BYD and Chery led a doubling of Chinese EV deliveries in April, even as Brussels keeps its tariff wall up and Stellantis quietly hands the keys to underused European plants.
Chinese brands accounted for more than 15 per cent of Europe’s electric-vehicle sales in April, the first time the threshold has been crossed in a single month.
Sales of fully electric cars from manufacturers including BYD and Chery more than doubled year-on-year to 38,281 units, according to Dataforce. Across the wider European car market, Chinese brands are closing in on 10 per cent.
Five years ago the figure was a rounding error. In 2021, Chinese carmakers were shifting a few thousand EVs a month in Europe. The pace of the shift since then is what makes April’s number significant rather than the number itself.
The plug-in hybrid story is starker. Chinese brands took close to 30 per cent of European PHEV sales in the most recent monthly cut, a segment they barely existed in two years ago. BYD’s Seal U and Atto 2, along with Chery’s Jaecoo and Omoda lines, have done most of the lifting.
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Jaecoo offers the clearest illustration of how quickly British buyers, in particular, have moved. The Jaecoo 7 was the UK’s best-selling new car in March, with 10,064 registrations, beating its closest competitor by 70 per cent.
The brand only launched in the UK in 2025. Plug-in hybrid variants accounted for 85 per cent of those March sales. The car has picked up the nickname Temu Range Rover in the UK press, a reference to the discount e-commerce platform and to the model it visibly resembles.
The UK does not apply tariffs on imported EVs, which is the other half of the story; roughly one in seven cars sold in Britain now comes from a Chinese brand.
“You can get a really good new car, very often for £389 ($521) a month,” Nathan Coe, chief executive of Auto Trader, said in an interview. “And that proposition for a car that looks good, works well and has a good range is very appealing for people.”
The implication, which Coe did not need to spell out, is that British buyers have weaker brand loyalty than their continental counterparts and notice price.
In the EU, where tariffs of 17 to 38 per cent now sit on top of Chinese-made EVs, the rise has been only marginally slowed. Chinese carmakers have responded by opening factories on the continent and, increasingly, by moving into the spare capacity of European rivals. BYD is building its own plant in Hungary.
It is also in talks with Stellantis and other European groups about taking on underused factories. Stellantis has already opened the door: its joint venture with Dongfeng will build the Chinese group’s Voyah-branded hybrids and EVs at Rennes in France, with Stellantis holding 51 per cent. Opel will build a compact electric crossover co-developed with Leapmotor in Zaragoza.
The pricing dynamics that make this attractive to Chinese groups are not subtle. A brutal price war at home has hammered margins, and exports are now where the profit is.
The pricing dynamics that make European factory deals attractive to Stellantis are also not subtle. The Peugeot-Fiat parent is shrinking in Europe and shifting investment toward the US, leaving plants on the continent that need to be filled by someone.
Brussels picked tariffs as the lever. The numbers from April suggest the lever is not, on its own, doing the work it was meant to do.
The European industry’s longer-term problem is the one Coe pointed at: a Chinese EV at €30,000 with a usable range and modern software, sold through a normal dealer network, is now a credible option for someone who would five years ago have bought a Volkswagen.
