How China’s EV Boom Caught Western Car Companies Asleep at the Wheel

“You won’t believe what’s coming,” warned the title of a January 2023 video from the Inside China Auto YouTube channel. “Europe’s premium car makers aren’t ready for this,” warned another video from the same channel, uploaded in July.

Produced by Shanghai-based automotive journalist Mark Rainford, a former communications executive for Mercedes-Benz, the channel is one of several by China-based Western commentators agog at what they are seeing—and driving.

The channels tell salivating viewers that the tech-heavy yet keenly priced Chinese electric vehicles that have appeared on China’s domestic market since the end of the global pandemic will soon wipe the floor with their Western counterparts.

Auto executives in Europe, America, and Japan “didn’t believe China’s car companies could grow so fast,” Rainford told me. “That’s an easy mistake to make from outside the country. You see a lot of stories about China—they don’t hit home until you live here and experience it.”

Rainford worked at Mercedes-Benz for eight years—in the UK, Germany, and latterly China—and has lived in China, in two stints, for five years. He started his YouTube channel to cater to the growing interest in Chinese cars from overseas. His most popular video—“Think You Know Chinese Cars? Think Again. You Won’t Believe What’s Coming”—has had more than 800,000 views. It’s an 84-minute wander through the 11 immense halls of the Guangzhou Auto Show, previewing the automotive near future.

He highlighted cars from 42 brands, almost all of which are largely unknown outside China. Some of the eye-popping EVs he featured would be considered concept cars at a Western auto show, but many are already on the road in China.

These “digital bling” cars, as Oxford-based Ade Thomas, founder of the five-year-old World EV Day, calls them—some with navigation on autopilot (NOA) systems, a precursor to full-on autonomous driving; others with face-recognition cameras that monitor driver fatigue; more equipped with multiple high-res dashboard screens pimped with generative AI and streaming video—are not inferior, unsafe copycats, as mainstream Asian and Western automakers have often urged us to believe, they are standards-compliant, road-going smartphones.

This “iPhone on wheels” epithet has been used by Tesla for many years, with traditional auto brands—led, so the caricature goes, by sensible German men in suits on eye-watering remuneration packages—reportedly flailing in Elon Musk’s wake.