The Chinese EV Maker That's Selling More Cars Than Tesla

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:16)

Tracy, Chinese EV exports, I feel like is a topic that we've danced around, maybe is the way to put it, in numerous episodes related to trade, batteries, trade policy, tech, things like that. But we've never really hit it square on, I don't think.

Tracy Alloway (0:36)

No, it's true, it's one of these things that's kind of, as you put it, hovering in the background. And every time it pops up, there's usually some amazing statistic attached to it. One of the things that's come up a few times now, I think, is this idea that China has surpassed Germany as the biggest exporter of cars. I think that happened last year or in a fairly recent quarter, and it seems to be on track to surpass Japan as well. So that's a pretty amazing development.

Joe Weisenthal (1:06)

It's a really extraordinary development. And I think it's like, we talked about this with Brad Setzer, for example, it came up and it really seems to have caught a lot of people by surprise.

And even as recently as 2018 or 2019, the ability of China to become a auto export powerhouse was not on a lot of people's radars.

Tracy Alloway (1:28)

Absolutely. And I think the other reason it keeps coming up in conversations and is of particular interest to us is because it relates a lot to this idea of the new industrial policy and the idea of nurturing domestic manufacturers and tech sectors of one sort or another.

And it also lands squarely into some of the tensions we've seen between Europe and the US over the Inflation Reduction Act.

Joe Weisenthal (1:53)

Yeah, I'm thinking about the episode that we recorded in Pennsylvania or this spring with Dan Wong, where we really talked about the Inflation Reduction Act. And the US has this incredible EV company called Tesla, but what we don't really have nearly as much to the degree is battery tech, which there's the Inflation Reduction Act is trying to foster and so forth.

And so there really is a lot here with this sort of global sort of remaking of the entire auto landscape potentially.

Tracy Alloway (2:23)

Right, and I think the domestic supply chain is probably where the US differs quite a bit to China. And I think it would be really interesting to dive into how the Chinese EV landscape is developing and how it compares and contrasts with the rest of the world.

Joe Weisenthal (2:38)

And how competitive are these? How good are these cars? Could they one day be on the roads across the United States?

Is the European industry going to be totally decimated by lower cost competitors? So many interesting topics, labor angles, labor costs with costs, so much here. Probably do several episodes over time on this topic.

Tracy Alloway (2:57)

But this is the first.

Joe Weisenthal (2:58)

But this is the first where we're just sort of looking at it directly. So I'm very excited about our guest. We have the perfect guest to sort of welcome us to this topic. We're going to be speaking with Corey Cantor. He is a senior associate for electric vehicles right here at BloombergNEF, done a lot of research, recently put out a big report on the state of the global EV market. Corey, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Corey Cantor (3:21)

Thanks, Joe, Tracy. It's great to be here and great. Always a great time to talk about electric vehicles.

Always a great, always news about electric vehicles.

Joe Weisenthal (3:31)

We're sold, we're sold.

I wanna actually start with, you know, again, there's a million different angles, but like we mentioned Tesla in the intro. It's like, okay, one thing the US definitely has is an extremely successful domestic EV company. But there's also like this Chinese EV company that's like, is it bigger than Tesla? Like, or is it close to it? Or like, what is it?

Corey Cantor (3:54)

It's bigger than Tesla. And folks at Bloomberg are probably really familiar with BYD, given that Warren Buffett invested in back in 2008 And since then, folks at Bloomberg in general have been tracking BYD's progress. BYD last year had more electric vehicle sales than Tesla. And it's been impressive how much they've grown in a short period of time. So if we go back to before the pandemic in 2019, BYD had about 220,000 electric vehicle sales.

And in about three years, it grew by nine times. So last year it was about 1.9 million electric vehicle sales. Compare that to Tesla last year was 1.3 million.