Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.
Tesla sales were down in 2025, while EV sales were up overall. Tesla sales were down in the US, in Europe (by almost 30%), and in China (for the first time since 2020). A lot of Tesla fans, however, are eager to point out where the Tesla Model Y and Model 3 are top sellers, which is still a lot of markets, and I saw a headline yesterday claiming that Tesla is dominating the market. First of all, Tesla is not dominating the market, and secondly, when the overall market trend is up and your trend is down (for two years in a row), I don’t think it’s time to cheer. It would be better to reflect on and admit what’s going wrong and try to fix it.
I was interviewed by BBC radio the other day regarding Tesla’s sales drop and BYD passing it up globally in 2025 in the BEV market. The funny thing is, this is not even a complicated story or challenge. You can explain it in just a few minutes. And it’s been the story or trend for the past couple of years. But it seems that some people are just becoming aware of it, and others are still not accepting or digesting it. (How long does a blip in demand have to go before it’s a long-term trend?)
That headline about Tesla “dominating” stimulated a thought, which led to this article. But let me just start with a handful of core points:
Tesla has only two mass-market models, launched in 2017 and 2020.
In the mid to late 2010s, Elon Musk decided that one thing would drive sales in the next decade — full self driving capability (like, real full self driving capability). He expected Tesla would achieve it within a couple of years and then have essentially unlimited demand for its vehicles in the 2020s, projecting 50% growth rate per year on average across the decade and culminating in 20 million vehicle sales per year in 2030.
It is now 2026 and full self driving capability isn’t perfected. (Maybe it will be soon, maybe it won’t.) But instead of implementing a Plan B for all of those years, Musk just kept assuming they were a year or less away. So, Tesla didn’t develop a bunch of new models to keep consumer demand growing. Actually, it only launched the Cybertruck, and the less said about its sales performance the better.
The Tesla Model Y and Model 3 are top sellers in China, Europe, and the US, but Tesla still only has about 5% share in China, about 6% share in Europe, and about 41% share in the US. That’s not dominating. For sure, five and six percent market share is not dominating! Tesla fans are fooling themselves if they think Tesla is dominating just because they have two top sellers. Globally, Tesla is around 12% share of the BEV market — good enough for second place, but certainly not dominating. (BYD has around 17% share, which is clearly much better, but still not dominating.)
The thing that crossed my mind after seeing that overly positive, congratulatory email about Tesla was: imagine how Tesla fans would be acting if the company had a bunch of different models available and was launching a new one every two or three months. Imagine how excited and gung ho they’d be and how much they’d be hyping the company and saying it’s dominating! Just sit on that for a moment thinking about it. The company would be so massively hyped, and sales would have been rising rather than falling in the past couple of years.
BYD has about 30 BEV models. It launched 9 new BEV models last year alone. Imagine if Tesla had 30 BEV models and launched 9 in 2025! Imagine if the company just had half of that, 15, and launched four or five last year. There would be so much hype around Tesla! There’s still so much hype around Tesla and it has had declining sales for the past two years and started delivering its latest model, the Cybertruck, in November 2023.
Sign up for CleanTechnica’s Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott’s in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Advertisement
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
[embedded content]
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica’s Comment Policy
Share this story!