BYD sold 463,561 new energy vehicles in September, its best month of 2026 and up 17% on a year earlier. The Chinese carmaker filed the numbers with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Thursday 1 October.

The number that really stands out is the all-electric one. BYD sold a record 273,143 battery-electric passenger cars in the month, up about a third on last September. And its overseas sales stayed above 180,000 for the third month in a row.

A record month for BYD's battery-electric cars

BYD sells two kinds of car. There are pure battery-electrics, and there are plug-in hybrids, which carry a petrol engine as well as a battery. For most of the past few years the hybrids did a lot of the heavy lifting. September tipped things further towards the pure electrics.

Photo: Ein Dahmer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0), cropped

Passenger battery-electric sales hit 273,143. That's up 33.21% on a year earlier and 6.6% on August, according to figures CnEVPost compiled from the filing. It's the highest monthly total BYD has ever reported for its battery-electric cars. Plug-in hybrid sales went the other way, slipping 2.36% to 183,570.

Put simply, battery-electric cars made up 59.81% of BYD's passenger sales in September. A year ago, that share was 52.17%.

You can see the shift across the whole year, too. BYD's passenger battery-electric sales for the first nine months came to 1,629,957, up 1.5% on the same stretch of 2025. At the end of August that tally was still running behind last year, so September pulled it back into growth.

The month also kept two streaks alive. It was BYD's fifth straight month of growth on the year before, and its seventh straight month of growth on the month before. Production came to 463,864 vehicles, so the factories were building cars at almost exactly the rate buyers were taking them.

Commercial vehicles are a small part of the business, but they grew fastest. BYD sold 6,848 commercial new energy vehicles in September, more than double the 3,210 it sold a year earlier. That includes 791 buses, up from 375.

BYD's third quarter returned to growth

Step back and you see a company climbing out of a slow start to the year. In January BYD sold 210,051 vehicles, well down on the year before. Since March, every month has been bigger than the one before it.

BYD sold 1,323,065 new energy vehicles in the third quarter, CnEVPost worked out. That's up 18.75% on a year earlier and 19.41% on the second quarter. It's also the company's first quarter of growth on the year before after four quarters of decline.

For the year so far, BYD is still a little behind 2025, at 3,131,576 vehicles, down 3.94%. But the gap is closing. At the end of August it was 6.84%.

Reuters said September was BYD's fifth straight month of rising global sales, "buoyed by strong exports that have increasingly become a key pillar offsetting persistently weak demand at home."

Overseas sales stay near their peak

Exports are still the engine. BYD's filing put its new energy vehicle exports at 180,700 in September, up 153.6% from 71,256 a year earlier.

That's a touch below August's record of 189,466, which we covered when BYD's overseas sales set the record last month. Still, it's the third month running above 180,000. Overseas sales made up 38.98% of everything BYD sold in September. A year earlier, that share was under 18%.

Over the first nine months, BYD sold 1,342,960 cars overseas, up 92.66%. That's already more than the roughly 1.05 million it sold outside China in all of 2025, according to the Portuguese EV news site EV.

BYD's been aiming higher abroad. In a 7 September research note citing management, Deutsche Bank said BYD had lifted its 2026 overseas target to between 1.9 million and 2 million vehicles, and was aiming for more than 2.5 million in 2027. EV, reporting on Deutsche Bank's note, said management had also told investors that shipping capacity held back overseas sales this year. BYD's plant in Hungary, its first passenger car factory in Europe, was expected to start assembly in November or December, EV said.

At home, sales are still below last year, but they're getting better. BYD's domestic sales, which is the total minus exports, came to 282,861 in September. That's down 12.97% on a year earlier but up 12.77% on August, and it's BYD's best month at home this year.

What it means for Australian buyers

Australia is one of the places where BYD's overseas push is easy to spot. The brand sold 8,231 cars here in August. The Sealion 7 was the sixth best-selling vehicle in the country that month, and that's out of every vehicle, not just EVs.

That same month, battery-electric cars outsold petrol cars in Australia for the first time, with 27,078 sales and 24.9% of the market. BYD was the number two brand.

More models are reaching local showrooms. The Atto 3 EVO started deliveries here in September, priced from $41,990 plus on-road costs for the Dynamic.

The September filing doesn't split sales by country. We'll know how Australia went once the official September new car figures come out.

What's next for BYD

BYD's next big launch is the Da Han sedan, due on 13 October. CnEVPost reported that BYD is quoting up to 1,008 km of electric range for it. That figure is on China's CLTC test cycle, which tends to give longer numbers than the WLTP test used in Australia and Europe. So it's worth waiting for local figures before you compare.

On charging, BYD said in late September that it had reached 2,000 flash-charging stations along Chinese highways, three months ahead of its target, CnEVPost reported.

BYD's hiring as well. CnEVPost said the company started a recruitment drive in September at its biggest production base, in Xi'an, looking for more than 8,000 workers across several sites.

All of September's numbers are unaudited, and BYD's filing says they could still be adjusted. But on these figures, BYD heads into the last quarter of 2026 with three things going for it. It's just had its biggest month of the year and its best month yet for battery-electric cars. And its overseas business is aiming to sell close to 2 million vehicles this year.