final desperate move before VW death, they keep shoting themselves into foot with green deal and other EU nonsense and then complain when Chinese come running...
"Five years ago, Chinese-brand vehicles barely registered in Europe selling 66,000 units out of a market of more than 11 million new cars. By 2023 that share had climbed to roughly 3%. Then it kept climbing: 6.1% in 2025, and 9.2% in the first half of 2026 alone, with Chinese manufacturers now regularly outselling established names like Ford, Audi and Mercedes-Benz in individual months.
Chinese brands are on track to sell more than 1 million cars in Europe in 2026 for the first time — a threshold that would have seemed implausible just three years ago, when sales were smaller than what a single mid-size European manufacturer might convert in a good quarter.
Much of that growth has come through a route the existing tariffs don't cover. The EU's elevated duties on Chinese EVs, in place since 2024, briefly slowed the pace that year — but manufacturers pivoted hard into plug-in hybrids, a category exempt from the levies. Chinese brands' share of European PHEV sales jumped from 2.5% to 13.7% in just twelve months."
final desperate move before VW death, they keep shoting themselves into foot with green deal and other EU nonsense and then complain when Chinese come running...
China invested in building EVs, and has the capacity to build 50M per year (global light vehicle sales TAM is ~90M/year). VW did not. The choice was "Green New Deal" or profits, and they picked profits. The Chinese won because they knew EVs were going to be the future, and the intentionally focused and maintained effort towards building the future through their five year plans. Everyone else gave up.
I think this is also another occurrence of the "innovato's dilemma" applied to the car industry. None of the incumbents have negotiated the shift to EV very well with similar patterns as we've seen previously in other industries, in this case combined with the huge investment and industrial capabilities of China.
final desperate move before VW death, they keep shoting themselves into foot with green deal and other EU nonsense and then complain when Chinese come running...
"Five years ago, Chinese-brand vehicles barely registered in Europe selling 66,000 units out of a market of more than 11 million new cars. By 2023 that share had climbed to roughly 3%. Then it kept climbing: 6.1% in 2025, and 9.2% in the first half of 2026 alone, with Chinese manufacturers now regularly outselling established names like Ford, Audi and Mercedes-Benz in individual months.
Chinese brands are on track to sell more than 1 million cars in Europe in 2026 for the first time — a threshold that would have seemed implausible just three years ago, when sales were smaller than what a single mid-size European manufacturer might convert in a good quarter.
Much of that growth has come through a route the existing tariffs don't cover. The EU's elevated duties on Chinese EVs, in place since 2024, briefly slowed the pace that year — but manufacturers pivoted hard into plug-in hybrids, a category exempt from the levies. Chinese brands' share of European PHEV sales jumped from 2.5% to 13.7% in just twelve months."
China invested in building EVs, and has the capacity to build 50M per year (global light vehicle sales TAM is ~90M/year). VW did not. The choice was "Green New Deal" or profits, and they picked profits. The Chinese won because they knew EVs were going to be the future, and the intentionally focused and maintained effort towards building the future through their five year plans. Everyone else gave up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49556939
China's Manufacturing Advantage, Explained [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451076 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgYKVpOsMJs - August 2026
I think this is also another occurrence of the "innovato's dilemma" applied to the car industry. None of the incumbents have negotiated the shift to EV very well with similar patterns as we've seen previously in other industries, in this case combined with the huge investment and industrial capabilities of China.
we are witnessing an industry collapse in real time.