Chinese mega-brand BYD shifted 4,272,145 automobile units in the 2024 calendar year. That accounted for a massive 41.3 percent increase from the 2023 calendar year, and shows that Build Your Dreams is actually (finally) building some pretty big dreams. That massive domestic and international growth is coming at the expense of traditional Western automakers like the Volkswagen Group. VW’s sales in China, which at one point accounted for half of the brand’s global profits, have halved since 2019 and it’s hard to be optimistic about any traditional automaker’s success in that market again.
BYD is very strategic about how it has rolled out its growth, doing just about everything right in order to attract new customers. Not only are BYD building better quality products with more attractive consumer interfaces, but they’re building competitive machines for a fraction of the price of what Volkswagen or even Tesla can turn out. Chinese consumers are buying BYDs because they’re just building better stuff.
Watch this explainer from Wendover Productions to dig into just how BYD became the behemoth it is, and how Volkswagen rested on its laurels a bit too long. VW was the first foreign automaker to produce vehicles in China way back in 1983 and it has long billed China as its biggest and most reliable market, but that era is over. BYD killed it.
“Over a century of institutional knowledge within companies like VW is now almost worthless. Perhaps the biggest value they retain is just their brand.”
New vehicles in 2025 are increasingly reliant on software and programming to make the difference between a good and great car. It seems, based on the current market growth, that companies like BYD are just making better software.
The Chinese government has been pumping its domestic manufacturers full of investment capital for years, and it’s starting to pay off as their march for global automotive takeover begins. BYD is already dominating the Asian markets and has begun developing a strong foothold in developing African car markets as well, but the biggest indicator of BYD’s future is found in South and Central America, where the company controls a massive 84 percent of the electric and hybrid market.
If Chinese brands take over the global south and the rapidly developing nations therein, an increasingly isolationist U.S. market will struggle to remain globally relevant. BYD is already taking on a significant percentage of the European market, displacing Volkswagen on its own home turf. This is a bellwether of things to come for the rest of the world. Without similarly massive government investment in electric vehicle architecture and production, the western world will be left in the manufacturing dust. For decades we’ve outsourced production of damn near everything to China for its cheap and plentiful labor, but the chickens are coming home to roost.
