Tesla posted record China sales in 2024. But this year is going to be tough as competition heats up
Tesla models Y and 3 are displayed at a Tesla dealership in Corte Madera, California, on Dec. 20, 2024.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Electric vehicle-maker Tesla’s sales in China climbed to a record high last year. Sustaining that performance in 2025 could prove tricky as competition with homegrown players intensifies, analysts said.
The U.S. electric vehicle maker saw annual sales in China jump 8.8% to a record high of more than 657,000 cars in 2024. In December alone, its sales rose 12.8% from the previous month to 83,000 units, according to Tesla China.
However, Tesla has been losing market share to Chinese new-energy-vehicle players, down from 7.8% in 2023 to 6% in the January to November period last year, according to Bill Russo, founder and CEO of Automobility, who believes Tesla is “struggling to keep pace [with domestic rivals] and has a limited and aging product portfolio.”
Brand resiliency and price cuts have supported Tesla’s sales so far, said Tu Le, founder and managing director of Sino Auto Insights, but he was less certain that Tesla could keep up its momentum in 2025, given the lack of new products and increased local competition, especially from Chinese companies.
Aggressive price war
Tesla slashed the price for its best-selling Model Y in China by 10,000 yuan ($1,364.5) in late December and extended a zero-interest five-year loan plan for car buyers until the end of January.
Its best-selling Model Y now starts at 239,900 yuan after the discount, while the Model 3 sedan starts at 231,900 yuan — Tesla had cut its prices by 14,000 yuan in April — according to its website.
Still that marked a significant premium over a swath of cheaper models offered by Chinese domestic carmakers. BYD, which dominated the market with around 34% market share, prices one of its best-selling models Seagull at 136,800 yuan, and the more affordable Yuan Plus model, starting at 96,800 yuan.
TOPSHOT – People look at a BYD Seagull car by Chinese electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer BYD Auto at the Bangkok International Motor Show in Nonthaburi on March 27, 2024. (Photo by Lillian SUWANRUMPHA / AFP) (Photo by LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP via Getty Images)
Lillian Suwanrumpha | Afp | Getty Images
As the price war extends into the new year, Li Auto introduced cash subsidies of 15,000 yuan per purchase along with a three-year zero-interest financing scheme, according to a post last Thursday on its social media Weibo account. Nio also extended a similar three-year zero-interest loan plan for its EV buyers.
The purchasing incentives came on top of Chinese authorities’ push to extend the consumer goods trade-in program, which subsidizes consumers to trade in old cars or appliances and buy new ones at a discount.
The government-subsidized trade-in program could further lower prices for both Model 3 and Model Y by up to 50,000 yuan, Tesla China said.
“Tesla has to discount aggressively to keep pace with the ongoing price war in the market,” Russo noted.
Despite dwindling market share, Tesla is unlikely to lose its ground completely in China, according to Joe McCabe, CEO and president of AutoForecast Solutions, who compared Tesla as “the Apple of cars” — an “early adopter” in the EV space with “phenomenal” technology.
“I don’t think Tesla is at risk of not surviving,” McCabe added, “all [Elon Musk] has to do is drop the price by 5%, because he can, and that will help for little blips.”
Head-to-head race
In addition to lowering prices, Chinese electric carmakers have rolled out a slew of new models, many with fancy in-car features, such as projectors, embedded refrigerators and driver-assist systems.
Meanwhile Tesla has been slow in adopting any of these features, with its product portfolio focused solely on fully electric vehicles, while its homegrown rivals have steered into plug-in hybrid cars and extended-range EV categories.
These more traditional models appeal to buyers who are “still worried about the leap to fully electric [cars],” Sam Fiorani, vice president of AutoForecast Solutions said. “Tesla has no plans for anything other than fully electric vehicles.”
The automaker’s plans of launching its full self-driving supervised system still hinges on regulatory permission in China, while several local competitors have made the advanced driver-assistance systems a basic part of their offering, including BYD.
