The Tesla Model Y’s trailing three-month share of China’s battery-electric vehicle (BEV) market by revenue fell to a new record low of 8.0% in July.
According to China’s Passenger Car Association (CPCA) figures cited by X user ‘alojoh’ on Sunday, the numbers mark a 55.6% fall from about 18% the world’s best-selling model held in March 2024.
The Nio ES8 and Xiaomi SU7 climbed to second and third place at 4.9% and 4.8% respectively.
CPCA data published last week showed Tesla delivered 25,158 Model Y units in China in July, down 18% from 30,766 a year earlier.
Four of the first seven months of 2026 posted year-over-year declines — January fell 34%, March dropped 17%, June slipped 14%, and July contracted 18%.
The domestic softness contrasts with a record export push.
GigaShanghai shipped 295,324 vehicles abroad in the first seven months of 2026, surpassing the 226,034 units exported for all of 2025 by 30.6%.
July alone accounted for 66,330 export units — a 143.3% year-over-year jump and the strongest export month in the plant’s history.
Overseas shipments made up 70.9% of Tesla China’s wholesale sales that month.
Tesla typically prioritizes exports from GigaShanghai in the first month of each quarter before shifting production toward domestic deliveries later in the period.
China’s share of Tesla‘s global deliveries fell to 26.3%, the lowest since late 2020.
Model Y in China
Tesla currently offers the Model Y in several trims in China, including the Model Y L — a six-seat variant that launched first in the Chinese market in August 2025 at a starting price of 339,000 yuan ($50,300).
The company is preparing to relaunch the Model Y Performance after the variant was filed with the MIIT on July 10 and subsequently entered the purchase tax exemption catalogue on August 14 with a CLTC range of 659 km from a 78.4 kWh battery pack.
An updated Model Y Performance debuted first in Europe in August 2025, arrived in North America in October and Canada in December. China had been the notable holdout.
Nio ES8 Reaches Second Place
In July 2025, the Nio ES8 delivered just 1,090 units.
CPCA data shows July 2026 deliveries of 10,284, an 843% year-over-year increase and a 14.7% month-over-month recovery after three consecutive months of decline.
The third-generation ES8 launched at Nio Day in September 2025 at around 100,000 yuan below the second generation — and generated more than 100,000 firm orders in about 48 hours.
Deliveries ramped from 2,803 in September to a peak of 22,258 in December.
The model reached 100,000 cumulative deliveries in seven months, which Nio said was the fastest for any model priced above 400,000 yuan in China. Its 130,000th delivery came on July 22.
Monthly demand nearly halved between March and June — from 16,255 to 8,966 units — as the initial backlog cleared.
However, Nio responded by broadening the lineup — a five-seat version of the ES8 launched on July 9 at 382,800 yuan, making July the first full month in which the flagship was available in five-, six-, and seven-seat configurations.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer William Li has framed the five-seat SUV segment as about three times the size of the three-row category the ES8 previously served.
The third-generation ES8 accounted for 54.1% of Nio-brand deliveries in Q1 2026, carried a gross margin of about 20%, and drove the company’s first-ever quarterly profit in Q4 2025.
Xiaomi SU7 Holds Third
The Xiaomi SU7 delivered 21,044 units in July, down 14% year-over-year — the fifth consecutive month of decline as the second-generation model works to recapture the first generation’s run rate.
The Beijing-based company stopped producing the first-generation SU7 after 370,000 units.
The switchover cratered registrations — January fell 95% year-over-year to 1,133 units and February hit 218, a 99% collapse.
The second-generation SU7 launched on March 19 at a starting price of 219,900 yuan ($32,600), secured 15,000 locked orders in 34 minutes, and began deliveries on March 23.
Recovery took until April, when SU7 deliveries surged to 26,826 units before settling into a range of 20,000 to 24,000 from May through July.
Xiaomi announced on Weibo on Monday that it delivered the 500,000th SU7 since the sedan’s debut in late March 2024 — reaching the milestone across two generations of the model.
The SU7 outsold Tesla’s Model 3 in China in 2025 with 258,164 deliveries against 200,361 for the Model 3, one of the first times the Model 3 was overtaken in the premium sedan segment since Tesla began local production in 2019.
Xiaomi has set a delivery target of 550,000 vehicles for 2026, a 34% increase from the 411,837 it registered last year.
Behind the top three, Li Auto‘s i6 holds 4.5% of BEV revenue share, followed by the Nio ES9 at 2.9%, the Tesla Model 3 at 2.8%, and the Xiaomi YU7, also at 2.8%.
