BEIJING — Survivors have emerged in China’s fiercely competitive car market, which is increasingly dominated by electric-powered vehicles.

Here are brands that have emerged as Chinese consumers’ favorite, according to industry data from Autohome:

Among the 10 most popular car models sold in China in the six months through July, Geely‘s Xingyuan electric hatchback was the bestseller with nearly 197,500 units sold.

The price? Just under 100,000 yuan ($14,820).

Geely has emerged as a close rival to BYD, ranking second by overall China sales volume in 2025. The Hangzhou-based company still sells gasoline-powered cars in addition to electric vehicles, such as those sold under its premium brand Zeekr.

The company’s Model Y ranked second in popularity with more than 180,000 of the electric SUVs sold. The Tesla car comes at a steeper price tag of 263,500 yuan to 313,500 yuan, but that didn’t stop it from topping sales of Li Auto‘s i6 SUV and Xiaomi’s SU7 sedan.

Three of the 10 best-selling cars, as per Autohome data from February through July, were from BYD. But the most popular one — a modestly priced Yuan UP SUV — just managed fifth place with nearly 97,700 units sold. In sixth place was the Ti 7 under BYD’s off-road brand, followed by its Sealion 06 SUV.

The Chinese car giant reported its passenger car sales dropped by more than 10% in the first half of the year.

BEIJING — Humanoid startup LimX Dynamics is getting ready to go public, just over four years after it was founded during the pandemic.

“Listing is a must,” said founder Will Zhang, emphasizing the importance of timing. He was speaking to reporters ahead of the company’s announcement Tuesday that it had raised $200 million in a pre-IPO round.

Zhang compared the situation to Chinese electric car startups Nio, Xpeng and Li Auto, which successively listed in the U.S. from 2018 to 2020. “Once the technology is mature, if [the company] doesn’t list, then like WM Motor, it may disappear,” he said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC.

Several overseas investors, including UAE-based Stone Venture, Italy-based GGG and Germany-based Redstone VC participated in LimX’s latest round, which valued the startup at 15 billion yuan ($2.21 billion), according to a press release.

The startup said it was already preparing for its IPO, likely in Hong Kong, and is in a confidential phase of review.

The urgency comes as China now has well over 100 humanoid companies, which fall under the national push for “embodied AI.”

Reflecting a rapid surge in interest, investment in the sector hit 47.09 billion yuan ($6.95 billion) in the second quarter, more than double that of the first quarter — and up over six times versus the same period last year, according to industry data provider Xiniu.

China has fast-tracked approval for humanoid company Unitree to list in Shanghai, while Hong Kong processes applications from more than 500 companies across sectors.

“With more industrial and collaborative robot companies potentially coming to IPO, competitive pressure is likely to persist,” Morgan Stanley said in a report last week, noting sector players DeepRobot and Leju that are looking to list soon.

The investment firm forecasts 18% growth in China’s industrial robots market this year, and shipment of 50,000 humanoids.

LimX aims to create fully autonomous commercial service robots. The company said it will kick off a multi-year plan to ship thousands of humanoids to the Middle East, and is delivering its entertainment-focused Luna humanoid to customers in South Korea.

To founder Zhang, the technology behind humanoid robots has already crossed the “0 to 1” line of innovating from scratch. The next barrier to entry, he said, lies in making a good product that meets users’ needs.

Other backers in the latest funding round include Chinese precision parts company Lens Technology, IDG Capital, WestSummit Capital, Nio Capital and Hefei Binhu Industry Development Group, the release said.

Sales of Tesla’s China-made electric vehicle rose by nearly 40% in May amid a broader recovery in the country’s EV market.

The automaker in May delivered 85,982 new energy vehicle units from its Shanghai Gigafactory — where it produces Model 3 and Model Y units for China and several overseas markets — according to preliminary data published Tuesday by the China Passenger Car Association. That’s a 39.4% year-on-year increase over the same period in 2025.

In total, 1.36 million passenger EVs were sold across China’s domestic EV manufacturers in May, a 12% growth year-on-year, and 11% higher than April’s total, according to the CPCA’s report. These figures indicate “an initial recovery” in China’s EV market, the CPCA said, as sales from several other Chinese EV automakers grew modestly in the month.

Tesla rival BYD halted an eight-month streak of declining sales volumes in May, posting 376,990 deliveries of its new energy passenger vehicles — a category which includes both battery electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles — a 0.02% increase over the 376,930 units delivered last May.

Figures from Stellantis-backed Leapmotor and Geely’s Zeekr both surged by more than 80% in May. After releasing its first flagship EV in over two years, Nio saw a 62.3% year-on-year increase.

