, BYD's founder Wang Chuanfu stood on stage in Shenzhen and unveiled "God's Eye," an advanced driver-assistance system that is a precursor to fully autonomous vehicles. A month later, Lian, who now heads BYD's automotive engineering research institute, was on stage with Wang to announce a new battery charging system capable of adding a driving range of about 470km in five minutes -- a fraction of the time it would take a Tesla to charge to that level. The startling technological advances made by BYD and others have sparked panic among legacy carmakers, who have responded by partnering with Chinese rivals to learn how to build vehicles faster and cheaper, and with better software. Mark Greeven, professor of innovation and strategy at IMD in China, says Musk "took his eye off the ball" just as Wang progressed from battery technology to software and chip development. "Tesla did fall back . . . BYD clearly used that time to catch up and say, 'We're going to invest in a set of capabilities that are going to make us competitive in the long term.'" But the man who forced an entire global industry to take electric propulsion seriously is not about to give up. In May, Musk stepped down from his US government role to focus on advancing Tesla's new growth areas: autonomous vehicles, AI, robotaxi services and a humanoid robot called Optimus. He says the new products will spur Tesla to become the most valuable company in the world, with a market capitalisation in the tens of trillions. "His reasoning is: will car companies exist in 10 years without autonomy?" says the former executive. "Probably not, like flip phones versus the iPhone." With the race to commercialise EVs almost over, he adds that "Tesla has to win in AI and autonomy." The chairman Known within BYD simply as "the chairman," the 59-year-old Wang used his obsession with batteries to enter car manufacturing in the early 2000s. Having attracted investment from Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway in 2008, he oversaw a period of staggering growth for the Chinese group, which sold 4.27 million vehicles last year, nearly 10 times as many as in 2020. Of that total, 1.76 million were pure EVs. Over the same four-year timeframe, Tesla's sales went from just shy of 500,000 vehicles to 1.79 million -- but BYD is in pole position to overtake Tesla in annual global EV sales for the first time in 2025 as it expands overseas. In China it now commands a 21 percent market share, according to Shanghai consultancy Automobility. Tesla, the company credited for sparking consumer interest in electric vehicles when it brought its first model to China in 2013, holds 8 percent. The success of BYD has come to symbolise the rise of Chinese auto manufacturing, an industry that was once heavily reliant on foreign partners such as Volkswagen, Toyota and General Motors for design and manufacturing know-how. While other western carmakers were compelled to form joint ventures with local groups, China changed its investment rules to allow Tesla to fully own and operate its Chinese subsidiary. The government reasoned that Tesla's presence -- via two massive plants to build its Model Y saloon and battery packs in Shanghai -- would help its domestic infrastructure and supply chain learn and modernise. Tesla accepted the risk of hardware and intellectual property being transferred, but concluded it was worth it in order to gain access to a huge new market, according to a person familiar with its negotiations. Yet the speed with which Chinese carmakers learnt and innovated enabled them to leave some of their European and Japanese rivals behind in the EV transition, according to Mathew Vachaparampil, chief executive of Caresoft, a specialist in cost reduction engineering. "While the legacy manufacturers in Europe, the US and Japan say [Tesla's] technology will not work in their vehicles, the Chinese say Elon Musk is the leader," Vachaparampil says. "They are now not only copying Tesla's technology, but improving it very quickly." Gigacasting, a method of casting and pressing fully formed chassis parts instead of welding together smaller components, is a good example. The process, which reduces vehicle weight, cuts manufacturing times and reduces labour costs, relies on a specially formed aluminium alloy developed by engineers at SpaceX, another Musk company. It was introduced for Chinese-made Model Y sports utility vehicles in 2021. But according to Caresoft analysis, by the time China's Xpeng released its G6 SUV in 2023, it had already adopted a gigacasting system that was both lighter and more rigid than the one used by Tesla. Xpeng and many other Chinese brands have also improved on Tesla's lightweight, aluminium-made cables for charging and coolant pumps inside EVs. During the Shanghai auto show in April, BYD showcased a premium Denza Z concept car featuring an advanced steer-by-wire system -- first introduced by Tesla in the Cybertruck. Chinese manufacturers have made innovations of their own, too. According to Caresoft, BYD has introduced around 100 cost-saving methods for a range of car components and materials that, if Tesla adopted, would save between $350 and $885 per vehicle. Alternatively, BYD could also save up to $1,860 per