Musk had warned in January that Chinese automakers could “demolish most other car companies in the world” unless regulators intervene with trade barriers, as the Warren Buffet-backed BYD overtook Tesla as the world’s top-selling EV company in the last quarter of 2023.
The U.S. imposed a 100% duty on Chinese EVs last September to protect its homegrown industries from the pricing pressure posed by heavily-subsidized peers from China. The European Union has also moved to impose tariffs as high as 45.3% on Chinese EV cars imported late last year, while Tesla enjoyed a lower tariff rate of 7.8%.
The trade barriers would force Chinese automakers to find buyers at home and in the “smaller, friendlier” foreign markets, adding pressure on Tesla’s sales in China and elsewhere, Fiorani added.
Tesla’s sales of China-made EV cars including exports to foreign markets fell modestly by 0.4% from a year ago to 93,766 units in December, according to CNBC’s calculation of China Passenger Car Association data.
BYD, which is subject to 17% tariff duties for car exports to European Union, still led the rank with 509,440 cars sold in December, a near 50% year-on-year jump.
—CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng and Sonia Heng contributed to this report.
Environment
The world isn’t close to breaking free from coal — in some countries, demand for it is surging
Piles of coal waiting to be transported at Guoyuan Port container terminal in Chongqing, China.
Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images
The world won’t be able to release its grip on coal anytime soon.
“Nothing can destroy coal,” U.S. President Donald Trump said at the recent World Economic Forum. “Not the weather, not a bomb.”
U.S. exports of coal have been rising steadily to satisfy growing global demand for the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel, even though its domestic consumption has decreased.
On top of that, the world’s coal capacity reached a new record high of nearly 2,175 gigawatts in 2024, data from Global Energy Monitor showed on Feb. 6. Coal capacity is the overall power output that can be generated from coal-fired power plants.
“The global shift away from coal remains challenging, largely driven by rising demand in Asia, even as Europe and the U.S. see significant declines in coal consumption,” said Dorothy Mei, project manager for Global Energy Monitor’s Global Coal Mine Tracker.
Global coal demand is also expected to have breached another fresh record high of 8.77 billion tonnes in 2024, and will remain at similar levels until 2027, the International Energy Agency predicted.
The main culprits?
China recently reported that its coal imports surged 14.4% to a record high in 2024, amounting to 542.7 million metric tons compared with 474.42 million tons the year before.
The world’s second largest economy is also the largest coal consumer globally, accounting for more than 56% of global demand in 2023, latest figures by IEA showed.
China’s record-high coal stockpiling strategy is largely geared toward preparing the country for potential power shortages caused by extreme weather events, said Mei.
There is little focus on using energy efficiently, when coal is so cheap.
Dave Jones
Ember Energy
Hydropower, wind and solar energy made up almost 30% of China’s electricity mix in 2023, data from energy think tank Ember Energy showed. When hydropower output drops as a result of insufficient rainfall, the Chinese government often relies on coal power to ensure energy security, Mei added.
“Additionally, another major barrier is not the availability of renewable energy infrastructure, but the difficulty of transmitting solar and wind power across provinces,” she said, adding that coal will continue to be a “critical energy backbone” in China until grid integration and management is fully developed across the entire country.
In India, climate-induced extreme heat has led to soaring energy demand for cooling, and clean energy sources are not built fast enough to meet the country’s growing power demand, said Mei.
India’s focus on economic and infrastructure development has also boosted the consumption of cement and steel, industries that are heavily reliant on coal, according to analysts CNBC spoke to.
The South Asian nation’s demand for steel is set to grow by 8-9% in 2025, outpacing that of other economies, owing to a pickup in steel-intensive construction in the infrastructure and residential sectors, data from consulting firm Crisil showed.
As recently as last December, India extended its directive for imported coal-based power plants to run at full capacity until Feb. 28.
