BYD, the world’s second largest electric car company, recently made an important decision for Tesla. The Chinese manufacturer has indeed put on hold its plan to sell electric cars in the United States. Enough to give Tesla some respite in 2023.
If you don’t know BYD, don’t worry, you will soon get to know this Chinese manufacturer and even see its electric cars passing through the streets of France. Its three electric cars dedicated to Europe, the Han, Tang and Atto 3 had made the trip to the Paris Motor Show a few weeks ago. We were then able to discover these electric cars.
One of BYD’s 2023 goals was to enter the US market. But not everything went as planned.
An announcement at CES… canceled
For the moment, the world number two in electric cars, BYD, is selling its models massively in China. But the manufacturer has understood that its growth was not optimal without exporting. Tesla’s main competitor therefore wanted to launch a first electric car dedicated to the North American market. And to do so, BYD was targeting CES in Las Vegas in January 2023, with an announcement with great fanfare.
Eventually, it will be nothing. The manufacturer was not even officially present at CES. The decision was recently reversed. Two reasons were given by sources internal to the manufacturer relayed by Reuters.
The first reason is the Biden administration’s distrust of Chinese companies, but also the anti-Chinese sentiment that reigns across the United States. We see this in particular with the Huawei affair on the side of electronic devices and in particular smartphones. Yet BYD had the backing of a consulting firm in Detroit (the land of American automakers) with a pre-arranged list of showrooms across the territory.
The ecological bonus plays against BYD
The second reason is much more pragmatic. Since January 1, 2023, the American ecological bonus has been completely revised. To qualify for the $7,500 rebate on an electric car, it must have been assembled in the United States. It was therefore impossible for BYD to be competitive with American manufacturers, and in particular Tesla, who offered this discount to their customers.
But BYD sources say the decision to launch in the US has not been abandoned. She was just put on hold. We then imagine that BYD wants to build an assembly plant across the Atlantic before launching into the American market. This is already the case, since the Chinese manufacturer has had a factory in California for ten years. It assembles electric buses that travel the streets of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
This recent move by BYD does Tesla’s business. The world leader in electric cars is still first on the podium, but followed more and more closely by the Asian manufacturer. With the recent Model 3 and Model Y price cuts, Tesla should maintain its lead in 2023. But if BYD had managed to launch in the United States with envious (we think of the BYD Seal) and affordable electric cars, the situation could have been very different.
In 2023, Elon Musk hopes to place the Tesla Model Y on the podium of the best-selling cars in the world, all engines combined. Or more exactly, on the first step of the podium, just that.
Chinese cars deprived of bonuses in Europe?
In Europe, some countries want to take the same path as the United States with the Biden administration. Namely, reserve ecological bonuses for locally assembled electric cars. This is the case of France, which is considering such a measure.
And that might make sense. Remember that 20% of electric cars sold in Europe in August 2022 were assembled in China. While only 18% of these 20% are sold by a Chinese brand! The fault, in particular, of Tesla, which has a huge part of its cars manufactured in its Gigafactory in Shanghai. But also European manufacturers who have partly relocated to China.
BYD, the Chinese giant, world number two in electric cars, is arriving in Europe and more particularly in France, with three models. The Atto 3, Han and Tang. We were able to board…
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