vehicle if it applied some of Tesla's ideas used in its brake system and heat-exchanger equipment. Lizzi Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, notes that China's manufacturing ecosystem, including years of investment in infrastructure, supply chain clustering and engineering talent, has "created the conditions" for BYD to succeed. "That tightly knitted production chain allows it to iterate faster, cut costs more effectively, and maintain a resilient supply chain," she says. Software is key, Tesla says Tesla believes that it still has significant advantages over Chinese rivals in areas such as automation technology, AI infrastructure, access to the latest Nvidia chips and billions of hours of driving video to train its neural network. "It's relatively easy to steal or mimic hardware IP," says one person close to Tesla. "It's almost impossible to reverse-engineer our software." Musk's biggest ambition in the short term is to deliver Tesla's self-driving robotaxis at scale following a limited launch in its home city of Austin. While analysts have cautioned that it will be a challenge for Tesla to catch up with frontrunners such as Google's Waymo, Musk claims the pivot to robotaxis and AI alone could take the company's valuation as high as $5 trillion. "I don't see anyone being able to compete with Tesla at present," he told investors in April. "As far as I'm aware, Tesla will have, I don't know, 99 percent market share or something ridiculous." The company's roughly $1 trillion market value suggests investors believe him. Meanwhile BYD, despite its success providing a wide range of affordable EVs, is not viewed as a software-focused group and, at around $140 billion, is not valued like one either. Its core strength is still perceived as stemming mostly from Wang's deep commitment to battery technology. The God's Eye announcement marked a big shift from Wang, who had previously resisted following domestic rivals like Xpeng and Nio in self-driving technology amid questions over safety. Suddenly, BYD was in the game. Early versions of the technology are not as advanced as Tesla's fully self-driving system, offering only basic functionality such as highway navigation and lane changing. But BYD plans to offer God's Eye in most models at no additional cost, a move analysts say could jeopardise Tesla's plans to seek a premium for its FSD-equipped vehicles. Tu Le, a founder of Sino Auto Insights, a consultancy, says the key is not what BYD offers now but the volume of data being collected, which could put it in a position to "win" the race for driverless cars. Each one of the 4.3 million vehicles that BYD sells each year will soon be collecting data to train the company's algorithms. Its size also allows BYD to secure competitive pricing for Nvidia chips that are used in its system, and enables it to provide semi-autonomous features often reserved for premium EVs in its Rmb70,000 ($9,600) budget hatchbacks. Tesla's monthly sales in China are much lower than BYD's, and fell by around 5 percent in the first six months of 2025. But brand damage stemming from Musk's political activism is not the cause, according to one current Tesla executive. "Now if you show up with a Tesla and not BYD when there is a de facto 'buy Chinese' rule, you have to explain. People don't want to do that," the executive says. "Also, the Chinese cars are better." However, the bigger challenge for Tesla is China's restrictions on data collection and transfer. FSD is based on a machine learning system that uses billions of hours of video to train an algorithm to make driving decisions in real time. Musk has said China does not permit Tesla to transfer driving video generated from its Chinese fleet outside the country, while the US authorities also will not allow Tesla to do training in China. That has in effect resulted in a twin-track learning process, with the Chinese iteration of FSD inevitably having inferior performance because fewer vehicles feed data into it. According to Duo Fu, a vice-president at Rystad Energy, a Norway-headquartered consultancy, FSD in China is much more reliant on simulations as opposed to real-life human driving experience. "Tesla has partnered with Baidu [a Chinese search and AI group] but Baidu can't disclose all the data points to Tesla," Duo adds. "The real-world data is definitely more valuable." Home field advantage While BYD might have home turf advantage when it comes to data collection and security, Wang's late pivot to driverless functionality has created some risks for the group. One is question marks over financial sustainability. Price wars among Chinese carmakers are putting margins and the industry's balance sheet under strain as Beijing demands more action to protect suppliers in the world's largest car market. It has also opened up some rare gaps in BYD's otherwise formidable vertical integration. Its market leadership has also enabled it to pressure suppliers for price cuts and extended payment terms, allowing it to rigorously control costs. But according to Chris McNally, an analyst with US investment bank Evercore, the God's Eye platform uses software and hardware partners, including Momenta, a Chinese group backed by General Motors in the US, and