But that’s not to say that India has been neglecting its renewable energy targets. The country has set an ambitious goal of fulfilling 50% of its electricity needs through renewable energy by 2030. And it has made progress. And as of last October, renewables account for more than 46.3% of the country’s electricity generation capacity, according to India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy.
Beyond China and India
Outside of India and China, other top countries building new coal plants are Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam, Global Energy Monitor noted.
Vietnam is expected to have surpassed Taiwan as the world’s fifth largest importer of coal, after the country’s coal imports reached a record high in more than a decade last year.
Indonesia’s coal production rose to around 831 million tons to notch a fresh high last year, data from the country’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources showed.
And the share of coal in Philippines’ electricity mix surpassed that of China in 2023, becoming Southeast Asia’s most coal-dependent country, Ember Energy reported.
“There is little focus on using energy efficiently, when coal is so cheap,” said Dave Jones, an electricity analyst at energy think tank Ember Energy.
Strong coal demand in Asia across the board is also partly a consequence of the surge in gas prices since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, given that a number of major thermal coal importers like China, India and Vietnam had scaled back plans for gas-based power buildouts following the high gas prices that ensued, said Ian Roper, commodity strategist at Astris Advisory Japan KK.
The AI factor
Global electricity consumption is expected to keep rising in 2025, the IEA said.
“The world needs more energy, and it needs it now,” said Rob Thummel, senior portfolio manager at Tortoise Capital. “For the global economy to grow, it needs efficient, cost-effective, and reliable energy supply sources,” he told CNBC.
Artificial intelligence has also accelerated the world’s need for energy. Reports have shown that power needs driven by data centers around the world will also prolong the demand for coal.
“The U.S., China and the world are in a race for AI superiority,” said Tim Winter, portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds. AI data centers are huge power users, making it harder to retire a reliable and affordable energy source such as coal, he explained.
By 2030, electricity demand from data centers could exceed 35 GW, more than double the 17 GW recorded in 2022, a report by Moody’s Ratings showed.
Is the energy transition still possible?
With global electricity demand rising faster, other industry watchers are beginning to echo IEA’s forecasts of coal demand remaining at all-time highs.
“There can be no transition when the demand for oil, for natural gas, for coal, continues to hit record highs,” said Eric Nuttall, senior portfolio manager at Ninepoint Partners.
Governments agreed in the 2015 Paris climate accord to limit global heating to well below 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. To prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius, it is estimated that emissions must be cut by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.
Others are less pessimistic, though they recognized the challenge of reaching those targets in time.
An ongoing pledge toward renewables, alongside a looming surge in global LNG supply may ensure that coal imports continue to weaken in some coal-importing markets, said Roper, who noted that coal consumption has been falling in Europe and Northeast Asia in recent years.
Additionally, if countries commit to its promises of tripling renewables by 2030, coal could start to see a meaningful decline in this decade, said Ember Energy’s Jones.
A Tesla owner reported that he crashed his Cybertruck into a pole after hitting a curb while using Full Self-Driving, Tesla’s advanced driving assist system that Elon Musk claims will be unsupervised this year.
The post is going viral.
Jonathan Challinger, a Florida-based software developer working for Kraus Hamdani Aerospace, reported in a viral post on X that he crashed his Cybertruck into a pole.
He reported that he was driving using Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system, a suite of advanced driver assist (ADAS) features that require driver supervision at all times. However, Tesla claims that it will soon work without driver supervision—hence the name.
Challinger said that he was driving with FSD v13.2.4 on the right lane, which was ending and merging into the left lane, but the car failed to merge and hit the curb.
He said that he failed to react in time and take control of the Cybertruck:
It failed to merge out of a lane that was ending (there was no one on my left) and made no attempt to slow down or turn until it had already hit the curb.
The Cybertruck then crashed into a light post. He was lucky to walkway without a scratch.
