Tesla named most valuable car brand in 2023

Tesla has overtaken Japan’s Toyota and Germany’s Mercedes-Benz as the most valuable car brand in the world in 2023.

Toyota, the world’s biggest carmaker by sales, is likely to post record sales for 2023 with 10 million Toyota and Lexus-branded vehicles sold. In the meantime, Chinese automaker BYD surpassed Tesla in battery electric vehicle sales in the fourth quarter of 2023.

For the entire 2023, however, Tesla remains a market leader in battery-only car sales with 1.82 million BEV sales in 2023 against 1.6 million for BYD. When it comes to the value of automaker brands, Tesla is seen as the most valuable brand in the world right now, as shown in our report.

Currently, the brand’s estimated value is $66.21 billion, up 43.9% from 2022, which is an impressive rise of $20.2 billion. According to the figures we looked at, Tesla was the most valuable car brand in the world in 2023, followed by Mercedes-Benz (valued at $58.8 billion), Toyota ($52.5 billion), BMW ($40.4 billion), and Porsche ($36.8 billion). Tesla also ranks 9th in The top 500 brands global ranking for 2023.

Brian McColl, a market analyst at TradingPedia, said: “Over the past few years, electric vehicles have been stealing market share from companies that traditionally make internal combustion engine cars (ICE cars), a trend that continues at a growing rate. As more consumers recognize the significance of carbon-neutral means of transportation, they are putting more value in brands such as Tesla.

“For years, the company has been a global leader in the design and manufacturing of fully electric vehicles, as well as in the cutting-edge technology that allows EV’s constant improvement. So, despite the recent criticism faced by its CEO, Elon Musk, Tesla will likely remain one of the most highly valued and respected EV brands in the world in the coming years.”

Methodology

Several reputable publications, including Forbes and Brand Finance, come up with a brand ranking every year. However, each has its own method of determining the value of a company or brand. Brand Finance, the publication we relied on for this visualisation, calculates the value of a brand in quite an interesting way, using the Royalty Relief method. In essence, researchers at Brand Finance determine the value a company “would be willing to pay to license its brand as if it did not own it”.

TradingPedia based its research on Brand Finance’s annual report on the top 500 global brands, and also sifted through dozens of country and industry-specific reports published on its Brandirectory website.