Whenever my husband and I are driving, we have a little game: I try to guess the make of the cars passing us. My brain point-blank refuses to remember most of them (what can I say, I am just a girl), so quite often I end up asking him, "What is that one?" And lately, his answer has been increasingly predictable: "Another Chinese car." Eventually, curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to Google what is actually happening with Chinese cars in the UAE. Fancy hearing the results?

From roughly 4% of the UAE market in 2023, Chinese brands jumped to around 7% in 2024 — and in the first nine months of 2025, they were estimated to account for 15–20% of the entire UAE automotive market. Jetour alone saw its sales rise by around 90% year-on-year.

Quite a dramatic climb! And naturally, it raises a few questions.

Why is this happening in the UAE specifically — a market where you can buy pretty much any car your heart desires, often at a genuinely competitive price? What is the "Jetour effect" that propelled its T2 to third place among the UAE's best-selling cars in 2025? And, perhaps most importantly, once the novelty, screens and attractive price tags are put aside, what do the people who actually drive Chinese cars have to say about them?

While 2025 might feel like the tipping point — the year we suddenly started spotting Chinese cars everywhere — their rise in the UAE began much earlier. Back in 2020, imports stood at around 10,000 vehicles. By 2025, that figure had climbed to roughly 570,000. And it wasn't one sudden leap: 2021 brought the first major jump, the momentum continued through 2023, and 2024–2025 is when the Chinese car boom really took off.

That growth isn't limited to one or two familiar names either. While Jetour might be the brand many of us now recognise on the road, there are more than 15 Chinese brands competing in the UAE. Their presence is growing quickly too: over the past two years, BYD listings have increased by 345%, JAC by 171% and Chery by 163%.

So, the numbers make one thing pretty clear: Chinese cars didn't suddenly arrive in the UAE in 2025 — they had been building momentum for years. The more interesting question is why that momentum has turned into such a boom now.

With a shift this big, there is never just one reason behind it. In this case, the pieces fit together rather neatly: China is making an extraordinary number of cars, competition at home is fierce, manufacturers need somewhere to sell them — and the UAE happens to offer a particularly attractive way in. But let's take it one reason at a time.

Back in 2003, China was producing around 5 million cars a year. Today, that figure has ballooned more than sixfold, with China now responsible for roughly 40% of global car manufacturing capacity — or, put more simply, about one in every three vehicles made worldwide.

And that scale creates an interesting problem: where do you actually put all those cars? China may have a population of more than a billion, but even its domestic market has limits. Once you are producing vehicles on this scale, looking abroad stops being simply an opportunity and starts becoming something closer to a necessity.

The scale is only half the story. China didn't just build a lot of cars; it built an extraordinarily competitive car market.

Think about established brands: people already know them, trust them and know roughly what they are getting. Those brands still need to innovate, of course, but they have the luxury of an existing reputation. Now throw BYD, Geely, Chery, SAIC, Changan, GWM and dozens of others into the ring. Many are still fighting to make a name for themselves, while competing fiercely with foreign manufacturers and each other — which means constant new launches, rapid tech upgrades and aggressive pricing.

The result is that Chinese brands can't simply offer another version of what already exists — they need to give buyers a reason to choose an unfamiliar name over one they already trust. And you can see that strategy across very different parts of the market. The Jetour T2 offers the look and presence of a much more expensive adventure SUV at a lower price; the Geely Monjaro packs premium-style features into a more accessible family SUV; and the BYD Seal takes on the Tesla Model 3 with aggressive pricing and plenty of technology. The cars are different, but the logic is much the same: if the badge can't sell the car yet, the product has to.

For Chinese carmakers looking to expand overseas, the UAE has one particularly obvious advantage: relatively low barriers to entry.

Imagine you are the manufacturer. Where would you rather sell your car? The UAE, where the standard customs duty on an imported vehicle is 5%? The European Union, where cars normally face a 10% import tariff — and a Chinese-made EV can attract another 7.8% to 35.3% on top, depending on the manufacturer? Or the United States, where the Section 301 tariff on Chinese EVs alone stands at 100%?

Put those figures side by side and the UAE starts looking rather appealing.

Not every Chinese car arriving in the UAE eventually ends up on Sheikh Zayed Road. A significant number enter through the country's free zones before being re-exported elsewhere, making the UAE more than simply a consumer market — it is also a major distribution hub for the wider region.

Free zones make that particularly practical. Cars can arrive and remain there without immediately being imported into the UAE mainland market, giving traders flexibility over whether they are eventually sold locally or shipped onwards. For Chinese manufacturers, establishing a presence here therefore provides access to considerably more than UAE buyers alone.

While Chinese cars are already quite popular across the country, their rise in the UAE is perhaps best embodied by one model: the Jetour T2. In 2025, it became the third-best-selling car in the country, overtaking some of the UAE’s usual favourites, including the Nissan Patrol and Toyota Land Cruiser.

So, what explains such a rapid rise? I haven’t tried the T2 myself, but a family friend has — and the way he describes it probably explains much of the appeal:

The biggest concern you will come across online is reliability. Because yes, what Chinese carmakers are offering today is impressive — but a car isn't supposed to impress you for a year or two. Ideally, it should keep going for a decade, perhaps longer, and still have someone willing to buy it at the end. Can today's Chinese cars do that? The slightly frustrating answer is: we don't really know yet. Their major push into markets such as the UAE is simply too recent for most models to have built up a proper ten-year track record.

There are, however, a few studies that give us some clues. Here are two worth knowing about:

J.D. Power asked 13,919 owners about problems they experienced during their first two to six months with a new car, from the engine and transmission to infotainment, climate control and driver-assistance systems. The results are encouraging: Chinese brands recorded 218 problems per 100 vehicles, compared with 224 for international mass-market brands and 219 for premium brands. For the first time in the study's 27-year history, Chinese domestic brands actually performed better on average than international mass-market competitors.

This study looked at cars between 13 and 48 months old, and here the picture becomes more cautious. Leading Chinese brands still lagged behind the best international competitors: Chery recorded 188 problems per 100 vehicles, compared with 156 for FAW Toyota and 158 for GAC Toyota. In other words, Chinese cars may now be highly competitive straight out of the showroom, but there is still a gap when it comes to how they age.

And then comes the question neither study can answer yet: what happens to a BYD, Jetour, Geely or Chery after eight or ten years and 150,000–200,000 kilometres? For now, we simply don’t know.

I did my own small investigation and went digging through Reddit for long-term owners. Same problem: most of the cars were simply too new — even the oldest examples I came across were from around 2022. On the bright side, genuinely disastrous stories were harder to find than I expected.

So, are Chinese cars reliable?

The evidence so far is encouraging, particularly when they are new, but the final verdict needs time. Chinese cars are good, Chinese cars are selling, and plenty of owners seem perfectly happy with them. Whether today's generation will still look quite so impressive after a decade on the road is the one thing no study can tell us yet. For that, we will simply have to wait.