Chinese car brands follow the Tesla template, but with a greater focus on price
Editor Paul Barker thinks the rise of Chinese car brands in the UK has caught out established names like Skoda and Vauxhall
Over the past 18 months or so Chinese car brands have been hitting UK roads in their droves. So to help you make sense of all these new manufacturers, we’ve created a special report covering everything you need to know.
Around one-in-10 new cars in the UK are now made by a Chinese brand, which is quite a rise. Even more significantly, we’ve never seen so many unfamiliar names arriving here at once.
It’s fascinating and, if you’re an established manufacturer, terrifying. I’ll be amazed if all the new brands survive, but the bigger players coming to the UK are hell bent on making an impression – and have the cash to do it.
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What’s more, the success is not based on incremental new-car sales. It has come – and will continue to come – at the expense of household names. The big brands we’ve known all our lives have been caught out by how quickly UK buyers have been willing to embrace the idea of driving a car from a firm they hadn’t heard of a couple of years ago – and maybe hasn’t even been producing vehicles for long.
In some ways Tesla is the template, but the Chinese major less on personality, more on affordability, and use lots of marketing money, and tech, to gain sales.
How legacy brands respond is key. Renault, for example, set up the Advanced China Development Centre in Shanghai to learn from the Chinese how to bring cars to market more quickly. Changing western culture to make decisions on a weekly, not monthly basis helps turbocharge projects: the ACDC developed the new Twingo in less than two years and with a 20,000-Euros (£17,400) price.
Stellantis is on it too, developing the low-cost ‘Smart Car’ platform under the Citroen C3 and Vauxhall Frontera to make EVs more affordable, and forging a joint venture with Leapmotor to import Chinese cars to Europe. Meanwhile, VW Group is partnering with XPeng on new software for China. Taking action is the attitude proposed by Skoda CEO Klaus Zellmer: “We just need to be better.”
This perfect storm of the transition to electric and the rising cost of living has made consumers more willing than ever to try something new. Despite vocal geopolitical concerns, Chinese cars are being met with less suspicion than new Japanese brands were in the sixties and seventies. The survival of the fittest car makers will be a compelling story to be played out over the coming years.
Did you know you can sell your car through Auto Express? We’ll help you get a great price and find a great deal on a new car, too.
Chinese cars on Auto Express
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