China floods the world with gasoline cars it can’t sell at home | Reuters
WARSAW – China’s electric-vehicle industry captured half its domestic market in just a few years, crushing sales of gasoline-powered vehicles from once-dominant global automakers.
But foreign players weren’t the only losers. Many Chinese legacy automakers also watched their sales collapse – and responded by flooding the world with fossil-fuel vehicles they couldn’t sell at home.
While Western policymakers have focused on the threat of China’s heavily subsidized EVs, protecting their markets with tariffs, U.S. and European automakers face greater competition from China’s gas-guzzlers in countries from Poland to South Africa to Uruguay. Fossil-fuel vehicles have accounted for 76% of Chinese auto exports since 2020, and total annual shipments jumped from 1 million to likely more than 6.5 million this year, according to data from China-based consultancy Automobility.
China’s gasoline-vehicle exports alone – not including EVs and plug-in hybrids – were enough last year to make it the world’s largest auto-exporting nation by volume, industry and government data show. This account of Chinese automakers’ global expansion is based on a Reuters review of auto-sales data in dozens of countries and interviews with more than 30 people, including executives from 11 Chinese and two Western automakers, distribution managers for Chinese brands and industry researchers.
The influx of Chinese gasoline cars into emerging and second-tier markets reflects a collision between Beijing’s current EV push and older policies that built China’s domestic gasoline-vehicle industry by leveraging foreign automakers’ technology.
Only two of China’s top 10 auto exporters focus exclusively on battery-powered vehicles. One of them is U.S. electric-car pioneer Tesla. The other is BYD, which sells only EVs and plug-in hybrids. BYD’s push abroad this year has made it China’s second-biggest exporter and tilted the nation’s exports toward plug-in cars. Still, China’s gasoline-vehicle exports are on pace to exceed 4.3 million and account for nearly two-thirds of this year’s total.
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