The all-electric Tesla SUV beat out BYD’s Qin Plus for the annual sales title by just 284 units.
While BYD may be trouncing Tesla in sales over here, it is however a slightly different story in its home market. Such is as it is the American automaker’s Model Y that recently came out on top in the annual sales chart in China for 2024, pipping the BYD Qin Plus by just 284 cars at the end of the year.
Tesla had managed to shift a whopping 480,309 units of its Model Y in China across the 12 months 2024, up by 5.24% from 456,394 cars it delivered in 2023. BYD on the other hand managed to sell 480,025 units of its Qin Plus sedan last year, of which 304,388 units were the PHEV variant, while the other 175,637 units were fully-electric.
The Tesla Model Y was incidentally one position behind the BYD Qin Plus sedan by the end of November 2024, but the American automaker had managed to secure its third-best sales month ever in China over December, with 61,881 units of the e-SUV being snapped up by buyers in the final 31 days of 2024.
This spike in sales during the dying days of last year for the Model Y could be partly attributed to the launch of the ‘Actually Smart Summon’ feature in China, which was pushed to owners through an over-the-air update during the middle of last month. Though the bigger possible reason as to why Tesla had a particularly good year end sales result in 2024 was for it to have offered a 10,000 yuan (RM 6,100) discount on the final payment for selected in-stock units, which could then be combined with a 5-year zero-interest financing plan for a monthly payment of as low as 2,667 yuan (RM 1,700) on this e-SUV.
It would seem however that Tesla might not have to rely on financial incentives for 2025 anymore, especially with the newly-refreshed Model Y that was first revealed in China a couple weeks back. It has after all been reported that this facelifted e-SUV has already received over 50,000 orders over there on the day it launched, with this number all but likely to have conservatively multiplied by many factors since then.
Looking further down the list of China’s best-selling cars last year meanwhile, BYD came in 2nd to 4th place, with the aforementioned Qin Plus snagging silver, the Seagull compact EV being awarded bronze, and the Song Plus (aka Sealion) just missing out on the podium. But perhaps all the more surprising here is that the fifth best-selling car in China last year was the Nissan Sylphy, which is then closely followed up by the Volkswagen Lavida.
