BYD continues its relentless expansion with another very strong month of global plug-in electric car sales, returning to 200,000+ units per month.
According to the company's report, in March, BYD passenger plug-in car sales amounted to 206,089, which is 98 percent more than a year ago.
The overwhelming majority of BYD sales are in China, while exports stand for several percent of the total result.
That's one of the best results so far (only October-December 2022 was better), which combined with the rate of growth, clearly indicate that soon we will see new all-time records from BYD.
As always, it's interesting to see that both all-electric (BEV) and plug-in hybrid (PHEV) sales expand at a very similar year-over-year rate. The PHEV segment remains slightly bigger and quicker growing though (no change here).
BYD plug-in car sales results:
- BEVs: 102,670 (up 91% year-over-year)
- PHEVs: 103,419 (up 104% year-over-year)
- Total: 206,089 (up 98% year-over-year)
Out of the total number, some 13,312 BYD plug-ins were exported. Besides passenger cars, BYD sold also 991 commercial electric vehicles for a total of 207,080 plug-in vehicles last month.
BYD plug-in electric car sales – March 2023
So far this year, BYD sold more than 547,000 passenger plug-in electric cars, which is 92 percent more than a year ago.
BYD plug-in sales year-to-date:
- BEVs: 264,647 (up 85% year-over-year)
- PHEVs: 283,270 (up 100% year-over-year)
- Total: 547,917 (up 92% year-over-year)
For reference, in 2022, BYD sold more than 1.85 million plug-in electric cars. The cumulative number of BYD plug-in electric cars is now more than 3.9 million units.
BYD's 12-month sales already exceeded 2.1 million units. The company might soon exceed 250,000 sales per month and aim beyond 2.5 million units (maybe even 3 million units) in 2023.
Top models
In terms of models, this time, the top-selling one was the BYD Qin family (BEV + PHEV) - 40,850, slightly ahead of the usually best BYD Song family (BEV + PHEV), which this time noted 40,510.
Interestingly, the all-electric BYD Yuan was right behind with 40,400 units. The all-electric Dolphin also did pretty well with 30,077.
Here are the results for some of the other models: BYD Han family (BEV + PHEV) - 13,550, BYD Tang family (BEV + PHEV) - 12,133, plug-in hybrid BYD Frigate 07 - 8,150, all-electric BYD Seal - 6,000 and plug-in hybrid BYD Destroyer 05 - 3,911.
According to CnEVPost, BYD extended and increased the discounts for some of its plug-in electric cars (including the Seal), which indicates that the Chinese brand is not immune to the general situation and competition.
The BYD Seal model is kind of a direct competitor to the Tesla Model 3. According to the report, customers can get a discount of up to $4,510 (31,000 CNY). That's more than a tenth of the nominal price of the top version (212,800-289,800 CNY).
A similar situation is with the BYD Song Plus (extension of the discount).
