Shanghai, China
CNN
 — 

This year’s Shanghai auto show has a clear message for visitors: China is now a global leader in innovation, and it wants the world to know.

The massive, thrumming exhibition that took place in the country’s financial capital over the past two weeks boasted over 60 football fields of floorspace, packed full of carmakers using the event to unveil a raft of new models with curtain-pulling reveals.

To a soundtrack of bass-thumping music, big brands showed off everything from electric batteries that can run for hundreds of miles on a five-minute charge to flying vehicles and cars with cutting-edge assisted driving, while armies of live streamers broadcast the specs to viewers across the country and crowds thronged to check out the new tech.

And unlike in decades past, when cars from legacy makers like GM, Volkswagen or BMW were the showpieces, this year it was China’s electric vehicle (EV) vanguard that were the ones to watch.

Case in point: All eyes were on the reveal of a hotly anticipated electric sportscar from BYD, an EV giant that’s also China’s top carmaker. Its new Denza Z is “a testament to pure emotional design” and “extreme performance,” Wolfgang Egger, an ex-Audi and Lamborghini designer who now directs BYD’s design, told a cheering crowd as he whisked off a covering to reveal the bright blue coupe. (“We love you,” some voices shouted back.)

In another hall, crowds waited in a line stretching outside the venue doors to see offerings from Chinese electronics giant-turned-carmaker Xiaomi. Others craned their necks to catch sight of Nio’s sleek ET9 luxury sedan, a rival to BMW’s 7-series or Porsche’s Panamera, shimmy and shake to the music as it showed off its suspension and automatic doors.

The event is such a spectacle that visitors can be forgiven for forgetting, if for a moment, that the global auto industry is being roiled by President Donald Trump’s tariffs on all cars imported into the United States — and that the US and China are locked in a seemingly intractable trade war that threatens to escalate into a decoupling.

But that’s precisely why the rapid ascent of China’s EV sector is so important to the country, as it squares off against the world’s largest economy and leading innovator.

Once seen as a producer of clumsy knock-offs, Chinese carmakers have catapulted to the forefront of the growing global EV industry — a major coup for a country aiming to transform into a fully-fledged tech powerhouse in multiple industries.

Last year, China’s privately-owned national champion BYD outsold US EV maker Tesla with its stable of hybrid and electric vehicles. BYD has also overtaken China market stalwart Volkswagen as the top seller of passenger cars domestically. (Tesla, which operates its Gigafactory in Shanghai, did not attend the auto show.)

That’s because Chinese consumers, who no longer see homegrown brands as second rate, started consistently buying more vehicles from Chinese carmakers than foreign-backed ones in 2023. And, as of last year, the country controls more than 60% of the rapidly growing global EV market, according to energy analytics firm Rho Motion.

While Trump’s trade war looms large over export strategies for global automakers, China’s EV producers are relatively insulated, having already looked to other markets for growth after heavy duties and other curbs were imposed on their vehicles during the Biden administration.

And as Trump pushes to bring back an automobile industry that once symbolized American prosperity, alienating US trade partners and shunning efforts to boost a homegrown EV sector along the way, China’s EV advantage is a potential soft power boon, and a chance to reshape its place in global trade and technology.

In China, though, the field is crowded and cutthroat, with competition sparking a fierce, yearslong price war. Domestic automakers are vying to one-up each other on tech and value for money — and fighting to capture market share around the world.

In March, BYD released a battery that takes just five minutes to give its latest models a range of 250 miles. That was already considerably faster than charging Tesla’s batteries and seen as a technological marvel. But just weeks later, on the eve of the auto show, BYD was upstaged by Chinese battery giant CATL, which says it can offer some 320 miles of range in the same time.

On the smart driving side, meanwhile, tech firms like Huawei and Momenta are pushing forward their latest intelligent driving technology after BYD upped the ante earlier this year by pledging to roll out its “God’s Eye” driver-assistance system in most of its models, including those costing around $10,000, at no extra charge.

“The technology is very strong (in China), but the price is not luxurious,” Wang Qiguang, a recent graduate living in Shanghai, observed while checking out BYD’s exhibit last week. “Its formed a kind of technological equality that everyone can enjoy … this is the best part of it.”

Analysts say homegrown intelligent driving technology would have enjoyed an even greater spotlight in Shanghai had the government not tightened rules around the marketing and testing of driver-assistance features following a fatal crash in March involving a Xiaomi sedan.

