CBS Sunday Morning visits Allen Day, a London dealership that has been selling Volkswagen cars for more than 50 years, where customers are now trading in their Lexuses for BYD Sealion 7s. The dealership boss says sales are excellent and the growth and quality of the product are, in his words, phenomenal. He never expected to sell Chinese cars.
BYD, which stands for Build Your Dreams, is a Chinese automaker that overtook Tesla last year as the world's top seller of fully electric vehicles. Tesla has since regained a lead in early 2026 on pure EV sales, though BYD still leads when plug-in hybrids are included. BYD's structural advantage comes from its origins: the company started as a battery manufacturer, which means it controls its entire supply chain before a car is ever assembled. According to Ben Nelms of New Automotive, a UK think tank, that gives BYD a cost advantage of roughly 25% over Western competitors.
The picture looks entirely different in the United States. In 2024, President Biden introduced 100% tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, a level that effectively doubles the price and makes import impractical. President Trump retained those tariffs and additionally rolled back emission standards and removed incentives to buy EVs. Analysts describe the combined effect as closing the market. The counter-argument: stifling competition may protect jobs in the short term while slowing the innovation that US automakers will eventually need to compete globally anyway.
The contrast in EV adoption across countries tells the story clearly. In Norway, about 97% of new car sales are now electric. In China, roughly half of all new car sales are EVs. In the US, the figure is under 10%. One British BYD owner, asked what his family in New Jersey thinks of his car, had a one-word answer: jealous.