To be fair, it was a strange location for a post, but there’s no reason why Tesla FSD shouldn’t have moved lane and even if it wouldn’t have changed lane, it should have hit the curb or post (pictures via TroyTeslike):
Challinger said that he shared the story as a “public service announcement” to tell people to remain attentive when using Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system and not become complacent:
Big fail on my part, obviously. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Pay attention. It can happen. I follow Tesla and FSD pretty closely and haven’t heard of any accident on V13 at all before this happened. It is easy to get complacent now – don’t.
It might be the first crash on Tesla’s latest FSD v13, which CEO Elon Musk has presented as “mind-blowing” and an important step toward achieving “unsupervised self-driving” by the end of the year.
Musk and his Tesla influencers often share FSD videos claiming that the technology is “on the verge of becoming truly self-driving,” despite data evidence pointing to Tesla still being years away from achieving this.
Electrek’s Take
This guy is lucky to be alive, and he is right. There’s a problem with people becoming complacent with FSD, and Tesla, and especially Elon Musk, are not doing enough to prevent that from happening.
On the contrary, Musk continues to hype every update, like Tesla is on the verge of solving self-driving, and claims that its quarterly safety report proves that FSD is safer than human driving, which is misleading.
If Tesla was developing FSD in a vacuum without Elon’s claims that it would be solved every year for the last 5 years and Tesla selling the software package to customers without any clear idea of when it can be achieved or on what hardware, it would be celebrated product.
Instead, it’s a product that is making Tesla lose credibility and potentially dangerous, as we see today.
I myself had the exact same problem that Challinger described where a lane ends, but FSD doesn’t detect it. It’s weird because it works most of the time so you can get this sentiment of complacency and give the system a chance to move. In this case, it evidently went too far.
Be careful out there and stop believing Elon Musk when he talks about self-driving.
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The 2025 Chicago Auto Show opened this week, and I’ve been struggling a bit with how to approach this story about the decline and fall of what was once the American auto industry’s premier commercial vehicle show – but one thing was absolutely clear: the Nissan LEAF is the best new car deal in Chicago. ***
Like any wild deal like this, there are asterisks and caveats. And (I promise) I will absolutely get to those. That said, I have some musings about the state of the Chicago Auto Show that I’ve shared, below, to sort of “set the stage,” if you will. If you want to skip those, you can can click here to get right to the nitty-grity on that 2025 Nissan LEAF deal, or simply click here to find a Nissan LEAF deal near you.
2025 Chicago Auto Show Map
If you have fond memories of the Chicago Auto Show from years past – and not even that many years past; like, pre-COVID years past – skip the 2025 show.
Once upon a time, the Chicago Auto Show occupied both main halls, with another hall housing commercial trucks and vendors, and drive activations outside and in the parking lot. Since that heyday, the show has shrunk significantly. It’s down to a single hall now. Depressingly, the show can’t even fill that with OEM displays, and has worked a number of vendors, drive events of both the EV and ICE-powered varieties, and even military recruiters into huge swaths of floor space. Despite the compacted nature of the displays, the show floor is not packed. You will be able to sit in any car you want, for as long as you want, with minimal chance of interruption.
I was lucky enough to be able to walk the show with my good friend and industry legend, Greg Lucia. Greg is best known for an iconic, gonzo PR stunt he pulled off while he was working at Toyota that involved the Space Shuttle Endeavour being towed to its final destination at the California Science Center in Los Angeles across the 405 freeway by a then-new Tundra.
Oddly enough, we both honed in on a specific year, 1997, as one that stood out.
“I had a part-time job at Sears while I was in college,” I told Greg. “I was making $9/hr. plus either 1% or 3% of everything I rang up. It worked out to a pretty steady $12/hr., and that money was good enough that there were a bunch of cars I could have reasonably bought. I ended up with a ’98 Dodge Dakota pickup. Manual. My payment was $218/mo.”
“Those were neat trucks,” he said. Adding, after a thoughtful minute, “I don’t think you could do that, today.”
