The EV market is booming outside of NA. EV growth share in Europe is remarkable and Tesla is flatlining there while everyone else advances.

US auto is not the trend setter here. BYD is crushing it by comparison

EVs are in the Cambrian Explosion state in China right now. There are dozens of companies fiercely competing on price and features.

The two most popular EVs in China are the Wuling Mini and the Geely Xingyuan. The first one costs $4500 for the base model, and the second one is $9800. And you can get a very decent EV for $15k with plenty of options.

In 2-3 years, these $5k and $10k cars will only get better, and they'll just slaughter all the competition in markets outside the US and Europe. Especially once used cars start appearing at a fraction of the cost.

Traditional auto manufacturers are dead. Full stop. They just haven't realized it yet. Tesla had a chance to compete in this market with Model 2 but Musk decided to blow their lead on a completely stillborn and gimmick-filled robotaxi.

> Was curious though so I looked it up and Tesla is currently selling more than Volkswagen, Ford, Rivian, Mercedes, and Toyota combined. Interesting.

Indeed. Global 2024 data shows Tesla selling about 1.8M. EV's only by that group of automakers comes to around 1.5M. Toyota and Ford are hybrid-first, not EV. VW is the only legacy automaker that comes near Tesla's EV scale. Mercedes prioritizes margin over volume. Rivian is capacity-limited.

Figured that metric is for EV only, which is not that surprising. But even for overall sales it's #11 on the list for first 3 quarters of 2025, which is not too shabby: https://www.carpro.com/blog/2025-year-to-date-u.s-auto-sales...

EVs or vehicles generally?

It's a myth that China heavily subsidises its EV industry. See e.g. this Bloomberg article titled "China Can't Cut EV Subsidies It Isn't Paying": https://archive.ph/5olix

there are around 140 EV companies in china competing very aggressively, they have excess capacity and are flooding the world market with cheap EVs, tough for Tesla to have a healthy margin in that environment

BYD's exports are not subsidized, and are, in fact, a massive cash cow for the firm.

They are also way cheaper and at comparable quality to western cars.

Sorry Model X, a friend calls their’s an E as in the letter grade.

I sometimes forget that’s not the real name, which gets confusing.

and Tesla is valued at over 21x more than GM

Mechanics is exactly the same - it's not Tesla revenues driving returns for investors, it's new investors putting their money into the stock at very high price.

> collapse suddenly

If BYD was in the US I think we could check this box reeeeaaally quickly. It would make Tesla irrelevant.

> In a Ponzi-scheme, there is no real product (or it is irrelevant)

This part is the smell.

"It's not a car company, it's a AI/Robot/whatever company." The valuation is supposedly justified by a future product that perpetually fails to materialize.

It's obviously not a classical Ponzi scheme in the mechanical sense where payouts are controlled by a central party. It has major Ponzi vibes though, with new money continuing to reward old money even though the fundamentals and products haven't done anything to justify that continued influx - only the hype has.