On the occasion of the return and European expansion of Great Wall Motors (now GWM), I flew to Beijing to attend the Beijing Auto Show 2026 —Auto China, as it’s known. And it made one thing strikingly clear: the Chinese automotive industry is now the one setting the rules.
So much so that Western manufacturers present (from the Germans to the French side of Stellantis, all the way to General Motors and Ford) are now chasing what Chinese brands are doing—often without succeeding. Or, as in the case of AUDI (the all-caps brand launched by Audi exclusively for China), ending up in situations that feel almost grotesque.
What’s changed
Walk through the halls of the Beijing Motor Show in 2026 and something feels structurally different from a decade ago. European brands still show up — they always will — but the energy belongs elsewhere. The Chinese pavilions, anchored by BYD, Geely and Great Wall, and now joined by consumer electronics names that until recently had nothing to do with cars, radiate a kind of kinetic confidence that is hard to manufacture. It is earned.
That confidence is, to a significant degree, a gift from the West. Joint venture rules that China enforced for years — requiring foreign brands to share ownership and, inevitably, knowledge with local partners — were seen at the time as the price of entry into the world’s largest car market. In hindsight, they were a masterclass in institutional learning. Western manufacturers brought quality, engineering rigour and brand prestige. What came back across the table was something they had not priced into the deal: an extraordinary capacity to absorb, adapt and then accelerate.
The acceleration is the part that caught most industry observers off guard. It is one thing to build a competent car. It is another to redefine what a car fundamentally is — from a mechanical object to a rolling software platform — and to do so faster than any incumbent thought possible.
Software as the new engine displacement
Premium German brands have long traded on engineering excellence. In China, where the younger buyer expects a vehicle to behave more like a smartphone than a machine — receiving software updates overnight, integrating seamlessly into a digital life, anticipating preferences rather than simply responding to them — that engineering excellence increasingly reads as a given rather than a differentiator. The premium is elsewhere now, and it lives in code.
BMW and Mercedes, like Audi before them, are experiencing falling sales volumes in China against the headwind of domestic brands making credible incursions into the prestige segment. These are not budget alternatives anymore. Several Chinese EVs now compete directly on interior refinement, technology integration and, increasingly, brand aspiration — at least within China’s domestic market.
Even Tesla, which arrived in Shanghai with the force of a cultural event and built a production base that became central to its global supply chain, is no longer operating in the clear water it once had. Its share of China’s electric vehicle market has contracted to roughly 8%, with domestic competitors claiming the ground it once held almost unopposed. The company’s absence from the Beijing show floor this year went noticed in ways that a press release could not fully address.
What this means for Nordic roads
For buyers in Norway, Sweden and Denmark — markets that are among the most EV-forward on the planet — the Chinese automotive surge is not a distant trade story. It is arriving in showrooms. Chinese brands collectively account for around 8% of new car sales in Europe, a share that would have seemed implausible five years ago and now looks like a floor rather than a ceiling.
Nordic consumers are, in some respects, the ideal early audience for this generation of Chinese electric vehicles. Range anxiety has receded as battery technology improved. Charging infrastructure, while uneven, is further developed here than almost anywhere else in Europe. And Scandinavian buyers, typically less brand-conservative than their counterparts further south (as seen in Denmark), have shown willingness to evaluate a car on its actual merits. That is precisely the environment in which a new entrant with strong technology credentials can gain traction quickly.
The structural tension behind all of this is worth understanding. China produces significantly more vehicles than its domestic market can absorb. That overcapacity is not incidental — it is a feature of an industrial system built for scale — and exporting it is not merely a commercial strategy but an economic necessity. European trade policy, including tariff discussions that have dragged on through 2025 and into 2026, reflects the anxiety that creates.
Beyond technology: the sports car revival
But the Beijing show was not all about efficiency metrics and software stacks. It carried a clear signal that Chinese manufacturers are now reaching for the part of the industry that was supposed to be Europe’s most defensible ground: the sports car.
A open-top grand tourer that splits the difference between Lamborghini’s drama and Pininfarina’s refinement. Convertibles of this ambition are no longer a European speciality — and the Denza Z makes that point with considerable style.
Lynk & Co is a curious case. The brand has always occupied a genuinely hybrid identity — born of the Geely group that also owns Volvo, designed with clear Scandinavian influence, and carrying a motorsport pedigree that most Europeans have never been told about. In the World Rally Championship, Cyan Racing — the Gothenburg-based operation that once ran as Polestar Cyan — has campaigned the Lynk & Co 03+ with considerable success. It is a racing car that wears a badge most Nordic fans associate with mild-mannered urban transport. The sporting soul was always there. Europe just never got to see it properly.
Now, to mark ten years of the brand, that soul has been given a body worthy of it. The Lynk & Co GT — unveiled under the name Time to Shine — is, by any honest measure, one of the most beautiful cars presented at any motor show in recent memory. It does not merely demonstrate that a Chinese brand can design a sports car. It asks whether European design houses still have an automatic claim to that territory.
BYD, meanwhile, is making the same point from a different angle. The Denza Z, a full convertible, occupies an aesthetic space somewhere between the drama of a Lamborghini Huracán and the sculptural restraint of the Pininfarina Battista. The open-top grand tourer is a format that European manufacturers have largely abandoned in recent years, deeming it commercially too marginal. BYD and the MG Cyberster — already on sale — suggest that appetite still exists. The Chinese industry is simply filling the space that Europe vacated.
Taken together, these cars make a broader argument that deserves to be heard clearly: Chinese manufacturers are now fielding a lineup that runs from entry-level urban EVs through luxury saloons all the way to aspirational sports cars. It is a range of genuine ambition and variety. Meanwhile, the European mainstream continues to contract around an ever-narrowing interpretation of the SUV — crossover after crossover, distinguished mainly by badge and ride height. The exceptions are real, but they are increasingly exceptions.
The real question
The honest question for the European industry — and, by extension, for dealers, policymakers and drivers across the Nordic region — is not whether Chinese cars are good enough. Many of them clearly are, and some are genuinely desirable.
The question is how quickly the intangibles catch up: service networks, resale value confidence, the kind of long-term trust that a brand only builds through years of presence. Those are real gaps, and they will not close overnight.