Greg is obviously correct. Auto Shows have turned a corner. Instead of being someplace that any able-bodied person could go and, with a reasonable amount of effort and willingness to put in the hours, pick out a fun, dependable vehicle. In such an economic climate, it’s no wonder that the car you drove said something about you above and beyond what you could afford. Today, the closest thing to that mid-sized Dakota is probably the current Ford Ranger. The mid-sized Ford starts at $32,820 … but the average part-time mall job doesn’t pay any more than I made back in ’97. If anything, it pays less.
I wondered what possible value a traditional auto show could offer a college kid in 2025, when something like a base Ford Mustang that started at about $15,800 in 1997 has more than doubled to $31,920 and the cost of college has risen even higher, over 140% in the same interim, while wages have largely stayed the same.
Deeply entrenched in this gloomy mood, I plodded along between the relatively subdued Nissan and Volkswagen booths towards the ComEd presser (see the show map, above), that was already under way.
ComEd $100M commercial EV rebate program
ComEd chose the Chicago Auto Show to lay out the 2025 version of their beneficial electrification rebate programs that will offer customers access to $100 million (up from $90M last year) in funding opportunities designed to remove up-front cost as a barrier to widespread adoption of EVs and the expansion of charging infrastructure in northern Illinois. $53 million of that budget is earmarked specifically business and public sector customers, with up to $7500 available for each light-duty (Class 1 or 2) EV purchased by a ComEd commercial customer.
That was when it hit me: this is why local events like the Chicago Auto Show exist — to highlight deals that are unique to the area, that outlets like Motor Trend and Car and Driver and even Electrek (if we’re being honest) might overlook due to factors like geography, international audiences, or some other general lack of interest.
Allow me then, to explain how a parks district, or a police department, or a car sharing fleet, or a delivery fleet, or any other company, incorporation, or LLC in northern Illinois can score an absolutely killer deal on a Nissan LEAF.
Structuring that $9,140 Nissan LEAF deal
For 2025, Nissan’s groundbreaking LEAF S starts at just $28,140 before incentives. That’s already more than twenty thousand US American dollars less than the $49,740 average transaction price of a new vehicle recorded just last month. But $28,140, you’ll notice, is a lot more than $9,140. Here’s how we get there:
- Nissan themselves are eager to get these LEAFs off dealer lots to make room for the next-generation version. So eager, in fact, that the company is offering $7,500 in customer cash right off the bat.
- If you’re an Illinois resident, you could get another $4,000 from the state if you buy between now and April 30th.
- Finally, if you’re a ComEd commercial customer you can score a third rebate — this one good for up to $7,500 if you spend more than 50% of your time driving the vehicle in a low-income or “EIEC” area.
- Now, we do some math: $28,140 – 7500 – 4000 – 7500 = $9,140 … and that’s before any dealer discounts or negotiations come into play. (!)
For that $9,140 you get a smooth, capable EV with 149 miles of range* whose only real shortcomings are its relatively slow charging speed* compared to something like a Hyundai IONIQ 5, of course, the CHAdeMO charging standard* that every other brand has abandoned and for which precious few public charging options exist.
And, admittedly, those are three very real, very scary asterisks.
For a business, though? For a parks district or city official or lab courier or car share service that has some dedicated parking space to put their own charging into? That’s not as much of an obstacle as it might be to you and me. Heck, a young, ambitious college student who realizes they can fit a few robot lawnmowers under the LEAF’s spacious 23.6 cubic foot (668 liters) hatch might just find the money needed to start an LLC in Illinois and find any number of fun, expressive, practical news car they can actually pay off with a part-time hustle at the 2025 Chicago Auto Show after all!
That’s my take, anyway — you can get tickets to the 2025 Chicago Auto Show here, explore ComEd’s business and public sector EV rebate program here, then let me know what you think of all these musings (and whether or not you think I could get a few Automowers into the back of a Fiat 500e) in the comments.
SOURCES | IMAGES: ComEd, Nissan, the twisted mind of Greg Lucia.
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