On British Roads, Chinese Cars Are Racing Ahead

On a recent Monday, Dougal Keith drove an electric car out of his dealership’s showroom in Leeds, in northern England, and hit the accelerator.

The car, a Chinese-made BYD Seal Excellence, can reach 60 miles per hour in 3.8 seconds — a key selling point. Another is the price tag, about 48,000 pounds ($64,400), which is 20 percent cheaper than a top-range Tesla Model 3.

Mr. Keith, who has been selling cars for more than four decades, said customers were skeptical of buying vehicles made in China when he opened a showroom in 2023 for BYD, China’s largest automaker. Now, he has six dealerships devoted to the brand.

“Some people have the perception that because it's Chinese it’s going to be made cheaply,” he said. But then, he would ask them, “Where do you think your iPhone is assembled?”

Chinese cars are rapidly gaining ground in Britain, driven by a combination of factors. The lack of steep tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles — unlike in the European Union or the United States, where officials see the levies as a way to protect domestic production — means the cars can be sold in Britain at better prices. And British car buyers are not particularly loyal to brands, with no major mass-market British carmaker to support.

Last month, roughly a dozen Chinese automakers, like BYD, Chery and Geely, accounted for 13 percent of new car registrations in Britain, roughly double their market share a year ago, according to data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

“The pace is like nothing the market has ever seen before,” said Ian Plummer, the chief commercial officer of Autotrader, Britain’s largest online car marketplace. BYD and Chery, which sell brands Jaecoo and Omoda, are gaining market share in Britain five or six times as fast as previous entrants, like Tesla a decade ago and South Korea’s Kia in the 1990s, he noted.

Britain’s domestic auto manufacturing industry has been in decline for years, and produced about 600,000 cars so far this year, about half the pace of production at the end of last decade. The largest producers include Japan’s Nissan; Jaguar Land Rover, owned by India’s Tata Motors; and Mini, which is part of BMW.

China has grown to become the largest car exporter in the world, making inroads in countries as far-flung as Mexico, Brazil, Malaysia and South Africa. China produces far more electric vehicles than any other country, and its automakers have proved adept at meeting shifting regulations and consumer preferences, gaining market share with in-demand hybrids as well.

Beijing has encouraged exports as a way to deal with overcapacity at home, which has led to cutthroat competition and substantial losses. The surge of Chinese exports has triggered a backlash in Western countries with large domestic auto industries.

U.S. tariffs of 100 percent on Chinese electric cars have effectively banned the vehicles there. The European Union has imposed tariffs of up to 45 percent on battery-powered vehicles from China.

Britain has not erected similar trade barriers, instead levying a 10 percent tariff on all imported cars. The British government has been pursuing closer economic ties with China.

Around two million new cars are sold in Britain every year. Since 2019, the number of different brands registering sales has nearly doubled, to more than 70, according to Autotrader. No single brand commands the same loyalty, or market share, as Volkswagen in Germany or Renault and Peugeot in France.

Chinese-made cars got a jump start in Britain thanks to SAIC Motor, a Chinese state-owned carmaker, which acquired the British sports car brand MG after its collapse in the mid-2000s. More and more production was shifted to China until, in 2016, SAIC closed MG’s factory in the Midlands, the center of British car manufacturing.

MG cars imported from China accounted for more than 4 percent of new registrations in Britain so far this year, the largest share for a Chinese-owned brand. BYD accounted for just over 2 percent, about the same as Tesla.

Mr. Keith, the auto dealer in Leeds, sold his first car at age 16 in 1980. Over the next decade, he gradually took over his father’s gas station and repair shop, which also sold Skoda cars, then made in Communist Czechoslovakia. In the early 1990s, he took a bet on the brand and opened a showroom just after Skoda was acquired by Volkswagen but before it gained a reputation for value and reliability.

By the early 2020s, China’s BYD had caught Mr. Keith’s attention. With a group of other independent dealerships, he pitched the automaker and two and a half years ago became one of the first franchised dealers for the brand in Britain.

Initially, it was “very hard work,” Mr. Keith said. Few car buyers had heard of BYD, and he offered only an all-electric model.

But as more models came out — particularly plug-in hybrids — sales increased. His sales staff emphasized the fully loaded vehicles’ perks, with rotatable touch screens, wireless phone chargers, voice controls and even karaoke features.

Customers “are beginning to understand it’s not a budget brand,” said Fozia Siddique, who has been selling BYD cars since the Leeds showroom opened.

Ms. Siddique recently helped sell a new BYD plug-in hybrid S.U.V. to Steve Vine. He bought the car, which retails for about £33,000, in part because of its spaciousness and the battery’s long range. Mr. Vine, 55, regularly drives more than 300 miles from his home near Leeds to the southwest coastal region of Cornwall, and wanted to be able to do so without needing to stop and charge for too long.

In Derbyshire, Roger Lyons, 60, recently bought a £48,000 electric BYD Seal Excellence after trying out models from Audi, Hyundai and Porsche. The BYD was “as nice to drive almost as a Porsche, and it’s got more toys than any of the other cars,” he said. His accountant had urged him to switch to an electric car to save on fuel costs, since his penchant for used luxury automobiles left him with two Audi sports cars that can be pricey to run and maintain.

Encouraged by the success of his BYD dealerships, this month Mr. Keith opened two locations to sell cars made by Changan, a Chinese state-owned automaker.

Next year, Mr. Keith expects sales at his company, which runs 28 dealerships selling a variety of global brands, to hit about £500 million, more than 50 percent higher than in 2024, boosted by the demand for Chinese cars.

In September, the BYD dealership in Leeds sold more cars than any of his other dealerships in the area. “It’s pretty good going for a brand that two years ago nobody had heard of,” he said.

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