- China is exporting millions of ICE cars that it can no longer sell at home.
- Western brands are losing emerging markets to cheap Chinese rivals.
- Chinese cars could account for 30 % of the global market by 2030.
China’s electric vehicle takeover has been so dramatic, it has blinded much of the world to an even bigger problem. While Western governments scramble to protect themselves from subsidized Chinese EVs, legacy Chinese automakers have been quietly unloading a tsunami of gasoline-powered cars into emerging markets.
These are the same vehicles that they can no longer shift at home because EVs have torched China’s combustion market. Beijing’s switch to electric has created winners from BYD and losers from state-backed giants of old, and those state giants are not planning to go quietly.
Related: China’s Getting Ready To Flood The World With Even Cheaper EVs And PHEVs
Since 2020, about three-quarters of China’s auto exports have been combustion cars, Reuters reports. That’s millions of petrol-engined vehicles headed for markets that foreign automakers once dominated.
China has gone from exporting 1 million vehicles a year to likely more than 6.5 million this year, enough to make it the world’s top auto exporter. EVs grab the headlines, but the numbers show that China is shaping the future of global combustion demand just as aggressively.
Overcapacity at home
The export surge is a direct byproduct of China’s EV policies. Years of subsidies, local government support, and a national mandate to dominate electric vehicles created a price war that crushed gasoline sales on the home front.
China now has enough idle gasoline car factories to build 30 million vehicles a year, far more than its market needs.
Instead of shutting plants down, Chinese automakers pushed their unwanted inventory into places where EV infrastructure is thin, and drivers’ wallets are even thinner. Eastern Europe, South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia have all become new battlegrounds, and Chinese brands are gaining fast, working hard to make up overseas what they’re losing at home.
Brands like SAIC, Dongfeng, BAIC, and Changan once depended on joint ventures with companies like GM, Nissan, and Honda, but those partnerships have withered. SAIC GM’s China sales plunged from more than 1 million a year to barely 400,000, but abroad, it’s a different story.
SAIC exported over a million vehicles last year. Chery went from 700,000 global sales in 2020 to more than 2.5 million in 2024, most of them gasoline-powered.
GM, Ford are losing out
Western automakers are finally noticing they are being outflanked not by shiny BYD EVs but by cheap Chinese combustion cars. In Mexico, Chinese brands are on track for a 14 percent market share, stealing customers from Chevrolet and Ford.
In South Africa, they control 16 percent of the market while selling almost no EVs at all. In Chile, a third of all new cars are Chinese, and most of them drink gasoline.
Chinese pickups are even undercutting their own joint venture partners. Dongfeng sells a pickup in Uruguay that is essentially a Nissan Navara with a facelift and an older Nissan engine for two-thirds the price of the real thing, according to the same report.
Where will this end? Consultancy forecasts told Reuters that Chinese automakers will add four million more overseas sales by 2030. Combined with growth at home, that could give China close to one-third of the global auto market within five years, and you know the takeover won’t stop there.