some chips from Nvidia. For years, the risks associated with reliance on US-made chips in particular have hovered over the Chinese car sector -- plans for driverless systems could be held back at any moment by US export controls or sanctions. "Given the geopolitical environment, no one will invest in a technology with such a high risk that they're still relying on foreign technology," says Raymond Tsang, an automotive technology expert with Bain in Shanghai. However, these vulnerabilities might not persist. Analysts believe BYD will soon develop most of its driverless systems in house and increasingly swap out Nvidia chips for those made by Beijing-based Horizon Robotics. "This is the BYD way to drive costs down," McNally says. It would also be consistent with a broader shift towards self-reliance in key technologies, in response to Washington's steadily increasing restrictions on technology exports to China. Yuqian Ding, a veteran Beijing-based auto analyst with HSBC, says that while BYD has not talked about developing a robotaxi service, executives have made "very clear" their plans to develop in-house all the important software and hardware needed for autonomous vehicles. Wang, the BYD boss, has also previously indicated to analysts that the company has all the tech and know-how to develop robots, in another potential long-term challenge to Musk. "With more than 5 million scale per annum, they can do everything," Ding says, adding: "That's the ultimate goal . . . Their target is much closer to Tesla." In an interview with the Financial Times this year, BYD's executive vice-president Stella Li said competition with Tesla in EVs and autonomous technology would accelerate innovation, ultimately making BYD a "better" company. "In the future, if you are not producing an electric car, if you're not introducing technology in intelligence and autonomous driving, you will be out," she warned. Additional reporting by Gloria Li in Hong Kong Graphic illustration by Ian Bott and data visualisation by Ray Douglas

China's Robotaxi Companies Are Racing Ahead of Tesla

"Tesla isn't even sitting at the (robotaxi) table yet," Lou Tiancheng, CTO of Chinese autonomous vehicle company Pony.ai, remarked during an interview in May. Last year, Wang Yunpeng, head of the autonomous driving unit at Baidu, China's search engine and AI giant, claimed Tesla was at least three to five years behind. The measure of robotaxi success isn't flashy demos or tech-day reveals -- it's large-scale, commercial, fully autonomous public service. By that standard, Tesla remains far behind. Globally, only Alphabet's Waymo and a handful of Chinese firms have overcome this barrier. While Waymo pioneered the robotaxi, nearly every other company providing regular public road service is Chinese. It mirrors the global electric vehicle market where, aside from Tesla, Chinese carmakers like BYD dominate the top ranks. At the center of this push is Baidu, often considered the West Point of China's autonomous vehicle (AV) industry. Its alumni populate almost the entire autonomous driving supply chain in China, from chips to software development to robotaxis. When Baidu began self-driving research in 2013, it envisioned becoming the Android of AV -- a software ecosystem provider to automakers worldwide. But China's fiercely competitive automotive landscape quashed this ambition. Top Chinese electric automakers such as Li Auto and XPeng opted to develop their own advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), while lower-tier companies turned to telecom giant Huawei or drone maker DJI. Baidu's own electric vehicle venture, Jidu, folded last year. Baidu's largest operations hub is Wuhan, a megacity in central China with over 13 million people, strategically chosen for its supportive regulatory environment and its status as China's automotive heartland. Baidu's sixth-generation robotaxi is a sleek vehicle with covered steering wheels and rear sliding doors. Still, 1,000 cars are modest compared to China's vast traditional taxi market and enormous ride-hailing fleets. Pony.ai, backed by Toyota and co-founded by ex-Baidu executive James Peng and coding prodigy Tiancheng Lou, operates 270 robotaxis. By year-end, they aim to scale production to 1,000 of their seventh-generation robotaxis, co-developed with Toyota and two local Chinese automakers. Pony.ai has not disclosed its robotaxi order numbers, but claims an impressive 1-to-20 ratio of remote safety operators to vehicles, and says its operational footprint is roughly 20 times the size of Waymo's service area in San Francisco. Since its NASDAQ debut, Pony.ai has attracted significant attention, including a partnership with Uber and rumored discussions involving Uber's controversial founder, Travis Kalanick, who was supposedly interested in acquiring the company's U.S. operations. WeRide, another company founded by Baidu's veterans, overcame early turmoil when its co-founder, former Baidu executive Wang Jing, stepped down amid a lawsuit alleging trade secret misappropriation. CTO Tony Han stepped in, steering WeRide to success with a 500-robotaxi fleet and diversified offerings including robo-buses and autonomous street sweepers. WeRide also collaborates with