► Chinese brands are booming in the UK
► What are the reasons behind the success?
► Gavin Green analyses…

The names may be unfamiliar, the styling occasionally challenging, and the EV tech is constantly evolving. But the buying experience couldn’t be more normal. It’s a crucial – and often ignored – element in how cleverly Chinese car makers are expanding into Europe and, especially, the UK.

In June 2025, one in 10 cars sold in the UK were from Chinese brands. Most were EVs. In the first six months of 2025, it was more than eight per cent – up from five per cent in 2024. That compares with 4.3 per cent across the EU, and just 1.6 per cent in Europe’s biggest car market, Germany. The UK is responsible for 30 per cent of all Chinese car sales in Europe. Thirty per cent of all EVs sold in the UK are Chinese.

Why is it working so well in the UK in particular?

Lower UK tariffs are a factor, and so is our lack of a strong indigenous industry to protect. There’s also the strange phenomenon of China’s number one UK car brand MG playing like a local, never mind that it’s owned by a Chinese state-controlled car maker.

The ambition is huge. China’s most prosperous car maker and EV market leader BYD expects to be the number one name plate in the UK in ‘three years’, according to its UK boss, Bono Ge. The Chinese manufacturers have been helped by some of the brands that used to sell in big volumes withdrawing from mainstream segments, as they try to move upmarket.

Ford has dropped its one-time top-seller, the Fiesta, and soon stops making the Focus. Instead, it concentrates on more profitable commercial vehicles and pricier name plates like Explorer, Capri and Mustang. Vauxhall is also scaling back.

This leaves a gaping hole in the market that the Chinese companies are delighted to fill. It also leaves prime dealer sites empty and desperate for product.

The big Chinese players are courting the major dealer groups and the best family-owned retailers. The high streets and car retailing parks of the UK increasingly house MG, BYD, Leapmotor, Omoda and Jaecoo showrooms. They are run by experienced dealers with strong local connections, happy to recommend these new brands to friends and acquaintances. The dealers have the customer relationship, not the car maker.

Says BYD’s Bono Ge: ‘The traditional dealer model helps us to sell cars. We partner with retailers who know their customers and have a great local network and local familiarity.’ This contrasts with other EV-focused brands such as Tesla, which sells direct to customers through its own network of stores or online platforms, and Polestar, which tried a similar model but has now taken a more conventional path.

‘The dealers know the market,’ says Ge. ‘They know the customer needs. They help us to learn faster. We also want to be in mainstream locations, where other OEM brands are available, and where established dealers operate.’

Initially, dealers introduced BYD to new customers who had never heard of the Chinese brand. Now, the level of unprompted familiarity approaches 50 per cent: last year’s sponsorship of the men’s football Euros saw a big uplift, says Ge. Battery electric vehicle buyers are also more likely to know about BYD than those in search of engines.

Many big dealer bodies have BYD franchises, including the family-owned Hendy group, which has a string of retailers across the South Coast. MG was its first Chinese brand. Now it has BYD, and shortly Jaecoo and Omoda.

‘All big dealer groups look at their representation and question whether it’s fit for the future,’ notes Mark Busby, commercial director of Hendy. The appeal of selling Chinese cars such as BYD is clear. ‘They are good products, priced well,’ says Busby. ‘The way they’re growing suggests they’re going to be dominant players in the future. You can really sense the high energy levels. And it’s true of customers, too.  When we opened our BYD dealership in Tonbridge, I’d never experienced such a level of inquiry. They are new, get good publicity, and consumers are curious.’

Of course, the Chinese car makers are hardly the first new market entrants to sell partly on low price. Lada, Proton and Daewoo, and many other makers, have tried that before and failed. But they only sold on price. As well as low labour costs and long working hours, the Chinese firms add advanced technology, increasingly high quality and very deep pockets.

BYD is particularly impressive and is the Chinese car maker most feared by the West. The world’s biggest EV maker, and the world’s third most valuable car maker after Tesla and Toyota, BYD is astonishingly ambitious. A car maker for just over 20 years, last year sales grew by 40 per cent globally.

It aims to be the number one car brand in the UK in just three years. Bono Ge says BYD will succeed because it will have a car in every major segment and because of the technology, reputation and cost advantages.

The goal is to sell more than half its cars outside China by 2030. If successful, it would become the world’s biggest car maker, overtaking Toyota. Europe is the main growth market; tariffs and protectionism currently rule out the USA. Production for Europe will come from Hungary and Turkey, and another site to be announced, as well as from China. Cars from BYD’s premium brand, Denza, will go on sale in the UK next year.

In the period August-October 2024 BYD hired 200,000 extra people. Repeat: extra people. That’s more than the entire workforce of America’s biggest car maker, General Motors. BYD’s total workforce of over 900,000 is equal to the combined employment of Volkswagen and Toyota.

Unlike European, American, Japanese and Korean car makers, BYD’s vertical supply model means it designs and produces all the core EV technologies itself, including the batteries and electric powertrain. On the Seal electric car, 75 per cent of parts are made in-house. On a Volkswagen ID. 3, it’s 35 per cent. On a typical BYD, it’s ‘over 70 per cent’, says Bono.  

New vehicle development typically takes BYD 18-20 months, compared with four years for long-established Western brands. New models come quick and fast. Since Tesla launched its top-selling Model Y in 2020, BYD has rolled out more than 40 new vehicles.

‘We own the supply chain, and that helps to develop new systems faster,’ says Bono Ge. ‘We have 120,000 engineers – the biggest R&D team in the automotive industry – and that speeds development.’ A faster development time cuts costs and gets fresh technology to market sooner.

Such rapid development is now common in China, and by comparison the Europeans are, as Ge succinctly puts it, the Europeans ‘a little bit slow’. Or, as a senior European engineer working for rival Chinese car brand Chery recently said: ‘Global car makers have no idea what they’re up against.’