Xiaomi reported more than 30,000 EV deliveries in May, a 7.1% year-on-year increase. The tech giant launched its YU7 GT SUV — a performance-focused variant of its popular YU7 SUV — which reportedly set a lap record at the Nürburgring racetrack in Germany, making it the fastest production SUV.

A handful of Chinese automakers also reported year-on-year declines in sales — 18.4% for Li Auto, and 4.1% for XPeng.

But it remains unclear whether Tesla’s FSD (Supervised) capabilities have already been made available to mainstream consumers in China.

On May 29, local media outlet The Beijing News reported that Tesla was facing a lawsuit from a group of 10 Chinese car owners for falsely claiming that its FSD (Supervised) features had were available in China, despite not having received approval from Chinese regulators.

Tesla has not responded to CNBC’s requests for comment.

—CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report.

BYD‘s passenger vehicle sales fell for an eighth consecutive month in April, while its domestic rivals Leapmotor and Zeekr notched record-high monthly deliveries as the market becomes more competitive.

BYD reported Sunday that it delivered 314,100 new energy passenger vehicles last month — comprising battery electric and plug-in hybrid models — a 15.7% decline from the year before but up 6.2% from March, CNBC’s records show.

Export figures for BYD rose to an all-time high of 135,098, according to a Hong Kong Stock Exchange filing — a record, and up more than 70% compared to the same period in 2025, according to CNBC’s calculations. The split in the Shenzhen-headquartered automaker’s domestic and overseas fortunes underscores its growing reliance on overseas markets amid intensifying competition at home.

In April, the market-leading EV giant reported a nearly 55.4% drop in profits year over year in the first quarter as operating revenue fell 11.8% to 150 billion yuan ($22 billion) amid strong showings from its domestic rivals in the same quarter.

Second-place Chinese EV maker Leapmotor posted its highest-ever number of monthly deliveries in April, with 71,387 units, up 73.9% over the same period in 2025. The Stellantis-backed company logged its previous monthly high in November 2025 and turned its first annual profit last year.

Geely‘s premium EV brand Zeekr also notched a fresh high in monthly sales with 31,787 units, representing a 131.6% year on year increase.

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi posted more than 30,000 EV deliveries in April, a more than 7.1% increase from the same period a year ago. The company has also reportedly received over 70,000 pre-orders of its upgraded SU7 sedan.

Nio delivered 29,356 EVs in April, up by 22.8% from the same period a year before. This figure includes sales from its lower-priced Onvo and Firefly brands.

April deliveries from startup Li Auto held steady at 34,085 units, up 0.4% from the same period the prior year.

Following the launch of its new GX SUV in the middle of the month, Xpeng posted a year-on-year sales decline — apart from BYD, the only other automaker to have reported a drop in year-on-year sales — with 31,011 deliveries, an 11.5% fall from the year before.

With plans to export more than one million units in 2026, BYD has increasingly asserted itself abroad.

The company accounted for at least 70% of EV sales in Mexico and 75% of Argentina’s EV sales in 2025, according to estimates from consultancy Latam Mobility.

New registrations of BYD’s passenger EVs across the European Union, the European Free Trade Association, and the U.K. rose by more than 155% year-on-year over the first quarter of 2026, according to figures from the European…

BEIJING — Electric carmakers in China are layering on more of the same artificial intelligence features as they try to survive a prolonged price war in the world’s largest auto market.

The competition has shifted over the last few years, from extending battery range to rolling out driver-assist systems and using more powerful automotive chips. Now, automakers are focusing on a suite of in-car AI features.

More than 50 car brands now use ByteDance’s Doubao AI model, the company’s cloud platform Volcano Engine announced last Friday at the Beijing auto show, where the tech unit had a booth next to robotaxi company Pony.ai.

That means Doubao is in 145 car models and over 7 million vehicles, Volcano Engine said. Besides domestic vehicles, Doubao AI has also been integrated in new foreign-branded models, such as the all-electric Mercedes-Benz GLC, the SAIC Audi E7X and the SAIC Volkswagen ID. ERA 9X.

“We will keep on integrating new features faster,” Fermín Soneira, CEO of the Audi and SAIC Cooperation Project, told reporters this month ahead of the auto show. He noted how automakers can quickly deploy tech updates remotely, or “over-the-air.”

Despite the rapid rollout of new features, automakers face persistent pressure on sales.

“It’s going to remain tough, because the capacity is there,” he said. “This price war is not going to really stop in the next month.”

The shift towards AI reflects consumer demand for connected features, including Huawei-smartphone-compatible interfaces or voice-based assistants such as Doubao.

ByteDance’s Doubao is by far the most widely used AI chatbot in China, with more than 155 million weekly active users as of early this year, according to consultancy Chozan. Volcano Engine’s auto show booth included demos of both Chinese-language and English-language AI systems for cars.

