What the October totals contain
The headline NEV number rose 10.97% year on year and 5.74% from September. That makes six consecutive months of year-on-year growth and eight consecutive months of month-on-month growth. The rate is easing, though: year-on-year growth was 16.98% in September, and October is the third month in a row in which it slowed.
Strip out the commercial side, which contributed 7,043 units (+45.22%), and BYD's passenger NEV sales came to 483,125, up 10.59% year on year. Year to date the group has sold 3,621,744 NEVs, still 2.16% behind 2025 – but the gap narrowed from 3.94% after nine months.
BEV share climbs to 63%
This is the part of the release that matters most. Pure electric cars took 63.28% of BYD's passenger sales in October, against 59.81% in September and 50.95% in October 2025. That is a 12.33 percentage point swing in twelve months. September's 273,143 BEVs became October's 305,743, a gain of 32,600 cars in one month.
The plug-in side tells the mirror image. PHEV sales fell 2.36% year on year in September and 17.23% in October, the second consecutive decline and a much steeper one. For the first ten months, BEVs total 1,935,700 units (+5.86%) against 1,625,969 PHEVs (−11.02%). BYD built its volume on dual-power cars; in 2026 the battery-only half is doing the pulling.
The product push behind that is visible in the pipeline we have been tracking, from the 5,500 mm Yangwang Altior at the top to the 5,145 mm seven-seat Ocean MPV still in testing. Neither is a volume car in Europe, but both show how wide BYD is spreading its range.
Exports are now a third of monthly volume
BYD shipped 170,194 NEVs abroad in October, up 102.84% year on year. That is 34.7% of the month's total NEV volume by our calculation. Month on month exports slipped 5.81% from September, so the doubling is a year-on-year effect rather than a new record.
Year to date, exports reached 1,513,154 units, up 93.75%. Against total YTD NEV sales of 3,621,744, roughly 41.8% of everything BYD sold in 2026 went outside China. That ratio is the reason the European pricing question keeps coming back.
What a BYD costs per 100 km
Our own arithmetic, with stated inputs: a compact electric car using 17 kWh/100 km costs about €3.40 per 100 km on Czech household electricity at roughly €0.20/kWh, and about €9.35 per 100 km on public DC charging at roughly €0.55/kWh. A petrol compact at 6.5 l/100 km and €1.40/l works out at €9.10 per 100 km. Home charging is roughly a third of the petrol cost; public fast charging sits at parity. You can plug your own tariff and consumption into our charging cost calculator, or check winter consumption with the range calculator.
The European duty question
Chinese-built BEVs entering the EU have faced countervailing duties since October 2024, set at 17% for BYD on top of the standard 10% import tariff. Talks about replacing the duties with minimum-price undertakings have been running since 2025 without a published outcome. Cars assembled at BYD's Szeged plant in Hungary fall outside the duty. The October release does not break exports down by destination, so it is not possible to say from these figures how much of the 170,194 went to EU customers.
For European buyers the practical reading is simpler than the politics. A BEV-heavy BYD range means more models competing in the €25,000–€40,000 bracket where the family cars sit, and more pressure on charging prices – our cheapest superchargers list currently covers 483 locations across Europe, and the spread between the cheapest and the average site is wider than most drivers expect. Grid-side capacity is the other half of that story, as the 500 kW depot flexibility project in Ireland shows.
What the release leaves open
October's 490,168 units are the highest since December 2024, and only the three months of Q4 2024 were bigger. The company has not published a European breakdown, an export destination split or a BEV/PHEV forecast for the rest of the year. The BEV record is three months old and running; the PHEV decline is two months old. Whether both continue through November is not in the data yet.
Model specifications for the cars sold in Europe are in our EV catalog.