China's Car Industry Is Wowing the World–But Crashing at Home
wsj.com
wsj.com
China growth straining global auto shipping capacity: Liner CEO - https://www.freightwaves.com/news/china-growth-straining-glo... - August 20th, 2026
(China currently exports ~12M EV units/year, and has domestic capacity to build ~50M EV units/year, total global TAM is ~90M units/year)
"The number of Chinese EV brands selling at least one product rose to a record 143 at the end of 2025, according to a tally by management consultant AlixPartners.” (Overcapacity subsidized by the CCP)
"Now, in a country with a shrinking population, reliable big-city mass transit and a growing robotaxi industry, sales of passenger cars to regular Chinese families are unlikely to ever again record a sustained surge, analysts said. But cities and their private-sector partners are reluctant to admit that their lofty ambitions won’t be fulfilled, which would result in factory closures and lost jobs.” (Lack of domestic demand means exports are the main path toward growth)
"In recent months, Germany’s once-towering trade surplus with China in automotive products has turned into a deficit. Germany—the country widely credited with inventing the automobile—is embracing Chinese brands, while German automakers are struggling in China.” (EU will begin restricting Chinese auto imports or enacting tariffs)
"In the U.K., BYD is selling its flagship Seal hybrid sedan for the equivalent of around $44,000, more than $10,000 less than a similarly equipped Volkswagen Passat. These vehicles are sold at Chinese price points we cannot match with European cost structures,” said Volkswagen Chief Executive Oliver Blume in an August memo to staff."
"About the only major market where Chinese automakers aren’t causing upheaval is the U.S., where tariffs and restrictions on Chinese vehicle technology have all but locked out the country’s automakers. General Motors and Ford are among the few automakers still pumping out relatively healthy profits.” (America isn't going to let them come in and destroy the US auto industry)
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... (constrain both graphs to EVs only)
BYD’s global sales rise 17% in September - https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/byd-global-sales-r... - October 8th, 2026
BYD’s $10,000 EV Is Getting A Huge Upgrade, With 5-Minute Charging - https://insideevs.com/news/809788/new-byd-seagull-dolphin-su... - September 28th, 2026
- Everybody knows that China’s EV landscape is vastly different from what we get in the United States, and the main difference is just how cheap cars can get over there. One such example is the BYD Seagull, which now retails for the equivalent of roughly $10,000.
- Thanks to its low price and more than decent equipment, the Seagull, sold as the Dolphin Surf in Europe, was once China’s best-selling car, and now there’s a brand-new one that promises to offer more of everything.
Hyundai Motor CEO warns of Chinese vehicle surge in the US without guardrails - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/hyunda... - September 17th, 2026
- Hyundai Motor CEO Jose Munoz warned on Thursday that the US could face a similar wave of Chinese auto imports that has disrupted Europe's car market unless Washington maintains tariffs and other market-access safeguards.
- Chinese automakers have rapidly expanded in Europe, eroding the market share and profitability of established manufacturers including Hyundai and Volkswagen, by offering vehicles at significantly lower prices.
- Munoz said Chinese vehicles are 30% to 40% cheaper than rival models in some markets, including Italy, Spain and France. That is despite trade barriers including tariffs or minimum pricing commitments that the European Union imposed on Chinese-built electric vehicles after concluding they benefited from unfair state subsidies.
BYD becomes Australia’s first brand since Holden to nearly outsell Toyota - https://www.drive.com.au/news/byd-becomes-australias-first-b... - July 3rd, 2026
- BYD has smashed its monthly sales record in Australia, becoming the first brand other than Toyota to deliver more than 18,000 cars since Holden's early 2000s peak.
BYD wants to become the world’s largest automaker in five years. Stella Li is the executive selling that vision to the world - https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/byd-wa... - June 15th, 2026
- In the past few years, BYD has been on an impressive sales trajectory. In 2022, the company dropped pure internal-combustion models from its lineup, focusing solely on electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. By 2024, global vehicle sales had reached 4.27 million units, ranking the company fourth among global car manufacturers. In 2025, BYD sold a record 4.6 million new-energy vehicles, making it the world's top-selling EV maker by pure-electric sales—stealing the crown from Elon Musk's Tesla.
