BYD, founded in 1995 as a Chinese battery company, has been quietly outengineering Tesla for years. That’s because Tesla, taken over by Elon Musk and away from its founders, has been making grandiose claims about battery innovation without being held accountable. A new scientific study reveals that Elon Musk once again has been fundamentally misleading consumers (fraud). Tesla batteries perform significantly worse in critical metrics.

Comparing this specific heating per volume, the Tesla 4680 cell creates around 2× of the heat to be dissipated at a 1 C load (Figure 8). Thus, when designing a system with the same power requirements, the cooling needed for the Tesla 4680 cells must dissipate approximately 2× more heat per volume than that needed for the BYD cell at the same load.

The damning evidence confirms what many non-experts have long suspected – Musk’s fluffy “revolution” rhetoric is all sales and delivery hype lacking technical substance. While Tesla pushed headlines with battery promises, through social media puppets and stage performances, BYD has been actually engineering superior technology.

Can’t deliver what you don’t build.

Tesla clearly thrived with a loophole, allowing it to avoid scientific scrutiny of its battery claims. Musk maintained only a façade of technological leadership. This study provides the start in a new era of hard data to expose the truth behind Tesla’s personality-driven brand narratives.

Battery experts everywhere have known this truth all along, but now the evidence is being made clear for everyone to see in a simple study: when it comes to actual engineering quality, Tesla falls far short of its competitors.