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    A growing new-car force? Australians bought more than 120,000 Chinese-made vehicles last year

    How many Chinese cars were sold in Oz?
    Andrew Chesterton
    Andrew Chesterton
    Contributing Journalist
    6 Jan 2023 • 2 min read

    China is emerging as an increasingly powerful new-car force in Australia, with more than 120,000 Chinese-made vehicles sold here last year.

    It's a meteoric rise for the relatively new vehicle manufacturing hub, with just 76,262 vehicles sold in 2021. That number boomed by more than 60 percent last year though, with Chinese-made vehicles accounting for 122,845 sales.

    It means one in every 10 vehicles sold in Australia now comes from China, marking the country as the next Korea, Thailand or Japan when it comes to building cars for our market.

    Read more about Chinese cars

    Leading that charge is brands like MG, which shifted a super-impressive 49,582 vehicles here last year, making it the seventh most popular brand in the country.

    More than 25,000 GWM vehicles found homes here, too, along with more than 16,000 LDVs, and more than 2000 examples of the BYD Atto 3.

    That's just north of 93,000 vehicles between those brands alone. Then there's Polestar and Volvo, both of which source some vehicles from China, and Tesla, which shifted almost 20,000 vehicles in Australia, many of which were built in China, too.

    The result makes China the fourth biggest supplier of vehicles to Australia, bested by Korea (159,244), Thailand (245,608) and Japan (330,061). But while each of those regions remained relatively static, only China saw true rapid-fire growth last year.

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