Despite All The Smack Talk, Tesla Copied BYD

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Tesla fans criticized BYD electric vehicles for years. Supposedly, they were cheap, boring, and poorly made. However, BYD has grown and grown over the past several years, now produces far more cars than Tesla, and has about the same number of R&D engineers as Tesla has total employees.

Now we have some news regarding Tesla and BYD that really busts the myth that Tesla didn’t have anything to learn from BYD and always did things better.

John McNeill, Tesla president from 2015 to 2018, which included the period of Tesla Model 3 production ramp-up and Model Y development, said in a recent interview that Tesla got a lot of inspiration from its Chinese EV rivals back then.

“The Chinese engineers are really disciplined about reusing parts underneath the hood that the customer can’t see, and they save a lot of money that way,” McNeill said. Rather than use a bunch of different parts, they tried to use high volumes of the same parts in a lot of different models, benefiting from economies of scale while still providing model variety to attract different types of customers. For example, the same windshield wiper motors and heat pumps were used across models.

All of this led to Tesla doing something very similar with the Model 3 and Model Y. Around 75% of the parts in the Model Y ended up being parts that were also in the Model 3. It was really just a slightly taller Model 3 with more cargo space and a hatch instead of a trunk.

So, while Tesla fans were trashing the Chinese EV brand, Tesla was actually tearing down its vehicles and learning from them. Years later, Tesla sales are much, much higher than they were, but BYD sales are in a whole other stratosphere.