BYD sold 557,090 fully electric vehicles in the second quarter, enough to take back the global BEV crown from Tesla a full day before Tesla reports its own numbers. Here is the part most coverage will skip: that winning figure is 8.22% lower than what BYD sold in the same quarter last year.

Tesla publishes its Q2 delivery report on Thursday, July 2. The analyst consensus Tesla compiles on its own investor relations page sits at 406,024 vehicles. Bloomberg’s estimate is more conservative at roughly 396,500. Even Goldman Sachs’ bullish call of about 420,000 would leave Tesla more than 135,000 vehicles behind a shrinking BYD.

This is the second handoff of the quarterly BEV title in six months, a seesaw I have tracked since BYD took the annual crown for the first time in January. The pattern behind the trophy exchange matters more than the trophy.

BYD Wins The Quarter On A Number That Went Backward

BYD’s 557,090 battery-electric deliveries for April through June came in 8.22% below the second quarter of 2025, according to the company’s Hong Kong stock exchange filing, yet the total still clears every published estimate for Tesla’s quarter by a six-figure margin.

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that the result should be enough to put BYD back on top when Tesla’s figures land. The June detail explains how a shrinking company still wins. BYD’s passenger BEV sales were 201,472 for the month, down 2.62% from a year earlier, while plug-in hybrid sales rose 14.69% to 195,820. Across the full quarter, PHEVs added another 531,292 units, which puts BYD’s total new-energy volume above 1.1 million vehicles for the three months.

The crown comparison counts only BYD’s passenger BEVs against Tesla’s all-electric lineup. That is the honest, like-for-like measure, and BYD wins it even in a down quarter.

Exports Approach Half Of BYD’s Business As China Volume Collapses

BYD’s overseas deliveries hit a record 175,349 vehicles in June, up 94.73% year over year, and now account for 43.46% of everything the company sells, according to data compiled by CnEVPost from BYD’s monthly filings, while home-market volume keeps falling by double digits.

The first-half split is stark. Overseas sales reached 792,256 units through June, up 70.65%. Domestic sales fell 39.57% to 1,016,255. Total first-half NEV volume of 1,808,511 sits 15.72% below last year. Reuters calculates June as BYD’s second straight month of year-over-year growth, at 403,472 total vehicles, after eight consecutive months of declines.

The home-market damage traces back to January 1, when China cut its NEV purchase tax exemption in half, from a maximum waiver of 30,000 yuan ($4,200) to 15,000 yuan ($2,100). We flagged that cliff in December, when the deadline failed to spark a buying rush. The China Passenger Car Association now expects the country’s car sales to fall 11% this year, a sharp downgrade from its earlier 1% decline forecast. The price war has a cost, too: BYD’s first-quarter net profit dropped 55% to 4.08 billion yuan ($561 million), its lowest in more than three years. The company has raised its 2026 overseas target to 1.5 million vehicles from the 1.3 million it set in January, because exports are the only lever still pulling.

Tesla Reports Thursday Carrying 50,000 Unsold Cars From Q1

Tesla delivered 358,023 vehicles in the first quarter while producing 408,386, leaving roughly 50,363 cars in inventory or transit at quarter’s end, a supply-demand gap about double the spread it posted in the second quarter of 2025, and that overhang shapes how Thursday’s number should be read.

Q1 marked a return to growth for Tesla, up 6.3% year over year, but the company still missed the 365,645-vehicle bar it compiled from analysts on its own investor relations page. Tesla did briefly retake the quarterly BEV lead in those three months. That reclaim owed more to Beijing’s tax change gutting BYD’s domestic volume than to any Tesla surge, a dynamic we broke down in March, when BYD’s January-February deliveries fell 36% while Tesla’s Shanghai output rose 35%.

Hitting the 406,024 consensus on Thursday would mean 5.7% growth over Q2 2025’s 384,122 deliveries, and back-to-back growth quarters for the first time since Tesla’s two straight annual declines began. The full-year 2026 consensus of 1,654,808 implies about 1% growth over 2025’s 1,636,129, and analysts have trimmed that figure by roughly 35,000 units since March.

June Splits China’s Other EV Makers Into Winners And Losers

Leapmotor, Nio, and Xpeng each posted their best month of 2026 in June, while Li Auto declined for a second consecutive month, according to delivery reports compiled by Investor’s Business Daily ahead of Tesla’s Thursday update.

Stellantis-backed Leapmotor nearly doubled June deliveries, up 94.5% to 93,376 vehicles after refreshing three of its SUV lines in mid-June. Nio grew 62.9% to 40,597 for the month, though its 107,658-unit quarter fell short of its own 110,000-to-115,000 guidance. Xpeng posted its first monthly growth of the year, up 15.9% to 40,126. Li Auto went the other way, down 14.8% to 30,895 and 7.4% below May. Xiaomi declined to publish exact figures again, saying only that it topped 30,000 deliveries for a third straight month.

EVXL’s Take

The headline every outlet will run tomorrow says BYD dethroned Tesla. The honest version says nobody won this quarter. BYD retook the crown with a BEV number that shrank 8%. Tesla will likely post single-digit growth against a 2025 quarter that was itself down 14% from 2024. The only genuine growth engine anywhere in this story is BYD’s export machine, and that tells you where the contest now actually lives.

It lives in the markets where both companies are allowed to compete. BYD passenger cars remain locked out of the US behind 100% tariffs, so Tesla’s home turf is a protected zone in exactly the way we criticize when Beijing does the subsidizing. On neutral ground, in Europe, Australia, Brazil, and Southeast Asia, BYD is winning on price and product cadence, as the full 2025 scorecard we published in February laid out in detail.

An honesty check on my own record: in that February piece I predicted BYD would outsell Tesla 2-to-1 on BEVs by Q3 2026. That call is in trouble. China’s tax cliff hit BYD’s volume harder than I expected, and the current gap is closer to 1.4-to-1. I would rather flag a wobbling prediction now than pretend I never made it. The direction still holds. The magnitude does not, at least not yet.

Watch two numbers on Thursday. First, the delivery total against the 406,024 bar Tesla set for itself. Second, the production-to-delivery gap after last quarter’s 50,363-car overhang. A consensus beat paired with another inventory build would show Tesla grading its own homework while stacking unsold cars, rather than proving any demand recovery. Either way, Tesla ends the quarter in second place in the segment it created, and its share price says investors stopped caring about that some time ago. Owners should care, though. Second place in volume with a frozen product line is how resale values erode.

Sources: Bloomberg, Reuters, CnEVPost, Investor’s Business Daily.

EVXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.