A new survey from Escalent shows that Europeans are increasingly considering Chinese cars.
At the same time, buyer consideration of American cars is declining in the continent.
However, the study also indicates that Europeans wouldn't pay a premium for Chinese cars, even if they're superior.

This year’s IAA could almost be considered a Shanghai Auto Show outpost, with all the Chinese brands swarming the exhibition halls and announcing grand plans. It can be overwhelming. This year, yet another Chinese brand, GAC, announced its intention to bring the somewhat reasonably priced Aion V to Europe. There are a lot of Chinese brands in Europe, so surely they can’t all be doing well?

The jury’s out on that. Some are hit or miss, some are priced too high, and some may not be quite right for European tastes, but the inroads that Chinese brands are making are having real effects. Market research firm Escalent is in the process of finalizing its Chinese Automotive Impact Brands study for 2025, and there are already some fascinating takeaways. KC Boyce, the firm's Vice President of Powertrain Innovation & Energy Transformation, shared some of the preliminary data from the study with InsideEVs, and there's a lot to dissect.

Escalent surveyed buyers in the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy between May 21 and July 31 of this year, and it learned that the perception of Chinese brands is surpassing that of American brands. Specifically, the firm found that buyers are more willing to consider a Chinese car over an American one. The study showed that 47% of potential buyers surveyed would consider a Chinese car, compared to 44% of the same buyers considering an American car.

This is a big gain for Chinese brands; in 2024, the same study said that only 31% of buyers would consider Chinese cars. It’s also a sizable loss for American brands, since in 2024, 51% of buyers said they would consider buying American.

Part of it, according to Escalent, is that trust in Chinese brands has grown. Chinese brands continue to make inroads into Europe, including advertising, marketing and establishing dealer networks. Consumer trust in Chinese brands is still low, though. In the study, only 19% of study participants trusted goods from China, but this is up from 12% in 2024. It’s also a stone’s throw from 24% for the US, which is down from 31% in 2024.

But why? It's easy to theorize that anti-US sentiment in Europe has grown significantly this year because of the back-and-forth tariff and geopolitical tensions that have occurred since the Trump administration assumed office this year. These tensions go beyond just tariffs, but also include defense and diplomacy between the U.S. and Europe. It doesn’t take a full-time data archivist to go online and see Europeans are souring on the U.S.

I asked Boyce if this is why the scores for American cars are so low. Boyce said that Escalent’s study wasn’t designed to ask why attitudes on Chinese cars are changing so rapidly, but he did agree that geopolitical tensions are a possible explanation.

“Although the study wasn’t intended to assess why consideration was changing over time outside of Chinese brands, I have to believe that geopolitics (tariffs, trade deals, the US stance on Russia/Ukraine) is playing into European buyers’ sentiment about the US and US auto brands,” Boyce said in an email.

He said that trust in goods from most countries stayed somewhat flat, except the U.S., which is the only country that lost points. Likewise, when it came to the willingness of Europeans to buy cars from the six countries surveyed, the U.S. is the only country that went down significantly.

https://insideevs.com/news/771750/chinese-c...Frw4kmfND0Vq5fw

This post has been edited by 30624770: Sep 14 2025, 07:30 PM