September in China: BYD, Then a 10,000-Unit Scrum Behind It

A Chinese Weibo account has compiled the September 2026 new-energy sales table, and it splits neatly into one enormous number and a traffic jam.

#	Brand	September 2026
1	BYD	463,600
2	Leapmotor	105,656
3	XPeng	41,256
4	Xiaomi	40,000+
5	HarmonyOS Smart Mobility	37,490
6	NIO (incl. Onvo and Firefly)	37,408
7	Zeekr	37,216
8	GAC Hyper / Aion	35,494
9	Li Auto	31,817
10	Deepal	30,185

The gap at the top is the story

BYD's 463,600 is not just first — it is larger than the next nine brands combined (roughly 396,500 on these figures). The distance between first and second is bigger than the entire rest of the table. Whatever the competitive argument is in China's EV market, it is not currently being had with BYD at the top of it.

Then everyone else, inside 11,000 units

Positions three to ten span 41,256 down to 30,185 — a band of about 11,000 vehicles containing eight brands. XPeng, Xiaomi, HarmonyOS, NIO, Zeekr, GAC, Li Auto and Deepal are separated by less than one good model launch. In a month where the whole market was soft, moving one place in this table is worth a few hundred cars.

That is the least comfortable kind of competition: eight companies with broadly comparable volumes, similar price points and no structural moat between them — while the two brands above them operate at entirely different scale, and Leapmotor's 105,656 sits at roughly two and a half times XPeng's volume.

Direction of travel differs more than position

The gaps between these brands are small; the trends are not:

• Leapmotor grew 59% year on year — its third consecutive month above 100,000.
• Zeekr grew 103.9%, and Xiaomi is above 40,000 in only its second full year of deliveries.
• HarmonyOS Smart Mobility is reported down nearly 30% year on year — the sharpest decline among the named brands.
• Li Auto fell 6.3%, Deepal declined, and XPeng was marginally down on last September's figure (our coverage of XPeng's month is here).

So the table is not a ranking of who is winning so much as a snapshot of who has a growth engine and who does not. Exports are the dividing line: Chinese coverage of the month describes six major new-energy brands declining domestically while BYD and Geely sprinted overseas — with the domestic market itself down an estimated 7–12% year on year in retail terms.

Where XPeng sits

Third on volume, roughly flat on the year, and — the part the volume column hides — with the highest average selling price of the volume players in this table, at around ¥169,000 per vehicle on first-half numbers, against roughly ¥100,000 for Leapmotor (we worked through that comparison here). Its September growth came from a ¥300,000-plus SUV and from export markets, not from chasing the bottom of the price range.

Caveats

• This is a compilation by a Weibo account, not an official statistic. It mixes reporting definitions: BYD's figure is a "sales" number that includes exports, others are "deliveries", and NIO's includes two sub-brands.
• Wholesale deliveries and retail sales are different things, and Chinese monthly announcements are wholesale — a figure can include channel fill.
• The Deepal entry was truncated in the original post (it read "3…"); we have used the separately reported 30,185.
• Year-on-year comparisons come from individual outlets, not from the table itself.
• Ranking across these brands is fragile by construction: different product mixes, price points and export exposures do not compare cleanly on volume alone.

The bottom line

One manufacturer at a scale nobody else is close to, one volume challenger with a 59% growth rate, and eight brands fighting over an 11,000-unit band in a shrinking domestic market. The interesting question in the Chinese EV market is no longer who leads it — it is how many of the eight in the middle can find a reason to exist that is not simply a cheaper version of the car next to them.

Source: 搞机王腾霄 and 俊俏的猫头鹰 (Weibo), with figures cross-checked against IT之家, Eastmoney, 经济观察报 and tmtpost — translated & adapted for XPENGTech.