August 2026: Leapmotor outsells Tesla China for the third month running — and BYD ships its biggest export haul yet

August 2026 brought the Chinese EV industry's largest monthly delivery tallies yet. BYD reported 440,293 total vehicles, with 189,466 crossing a border — closing on Chery Group's export count of 196,984. Chery reached a Jan-Aug cumulative of 1.91 million vehicles. Geely surpassed 1.94 million for the same period, with export volumes up 170 per cent year-on-year. At SAIC — parent of MG in the UK — August NEV sales hit 187,037, a gain of 44.1 per cent on the prior year. The outlier was GWM: overall sales slipped 1.87 per cent year-on-year, and domestic Chinese volumes fell for a tenth consecutive month while overseas shipments carried more than half the group's total.

The most striking data point in August was not from BYD or Chery — it was from a brand that UK buyers still sometimes treat as a budget newcomer. Leapmotor delivered 103,129 vehicles globally in August 2026, surpassing Tesla China's wholesale figure of 86,166 for the third month in a row. That is no longer a statistical quirk; it is a sustained performance. Leapmotor's Jan-Aug total stands at 560,883. For UK buyers of the B10, C10, or B05, the relevance is direct: the company behind their vehicle's design — backed in Europe by Stellantis — is scaling at pace. Xpeng also returned to sequential delivery growth in August with 39,107 vehicles, supported by its new GX model.

The BYD Sealion 08 — a mid-to-large SUV at 5,115mm long, with a 3,030mm wheelbase — launched in China on 2 September 2026 and has no announced UK programme. It deserves attention not as a purchase option but as a technology benchmark. The BEV variant carries a 115 kWh second-generation Blade Battery with CLTC range claims of 900 km (rear-wheel drive) and 800 km (all-wheel drive). Note that CLTC is China's testing standard; real-world WLTP-equivalent figures for UK conditions would be materially lower — typically 20–30 per cent less. The PHEV variant has flash charging capability: 10 to 70 per cent in five minutes at a BYD Denza station. The Sealion series sold 48,559 units in August 2026, down 8.86 per cent year-on-year.

Set aside the delivery tallies for a moment and consider what BYD is building beneath them. In September 2026 the company confirmed mass production of its own 4D millimeter-wave radar chip — manufactured on a 28nm process, rated for detection beyond 400 metres, and already ASIL B certified for ADAS use. This sits alongside the Xuanji A3, a 4nm automotive chip offering over 700 TOPS of compute per unit and more than 2,100 TOPS in a triple-chip configuration — China's first 4nm automotive silicon. The A3 is planned for deployment in Denza models in 2027. BYD's cumulative semiconductor R&D investment has surpassed 100 billion CNY, with more than 7,000 staff working in chip development. The practical implication for buyers of today's BYD models in the UK: the company is building the hardware foundation to sustain ADAS improvement over time, though the UK versions of current models do not yet benefit from this generation of silicon.

For UK buyers the most directly relevant numbers in this data release come from Chery. The company confirmed that Jaecoo 7, Jaecoo 5, and Omoda 5 each appeared among the UK's ten best-selling models so far in 2026 — a remarkable result for a brand that arrived here less than three years ago. Chery's Jan-Aug export total reached 1,343,334 vehicles, up 68 per cent year-on-year. GWM presents a more mixed picture. Domestic Chinese sales contracted for a tenth consecutive month, a sustained pressure signal that warrants monitoring by anyone financing an Ora 03 over three or more years. Overseas dependency exceeding 55 per cent is a buffer, not a remedy. NIO, meanwhile, posted an adjusted operating profit in Q2 2026 — a first for a company that has been loss-making at the operating level for most of its history — alongside August deliveries of 35,836 across its NIO brand and 14,662 from the more affordable ONVO marque.