As Chinese automakers fight a bruising price war at home, they are also waging a battle for the overcrowded Australian market. And like in any conflict, it helps to capture high ground.
In May, Hebei-headquartered Great Wall Motor (GWM) brought three of its latest models to the Springs 4×4 Adventure Park in southeast Queensland. Owner and professional offroad driver Lucas Bree classifies the courses at the 1,700-acre park as ranging “from easy to stupid.”
GWM handed him the keys to the three models, comprising one plug-in hybrid and two conventional models, and asked him to drive them up Beer O’Clock Hill.
The almost 50-degree climb over loose and jagged rocks undoubtedly falls in the latter category of Bree’s ratings system. Hundreds of drivers have failed in attempts to get their vehicles to the top. GWM, said Bree, was the first company to organize a test run.
The day of the attempt was wet and Bree first had to figure out where the buttons were.
“It’s not the greatest situation to be on a learning curve with a car,” he told Nikkei Asia, standing halfway up the sharp incline.
But, one by one, he got them up. The Cannon Alpha became the first plug-in hybrid car to pass the test, and like the other two models—the Cannon XSR Diesel and the Tank 300 Diesel—achieved it without modification to their mass market specs, something only the Ineos Grenadier had previously managed.
It was a marketing win for GWM.
“It is a badge of honor,” said GWM Australia COO John Kett. “It’s helping to validate our credentials, which is incredibly important.”
Like Beer O’clock Hill, Australia’s automotive market is tough, by some measures the most competitive in the world. More than 70 brands compete for a share of the 1.2 million new cars and trucks sold annually, a level that has remained largely unchanged for years. By comparison, the US sells 17 million new vehicles a year but has only around 40 brands on offer.
And it’s getting tougher. Chinese makers are arriving en masse down under to duke it out and learn lessons for further global expansion. Around ten of them, or their subsidiary brands, have either launched in the past 12 months or plan to enter soon.
“It’s quite conceivable that in the next two to three years … the brands could go from 75 to 100, so that’s a huge challenge,” Kett said.
Wielding scale, speed, and cost advantages, Chinese carmakers could muscle out legacy rivals from Japan, South Korea, and Europe, experts say. Over the past decade, the number of Chinese-brand cars on Australia’s roads has exploded, with 2,175 vehicles sold in 2015 to 142,521 last year, some 12% of total sales, according to research by Cox Automotive.
In the first six months of 2025, they made up about 16% of all sales, with GWM the seventh most popular, BYD the eighth, and MG the tenth.
“The past few years has seen a veritable avalanche of products from emerging players such as BYD, MG, and GWM, among many others, and there’s still a lot of growth to come,” said Mike Costello, Cox Automotive analyst and corporate affairs manager.
China is going after a uniquely Australian segment: utes.
Short for “coupe utility,” ute originally referred to vehicles with the cargo-carrying area integrated into the chassis, a design pioneered in Australia in the 1930s. The label is now more generally used for pickup truck style models, where the bed is separate.
Utes make up about 20% of cars sold in the country and they have emerged as a hotly contested battleground for brands looking to appeal to the country’s army of builders, electricians, plumbers, and other tradesmen known as “tradies” in Australia.
The 4×4 ute segment is led by the Ford Ranger and Toyota Hilux. More Chinese brands are joining the race. In a rare move, JAC and MG chose Australia for the global launches of ute models earlier this year, and BYD’s Shark, a plug-in hybrid model launched last year, is now fourth in that category. The two GWM Cannon models that conquered Beer O’Clock are also utes. Chery Australia is planning to launch its first ute next year, automotive website CarExpert reported last week.
“The thing I’m really surprised about is the Chinese moving into the ute market,” said industry expert Matt Hobbs. “There is a huge focus of Chinese companies, particularly with their right-hand drive versions, to get it right in Australia and then take it global.”
Costello said Australia was an ideal test market on Chinese automakers’ “path to global sales dominance.” With no domestic market to protect—the last Australian car was produced in 2017—it has almost no trade barriers, a particularly enticing prospect as tariff walls have risen elsewhere.
Australia is also close to China, home to an affluent population, and has an established dealership network, Costello said. Small though it may be, he said, the market provides an outlet for overflow from China’s saturated domestic market.
