See BYD’s Fleet of Car-Carrying Cargo Ships Taking the Fight to Tesla

Elon Musk had a problem. As Tesla struggled to ramp up sales in October 2022, it faced a critical shortage of ships to deliver its EVs.

“There weren’t enough boats, there weren’t enough trains, there weren’t enough car carriers,” Musk told investors, after Tesla announced it had delivered tens of thousands of cars fewer than it made over the previous quarter.

As Tesla struggled, its biggest Chinese rival devised a novel solution.

BYD, which is on course to surpass Tesla this year as the world’s top seller of EVs, decided in 2022 to build a fleet of seven giant ships, each capable of carrying thousands of cars.

Unlike most of its Western rivals, which typically buy space on car carriers operated by shipping companies, BYD has cut out the intermediary as it doubles down on ambitious plans to sell half its cars outside China by 2030.

Six of BYD’s giant ships, which are emblazoned with the company’s livery and a striking red and white color scheme, have entered service in the past year.

Data obtained by Business Insider from ship tracking and maritime analytics provider MarineTraffic shows how the Chinese carmaker is using this fleet to drive an unprecedented international expansion, flooding ports in Europe, Brazil, and Mexico as it takes the fight to Tesla and overtakes legacy automakers.

EVs on the high seas

BYD’s first ship set sail in January 2024, when the BYD Explorer No.1 — a 200-meter-long, 13-deck, roll-on roll-off behemoth — went into service.

In July, the Zhengzhou, which can carry up to 7,000 vehicles, became the seventh vessel to join the fleet. The largest ship in BYD’s armada, the Shenzhen, has a capacity of over 9,000 vehicles, making it one of the world’s largest car-carrying vessels.

The massive ships have been busy. After launching, Explorer No.1 immediately began a 41-day voyage to Europe, the first of three separate trips there in 2024.

Explorer No.1 has also made three voyages to Brazil since May 2024. In May this year, it docked in the Brazilian port of Portocel in its second visit in four months, with two other BYD ships, the Hefei and the Shenzhen, also arriving in Brazil in April and May.

All three arrived fully laden and left empty as BYD raced to deliver its vehicles to Brazil ahead of a planned EV tariff rise in July.

The voyages to Europe and Brazil coincide with BYD’s sales surging in both markets.

BYD, which did not respond to a request for comment for this story, sold just 2,500 vehicles in Brazil in the first half of 2023. It’s sold over 56,000 vehicles there so far this year, per data from Brazil’s National Federation of Automotive Vehicle Distribution.

That’s more than Nissan, Renault, and Ford, and it has seen BYD take a dominant position in one of the world’s fastest-growing EV markets.

In Europe, BYD’s sales in the first half of the year were more than 300% higher than over the same period in 2024.

The Chinese carmaker sold more pure battery-electric vehicles than Musk’s automaker in Europe for the first time in April, and its global EV sales have outpaced Tesla’s for the past three quarters.

Stian Omli, a senior vice president at logistics intelligence firm Esgian, told Business Insider that BYD was essentially operating a “shuttle service” between its production hubs in China and key ports in Europe and Brazil.

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BYD’s strategy is shaking up the car shipping industry, which has been dominated historically by a handful of established shipping companies that usually plan and invest on cycles of a decade or longer.

Companies like Norwegian logistics giant Wallenius Wilhelmsen and Japanese firm NYK Line sell space aboard their ships to multiple companies, then try to stop at as many ports as possible and pick up cargo for the return voyages. But Omli said BYD’s strategy was to go direct, dump a massive number of EVs at one or two destination ports, and often return to China empty.

“Just like they have changed the competitive landscape when it comes to cars, the Chinese are also changing the competitive landscape when it comes to the car carriers,” Omli said.

China’s brutal EV market forces BYD to go global

Stephen Dyer, managing director at auto consultancy AlixPartners, told Business Insider that the Chinese EV industry’s drive to expand overseas is driven by a “never-ending” price war at home, as over 100 EV brands fight it out in the world’s most brutally competitive car market.

“If you can succeed outside China, you gain credibility with your core market consumers in China,” said Dyer.

BYD could do with a boost. In July, the automaker’s sales fell for the first time this year, putting its target of selling 5.5 million cars in 2025 at risk.