For Chinese consumers, driving isn’t just about function, it’s also about fun. Carmakers are jostling to win customers by offering kitted-out entertainment systems with multiple screens that pair seamlessly with phones, vibrating massage seats that recline like La-Z-Boys and voice activated controls for everything – at bargain prices.

“We’re in the back seat and there’s heated seats, voice controls, moon roof all the way to the back, lots of leg room. And (we’re looking at the price) and it’s like, what is that in USD? And we find out that’s like $28,000, but you can get the baseline at $20,000 – that’s kind of a shock,” said one American businessman visiting the car show, who was not authorized to speak to media.

He and his colleagues, who sell automotive parts, had come over after their boss said they needed to “see what was happening in the China market.”

The speed of China’s advances has stunned even foreign carmakers with deep roots in the country, which shut its borders for years during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We came back after the country reopened … (and we) immediately realized: Wow, China has changed so much,” Stephen Ma, who heads Japanese car giant Nissan’s China business, told reporters at the auto show. “I’ve worked in China for many years, and I knew things move faster here than in other countries, but I didn’t expect it to be this fast – it really exceeded our expectations.”

And while the fierce competition is driving rapid innovation, it also creates major challenges. Dozens of Chinese EV players are vying for market share in a sector that’s grappling with overcapacity. Many firms have yet to make a profit, and they’re up against a Goliath: BYD occupies some 30% of China’s “new energy vehicle” market of battery powered cars and hybrids.

“It’s just really difficult to differentiate yourself in this market,” said Tu Le, founder and managing director of the US-based consultancy firm Sino Auto Insights. “That’s why it’s so important for a lot of these companies to export, because the competition is so intense here that the only breathing room that they’re likely to get … is if they go somewhere where there’s not as many Chinese competitors.”

Concerns about Chinese overcapacity and industrial policy prompted the US and Canada last year to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, while the European Union launched an investigation into what it called unfair subsidies and raised its levies to as high as 45%. (Beijing has denied its success depends on subsidies and last month said it will negotiate with the EU on EV price commitments.)

Those hurdles don’t seem to be daunting Chinese carmakers, who exported 441,000 EVs, including hybrids, in the first quarter of this year, up more than 40% from the same period last year, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

BYD owner Julaluck Chanasri, a YouTube influencer from Thailand, told CNN many people in her country “have changed from Toyota, Honda to BYD’s electric cars.”

“If China can keep the cheap price then (its brands) will continue to grow,” added her husband, Didsakorn, as they checked out one of BYD’s Denza brand SUVs in Shanghai.

Such is the momentum behind Chinese EVs that it’s hard to remember when, just two decades ago, China had no car culture to speak of.

In the late 1970s, when China began opening its economy, there were few private cars in the country, which was then known as a “kingdom of bicycles.”

It wasn’t until the early 2000s, when rapid economic growth catapulted hundreds of millions into the middle class that ownership took off.

That’s when a slew of foreign automakers, some of which dipped their toes into the market decades earlier in anticipation of growth, piled in, setting up joint ventures with domestic companies to manufacture in China. The government required the German, US and Japanese car giants to transfer tech and know-how to their local partners.

But even as China emerged as a major car manufacturer, its homegrown brands were still seen as second-rate. A dating show most infamously captured the zeitgeist when a contestant confidently declared that she’d “rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle.”

China’s enthusiastic adoption of electric vehicles combined with hefty government support has flipped the script.

By 2009, around the same time Tesla received a nearly half billion-dollar loan from the US government, Beijing ramped up a concerted strategy to develop so-called “new energy vehicles.”

That included showering the industry with support, such as awarding contracts for public taxi and bus fleets and building out charging infrastructure, as well as tax incentives and buyer rebates or subsidies.

Estimates for those subsidies vary widely, with Chinese state media citing 10 years’ worth of such measures at roughly $20 billion. Analysts have suggested Chinese government support for the sector could be between more than $50 billion in a decade to as much as $200 billion between 2009 and 2023. Meanwhile, Beijing has aggressively sought out the raw materials needed to produce EV batteries and now dominates those supply chains.

But longtime observers say it wasn’t industrial policy alone: Visionary entrepreneurs were pouring into the sector.

Among them was Wang Chuanfu, an engineer with a Dickensian backstory who founded his battery company, BYD, in 1995 and moved into car production in 2003. The company got global notice in 2008 when it received a $230 million investment from Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway.

