China Surpasses Japan to Become World’s Largest Car Exporter

China’s global dominance in electric cars helped it overtake Japan as the world’s biggest vehicle exporter last year, official data confirmed Wednesday.

Japanese giants such as Toyota and Nissan have been much more cautious than their Chinese counterparts like BYD on electric vehicles (EVs), banking instead on hybrid models.

Figures released Wednesday by the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association showed shipments of cars, trucks and buses rising 16 percent to 4.42 million last year.

But China exported almost 500,000 more — 4.91 million vehicles in total, as reported by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers this month.

China’s customs bureau put the number even higher at 5.22 million, a huge year-on-year rise of 57 percent, with one in three fully electric vehicles.

The country had already been shipping more vehicles than Japan on a monthly basis, but Wednesday’s data confirmed that it was also number one for a whole year.

Unlike Chinese firms, Japanese automakers including Toyota — re-confirmed on Tuesday as the world’s largest company by unit sales — also make huge volumes of vehicles in other countries.

In 2022, vehicle production in Japan excluding motorcycles totalled 7.84 million units, but overseas production was almost 17 million.

Japanese manufacturers have long bet on hybrids that combine battery power and internal combustion engines, an area they pioneered with the likes of the Toyota Prius.

But they have vowed to up their game, with Toyota aiming to sell 1.5 million EVs annually by 2026 and 3.5 million by 2030.

The European Commission is investigating Chinese state subsidies in a probe that could lead to the European Union imposing import duties.

To soothe concerns, BYD is planning to build more factories abroad including a $600 million plant in Brazil and another in Hungary.