When talking about electric car manufacturers and asking people to name one such manufacturer, most people would probably point out Tesla. And while American company is probably the most famous among the bunch, it certainly wasn't the most successful in the year 2017. This honor was granted to less known (at least in Europe) Chinese company BYD thanks to outstanding results in the last months and especially December of 2017.

What is outstanding at last December is, that company with 15.873 sold cars more than doubled the sale, compared to the same period last year. Among them the most wanted car was Song DM, a middle range SUV with 4,634 examples sold in December alone. On a yearly base it was sold in total of 30.911 examples.

Margin of only few thousand cars

In all the year of 2017 BYD sold a total of 108,956 cars, which means it beat Tesla only by a 5,900-ish cars. To put this in another perspective, if BYD recorded the same sales numbers in December 2017 as they did in 2016, while sale in all the other months would stay the same, results would be different and Tesla would take the first place.

American company though still made a milestone. 2017 was, thanks to new Model 3 first year, in which they sold more than 100.000 cars (in total 103,020). However, this number should be much higher if there were not all the delays in production of this very same car. Those in the last weeks of 2017 slowly started going away which means numbers next year could get much different and BYD will have to start to work hard if they want to remain the number one.

Jure Šujica
Photo: Avto Magazin, Tesla