America helped pioneer the electric-vehicle revolution, yet today no major EV battery maker is based in the United States. Asia’s dominance reveals how sustained investment, organizational capabilities, and America’s embrace of shareholder value reshaped the global race for a critical technology.
Based on a program to develop a zero-emission electric vehicle (EV) launched in 1990, between 1996 and 1999 General Motors (GM) produced 1,117 EV1s, leasing them to selected customers. In October 2000, however, having ceased the production of EV1s, GM sold its EV battery joint venture with Energy Conversion Devices to Texaco. Then, from April 2003, GM began to reclaim the EV1s from their users and literally crushed them out of existence. Recognizing the opening created by GM’s destruction of the EV1, in July 2003, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla. Ten months later, Elon Musk became Tesla’s main financial backer and chairman, investing $6.35 million of the $7.5 million raised in Tesla’s first round of venture funding. Flash forward 15 years to 2019, when Tesla sold 367,656 battery electric vehicles (BEVs) worldwide, with 51.5 percent delivered outside the United States, including 42,715 BEVs produced and sold in China. Tesla’s success signaled that the United States was positioned to become the leader of the global EV transition. That apparent lead was short-lived. China-based BYD, which sold just 147,185 BEVs in 2019, delivered 2,256,714 BEVs in 2025, compared with Tesla’s 1,636,129.
BYD also sold 2,288,709 plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), compared with Tesla’s zero, and the Chinese company could claim global leadership in both types of EV. Moreover, inside every vehicle BYD delivered in 2025 was a BYD battery, making the company the world’s second largest EV battery maker. BYD’s 16.4 percent share of the global EV battery market was less than half the 39.1 percent share of China-based CATL, a pure-play battery maker, but far surpassed Korea-based LG Energy Solution, in third place with a 9.3 percent share. Japan-based Panasonic, which supplies the batteries for Tesla’s EVs produced in the United States, had 3.9 percent of the global EV battery market in 2025. Asia is home to all the leading EV battery companies, while the United States can claim no major EV battery maker. This paper documents the rise to global dominance of the Asian EV battery companies, focusing on Panasonic, LG Energy Solution, BYD, and CATL. Building on the contents of this paper, we are currently deploying the “theory of innovative enterprise” to explain fully, in future papers, the sources of competitive advantage of the Asian battery makers and the reasons why the United States has fallen so far behind in the development and production of this critical technology.
