I’ve just spent a week in China – here’s why I think Chinese car companies could dominate in the UK
January 19, 2026 by Tom Wiltshire
Car changing is a big deal
Deputy reviews editor Tom Wiltshire is fresh from a week in the PRC, and has come home both impressed and intimidated by the scale of what it’s building – and Western car manufacturers should be quaking
I was a pretty poor student of A-Level geography but one thing I remember from my Human Geog textbook was ‘technological leapfrogging’. Many developing countries, for example, have no real landline phone networks – because by the time the country had matured to the point where people wanted phones, the Nokia 3310 existed.
China’s car industry is a little like that. It started in 1956, but like many emerging national industries it began building badge-engineered models – in this case based on Soviet designs. However, the first Chinese citizens didn’t start buying private cars until the 1980s. Several of China’s largest companies today – Geely, BYD, Chery – weren’t founded until the 1990s or the 2000s.
This means China doesn’t have a rich history of internal combustion to draw from – in fact, most Chinese firms would rather you forget they ever built plain old petrol cars. But this means the domestic industry has been able to commit wholesale to so-called New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) – pure electric and plug-in hybrid (PHEV) cars. And boy, has it committed.
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I’ve just spent a week in China on a press trip with Geely, being shown round the firm’s R&D centre, safety centre, HQ and one of its factories. And it’s fair to say that the modernity, the speed of development and most importantly, the sheer scale has just about blown my mind.
Of the 20+ million EVs sold worldwide in 2025, more than half (12.9m) were sold in China. Over 50% of new car sales in the country were either EV or PHEV, and they’re amazingly faithful consumers – the top 10 brands were all homegrown, with BYD contributing a staggering 3.5m vehicles alone.
Geely’s best-selling model, the EX2, shifts more than 50,000 units per month – the best-selling car in the UK barely managed that number in the entire year. Just walking round the city of Hangzhou is a vehicular culture shock – traffic is full of unfamiliar (to Westerners) home-grown vehicles, and aurally the rumble of diesels is largely replaced with the whirr of EV motors.
It’s so pervasive that the occasional diesel-powered van or bus is really noticeable. In this crowd, it’s the occasional Western BMW or Mercedes that looks staid and old-fashioned next to the super-modern Nios or Zeekrs.
The Chinese companies aren’t just content with sales on their home turf, though – they’re expanding, and the UK market is firmly in their sights. Geely has announced it’s targeting 100,000 sales by 2030 – by current numbers, that’d place them sixth in the manufacturer charts, ahead of giants like Hyundai and Toyota.
BYD is even more ambitious – after soaring sales in 2025, it expects to be the number one in the UK ‘within three years’.
Can they do it? Well, I don’t reckon image-conscious ultra-luxury brands or sports car brands have anything to worry about just yet. The Chinese alternatives don’t have the heritage to knock off the former, nor, for the most part, the driving sparkle to scare the latter (though that’s a problem Geely has fixed simply by buying Lotus).
But more mainstream companies should be very afraid. China’s proved it’s capable of making cars that UK customers want to buy, and the kicker is that they can do it for a lower price than any of the Western alternatives.
They’re agile enough to capitalise on trends, developing cars in months instead of years, and shrewd enough to penetrate the market with a traditional dealer model at a time when more companies are moving to online sales and upmarket boutiques.
So watch out, cause your next car may well be Chinese – and it might be a pretty damn good one, too.
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