IF I HAD a pound for every time a Chinese car maker said it was going to break into Europe, I’d be a rich(ish) woman. Inevitably, such plans that we reported three-plus years ago have been dramatically slowed by the way the world has gone in the interim.
Still, Chinese makers – the likes of Aiways, Chery, Geely (excluding its ownership of known brands such as Lotus), Great Wall, Nio, SAIC, Xpeng – are persevering and some have made headway playing to the easier European EV markets, namely Norway. At the Paris motor show last month, there was a dearth of car makers other than the French and, you guessed it, Chinese.
But despite the progress, we haven’t been able to buy a car in the UK from a new,…
