The innovations and eccentricities coming soon from the Chinese auto industry – Wallpaper*

It doesn’t take a business analyst to realise that Chinese cars are going to become much more of a thing in 2025. But even though many of the country’s plentiful supply brands already up and running in Europe and the US – either under their own steam or through acquired IP, collaborations and partnerships – there are many more companies weighing up the pros and cons.

Up until now, the Chinese car companies that have made the biggest inroad into European and American markets have tended to take existing badges and apply a new high-tech spin – like MG, Lotus, and Smart. Others have arrived with new nameplates – BYD, Nio, Zeekr, Great Wall Motor, for example – while still more manufacturers are readying themselves to enter the market in 2025 or 2026 (Hongqi Auto, Firefly, Omoda, Jaecoo, Yangwang to name a few).

The Chinese auto industry has made huge strides in innovation, safety, quality and branding in the 2020s and the country’s early and autocratically driven pivot to EVs gave it a huge head start on the technology, both in terms of home-grown brands and in the factories it runs for foreign manufacturers.

Today, over three-quarters of all EVs sold go to China, and a substantial proportion of these are built there as well. However, punitive import tariffs are coming from both the EU and the USA, spannering the sales projections of many Europe-based brands that rely on Chinese production, including Mini, Polestar and Lotus.

To the outsider, the Chinese motor industry is a dense thicket of partnerships, alliances, sub-brands, collaborations, platform-sharing and general confusion. In fact, most of the major Chinese car makers are partnered in some way or another with a Western manufacturer – it was a condition of doing business when the market opened up in the 1970s and 1980s.

SAIC Motor works alongside VW and GM, BAIC works with Hyundai and Mercedes, Dongfeng with Nissan, Honda and others. That’s not the whole story, because each conglomerate also has layers of brands and sub-brands, helped by the ease of electric platform sharing and cross-industry partnerships from big players in tech like Xiaomi and Huawei.

And don’t forget – these are just the models that match or exceed our current expectations for how a contemporary car should feel and perform. There are myriad tiny manufacturers making equally tiny cars for China’s vast rural population. Huge sellers like the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV will never break into legislatively prohibitive markets like the EU or the US, however much they tempt with their tiny footprints and low, low costs.