The price war has turned into a feature war around cockpit technology, said Stephen Dyer, partner and managing director and head of AlixPartners’ Asia automotive and industrials consulting practice.

The challenge is, however, that much of that technology soon becomes similar, making it harder for companies to stand out.

Among the top 20 best-selling electric car models in China, those priced at 100,000 yuan ($14,645) or above offered similar driver-assist and in-car entertainment functions, according to AlixPartners.

With “technology, they’re going to have to race and keep racing, because it disseminates so quickly that you’re never going to be able to sustain a differentiated technology for long,” Dyer said.

Instead, he expects Chinese companies to start competing more on the “outside-of-the-car experience,” similar to luxury brands that offer exclusive lifestyle experiences.

Chinese automaker Nio, for example, offers its customers exclusive access to products and clubhouses, on top of vehicles featuring…

BEIJING — Chinese tech giant Alibaba said Friday that its Qwen artificial intelligence model will be integrated into vehicles from automakers including BYD and a local joint venture of Volkswagen, as the industry pushes to add more in-car digital services and compete for buyers in a slowing electric vehicle market.

The model will run on Nvidia‘s automotive chip system and is designed to function even with limited network connectivity.

Alibaba said select models will allow drivers to order food delivery, book hotels, buy tickets to attractions and track packages, among other features, through voice commands.

The system combines on-device processing with cloud-based computing to interpret voice commands, plan multi-step tasks and connect to services such as payments and navigation.

Auto companies that will integrate Qwen into their vehicle systems include BYD, Geely, Li Auto, Changan, Dongfeng, BAIC, Great Wall Motor, SAIC Volkswagen and SAIC IM Motors.

The announcement was made on the opening day of the Beijing Auto Show 2026.

Earlier this year, FAW Group‘s Hongqi brand integrated Qwen into its in-car system, debuting in the Hongqi HS6 plug-in hybrid model.

The rollout comes as Chinese automakers compete to attract buyers in a slowing electric-car market and seek to differentiate through in-car software and services.

A local version of Audi in China, which replaces its four-ring logo with a wordmark, said its second model — an electric SUV called the E7X — will begin presales on May 8. The vehicle will incorporate AI features from ByteDance’s Doubao and iFlyTek, Audi said at the auto show.

It was not immediately clear whether the AI features would be available in cars exported outside China.

Cadillac, the American luxury vehicle division of General Motors, also showed off a new model with voice-assistant capabilities that can connect with ByteDance’s Doubao AI.

Hi, this is Evelyn, writing to you from Beijing. Welcome to the latest edition of The China Connection — a succinct snapshot of what I’m seeing and hearing from local businesses.

Today, I dig into rising valuations for Chinese humanoid startups and why they still aren’t attracting the same kind of money as their U.S. rivals — despite delivering far more robots. Are U.S. VCs missing out?

Chinese humanoid startups are already shipping robots to factories and malls, while their U.S. rivals remain focused on development — and far higher valuations.

It’s a growing divide.

U.S. humanoid robot startup Figure commands a valuation of at least $39 billion; Texas-based rival Apptronik, meanwhile, achieved a $5 billion valuation in February.

That’s well above the $3 billion-plus valuation of Chinese startup Galbot, which claims to be the highest-valued privately-held Chinese company in the sector. And its backers come from China, Singapore and the Middle East — not the U.S.

Among private companies — and there are well over 100 humanoid startups in China — AI2 Robotics has achieved a 20 billion yuan ($2.93 billion) valuation, according to CEO and founder Eric Guo.

It might be a fraction of Figure’s valuation, but Guo claimed a large, foreign high-end manufacturer chose AI2’s robots over the U.S. startup’s for factory work. AI2 is also rolling out robots at airports in China, as well as in semiconductor and healthcare factories.

“Commercialization and tech capability aren’t contradictory,” Guo said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC.

It’s an investment thesis he expects investors — even from the U.S. — to start picking up on in just a few months.

If that shift happens, China is well-positioned.

Chinese humanoid startups took the top six spots in Omdia’s rankings of global robot shipments in 2025. Figure and Tesla were the only U.S. companies that made the top 10. While a Figure robot appeared beside U.S. first lady Melania Trump at a White House event in March, Tesla’s Optimus still largely remains in development.

Another reason for the valuation gap is how investors perceive the companies and their ambitions.

U.S. humanoid startups are being priced as wide-reaching artificial intelligence platforms, while Chinese ones are seen more as industrial hardware plays, said Rui Ma, founder of Tech Buzz China, which regularly brings U.S. investors to visit Chinese startups.

“If China ends up dominating manufacturing scale and real-world deployment,” U.S. venture capital funds may miss out on the opportunity to some degree, she said.

Geopolitics has complicated the investment landscape.

