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Comment by padjo | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been hearing about the rise of the Chinese car industry for 20 years, judging by the number of BYDs I’m now seeing it has finally happened.

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In my country over last 5 years the majority of new cars now from China, it happened so swift. I still think that Japan cars are the best, but it's hard to justify paying 2x and getting inferior (in terms on features) product, while reviews of new chinese cars are largely positive.

Which country?

Kazakhstan

Interesting thank you. When I was there in 2012 or so I was surprised to see a huge number of small Daewoo branded cars, a long extinct brand in the west. Small getabouts seemed very popular. That was a long time ago I know, but I imagine some of these cheap Chinese small models are filling that segment now?

Nearby Uzbekistan was the location of maybe the only surviving post 2008 Daewoo car factory outside of Korea? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UzAuto_Motors

Hah there you go. Fun little bit of history

Xiaomi is another maker. I saw a good review on Xiaomi SU7 - https://youtu.be/Mb6H7trzMfI by Marques Brownlee

If you only travel to North America and Europe you’d never know but I went to South America and India and the former mostly had Chinese cars and the latter had big ads for a BYD MPV everywhere in Bangalore.

So the Chinese car makers are popular outside the West. I drove a couple of Changan cars and they weren’t even as nice as my Subaru in terms of handling but they functioned well as cars.

BYD is very much present in the UK (Telsa still seem the most common, but BYD are getting close), it must be the same in mainland Europe unless the EU is blocking them more aggressively. The Ford dealer down the road from me turned into a BYD service centre in the last couple of months.

> BYD has overtaken Tesla in overall European registrations for the first time in 2025 (BYD outsold Tesla across EU + EFTA + UK in several months)

> Across EU+EFTA+UK in October 2025, BYD’s registrations (~17 470) were ~2.5× Tesla’s (~6 964), and YTD BYD’s total (~138 390) was closing the gap on Tesla’s (~180 688).

Still not as strong as in other markets. In Finland, BYD is not even in top10:

- 1. Skoda Enyaq (~1614 units)

– 2. VW ID.4 (~1582)

– 3. Tesla Model Y (~1516)

- Other brands include VW ID.7, Kia EV3, Volvo, Audi, Polestar.

Can confirm. Colombia based, a year ago I had my first Uber trip in a BYD, now I would guess about 10% of my journeys are Chinese EVs. It's impressive how fast they've caught up and mostly surpased their competition. If the Japanese took 20 years, the Koreans 10, then the Chinese have done it in 5.

They've suddenly all appeared in Australia too - we had BYD for quite a while and brands like Volvo and Polestar (owned by China's Geeley), but suddenly we have Leapmotor, Deepal, Omoda Jaecoo and Geeley themselves (just the ones I can think of, probably others) having all appeared on our market in literally something like six months...

They also migrated 100s of millions of mopeds to electric bikes and shipped new ebikes over the last 10 years. That enormous scale no doubt fed directly to battery technology and assembly techniques that help with cars. Many Chinese don't own cars. (That's changing fast).

China is the largest car market in the world. Almost twice as large as the United States.

China is also over 70% of the world's EV production

In Lima I would say half the cars I see on the road are Chinese, many I’ve never heard of. It’s crazy.

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