Bosch, the German technology giant and WeRide's major investor, on ADAS development, though major commercial clients remain elusive. Now these firms are turning outward, eyeing overseas expansion in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East -- racing to claim global robotaxi territory ahead of American competitors. Early this year, Baidu expanded into Dubai and Abu Dhabi after securing road‑test permits, and reportedly plans to enter Singapore, Malaysia, and Switzerland. Pony.ai signed an agreement with Dubai's transit authority, aiming for fully driverless operations by 2026, and maintains test operations in South Korea and Luxembourg. WeRide partnered with Uber for pilot operations in Abu Dhabi, becoming the Middle East's first fully driverless robotaxi service, and plans expansion into 15 more cities globally over the next five years. Technologically, Chinese robotaxi firms have largely used Waymo's playbook in hardware -- combining lidar, radar, cameras, precision GPS, and high-definition maps. Their advantage is cost. Thanks to China's manufacturing prowess, these companies could quickly scale fleets when ready. For example, Baidu brought robotaxi production costs down to just US $28,000 per vehicle -- a fraction of Waymo's hundreds-of-thousands-per-vehicle expense, on par with Tesla's forthcoming CyberCab. Pony.ai, meanwhile, boasted a 68 percent drop in lidar costs and an 80 percent reduction in computing costs with the launch of its seventh-generation robotaxi. Their software is a combination of AI models and rule-based code, designed to interpret traffic patterns, predict behaviors, and execute driving decisions. All three Chinese robotaxi firms now boast "end-to-end" systems -- a term popularized by Tesla that refers to AI models capable of processing raw sensor data and directly outputting driving actions. Unlike Waymo's early suburban testing in Phoenix, Ariz., Chinese robotaxis are trained in the dense, chaotic streets of Beijing and Guangzhou, where roads are often packed with motorbikes, bicycles, and street vendors. The ability to operate in such conditions could arguably make their systems more adaptable. Yet challenges persist, mostly regulatory hurdles. Neither China nor the United States has enacted nationwide laws governing robotaxis, leaving the regulation to states and cities. As a result, the industry operates under a fragmented patchwork of local-level policies, with each jurisdiction setting its own rules and requirements. Unlike some U.S. states, which are quicker with permits but stringent on ongoing safety monitoring, Chinese cities initially demand rigorous testing before granting permits. Almost all Chinese cities that allow robotaxis only permit their operation within geofenced zones, often in suburban districts away from dense downtown areas. In contrast, Waymo's service is allowed to cover large parts of San Francisco, including downtown. Interestingly, Chinese AV companies have leveraged Waymo's progress to spur government support at home. When Waymo's ride volume surged last year, Chinese firms intensified their lobbying efforts, urging regulators for more expansive operating permissions. Social issues also loom large. Apollo Go's expansion in Wuhan last year sparked protests from local taxi drivers who feared for their livelihoods. In response, the Wuhan Transportation Bureau clarified that Apollo Go operates only 400 robotaxis in the city. Baidu CEO Robin Li acknowledged the concerns, emphasizing that scaling robotaxi operations will be a gradual process that may take many years. Profitability is another challenge for all robotaxi firms. Despite growing ride volumes and improving hardware economics, none of the players have yet reached break-even. Most services remain heavily subsidized, especially during pilot phases. Pony.ai has set the goal of turning profitable by 2029. Another strategic dependency is chips. Most Chinese robotaxi fleets are currently powered by Nvidia chips, particularly the widely used Orin system-on-chip. These chips handle the bulk of sensor fusion, perception, and path-planning workloads. The reliance on a U.S. supplier poses geopolitical and supply chain risks. Recent export restrictions and rising tensions between the United States and China have prompted some Chinese firms to explore domestic alternatives, but so far, no local chipmaker has matched Nvidia's AV computing capabilities. Where does this leave Tesla? Elon Musk's vision-only approach to robotaxis is impressive, but the leap to true Level 4 or 5 autonomy -- vehicles that drive entirely on their own in any conditions -- remains dauntingly high. Tesla's modest Austin pilot reveals that the company will need the same careful geographic expansion and safety monitoring that Waymo and Baidu employed years earlier. While Tesla's production scale could eventually dwarf Waymo and Chinese players, the ultimate winners will ultimately be determined by safety, operational excellence, passenger trust, and regulatory navigation. Tesla must brace for fierce global competition from Chinese robotaxi firms already establishing footholds worldwide. Just as Tesla once found itself surrounded by Chinese electric vehicle rivals, robotaxis could be next.