Tesla vehicles registered 10,200 insurance units in China last week, bringing the number to 26,118 for the first three weeks of May.
Li Auto founder, chairman and CEO Li Xiang said last week that they had been complained about by some of their peers and therefore could not continue to share the weekly insurance registration numbers.
Interestingly, however, the company resumed sharing those numbers today to continue to show that it leads the pack among Chinese new energy vehicle (NEV) startups.
For the week of May 15 to May 21, Li Auto sold 7,100 units, far outpacing other new car brands and reigning as the weekly sales leader for new automaking brands in the Chinese market, the company said today on Weibo.
Li Auto did not explain on what basis the sales were counted, but apparently, they were insurance registrations.
Li Auto surpassed all other traditional luxury brands except Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi to remain in the top five luxury brands in the Chinese market in terms of sales, the highest-ranked Chinese brand on the list, it said.
In the first two weeks of May, Li Auto vehicles had 4,543 and 6,670 insurance registrations, respectively. This means that from May 1 to May 21, Li Auto sold about 18,313 vehicles.
The tables Li Auto shared today show that Nio vehicles had 1,400 insurance registrations last week. This means that Nio had 3,700 insurance registrations for the first three weeks of May.
Nio deliveries continue to be curbed by the upcoming launch of the new ES6, with insurance registration figures of 1,100 and 1,200 in the first and second weeks of May, respectively.
Nio will officially launch the new ES6 on May 24, and its deliveries will start on May 25.
The company is getting the ES6 to market with unprecedented efficiency, and as of May 20, the new ES6 show cars were available at nearly 300 Nio stores in 92 cities.
Xpeng registered 1,500 insurance units last week, the same as the previous week. In the first three weeks of May, Xpeng vehicles had 3,870 insurance registrations.
Xpeng deliveries were also dampened by the new model G6, which is expected to officially launch and begin deliveries at the end of next month.
A leaked image on Chinese social media yesterday shows that Xpeng saw the first production vehicle of the G6 rool off the assembly line.
Insurance registrations for Tesla vehicles in China were 10,200 last week, bringing the figure to 26,118 for the first three weeks of May. The number was 5,928 and 9,990 in the first two weeks of May.
BYD's (OTCMKTS: BYDDY) premium brand Denza had 2,600 insurance registrations last week, according to Li Auto, which doesn't share the figure for BYD.
Zeekr's figure for last week was 2,000 units. Its figure for the second week of May was 1,500 units, and the first week's figure was not available.
Neta had 1,500 units last week and 1,000 and 1,700 respectively in the first two weeks of May.
Notably, Li Auto's models are all extended-range electric vehicles (EREVs), targeting a much larger market than its pure-electric-only peers like Nio, Xpeng and Tesla.
Separately, according to data shared by auto blogger Yulong Zhu, insurance registrations for all cars last week were 350,000, of which 125,000 were NEVs, a 35.86 percent penetration rate.
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