So many car makers get called ‘the Chinese Tesla’ – but which one really comes closest?

Words Nick Gibbs
Photography Getty, Alex Tapley, Daniela Loof, manufacturers

The first candidate, BYD, will be no stranger to readers of CAR. Its sales in the first half of 2025 totalled 2.14 million (of which 1.02m were EVs). In the first quarter of 2025, its profits were equivalent to £1.1 billion.

If Tesla is the global EV alpha male – all outspoken arrogance – then BYD is its nerdish counterpart. Armed with their own batteries, the nerds overtook Tesla and became the biggest global maker of electric cars in the first half of 2025. CEO Wang Chuanfu and his team has worked below the radar (rather than waving frantically at it) to cut cost and thus lower the sticker price on battery-powered vehicles and it’s working.

Tesla ripped up the rulebook on sales, software, charging networks and claims of autonomy, but BYD so far has followed the accepted wisdom. It offers a full range of cars, for one thing. As the company grows in confidence, however, that innovation (eg the claimed five-minute ‘megawatt’ charge) is coming – and Tesla isn’t the only one about to get rolled over.

Your content goes here. Edit or remove this text inline or in the module Content settings. You can also style every aspect of this content in the module Design settings and even apply custom CSS to this text in the module Advanced settings.

Four out of five. In terms of measurable success, yes. But it’s not even trying to follow the Musk path.

If BYD has had Tesla rivalry reluctantly thrust upon it, Xpeng ate up Tesla’s Silicon Valley playbook. CEO He Xiaopeng owned one of the first Teslas in China and set out in 2014 to establish a local equivalent with an emphasis on ‘smart’ EVs with semi-autonomous capability and vast screens delivering a cloud-hosted digital experience.

How’s that going? Good and bad. Xpeng hasn’t turned a profit yet, but VW is so impressed that it bought an Xpeng platform to help boost its ailing performance in China. In the first half of 2025, Xpeng’s sales – all EVs – came to 197,189.

Xpeng’s own Model Y, the G6, has finally arrived in the UK to a muted reception, but the company has actually done what Tesla baulked at and launched a lower cost model in the Mona 03 sedan that’s tearing up the charts in China.

As with many early Tesla wannabes, the company is diverging from Musk’s two-model mission to satisfy a tricky China market and that means keeping the line-up sparkling, including this year adding the jaw-dropping P7 sedan. It’s also reactive enough to add plug-in hybrids. Now comes the tricky bit: impressing the rest of the world.

Four out of five. It’s a proper Tesla rival waiting for the world to take notice.

It’s not that long ago that Nio was going to be THE global rival to Tesla. With a glitzy launch at the Saatchi gallery on the Kings Road in London in 2016, the company had the backing and the vision, and in Bin Li the inspiring CEO to make it happen. It even had the killer tech in the battery-swapping mechanism that Tesla originally promised, but backed away from.

But despite nailing the swapping tech with 3408 stations (mostly in China) and electric cars in general, Nio still hasn’t reached the million car sales mark after almost 10 years, and doesn’t make a profit.

That could change after it climbed down from its premium post to launch the cheaper and more Tesla-angled Onvo brand along with the Firefly small hatchback. Together they helped increase Nio sales by 25 per cent in the second quarter, but the electric competition is now frighteningly good in its only serious market, China; Nio sold 114,150 in the first half of 2025.

Onvo and Firefly might help rejuice European sales after demand for the Nio brand sputtered to a near halt in the region but there’s still a long way to go before the company could be called a success. Nio’s cash burn would scare even an early Tesla investor, but the company’s stock price has bumped slowly downwards from its stellar high in 2020 in the opposite direction to Tesla’s, which is now propelled by something mystical and far removed from market realities.

Two out of five. Nio assembled the A-team to challenge Tesla domination but the results have been C-grade at best.

Leapmotor was started in 2015 because founder Jiangming Zhu saw cars as a rolling platform for his beloved electronics. The C10 and B10 SUVs are, like Teslas, cars that are ‘software-defined’.

Leapmotor’s cars are gaining traction, with sales doubling in the first half of 2025, helped by Stellantis spotting an opportunity and setting up a European sales network. Plug-in hybrid alternatives are helping too. To the end of June, total sales for 2025 came to 221,664.

In a key metric in the battle to overtake Tesla, Leapmotor is now profitable, bagging £3m in the first half of the year. In a nice touch, its finances were tipped into the black by emissions credits paid by EV laggards and local subsidies, just like Tesla.

Like all Chinese ‘smart’ EV companies, Leapmotor is touting its own version of Tesla’s ‘FSD’ semi-autonomy but with the back-up lidar sensor that Tesla sniffs at. Reworking all that cleverness into something Europeans find palatable enough to pay extra for will take, we suspect, longer to achieve.

Three out of five. All the pieces are there, but making them Tesla shaped will take some work.

Arguably Tesla’s biggest competitive edge was always its cultish momentum, largely derived from Musk’s bombastic claims and the loyal echoes from the stockholding faithful. If that’s the metric to beat then Xiaomi is the most fearsome rival yet.

Adding electric cars to the company’s smart appliances in 2024 was a perfectly timed move from founder Lei Jun, and the guy is now treated as a rock star in China. Profits for the first half of 2025, including smart appliances, came to £2.74bn.

Designed with a knowing wink in the direction of Porsche and its Taycan, the launch SU7 sedan has been a smash hit in China and accounted for all Xiaomi’s 157,171 sales in the first six months of the year. Add the newly launched YU7 SUV (with its whiff of the Ferrari Purosangue) and the company is primed to tear past Tesla’s falling Chinese sales (264,498 in the first six months).

Even a slew of dashcam videos showing the SU7’s unfortunate inability to avoid crashing hasn’t tempered the buzz and perhaps even conferred some Tesla-style bad-boy status, with the 690bhp version of the YU7 capable of accelerating to 62mph in 3.2 seconds, for the equivalent of just £33,500.

Xiaomi highest profile fan in the automotive world is probably Ford CEO Jim Farley, who has heaped praise on the SU7 in the way that the former VW CEO Herbert Diess used to extoll the virtues of Tesla. The stage is set but winning over a global crowd won’t be easy.

Five out of five. Global hype, influencer fave, just two models, absurd speeds, whiff of danger: Xiaomi lays the greatest claim to being the next Tesla.