BYD’s decision to operate its own ships had its roots in a post-COVID supply crunch between 2021 and 2023, when high demand combined with a shortage of specialised car carriers. This crunch sent the price of one car carrier for a yearlong charter soaring as high as $125,000 per day, far above the typical pre-COVID high of around $25,000, Omli said.

This is what made Musk rage and prompted BYD to embark on its radical strategy just as it was beginning to enter international markets in earnest.

BYD’s setup allows the company to avoid being caught out if prices soar again, Omli said, and also gives it more flexibility to send its cars where and when it wants.

Control over its supply chain is a key part of BYD’s formula for building EVs quicker and cheaper than its rivals. The company manufactures almost all of its own parts. Executive vice president Stella Li previously said that the tires and windows of BYD’s Dolphin hatchback were the only parts not made in-house.

“Developing your own component suppliers gives BYD not only some cost leverage over other suppliers, but also the flexibility to do things much faster,” Dyer said.

“When you have your own fleet, it’s the same idea. It allows you to do things quickly and flexibly. You can divert them to anywhere that you want to go, even part of the way on the voyage. You’re assured of supply,” he added.

A costly gambit

BYD is not the only Chinese EV company to dabble in deep-sea shipping.

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Rivals such as SAIC Motors have built even larger fleets, and Omli estimated the share of the global deep-sea car carrier fleet controlled by Chinese companies will rise from 10-15% to as much as 25% in the next few years.

It’s a hefty investment. Omli estimated that building the first four ships in its fleet cost BYD around $500 million, with such ships typically costing between $100 and $130 million each to build.

BYD’s fleet shows no signs of slowing down. The automaker’s monthly vehicle exports in July were nearly three times higher than a year ago, per company figures, and its vessels have made six voyages to Europe so far this year.

Recently, BYD’s fleet has deployed its “shuttle service” strategy in Mexico. The 200-meter-long Changzhou became the first BYD vessel to arrive in the country in June, before criss-crossing the Pacific and returning with another load a month later.

The Explorer No.1 has just made the same journey, docking at the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas on 14 August.

BYD recently abandoned plans to build a factory in Mexico, but the company’s EVs are still in high demand there. Executives say they expect sales to double this year.

Data from Esgian shows that the four BYD vessels it tracks — The Explorer No.1, Shenzhen, Hefei, and Changzhou — have visited the Mexican ports of Mazatlan and Lararo Cardenas, along with Portocel, more than any other ports outside Asia this year.

No risk, no reward

While BYD’s shipbuilding surge has given the company the flexibility to export its EVs at unprecedented volume, the strategy has risks.

The company and its Chinese rivals have shipped so many vehicles to Europe over the past two years that it has put shipping infrastructure under pressure and turned some ports into giant parking lots.

Germany-based auto analyst Matthias Schmidt told Business Insider that most of BYD’s sales in Europe were to companies and dealerships, rather than consumers.

Schmidt said he believed BYD’s strategy was to flood the market through corporate channels and build enough momentum to become a recognisable brand for European consumers.

The shipping supply crunch that pushed BYD to build its fleet has now mostly abated. A wave of car-carrying ships has been launched in the past two years, easing the shortage and bringing prices down to around $50,000 per day for one car carrier on a one-year charter, with Omli estimating they will probably fall to around $30,000.

With shipping via external carriers a more affordable option, Schmidt said BYD now has to justify the massive costs of running its own fleet by exporting more vehicles.

“That’s probably partly behind the high number of vehicles coming to Europe right now. They need to ship those vessels relatively full to maximise utilisation,” Schmidt added.

Alexander Brown, a senior analyst at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies, said that “a lot has changed” since BYD went all in on its own ships three years ago.

Since then, Western economies have raised trade barriers to protect their own auto industries from Chinese carmakers, and the Trump administration has set about reordering global trade with tariffs.

With this protectionism in mind, BYD has another big investment: factories. It recently began production at its new factory in Brazil, on the site of a plant Ford closed in 2021 after years of poor sales and big losses, ending a century of Ford production in the country.

The Detroit automaker also shut down multiple plants in Europe, and Chinese automakers are now filling that gap. BYD is building production sites for the European market in Hungary and Turkey.

Brown added that, if BYD had known how much tariffs would rise after going all in on cargo ships, “they may have done things a little bit differently.”

Graphics by Jinpeng Li.