- Much of this growth has been driven by its global expansion. International sales more than doubled in 2025 to just over 1 million vehicles as BYD pushed into Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, where higher pricing helps offset fierce domestic competition and ongoing price wars in China's EV market. In May, BYD sold more than 160,000 vehicles abroad, up 80% year on year, and is targeting 1.5 million overseas sales in 2026.
Can't make enough money doing that, plus not everyone wants a $10,000 USD EV that can charge in 5 minutes. Americans for example want Ford F-150s. Chinese people aren't even buying them since sales are down and China is focusing on exports while subsidizing factories (what does that tell you about demand and the economics?).
So you can't just say "BYD build this car therefore China will own every market" which is what you're implying here. Also BYD still has to compete in the Chinese market - race to the bottom means commoditization. Android sells the most phones, but Apple makes the most money. You'd always rather be Apple.
> The world my dude. Per my last comment, "total global TAM is ~90M units/year."
Can you provide a breakdown by country if you have one? For example the US wouldn't be included in that TAM, obviously, since we won't allow their cars here. Europe will follow as well with tariffs and sales quotas at a minimum because they will protect the industry before they'll adopt Chinese EVs, but until they formally do I think it's fine to include the continent in that TAM.
> They might price higher in some countries, but the demand for China produced high quality low price EVs will be voracious in a world of high oil prices for at least the next year or two.
Yes and no. There's a lot of nuance to be had here.
Chinese carmakers now sell one EV abroad for every two at home - https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ev-exports-overcapacity-g... - August 18th, 2026
- Some 540,000 EVs left China in July, a monthly record, while about 980,000 were sold at home, according to a report from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a London-based research firm. That worked out to one EV exported for every two sold domestically, compared with one for every five last July.
- The move abroad is permanent rather than a response to one bad year, and the price war that has played out inside China for two years is following the cars overseas, Lei Xing, founder of Chinese auto industry consultancy AutoXing, told Rest of World. Chinese cars are inexpensive, widely available, and carry the technology buyers want, much like Japanese and German cars did when those countries built their own export industries, he said.
- EV sales outside China, Europe, and North America almost doubled to 1.7 million units in the first seven months of this year, and Chinese brands supplied half of them, up from a quarter in 2023, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
- “The expectation is that significantly more EVs will be sold in the rest-of-world region this year than in North America,” George Whitcombe, senior EV analyst at Benchmark, told Rest of World.
VW is laying 100k workers off, for example.
Volkswagen to cut further 50,000 jobs as it ends row with union over revival plan - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/sep/03/volkswagen-... - September 4th, 2026
BMW 8000.
BMW to cut ‘as many as 8,000 jobs’ under pressure from Chinese rivals - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jul/29/bmw-cut-job... - July 29th, 2026
I don't care who profits, profit doesn't matter, I care about units moved. Who cares what Americans want? It is a shrinking market. You can safely ignore it as an EV exporter. The opportunity is the rest of the world. The US is currently less than 19% of the global light vehicle market, and will continue to shrink over time as India and Africa grows.
A ‘perfect storm’ points to a much smaller U.S. auto market by 2040 - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/28/us-auto-market.html - June 28th, 2026
- Ten years ago, a record 17.6 million cars, trucks and SUVs were sold in the U.S. Some forecasts say the country might not come close to that number again.
- Analysts at consulting firm Bain & Company said several signs indicate the market is about to shrink even more. Falling birth rates, behavioral changes, high car prices and a growing array of alternatives could drive sales down by more than 2 million units by 2040, according to their analysis.
- These indications point to a future where automakers fiercely compete for a shrinking number of customers, said Mark Gottfredson, a partner at Bain & Company.
That doesn't make much sense to me other than China's goal of trying to subsidize its companies and run other automakers out of business, but the US has already prevented China from entering the market (so 340 million of the richest customers on the planet are unavailable) and Europe will continue to restrict Chinese EV sales as well.
So that leaves China where exactly? Exporting $10,000 EVs to Indonesia? Sorry but that's not a big enough market with enough profit to keep the companies busy. Plus you have a glut of Chinese EV makers in China that are going to go out of business precisely because the economics don't work.
You can't sell cars at a loss indefinitely but if China wants to give away a lot of money to other countries without auto industries I mean they're welcome to do that. I just don't understand the economics of it. I'm not sure you're accounting for them either.
