China has already crossed its record car export number from last year, and we’re only 2/3 of the way through the year. It shows how China’s EV choices are leading the country to dominate manufacturing, while the rest of the world’s automaking nations simply stand by and eagerly enable it.
Chinese car sales numbers for the month of August are in, and paint a once-again rosy picture for EVs. Sales of battery-electric vehicles are up, and sales of anything with an engine in them are collapsing.
But it’s not just happening domestically, it’s also happening in the export market. While BEV sales only grew slightly within China, they skyrocketed outside China – and China has happily been the one to fill that demand.
Exports of New Energy Vehicles (NEVs, battery electric + plug-in hybrid) grew 154.7% in August from their already-high point a year ago. NEVs accounted for 58.4% of total Chinese car exports in August, a number that has been steadily rising.
China may export more EVs than any other country exports cars in total
But they also reached a major milestone in August, with total exports of Chinese cars for the year of 2026 already crossing the high bar the country set in 2025. Through August of this year, China exported 6.2 million passenger vehicles. In all of 2025, China had exported 6.1 million passenger vehicles. This is compared to the next-top exporter Japan, with 5.1 million total cars exported in 2025.
So, China already beat its record, and it’s still got 4 months to go. By the end of the year, it’s on track to increase exports by somewhere around 50% in a year.
Looking forward, if China ends the year with around 9 million vehicles exported, and a little over half of them are NEVs, that means China will have not only exported more vehicles than any other country, but will have exported more NEVs than any other country has exported cars in total. It looks like it will be close this year, but almost certainly that milestone will be met last year.
China might win in export value soon, too
There’s also a chance that China might take the last crown it doesn’t hold: export value.
While China currently dominates in exported units, Germany has in recent years still sold more dollars worth of cars. This is because German cars are more expensive, on average, than Chinese cars.
But German export value is going down, while Chinese export value is skyrocketing. The two lines are bound to cross, and that should happen either this year or next, if trends hold – and we see little reason to think they won’t, given the retreat from EV manufacturing going on in the rest of the world.
In pure numbers, China already brought in over a hundred billion dollars in export value with auto exports last year. Which makes the ~$230 billion the country spent on building up its EV industry look like quite the bargain.
The US was on the path for a similar boom in manufacturing thanks to President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, but Mr. Trump and republicans then decided to kill that manufacturing boom in any way they can and send those jobs to China.
China is dominating because other countries aren’t trying
It’s an extension of the recent story of China absolutely dominating the global car export market.
Until 2020, China was the sixth-largest car exporter in the world, behind Japan, Mexico, Germany, South Korea, and the US (with most of Mexico’s cars going directly over the border to the US). And for the last five decades, Japan and Germany have been trading the top spot back and forth.
But then, the sleeping giant woke up, and started selling EVs to the world. And with no other country bothering to compete (and some actively burning money so China can win), China has had a blue ocean market to calmly wade into.
By 2024, China had jumped into first place globally, first by offloading its unwanted gas-powered cars (which we warned you all about), then by steadily rising its export of affordable, high-tech EVs.
And this year, the market got supercharged by an idiotic oil conflict which is spiking energy prices globally, leading everyone to finally recognize that maybe it’s a good time to get off this resource that everyone has known for decades that we should be off of.
That oil conflict was timed well for China, because the US and Europe are actively retreating from providing the cars the world wants, handing China an easy win. Automakers in those countries seem content to instead beg for tariffs and other protectionist nonsense, which will not work, instead of putting in any tiny amount of effort required to update their thinking to the modern age and provide the electric vehicles the world wants and needs.
And now, you can see the result of that thinking, which we have repeatedly warned you of ahead of time: China is making a ton of money, and you’re becoming irrelevant. You can either do something about it, or you can sit around pretending none of this is happening, as you’ve been doing for years.
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