ON a recent Monday in Leeds, Dougal Keith drove a Chinese-made BYD Seal Excellence out of his dealership and hit the accelerator.
The car can reach 100kph in 3.8 seconds – a key selling point – and comes with a £48,000 price tag, roughly 20% cheaper than a top-range Tesla Model 3.
Keith, a car salesman for more than 40 years, said customers were sceptical of buying Chinese vehicles when he opened a showroom for BYD in 2023.
Now, he runs six dealerships devoted to the brand.
“Some people think because it’s Chinese it’s made cheaply,” he said. “But then I ask, ‘Where do you think your iphone is assembled?’”
Chinese cars are gaining ground in Britain for a mix of reasons.
There are no steep tariffs on Chinese EVS – unlike in the EU or the US – allowing lower prices. British buyers are also less brand-loyal, with no major domestic mass-market automaker to defend.
Roughly a dozen Chinese brands, including BYD, Chery and Geely, made up 13% of new car registrations in Britain in November, double their share a year ago, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.
“The pace is like nothing the market has ever seen,” said Ian Plummer, chief commercial officer of Autotrader.
BYD and Chery, selling Jaecoo and Omoda models, are gaining market share five or six times faster than Tesla a decade ago or South Korea’s Kia in the 1990s.
Britain’s domestic auto industry has been shrinking, producing about 600,000 cars in 2025, roughly half of the output at the end of the last decade.
Major producers include Nissan, Jaguar Land Rover and Mini.
Meanwhile, China is now the world’s largest car exporter and leads in EV production, exporting to markets from Mexico to South Africa.
Chinese automakers have mastered shifting regulations and consumer demand, particularly for hybrids.
Beijing encourages exports to manage domestic overcapacity, sometimes leading to heavy losses and triggering pushback in Western countries.
The US has imposed 100% tariffs on Chinese EVS, the EU up to 45%, while Britain charges 10% on all imported cars.
About two million new cars are sold in Britain each year.
Since 2019, the number of brands registering sales has nearly doubled to over 70.
No single brand commands loyalty like Volkswagen in Germany or Renault in France, giving newcomers room to grow.
Chinese brands first gained a foothold with SAIC Motor’s acquisition of MG.
Production gradually moved to China, and the UK MG factory closed in 2016.
MG now accounts for over 4% of new registrations – the largest share for a Chinese-owned brand – while BYD holds just over 2%, similar to Tesla.
Keith sold his first car in 1980 at 16 and later expanded his family business.
By the early 2020s, he noticed BYD and,
“Some people think because it’s Chinese it’s made cheaply. But then I ask, ‘Where do you think your iphone is assembled?’”
Dougal Keith
with other independent dealers, secured one of the first UK franchises.
Initially, sales were slow, with only an all-electric model available.
As more models arrived, particularly plug-in hybrids, sales surged.
Dealers highlighted tech features: rotatable touch screens, wireless chargers, voice controls, even karaoke.
“Customers are beginning to understand it’s not a budget brand,” said Fozia Siddique, who has worked with BYD since the Leeds showroom opened.
She recently sold a BYD plug-in hybrid SUV to Steve Vine, 55, who drives more than 480km from Leeds to Cornwall and wanted a long-range EV.
Roger Lyons, 60, in Derbyshire, chose a £48,000 BYD Seal Excellence after testing Audi, Hyundai and Porsche models.
“It’s almost as nice to drive as a Porsche, and it’s got more toys than any of the others,” he said, adding that switching to electric would help cut fuel costs.
Encouraged by the success of BYD, Keith opened two more dealerships selling Changan vehicles.
His group, which runs 28 dealerships selling global brands, expects £500mil in sales for 2025, over 50% higher than 2024.
In September, the Leeds BYD showroom outsold all his other local locations.
“It’s pretty good going for a brand that two years ago nobody had heard of,” he said. — ©2026 The New York Times Company
A worker checks a chip at Jade Bird Fire Co in Zhangjiakou, North China's Hebei Province, on March 27, 2022. Jade Bird makes firefighting products. Its self-developed Zhuhuan chip, which integrates fire detection capability, communication technology and integrated circuit technology, is widely used in China. Photo: VCG
China's rise
Despite US attempts to reshape the world's chip supply chains to a US-led one, China's chip industry is developing in a stable manner, be it the technologies or the markets, inspiring confidence among analysts that China will make breakthroughs in key chip technologies in about three to five years.
According to South Korean Customs statistics, South Korea's exports to China totaled $13.4 billion in May this year, while imports reached $14.9 billion, showing a deficit on the South Korean side for the first time, electronics information portal ijiwei.com reported.
One important stimulus for the situation is that China's exports of semiconductor products, which account for about one-sixth of the country's total exports to South Korea, surged 40.9 percent in the month, data provided by the Korea International Trade Association showed.
Besides, the rising popularity of China's electronic products like mobile phones has boosted demand for domestic chip products. For example, Chinese mobile phone brand Xiaomi recently launched a phone equipped with a China-made chip JR510, according to media reports.
On the technology side, Chinese companies are also making rapid progress. The country's chip giant Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) said it had made a breakthrough in the first generation FinFET technology and entered mass production in Q4 of 2019, while the tech's second generation, rendered equivalent to the 7nm and 5nm manufacturing process of TSMC, is also in a period of pilot production.
SMIC's profits surged 147.7 percent on a yearly basis in 2021 in yuan's terms, the company's annual report showed.
According to Ma, China's sense of urgency for chip industrial independence has enhanced a lot over recent years. This is giving rise to strengthened input, from the industrial, research and university sides, into the industry, bringing positive results such as a surge in chip product categories from hundreds to thousands.
In terms of technologies, China is also "leaping in progress," he said, adding that though China still has several technological bottlenecks to break through, it should be able to solve those bottlenecks after 3-5 years of stable development.
Xiang predicted that the large-scale storage in China's chip industry will start in 2023, as compared with chips from Europe, the US and South Korea, China's domestic chips are of good quality, priced about 60 percent lower than that of other countries.
