Germany turns on Brussels as Chinese car sales on track to exceed 1M in 2026

"Five years ago, Chinese-brand vehicles barely registered in Europe selling 66,000 units out of a market of more than 11 million new cars. By 2023 that share had climbed to roughly 3%. Then it kept climbing: 6.1% in 2025, and 9.2% in the first half of 2026 alone, with Chinese manufacturers now regularly outselling established names like Ford, Audi and Mercedes-Benz in individual months.

Chinese brands are on track to sell more than 1 million cars in Europe in 2026 for the first time — a threshold that would have seemed implausible just three years ago, when sales were smaller than what a single mid-size European manufacturer might convert in a good quarter.

Much of that growth has come through a route the existing tariffs don't cover. The EU's elevated duties on Chinese EVs, in place since 2024, briefly slowed the pace that year — but manufacturers pivoted hard into plug-in hybrids, a category exempt from the levies. Chinese brands' share of European PHEV sales jumped from 2.5% to 13.7% in just twelve months."