According to a new report from ABI Research, in 2030, 1.2 million Chinese-made Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) will be imported by the European Union (EU), making up 12% of the bloc’s BEV sales. Chinese brands like BYD, XPENG and NIO are launching models across Europe in 2023.

In the last five years, exports of cars from the EU to China have fallen slightly, but EU imports of Chinese cars have quadrupled, reversing the trade flow, ABI found. In 2022, China became the EU’s biggest source of imported cars, but this still accounted for only under 6% of all vehicles registered that year. However, 28% of the EU’s BEVs were imported from China.

Chinese brands did not make the majority of these imported EVs. Western automakers are increasingly using China as an export base, taking advantage of the local supply chain and the benefits of locating their capacity with the largest source of demand, ABI reported.

These findings are from ABI Research’s Chinese Electric Vehicle OEMs application analysis report.