> Bookmark my comment for five years from now, see if I'm wrong. China has shown they can scale, the rest of the world has not.
I'm not sure what you're trying to be right or wrong about. Simultaneously you're citing things that I've cited (I guess you didn't read my comments for some reason) as reasons that Europe will restrict Chinese EV sales. The US already has. Japan and Korea will too, to varying extents.
Scaling doesn't matter if you don't have customers or you aren't making money.
> Chinese carmakers now sell one EV abroad for every two at home - https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ev-exports-overcapacity-g... - August 18th, 2026
This is the exact kind of problem that I'm highlighting. China's domestic market is faltering, there is a lot of subsidization and uneconomic business practices, and this leads to a race to the bottom which means many of these auto manufacturers will have to go bankrupt because they can't compete on cost. Instead China has to turn its over-capacity to its export markets. The problem is who will those markets be? Of course many Chinese automakers will survive all of this and go on to let's say be the dominant player in, idk, Indonesia and Brazil or something, but the export markets that everybody wants to play in are closing their doors precisely because the Chinese cars are too heavily subsidized or the cost is too low (regardless of reason) which would cause the domestic manufacturers to go out of business. Obviously the US, Europe, Japan, Korea aren't going to let that happen.
Selling 2 EVs abroad for every 1 at home is a bad sign, not a good one.
https://ember-energy.org/data/ev-sales-tracker/ (upper right hand corner of data viz).
> As of September 2026, there were an estimated 90.6 million EVs on the road, including 61.5M battery electric and 29.1M plug-in hybrids. In a single day, these vehicles displace 1.44 million barrels of oil. [My note: Every month of EV sales improves this number, permanently]
China will continue to scale up EV sales, and combustion vehicles will continue to decline. That's my point. Peak combustion vehicles sales was 2017, it's all down hill from here. How long to 100% EV sales? Probably not 5 years, potentially 10-15 years. Depends on when we hit step change tipping points and petroleum supply chain death spirals.
The sooner legacy auto and combustion vehicle makers are pushed to economic failure, the faster EV deployments go faster. So, push them to failure. This matters to me because of climate change, but I understand this might not matter to others. "It is what it is."
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/global-sales-of-com...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electric-car-sales?tab=li...
You are not thinking in systems. Think in systems.
Well China isn't the only country that builds electric vehicles, but even so internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles will be around for a long time. Actually that's in part because of China. We'd have seen greater adoption by now but because in part of Chinese hoarding of rare earth mineral processing American, European, Japanese, and Korean automakers have had to maintain ICE fleets. Of course, as you noted, there are scaling issues, they don't want to spend the money to develop EVs when the markets aren't really settled, &c. but there are quite a few factors at play. If you care about emissions/oil/energy usage you should actually be in favor of no cars to hold a more consistent position.
> Every unit they move assists in this, as well as reducing oil demand.
The good thing is that China helps US/EU/J/K/&c. here because reducing oil demand in other countries means there is more available for us to keep using.
> I don't care what happens the US or Europe legacy auto
Sure but US and Europe do and because they do they say sorry China can't sell your cars here and then China can't sell its cars there. They lose out on lots of $$ but as you said that's fine so it works for everyone.
> Subsidies, no subsidies, that's a silly argument.
China doesn't have infinite money so it's not a silly argument.
> The Western world is sad China plays by different spreadsheet rules, it is what it is.
What do we have to be sad about? We just say sorry can't sell your cars here and then we just keep living our awesome lives.
> China doesn't need profits, they need to keep their economy producing, even if at breakeven, or a potential loss.
You need profits though, that's an inescapable fact of reality. Otherwise you just go out of business.
> China will continue to scale up EV sales, and combustion vehicles will continue to decline. That's my point. Peak combustion vehicles sales was 2017, it's all down hill from here.
Well vehicle sales will decline even in China across all vehicles, not just ICE or EV. Continuing to scale up EV sales when sales will decline and your TAM isn't as big as you think means you're spending a lot of money building factories that won't get used. Resources and money are limited (this isn't a debatable fact) so at some point you just can't do it anymore, the companies go bust, and then at least in the west we never really cared because we're doing our own thing with our own cars.