October 2024 was to be the first time ever that BYD has breached the 500,000 unit sales mark.
While it was already known as an eventual inevitability, it nevertheless looks like the time for BYD to join the ranks as one of the world’s largest automaker may be much sooner than most would expect. Such is especially as the Chinese company has recently announced that it had managed to set a new monthly sales record, by selling a whopping 500,526 cars in just the month of October alone!
Now just for a bit of context here on how impressive this feat is for BYD, the world’s largest automaker by volume, Toyota, had in comparison managed to shift 826,823 vehicles worldwide in August. Honda meanwhile has never once managed to even hit that 500,000 unit sales figure, with it only slightly going over the 410,000 mark once in recent time (November 2023) despite its global presence.
This staggering sales figure for BYD in October comes ahead of the company’s fifth consecutive month of record-breaking sales. The 500,000+ units shifted by the Chinese automaker is incidentally to be up nearly 20% from its September sales, and is a whole 66.5% more than the 301,833 cars it sold over the same month just last year.
BYD has thus far sold 3,236,927 cars globally from January to October this year, up 36% from the same period last year. Worth highlighting here too for the Chinese automaker to previously ceased the production and sales of vehicles powered solely by internal combustion engines in March 2022, with all the cars it sold since then being either electrified or fully-electric models.
And rather interestingly on the topic of EVs here, the automaker’s overall share of fully-electric vehicles in its sales makeup has actually continued to slide in October. BYD’s 189,614 all-electric passenger vehicle sales figure made up 37.9% of its sales in October, down 1.6% from 39.5% in September.
PHEV sales on the other hand previously surpassed BEV sales in BYD’s lineup in February of this year, with the 310,912 units shifted in October marking another 2.1% rise in the already sizeable 60% share these plug-in hybrid vehicles accounted for in the company’s sales split in September.
If the automaker’s 3.6 million cumulative annual vehicle sales target for this year is achieved, BYD will be poised to overtake the likes of Suzuki and Nissan to secure a spot in the top 10 ranking of the best-selling car brand this year. It would nevertheless still likely only come in as the runner-up to the, with 2023’s 5th place SAIC recording an annual sales figure of just over 5 million units last year.