Fifteen years later, after BYD produced its 5 millionth car, Wang was overcome by emotion on stage where he declared that despite challenges and ridicule “the era of Chinese cars has arrived.”

And China’s success, also partly spurred by Tesla’s move to manufacture in Shanghai, has in turn shaped the global industry, experts say.

“For a very long time, Western automakers were looking at EVs as not a realistic option because the prices were outrageous,” according to John Helveston, an assistant professor of engineering management and systems engineering at George Washington University in the US.

“The exponential decline in cost (has) all been driven by the Chinese industrial ecosystem … a lot of it is primarily due to scaling up the production of every aspect of that supply chain.”

Today, roughly half of new cars sold in China are battery EVs or hybrids. By comparison, sales of such vehicles made up just over 20% of total vehicles sales in the US in the third quarter of last year, according to the most recent data cited by the US Energy Information Administration.

The success of the industry has been hailed by Chinese state media and propagandists as an example of the country’s contributions to the global energy transition and its “technological prowess.”

There’s a lot to play up. This spring, American Youtuber iShowSpeed, who has nearly 40 million subscribers, went viral on Chinese social media for featuring BYD’s luxury Yangwang brand, showing off how its U9 sportscar can “dance” and yelling “these China cars got it” as he drove the water-equipped U8 SUV through a river.

Now, it’s the foreign brands losing revenue and market share that are looking to partner with Chinese companies to make use of homegrown innovation and win back customers. In Shanghai, Volkswagen has played up its “in China, for China” approach.

“This means more local development, new tech partnerships and greater speed of implementation,” Ralf Brandstätter, CEO of Volkswagen Group China, said in a statement last month. “At the same time, we are accelerating our electric offensive with additional products for new segments.”

Recent years have seen a flurry of new EV partnerships between foreign and Chinese companies, like VW’s 2023 $700 million investment in XPeng; European auto giant Stellantis launched a venture to sell Leapmotor’s budget EVs outside China; Toyota linked up with Chinese intelligent driving firm Momenta and in 2019 announced a partnership with BYD; GM brand Buick is working with Momenta, as well as CATL on batteries.

That’s all part of what industry expert Lei Xing called a “counterattack” from the foreign firms still competing in China.

“They have the products, they have the Chinese tech inside (those products) that they are able to show and say: ‘We’ve learned … and now we are showing what we think is needed in order to be relevant in the Chinese market,’” he said, adding that “the jury is still out” on how successful such efforts will be.

The fight to stay relevant is playing out during a deeply uncertain moment in the global auto industry, following Trump’s imposition of 25% tariffs on cars and, as of this weekend, 25% levies on auto parts imported into the US — not to mention his general ratcheting up of trade conflict with China. (On Tuesday, Trump tapped the brakes on automakers with some limited measures of relief.)

Tariffs from both the US and China on each others’ goods now stand at well over 100%, with some limited exceptions, sending US automakers and their suppliers scrambling to shift parts of supply chains away from China.

In the other direction, US auto giant Ford stopped shipping vehicles to China last month, with its China CFO Ryan Anderson telling CNN in Shanghai that it “brought as many” as possible of their select imported models into China ahead of the tariffs, but “the supply that we’ve got in the country now is basically all we’ll have until the tariffs relax.”

For many Chinese EV makers, their strategy is still focused on markets outside the US, while preparing for the potential impact of further trade escalation, including if Washington further tightens export controls on semiconductor technology.

James Peng, the cofounder and CEO of Pony.AI, a Chinese autonomous driving firm with roots in Silicon Valley, told CNN he thought it was unlikely the chips from US firm Nvidia that it relies on would come under export controls, but the company was sourcing backups and alternatives, because “we don’t know what’s coming (down) the pipe.”

And while the company, which is pioneering robotaxi services in major Chinese cities, carries out some research and development in the US, doing that at a larger scale or commercializing it there is “going to be tough.”

“We’ll see if there’s a way when the situation permits,” Peng said.

For some observers of the rapacious innovation on show in Shanghai, like Helveston in Washington, the US-China showdown and American policy direction sets up the potential for a split future.

On one side, China’s carmakers become increasingly dominant in a world transitioning to electric vehicles, and one the other, he said, the US cuts its support for EVs and remains “an island of tailpipes.”