The trend is forecast to accelerate, with China expected to become the dominant source of imported cars in Australia by 2035, according to a recent report by the Centre for International Economics commissioned by the Australian Automotive Dealer Association (AADA).
Cars manufactured in China—including those from Western brands like Tesla, Volvo and BMW—are forecast to account for 43% of all vehicles sold in Australia by the middle of the next decade, cutting into the share of shipments from Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and elsewhere.
The influx, said the report’s authors, will be driven by China’s major production cost advantages and will be accelerated by Australia’s fuel efficiency standards. The laws, which came into effect this year, require companies to reduce the emissions of their overall fleets or face penalties, favoring companies with electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid cars to offer.
“As emissions standards tighten, supply chains globalize, and EV technology dominates, China is set to play an increasingly central role in Australia’s automotive future and redefine our automotive landscape,” they wrote.
AADA chief executive James Voortman said the rapid influx is a mixed bag for Australia’s almost 4,000 car dealers.
“It’s been a tale of mixed blessings,” he said. “A lot have done really well,” Voortman said, by adding Chinese brands to their product lines. “There’s some that got on the bandwagon a little late and have suffered because their existing brands have lost market share.”
The big test for the entrants, he said, will be meeting customers’ needs post sale, noting market leaders like Toyota, Ford, Mazda, Kia, and Mitsubishi have spent a lot of time and money building nationwide service and repair networks.
“The question is will the Chinese brands take the same amount of care or are they just going to be focused on that one goal, which is just getting as many cars into the country as possible,” he said.
Mark Avis, a 40-year car sales veteran and general manager of Brighton Auto, is among the dealers that have made the switch. His once Honda-badged showroom in Melbourne changed to GWM branding after the Japanese company terminated his franchise arrangement, and he says he’s now selling about the same amount of the Chinese brand as he did with Honda.
“It’s history repeating itself,” Avis said. “When the Japanese cars came in the 1970s and the 1980s, they were good-quality cars that were undercutting pricewise.”
He said that Chinese models have filled a void at the affordable end of the market after cost-of-living concerns began to set in following the Covid-19 pandemic. But he pointed to a key difference from the Japanese and South Korean waves of the past.
“The main difference between the Chinese and the legacy automakers is the speed to market,” he said. “It’s not a three- or four- or five-year process. They can get [new models] to market fairly quickly.”
The new entrants are also benefiting from increasingly brand-agnostic consumers, Avis said. Gone are the days when it was common to swear allegiance to either Australian built Holdens, a subsidiary of General Motors, or their chief locally produced rival Fords.
“The younger generation, it appears to me, don’t have the same loyalty,” he said.
BYD, which entered Australia in 2022, is looking to make further inroads after rocketing into the top 10. Initially selling through a third-party distributor and a joint venture with Eagers Automotive, the country’s largest dealership group, the Chinese auto giant took full control of its Australian distribution this month.
Stephen Collins, the company’s recently appointed Australian chief operating officer, said the switch would streamline operations as its presence in the country grows. Its focus will be on pick-up models and SUVs, the latter category being most popular in Australia, with 22% of the market.
“To succeed in Australia really means opportunities to succeed in other advanced and highly competitive markets,” he told Nikkei Asia, saying BYD’s core strength in EVs and hybrid cars means it was well positioned.
“We’ve got aspirations to be bigger and better. I’m not going to call out a number or a ranking, but we’ve certainly got aspirations for that trajectory to continue.”
Back at the Springs Adventure Park, Bree wanted his hill to be at the center of the battle. After GWM’s success, South Korean automaker Kia organized a run for its ute, the Tasman, which reached the summit. Bree said he had been in touch with BYD about taking a Shark up the hill, but it has yet to go ahead.
The previous three attempts in that vehicle had been by privately owned cars. One had to be hauled up using a winch. Another “substantially damaged.”
He issued a challenge to any automaker marketing models as tough off-roaders to test their mettle and demonstrate they had the grit needed to ascend Beer O’Clock Hill.
“Every brand has to have an opportunity to prove itself,” he said. ‘What better way to do that than probably one of the most treacherous hills on the planet?”
This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.