In the main forum I speculated that there might be an inventory issue. Tesla CN website extended the delivery times from end of year to 1-4 weeks a few days ago. Tesla actually increased the price of cars sold in China from Nov to Dec by halving the insurance discount. It also seems that the cars ready to ship out of their dock prior to shut down are RHD cars to AUS, not giving a chance to replenish any inventory shortage for December or even Jan.China NEV insurance registrations for last week are out. Tesla fell to 8915. Barring the possibility of fleet sales that I mentioned earlier, China sales are trending toward ~45k for December vs. 62.5k in November and 70.6k December last year. Q4 looks closer to 125k now, vs. 116k last year.
This seems to be mostly a Tesla issue. BYD had 51k registrations again last week. The latest press reports say Shanghai will run January 3-19 then shut down for Lunar New Year. Q1 is seasonally soft in China, more so this year with planned subsidy cuts, but Tesla demand has historically held up pretty well.
I get the feeling China demand at Q4 price levels is settling in at 400-500k/year. If so, they need to launch the Model 2 or whatever they call it in 2023.
It seems that all of this was done on purpose due to the Covid wave. Also there are some PHEV incentives going away in 2023 so deliveries of those may be high for BYD. I know Shanghai will seize to allow PHEV plates to be part of the NEV plate allocation starting 2023 which will just destroy sales.