November 29, 2025 – According to Business Insider, carmakers globally have been taking cues from their Chinese counterparts, and even Tesla, a frontrunner in the electric vehicle (EV) sector, is no exception.
Jon McNeill, who previously served as Tesla’s global president of sales and marketing and is now a board member at General Motors, revealed that Tesla has disassembled and analyzed multiple Chinese-made EVs. The insights gained from these exercises have been incorporated into the design of some of its best-selling models.
During his tenure at Tesla from 2015 to 2018, when the company was grappling with the “production hell” of the Model 3 and just unveiling the first images of the Model Y, McNeill described Tesla as a “learning sponge.” He noted that one of the key lessons learned from Chinese EVs was the high degree of component reuse—sharing a large number of core parts across different models. This approach is evident in the Model 3 and Model Y, with Tesla CEO Elon Musk stating as early as 2019 during an earnings call that about 75% of the parts in the Model Y were shared with the Model 3, significantly accelerating its production ramp-up.
Although McNeill did not disclose which specific Chinese EVs Tesla had disassembled during his time at the company, he mentioned that in a recent joint disassembly of a BYD model with General Motors, he observed that the Chinese EV giant had taken component reuse to a new level. “Chinese engineers are very methodical about reusing internal parts that customers don’t see, saving a lot of money this way,” he said.
Of course, component reuse is not unique to Chinese automakers. The global automotive industry has long employed strategies like sharing parts within a platform, such as using the same steering wheels or turn signal stalks across different models of the same brand. However, McNeill pointed out that Chinese automakers like BYD have taken this to an extreme, extending reuse to secondary components, including battery packs, heat pumps, and even the motor systems in seats.
“If you disassemble all BYD models, you’ll find they use the exact same wiper motor, the same heat pump, and the same wiring harness channels,” McNeill said. “In other words, each model isn’t designed in isolation by a separate team.” He added that this approach was “extremely smart” because “a wiper motor itself doesn’t really change or enhance the driving experience for users.”
Notably, this deep level of component reuse differs from the common “platform-sharing” strategy in the industry, where different models share a common chassis or underlying architecture. McNeill said that the extent of component reuse among Chinese EV makers is uncommon among traditional automakers. He cited Toyota as an example, noting that each of its models comes with completely different heat pumps, wiper motors, and seat adjusters. “In other words, the ‘guts’ of a Corolla and a Camry have almost nothing in common,” he said.
Component reuse is crucial for any automaker to achieve efficient mass production and cost reduction, especially for emerging players. McNeill emphasized that over the past century, only one car company had truly succeeded in starting from scratch and scaling up successfully: Tesla. “Building cars is incredibly difficult, extremely capital-intensive,” he said, adding that American EV companies like Tesla needed to be “absolutely relentless” in cutting costs.
The ability of EV makers like Tesla, BYD, and Rivian to reuse components at a deeper level stems from their highly vertically integrated operating models—designing and manufacturing a large number of core components in-house. This level of control over design and production enables automakers to standardize more parts and ramp up production faster.
RJ Scaringe, CEO of Rivian, previously revealed that the company had disassembled a Xiaomi SU7 and praised the Chinese automaker for its “highly vertically integrated technology platform.” However, he also said that Xiaomi or other Chinese automakers’ approaches to further reducing EV manufacturing costs did not offer any new insights. “We fully understand how they do it in terms of cost,” Scaringe said. “But this disassembly didn’t teach us anything new.”
