Agency Report –
Chinese car brands remain a rare sight in Germany, accounting for just 0.1% to 0.2% of the country’s passenger car fleet as of January 1, 2025, according to a dpa analysis of figures from the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA).
While competition from China has made itself felt in the global sales figures of German car manufacturers, the numbers show this is not yet the case on domestic roads.
The KBA’s quarterly inventory said that there were exactly 70,046 Chinese vehicles on German roads under a narrow definition of what constitutes Chinese brands, out of a total of 49.3 million passenger cars in Germany. A notable 72% of these were electric vehicles.
MG Roewe leads the pack by a wide margin with 49,557 vehicles. Lynk & Co and Great Wall Motor (GWM) follow with just over 6,000 cars each, while BYD accounts for around 4,500. Nio has about 1,700 vehicles, and other brands like Aiways, Xpeng, Leapmotor, and Maxus are represented in the low hundreds. Some smaller-volume brands are likely grouped under “other” in KBA records.
Most of these Chinese brands – excluding Volvo, owned by China’s Geely – have only recently entered the German market. Their presence is growing, albeit slowly, as they still make up just around 1% of new car registrations.
If Chinese brands are looked at in a broader sense – including Polestar and Volvo Cars, which belong to Chinese group Geely, and Smart, which is now a joint venture between Mercedes-Benz and Geely – the figures would be in the high hundreds of thousands or even about 1 million.
