At Least 123 Chinese Electric Car Manufacturers Are Competing Against Tesla – Autoblog

• The Chinese electric vehicle market has become increasingly competitive.
• About 123 car companies sold electric vehicles, an auto consultant told WSJ.
• But few brands are keeping Tesla’s dominance in China in check.

Competition in the electric vehicle sector is getting tougher for Tesla in China, but what exactly does that market look like?

Here’s a statistic that Stephen Dyer, an auto consultant at AlixPartners, told the Wall Street Journal: In 2023, about 123 auto companies in China sold an electric vehicle.

To put that in perspective, US News listed over 65 car brands in the US in 2023, some of which may have already left the country when the list was published.

That’s a lot of companies trying to break into the electric vehicle market, and a big part of that is thanks to the Chinese government.

As Business Insider’s Linette Lopez noted in February, automakers received a huge boost from Beijing as it handed out government subsidies to all automakers that would help the country’s transition to electric vehicles.

Lopez wrote that China began slowing the subsidy pipeline in 2016, but that doesn’t mean support has completely disappeared.

The Germany-based Kiel Institute for the World Economy released a report in April that BYD, China’s leading electric car maker, received more than $2.2 billion in subsidies in 2022.

The massive government support only fueled a surge in electric vehicle production and a price war that Tesla has largely stayed out of – to the company’s detriment.

Still, Tesla remains one of the top sellers of electric vehicles in the country and few brands compete with the U.S.-based automaker.

Dyer, the auto consultant at AlixPartners, told the Journal that only four electric vehicle makers would have sold more than 400,000 vehicles each in China in 2023: BYD, Aion, Wuling and Tesla.

The latest quarterly earnings reports for 2024 show that Tesla remains the global electric vehicle leader with approximately 387,000 vehicles sold, compared to BYD, which reported approximately 300,114 EVs sold.

But the competition comes amid a slowdown in electric vehicle sales being felt in the U.S. and China.

While U.S. consumers continue to look for a cheaper alternative to electric vehicles, China faces a more complex situation, as BI’s George Glover noted. This leads to frustrating price wars and an overall stalled economy caused by deflation and a real estate collapse.

Tesla and BYD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.