About ten years ago, I made a bet with a friend. He is one of the most reasonable men I know: generous in argument, intellectually honest, and, like most of us at the time, utterly convinced that Chinese products were junk.

He was a good-natured snob about it, almost charming in his contempt.

I told him he was wrong. I told him that even then, in 2015, a significant share of the iPhone—the great totem of Western quality and Californian creativity—was being machined, assembled, and increasingly engineered by Chinese hands inside Chinese factories. If Apple was the gold standard, I said, then Chinese workmanship was already part of that gold standard.

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He laughed and pointed at the cars.

“Look at their cars,” he said.

I conceded that Chinese cars were not yet Toyotas. But they were already decent, and more importantly, the country had begun an unmistakable pivot toward electric vehicles.

“Wait,” I told him. “Give it a decade.”

The West Still Underestimates Chinese Cars

In 2025, BYD sold roughly 2.26 million battery-electric vehicles globally and became the world’s top-selling EV brand for the first time. Tesla, the company that defined the category and convinced a generation that the future was electric, sold about 1.64 million, down from the year before.

BYD alone now commands around a fifth of the global EV market. Geely is growing at more than 80 percent year on year. Xiaomi, a phone company until five minutes ago, has cracked the global top ten of carmakers.

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Chinese brands are opening factories in Hungary, Brazil, and Thailand while Volkswagen lays off German workers and shuts plants in Wolfsburg. The European Union, faced with a product its own industry could not match, has done what declining empires always do when confronted with superior competition:........

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