There are over 150 different automakers in China right now struggling to find a way to stand apart from the crowd and find their market. In recent years China has found the European market ready and willing to accept cars from China, to the point where Chinese imports now make up over 20% of Euro market new car sales. As with all things from China, you have to separate the truly well engineered vehicles from the cheap underwhelming junk, but when you do, the cream rises to the top. Top Gear recently collected 20 examples of Chinese-built machinery and put them through the wringer of track testing to see which ones stand up to the rigors of daily operation. Some stood out in a good way and others fell flat on their face.
Top Gear's Ollie Marriage and Tom Ford came to some pretty smart conclusions after driving all of these machines. In the good column, MG's Cyberster, the Lotus Eletre and Emiya, and XPeng's Tesla Model Y copying G6. Then there's the undriveable taff, like Chery's Omoda 5 and Skywell's BE11. Thankfully the good dramatically outweighs the bad, and every new model that enters the market has improved on the ones before it. China is building cheap and cheerful machines, particularly the small "supermini" class of cars. The best of the bunch are still Euro-centric brands building cars to their specifications in Chinese factories, but China is learning how to compete in the global automotive market. This feels analogous to Korean cars in the early 2000s or Japanese cars in the 1970s, but the learning curve is getting significantly shorter.
If the Chinese takeover of the global market continues apace, and the U.S. market remains a tariff-cutoff protectionist home market, it's entirely possible we'll see a dramatic decline in U.S. brand automobile exports. China doesn't necessarily have to build better cars to become the global leader in automobiles, either. With a Chinese stranglehold on developing markets in the global south, the so-called soft power of a company like BYD or Great Wall goes a long way toward pushing American manufacturers out. Americans already buy almost all of their goods from Chinese manufacturers, why not cars, too?
If BYD could deliver its Dolphin Surf, a compact electric hatchback, to your door for under $25,000 wouldn't you be interested? I know I would. UK buyers can kip down to the shops and bag one for just 18,000 quid, they can. Ni hao, China.
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