Earlier this month, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with Nissan to manufacture vehicles at the Sunderland plant — Britain's largest car factory — from as early as 2027. 

That trajectory tells you most of what you need to know about what is happening to the UK's car parc.

In April 2026, 12 Chinese brands appeared in the UK new car registration rankings, with a combined total of 24,669 units and a 16.5% market share for the month. 

Across the first four months of the year, Chinese automakers sold 80,960 vehicles in the UK. The combined registrations of BYD and Chery Group exceeded Volkswagen, currently the UK's biggest single brand. 

Chery-owned brands including Omoda and Jaecoo recorded registration growth of 338% across Europe in the same period. The Jaecoo 7 reached cumulative sales of 17,668 units year-to-date, ranking third among best-selling models in the UK, behind only the Ford Puma and Kia Sportage.

These vehicles are no longer on the margins of the car parc. And the Nissan-Chery deal marks a further step change because Chinese brands are no longer just arriving but being manufactured here too.

The question for the aftermarket is whether the infrastructure to support this — parts supply, repair knowledge, insurer confidence — is building quickly enough to keep pace.

Right now, the honest answer is ‘not quite’.

The insurance problem

Premiums for some Chinese models are significantly more expensive than those of established European counterparts, with some major UK insurers declining to offer quotes at all. The reasons are understandable, even if the consequences are not. 

A limited claims history, developing parts supply networks, and uncertainty around battery repairability and write-off likelihood, all feed directly into repair costs and total-loss rates.

The consequence is a pattern the industry will recognise and that I’ve written about before. 

Vehicles are being written off for damage that would be a straightforward bodyshop repair on a Ford or Vauxhall, not because they are unrepairable, but because the parts data is incomplete and the supply chain is not yet established.

That drives write-off rates up, which reinforces insurer caution, and keeps premiums high, eroding the affordability case that made these cars attractive in the first place.

The industry has navigated this before. Both Japanese and Korean brands faced it. The difference this time is speed. 

More new brands have entered the UK market in the past 18 months than in the previous two decades combined. The usual bedding-in period is not available at this pace.

What needs to happen

Insurer confidence in repairing Chinese brand vehicles will not come until repair costs are predictable, and repair costs will not be predictable until parts are reliably available at known prices. 

That is not purely a supply chain challenge but a data one. Repairers need technical information and insurers need claims history. Both need to come from somewhere.

Some manufacturers are working on this. Omoda and Jaecoo have teams working directly with insurers on repair data and parts supply chains, acknowledging that confidence builds incrementally and that insurers are by nature risk-averse. 

That is the right approach. But it requires the whole supply chain — distributors, workshop groups, parts suppliers — to move in the same direction.

The servicing gap

In rural areas, the nearest Chery Group dealer can be more than 50 miles away. 

Basic servicing — brakes, tyres, fluids — can be done anywhere. But EV-specific work, like batteries, motors or software, typically requires a dealer or specialist, and the network of independent EV specialists remains limited.

Significant numbers of used Chinese EVs are already in circulation in the UK, and as seven-year warranty periods run their course, more of these vehicles will move into the independent servicing market. 

The workshops best positioned to handle them — with the right parts access, diagnostic capability, and trained technicians — will capture a disproportionate share of one of the fastest-growing segments in the car parc.

At LKQ Europe, building parts coverage and technical support for Chinese brand vehicles as they age into the independent aftermarket is a priority we have been working on for some time, and one we will continue to push ahead with. 

If you are encountering challenges with Chinese brand vehicles - whether that is access to parts, technical information, or insurer behaviour — then we would like to hear about it. These are the experiences that inform where we focus our efforts and the conversations we have on the industry's behalf.