Roma — At Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, on Thursday 30 November there will be a Hollywood party between adoring fans and CEO Elon Musk for the first deliveries of Cybertruck, the space-shaped electric pick-up presented as a concept four years ago and between thousand delays arrived on the market.
But in 2023 it could be Byd, the Chinese rival ready to take the crown of the world‘s leading manufacturer of electric cars from Musk. At the end of September, Tesla was still ahead by around 3,000 units but many analysts see it overtaking by December 31st. A record that would also weigh symbolically in times of complicated energy transition of which the car is the protagonist.
The Byd Act 3
BYD has already been world number one since last year for sales of electrified vehicles, i.e. pure electric vehicles like Teslas and plug-in hybrid cars with batteries to recharge. The numbers for 2022: 1.8 million against 1.32 for Tesla.
Il Tesla Cybertruck
This year, Musk confirmed his goal of selling 1.8 million units worldwide despite a slowdown in the third quarter and the failure to achieve quarterly financial targets that made Wall Street turn up their noses.
Musk is aiming for a notable leap forward but it shouldn’t be enough with BYD, according to analysts. Because the main game is being played in China, at the home of the rival, where last year 64% of all electric vehicles in the world were produced and where 59% were sold, according to data from the World Economic Forum.
The record hangs on the typology of the range of the two manufacturers. Tesla currently sells only four models – Model S, Model 3 sedan, Model X and Y SUV – with premium brand prices, between 40 thousand and 100 thousand dollars.
BYD, on the contrary, has focused its growth on more electric models at affordable prices: at the Shanghai Motor Show last spring, the launch on the domestic market of Seagull, an electric vehicle for everyone with a price of 73 thousand yuan, the equivalent of about 10 thousand dollars.
Zero emission Byd models unknown to us (who knows until when) named Song, Qin Plus, Dolphin, Yuan Plus and those of the Han sub-brand are in the ranking of the top 10 best-selling cars in China, where Tesla can only boast Model Y. And if it is true that the Chinese economy is struggling with rising youth unemployment and ongoing deflation, even consumers in the world‘s largest electric market are forced to do their homework before buying.
«Buying a car is not people’s first thought when faced with wars», Musk stated in a call with analysts on October 18th. Which since the beginning of the year has triggered a price war by reducing Tesla’s price lists on all markets by up to 25% on several occasions, and with other sensational and targeted discounts such as for Model Y in China.
Almost all rivals were forced to copy. The results were there, positive and negative: faced with a global demand for electric vehicles that was on the rise but decidedly lower than the hopes and investments of the manufacturers, Musk reduced stocks but had to give up slices of profits and turnover, taking some hits on the stock exchange.
What to do? “It must offer an affordable vehicle” if it wants to compete with BYD, Seth Goldstein, a Morningstar analyst, says easily, which means for Tesla to accelerate on the $25,000 Model 2 for which Musk has once again shied away from analysts .
But this time it will have to hurry if it wants to sell 20 million electric vehicles in 2030, as it continues to promise.