U.S.-China tensions, along with domestic national security policies, have chilled cross-border investment. Large U.S. pension funds that once invested heavily in Chinese…

Hi, this is Evelyn, writing to you from Beijing. Welcome to the latest edition of The China Connection — a succinct snapshot of what I’m seeing and hearing from local businesses.

Today, I talk to Volkswagen China’s chief technology officer about how they are pivoting away from engines. It starts with chips, obviously, but which company’s?

Enjoy!
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Volkswagen is preparing for a future driven by chips. And, at least in China, Nvidia isn’t part of the picture.

With advanced tech from local Chinese players, “for us, there is no reason to stick [to] Nvidia,” Thomas Ulbrich, chief technology officer of Volkswagen Group China, told me last week. We chatted in his office, during one of his rare days at the German automaker’s Beijing headquarters.

Ulbrich spends most of the time in Hefei, an automotive hub just hours from Shanghai.

That’s where Volkswagen’s factories are located, as well as its biggest research and development center outside of Germany. For semiconductors, the company has a joint venture with Chinese automotive chip company Horizon Robotics, and a partnership with electric car company Xpeng, which has developed its own “Turing” car chip.

The Xpeng Turing chip is part of Volkswagen’s first all-electric SUV, the ID. UNYX 08. Production began Friday in Hefei, with deliveries in China set to begin by the end of June. The vehicle comes with L2 advanced driver–assist, which means it can help drivers navigate highways and urban streets.

That’s a driver–assist feature Xpeng has already rolled out in China, while Tesla has yet to get Beijing’s approval for its version.

Having that specific expertise in driver-assist software is also why Ulbrich said Volkswagen is working with Xpeng chips, as well as Horizon.

“Why does a customer buy a car?” Ulbrich said.

“Ten years ago, it was brand, brand, brand,” he said. “But nowadays it is intelligence of the car, mainly driven by smart EVs.”

In about two years, he expects Volkswagen cars in China to reach L3 capabilities, which will allow drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel under specific conditions. When regulators allow L3 to be used, liability for accidents is set to shift from driver to manufacturer.

Meanwhile, Volkswagen’s joint venture with Horizon, called Carizon, is developing its first advanced automotive chip, with expected delivery in three to five years.

Nvidia has also bet that automotive chips will be a billion-dollar business. But segment growth has slowed in recent quarters, while the Chinese EV partners that once partnered with Nvidia have begun developing their own chips in-house.

As for applications of artificial intelligence, Ulbrich said AI integration would happen faster in factories than in cars. He said Volkswagen is already incorporating…

Tesla’s China-made electric vehicle sales rose over the first two months of 2026 from the year before, regaining some lost ground to China’s BYD.

The combined January and February sales in Tesla’s China-made EVs rose by more than 35% to 127,728, up from 93,926 in the previous year, according to data published Thursday by the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).

The figure was adjusted to account for the seasonal sales slowdown during the two-week Chinese New Year holiday, which took place mid-February.

The combined sales volume from Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory — which produces the Model 3 and Model Y for domestic and foreign markets in Europe, the Asia-Pacific and elsewhere — was second only to BYD, which reported a 36% decline in deliveries on year during the same period.

BYD unseated Tesla as the world’s largest EV seller, on a calendar-year basis, for the first time in 2025, but Tesla’s recent delivery figures suggest that demand remains relatively healthy, as the combined sales volume for Tesla’s China-made EVs is still more than double that of the next closest automaker, Leapmotor.

Reuters also reported last week that new registrations for Tesla’s EVs, a proxy for sales, rose broadly across Europe in February, most of which are exported from Tesla’s Shanghai factory.

Still, there is little indication that the American automaker is primed to catch up to BYD’s sizeable lead in domestic and overseas sales.

BYD’s new Blade battery and charging capabilities — touted to be able to achieve a 97% charge from 10% in just nine minutes — was unveiled last week to critical acclaim, as it was said to overcome common concerns over EV battery ranges.

BYD’s growing overseas footprint also enables the Shenzhen-headquartered automaker to maintain a strong lead over its domestic competitors, with its export figures exceeding domestic sales for the first time in February.

“BYD’s hedge is exports — [the company’s] overseas sales crossed 1 million units in 2025 for the first time, a buffer purely domestic rivals can’t match,” Leon Cheng, head of the mobility practice at management consulting firm YCP, told CNBC.

Other automakers from China have also grown increasingly competitive by offering a wider spread of features at more affordable prices, chipping away at sales from both BYD and Tesla.

In February, Geely’s Xingyuan was the best sold car model in China, beating offerings from Tesla and BYD, according to data from Autohome. In the month before, Xiaomi’s YU7 SUV dethroned Tesla’s Model Y as the best sold car in China.

In its report, the CPCA noted that March’s finalized sales figures could provide a better gauge for the…