LONDON, U.K. — I’m heading north out of London into the Essex countryside. The car I’m driving, a BYD Dolphin, is steering itself, staying in its lane and keeping a safe distance from the cars ahead. I need to adjust the air conditioning so I glance down at the touchscreen to find the right menu. Suddenly, a female voice orders me to “keep eyes on road.” The touchscreen then hides all speed information and instead warns me that I’m not holding the steering wheel tightly enough. Admonished and afraid, I turn my attention back to the road. Such is life driving a Chinese EV.
Canadians are about to see mass-market Chinese electric vehicles on the roads for the first time. Each year, 49,000 of them will arrive thanks to a trade agreement that reduced the import tax on the cars from 100 per cent down to just 6.1 per cent.
Talking Points
- Tens of thousands of mass-market Chinese EVs will soon start rolling into Canada. In the U.K., where mass-market Chinese EVs have now been on sale for three years, the cars have become top sellers.
- Mass-market Chinese EVs are generally well-made and good value, but strange technical and safety features can make driving them an interesting experience
I’ve watched the same happen in the U.K., which has friendly trading terms for Chinese manufacturers—a flat 10 per cent import fee—compared to the European Union where Chinese carmakers are prevented from significantly undercutting European manufacturers. The upshot is that Chinese EVs are everywhere in the U.K. MG, once a British company that’s now a subsidiary of Chinese state-owned manufacturer SAIC, was amongst the top 10 bestselling car brands in the U.K. last year, while Jaecoo, owned by the partly state-controlled firm Chery, produces the 7 SUV, which is consistently amongst the top 10 best-selling new cars in the U.K., despite only delivering its first cars here a little more than a year ago.
Perhaps the best example of the U.K.’s Chinese EV boom is BYD, which is now the world’s biggest EV manufacturer, having leapfrogged Tesla last year. In early 2023 it had no dealerships in the U.K. By the end of 2025, it had 125. In Canada, BYD is planning to open 20 dealerships this year alone.
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Even those who have no interest in cars know about BYD; it hits close to home even for me. We’ve been a Ford family for three generations; my grandfather worked for Ford for more than 40 years and my family has only ever owned Fords as a result. Yet BYD’s rapid rise in the U.K. is inescapable. My mom, who’s only ever owned Fords, has noticed that her local Ford dealership has started selling BYDs—and she’s tempted to try one out.
The rapid success of Chinese EVs in the U.K. is unprecedented in recent memory. For comparison, South Korean mega-corp Kia sold around 56,000 cars in its first decade in the U.K. from 1991 to 2001. BYD managed that in two years and will probably hit 100,000 cumulative sales in 2026.
On the face of it, Canada’s EV deal with China sounds inconsequential. The 49,000 annual limit is less than the number of F-Series pickups Ford sells in six months in Canada and a tiny proportion of Canada’s 1.9 million annual new car sales, but it’s almost 30 per cent of a Canadian EV and plug-in hybrid market that has been thrown into turmoil by a trade war and start-stop subsidies.
You might not have noticed, but Canadians have actually been driving Chinese cars for a good while now; EVs from Volvo, Lotus and Polestar, all subsidiaries of Chinese manufacturer Geely, are all sold in Canada and represent the more premium end of the market. In the wake of the new trade deal, Geely has made noises about bringing more Chinese-made Volvos to Canada, while Lotus has said it could cut the price of its $126,000 sportscar-cum-SUV Eletre model by up to 50 per cent. Yet, as the U.K. has shown, it’s not sales of high-end EVs that can turn an industry on its head. It’s cheap, mundane, mass-market EVs. And this is where China excels.
