@samuelszuchan: Chinese automakers are now selling brand-new cars as used. The seats are still wrapped in plastic. The odometer reads zero. Here's how it works. Automakers under pressure to hit subsidy-tied sales targets “sell” new cars on paper to affiliated dealerships, claim the EV subsidy, then resell those same cars as “used” at a steep discount, often to markets like Russia and Central Asia. Reuters confirmed in July 2025 that Zeekr, owned by Geely, and Neta booked sales by registering insurance policies for cars that had never reached customers. Xiamen C&D registered Zeekr's December batch under two of its own subsidiaries just to let Zeekr count them as sales for the year. Great Wall Motors' CEO Wei Jianjun estimated about 4,000 dealerships were involved in this practice. He called it “the Evergrande of the auto industry.” The People's Daily, the central Party paper, ran an editorial against it. National passenger car inventory hit 3.5 million units in April 2025. This is happening inside the most intense EV price war in history. BYD dropped the price of its smallest car, the Seagull, twenty percent to about $7,780 in May 2025 and slashed prices on 22 models by as much as 34 percent. The median net profit margin for listed Chinese automakers in 2024 was 0.83 percent, down from 2.7 percent in 2019. Cars are now being produced, registered, and parked with no buyer in sight. The industrial output exists. The end demand does not. Which makes you wonder what exactly we're measuring when we call this productivity.

Sam Szuchan

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Region: US

Saturday 23 May 2026 19:02:01 GMT