Chinese carmakers are finally making it into Japan through an unlikely route: commercial vehicles. Thanks to a booming online commerce in Japan, Chinese-made EVs such as those from Dongfeng Motor Group and Guangxi Automobile Group Co. have made their way into the fleets of logistics companies there.
While there are still questions on how Chinese-made vehicles will perform three or four years down the road, this isn’t seen as a problem for these logistics companies. In the here and now, they work fine. It also should serve as a wakeup call to Japanese car manufacturers. Thanks in part to Chinese government policies as well as creating a whole manufacturing infrastructure surrounding EVs, EV makers there are able to produce electric vehicles at shockingly low prices—as low as 20 percent of what Europeans, on the average, pay for.