The interior of a Jaecoo 7 SUV. The car, one of the best-selling new vehicles in the U.K., is manufactured by partly-state controlled Chery. Photo: John Keeble/Getty Images
One thing nearly every Chinese EV does is give you a semblance of luxury and comfort on a budget. I’ve driven nearly every BYD on the market in the U.K. and the consistency between models is remarkable. Whether you’re driving the low-cost Dolphin Surf or the top-spec Sealion SUV, the interiors and features are consistently high quality across the range. The interiors and manufacturing in many mid-range Chinese EVs are high-quality and genuinely beat legacy carmakers such as Mercedes and BMW in some areas; there are always plenty of useful cubbies to stash your stuff.
Many of BYD’s cars have rotating, Tesla-esque touchscreens. While Tesla has spent years polishing the tech, the touchscreens in many Chinese EVs leave a lot to be desired and mostly end up feeling like massive, clunky Android phones. BYD itself is reverting to using fixed touchscreens because the rotating ones didn’t always play nice with third-party apps like Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.
All the Chinese EVs I’ve driven suffer from similar tech issues. Important settings, such as climate control and fog lights, are often buried several layers deep in labyrinthian touchscreen menus. I’ve also found plenty of odd and unclear translations in the BYD EVs I’ve driven. Cars made by Smart—a collaboration between Mercedes-Benz and Geely that withdrew from North America in 2019—have bizarre animated animal avatars permanently displayed on the car’s homescreen.
The technical oddities don’t stop there. Chinese EVs are also often incredibly safe as manufacturers tend to follow the law to the letter. This has resulted in an impressive number of Chinese EV brands achieving five stars in the gold-standard European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) crash and safety tests on their first attempts, including the Zeekr X which was awarded ‘best in class’ by the group in 2024.
This is great and noble in principle, but results in cars that are downright dangerous to drive in some situations. The MG 4, for example, is so aggressively in-tune with Euro NCAP’s lane-keeping test—where the car’s sensors and computers must prevent the car from leaving its lane by forcing the car to steer—that real-world scenarios, such as the presence of roadside shrubbery and cyclists, confounded the technology. Issues caused by over-zealous safety features in Chinese EVs have also come up in off-record conversations I’ve had with European car safety insiders.
My ‘eyes on road’ story is cut from the same cloth. The often-confusing menu structures of Chinese EV touchscreens require you to take your eyes off the road, but their safety features often make it impossible for you to look away for longer than a millisecond. Easier said than done when the controls for the air conditioning are hidden behind random symbols or poorly translated text. This means high safety scores but a poor real-world experience. Chinese cars aren’t homogenous, though—and manufacturers are learning all the time.
Ultimately, all this safety talk might not bother Canadians too much; European and U.K. safety standards are much stricter than in Canada and mandate that several autonomous driving assistance technologies must be switched on by default every time you start the car. These are usually optional extras elsewhere in the world.
The sudden arrival of Chinese EVs in Canada may also create some teething problems. In the U.K., for example, spare parts for some Chinese EVs were so hard to come by that some insurance companies wouldn’t cover them. Sometimes repair instructions weren’t available or Chinese manufacturers made assumptions about the repair market, and human labour costs, that didn’t match reality. It took time for some firms to iron out the kinks.
When mass-market Chinese car brands arrive in Canada, expect heavy discounts and undercutting; cars can be made incredibly cheaply in China and, even with tariffs included, there’s a lot of room for discounts. The BYD Dolphin Surf, for example, costs 63,800 Chinese yuan ($12,870) to buy in China and £18,675 ($34,500) to buy in the U.K. The Chinese-built but Romanian-badged Dacia Spring EV costs £15,990 ($29,500), but comes with significant compromises including a one-star Euro NCAP rating compared to the Dolphin Surf’s five. The cheapest European-built budget EV available in the U.K., the Citroen e-C3, costs £19,995 ($37,000).
“The [Chinese brands] that have come to the U.K. in the last six or 12 months have come in with cheaper cars, higher spec with cheap finance options,” said Pat Hoy, founder of Insider Car Deals, a U.K.-based car buying service. As demand has grown, that plan has shifted. “Once they start to gain a bit of traction, those offers start to come down,” says Hoy. “BYD, compared to where they were a year ago, is offering lower incentives.”
