Xpeng EV sales went down in October. It delivers about the half number of cars as Nio’s and Li Auto’s. Both the competitors have more than 10,000 units each, while Xpeng sold 5,101 cars in the third-straight month of the deadline.
The competition is getting tougher. Older automakers BYD and Tesla lead monthly deliveries by far, while new entrant Huawei claims its Aito brand has topped the 10,000-a-month mark less than a year since launch. Deliveries of Xpeng’s best-selling model, the P7 sedan, halved from September to October, with just over 2,100 units delivered last month. The company’s newly launched G9 SUV saw deliveries surge from 184 units in September to 623 units in October. Xpeng said mass deliveries of the G9 began on Oct. 27. The company has said it expects the new model to become its best-selling car next year.
Meanwhile, Nio has targeted a higher price range for both SUVs and sedans. It said that it delivered 10,059 vehicles in October. That marked a slight decline from September but marked a fifth-straight month of deliveries that topped 10,000. “Vehicle production and delivery were constrained by operation challenges in our plants as well as supply chain volatilities due to the COVID-19 situations in certain regions in China,” Nio said in a press release.
Other EV sales
Li Auto delivered 10,052 vehicles in October. Since May, the company has delivered more than 10,000 cars every month, except in August. After having only one model on the market since 2019, Li Auto has launched three new models in the last few months — the L9 which began deliveries in August, the L8 which is set to begin deliveries this month and the L7 which is set to reach consumers early next year.
Unlike Xpeng and Nio, Li Auto’s vehicles are not purely electric as they come with a fuel tank to charge the battery and extend the driving range. Among the three companies, Li Auto’s U.S.-listed shares have held up the best in a year of broad market declines. The stock is down by about 55% so far this year, while Nio shares have dropped by 69% and Xpeng is down by 87%. “We think the volume of G9 next year will exceed what we have achieved for P7, which makes it one of our top-selling vehicles,” Gu said in an interview. The P7 was Xpeng’s first sedan, launched in May 2020, which quickly outsold the company’s existing G3 SUV launched in December 2018. The P7 ranked 10th among all new energy passenger cars — excluding SUVs — sold in China during the first eight months of this year, according to the China Passenger Car Association.
