Not a Commie fan, but here's a report coming out of china.
China cools on Tesla amid EV ‘bloodbath’
Sales plunge as buyers turn more to local brands offering more efficient, cheaper cars
- The Straits Times
- 14 Mar 2025
- Alexandra Stevenson
SHANGHAI – Tesla is getting crushed in China, its most important market outside the US and one that it had dominated for years.
When Ms Liu Jie, 32, decided to buy an electric car in October 2024, Tesla was one of her top choices. But after test-driving a few Chinese cars, she went with a sports sedan from Xiaomi, a consumer gadget maker better known for its smartphones, kettles and robot vacuums.
“Xiaomi is more fashionable,” Ms Liu said last week in Beijing. “Tesla, for me, it’s a little bit normal. You can see the Tesla Model Y everywhere.”
It is not personal, buyers said. Tesla is still considered a top brand, and chief executive Elon Musk is admired in China. Beijing rolled out the red carpet when he broke ground on the company’s first overseas factory in Shanghai. Mr Musk is credited with igniting China’s local electric vehicle industry.
But now that market is a bloodbath of competition from Chinese rivals. Chinese drivers who once flocked to Tesla are turning more and more to local brands that offer more efficient cars with better technology, sometimes at half the price.
Tesla’s biggest rival, electric car giant BYD, sold 481,318 cars in the first two months of 2025, over three-quarters more than it did over the same period in 2024. Tesla sold 60,480 vehicles in the first two months of the year, a drop of 14 per cent from 2024.
Tesla’s sales in China are plunging as the carmaker faces criticism over Mr Musk’s role as an aide to US President Donald Trump in charge of cutting federal spending. Tesla lost nearly onethird of its value over the past month as investors shunned the stock.
The threat that BYD poses to Tesla in China has been building for years. BYD has sold around one million more cars each year for the past three years. The popularity of BYD has been driven in part by the fact that its cars are cheaper. It has helped that local governments sometimes steer business in the company’s direction.
But a property crisis and a broadly slowing consumer economy have hit households and badly dented people’s appetite to shop, making it hard for all carmakers.
Things have become so bad that the government began offering subsidies a year ago for consumers to trade in their old cars.
The government increased the incentives last week. Domestic companies have benefited from the subsidies, but so has Tesla.
Even amid the economic slowdown, there is still a market for luxury cars, for those who can afford them. Ms Liu, who had a budget of around US$41,000 (S$54,600), said Tesla would have been an affordable luxury option compared with the US$41,305 Xiaomi SU7 Max that she bought. And while Tesla offers a five-year zero-interest loan, Xiaomi does not offer any financing.
Many Chinese drivers are also willing to pay more for advanced technology like self-driving, an area in which Tesla has lagged because the government has delayed the company’s introduction of similar or better technology.
But Tesla faces another problem: demand. Sales are slowing for all cars in China.
The policies aimed at replacing gas guzzlers with electric vehicles have helped.
In cities like Shanghai and Beijing, car owners can trade in older cars for a new one and get a nearly US$2,100 subsidy. In some Tesla dealerships, employees have created a wall with photos of the cars that buyers have traded in – they range from Porsches to Mercedeses and even the occasional Chinese car.
But trading in an old car for a new one is usually a one-time thing.
For many dealers, it is getting harder to sell any car. “It was OK two years ago, but now the market is saturated,” said Mr Chen Jiaming, a salesperson at an FAWVolkswagen (FAW-VW) dealership in Shanghai, a collaboration of the Volkswagen Group with the state-owned FAW Group.
Mr Chen works out of the basement of a mall near Shanghai’s
Zhongshan Park that was converted from a foodcourt three years ago when electric vehicles first took off in China.
Some of the one dozen dealerships in the basement of the mall have already left; the lights inside were turned off on a recent weekday. A row of claw machines lit up another empty space. In order to keep the FAW-VW dealership from closing, the mall gave it seven months of free rent, Mr Chen said.
“I think Tesla’s competitiveness in China will only last for the next two or three years at most,” said Mr Chen, who owns a BYD. Tesla’s driving technology is no longer cutting-edge compared with local rivals, he added.
After years of lobbying the government, Tesla was finally allowed to offer a version of its Autopilot technology to Chinese drivers in February. The feature is a step below the full self-driving feature that Tesla drivers in the US can use. Drivers who want access to the necessary software update in China have to pay an additional US$8,800.
Younger buyers prefer Chinese brands, said Ms Xia Lifang, an employee working at the nearby dealership for Arcfox, a Chinese electric carmaker. Tesla and BYD remain the most trusted brands in China, she said, but people born in the 1990s and 2000s are more open to trying new brands.
“Our car looks better than Tesla,” Ms Xia said with a smile.
She added: “You could buy two of our cars for the price of one Tesla.”
https://www.pressreader.com/singapore/the-straits-times/20250314/281676850684224