BYD and its rivals now own a quarter of the NZ new car market

New Zealand registered 8,736 new passenger vehicles in July 2026, up 14.8% year-on-year from 7,605 units a year earlier. That makes it the best July since 2021. But the raw number hides the real story. The growth was not spread across the market. It came from one place.

Chinese brands accounted for 2,286 registrations, 26.2% of the total market, more than double what those same brands managed twelve months ago. In effect, Chinese marques generated almost the entire net increase in new car sales. Strip them out and the market barely moved.

The brands doing the damage

BYD landed 622 registrations to sit third overall, with GWM fourth on 479 and Chery in the top 10 on 309. Both BYD and Chery grew more than 140% year-on-year. Five Chinese marques – BYD, GWM, MG, Chery and Zeekr – now sit inside the top 15 brands.

Motor Trade Association chief executive Lee Marshall put the appeal bluntly: “Many of the Chinese vehicles have one strong appeal to consumers – price.” That, plus a fuel shock, has done the rest.

The fuel crisis lit the fuse

BYD New Zealand general manager Warren Wilmot told Mike Hosking on 4 August that the US-Iran conflict and the resulting fuel-cost spiral are pushing consumers toward electric vehicles, and that BYD received its largest-ever shipment to New Zealand on the back of the demand. He drew an explicit parallel with the 1970s oil crisis, when Kiwis dumped big American cars for smaller Japanese ones. The same dynamic, he argued, is now running in favour of affordable Chinese EVs.

Marshall reinforced the point on Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive on 3 August, explaining how cheap EVs are rewiring purchasing behaviour under fuel-cost pressure. Electrification is no longer niche: nearly one in three new vehicles registered in July could be plugged in.

Legacy brands are being squeezed out of the centre

The flip side of Chinese growth is legacy decline. The top six selling brands made up about 55% of registrations two and a half years ago; they now make up roughly 45%. As Marshall has noted, New Zealand is a marginal market by global standards, which changes the value equation for anyone importing cars here.

That matters because brand-exit decisions happen fast and at distributor level, not at head office. Fiat’s EV withdrawal from Australia and New Zealand, Marshall has pointed out, was a distributor call, not a manufacturer one. Consumers get no warning.

The risk nobody’s pricing

Here is the angle most consumer coverage misses. Marshall has warned there are at least 100 EV makers in China, and within a couple of years there will be about six. That means roughly 94 are going to fall over. For B2B buyers, that is not trivia, it is a balance-sheet problem.

A fleet manager buying 50 vehicles from a newer Chinese marque today is making a bet on that brand still existing in three years. If it exits or collapses globally, parts supply, warranty support and resale values all take a hit. Finance and leasing companies are exposed to the same bet, because they price residual values on the assumption the brand survives. Zeekr, GAC, JMC, BAIC, Dongfeng, XPeng, Foton and others have all either entered or signalled entry to New Zealand. Not all of them will make it through the consolidation Marshall describes.

What this means for business

For fleet operators, purchase price can no longer be the deciding factor. The cheapest EV on the lot today may be the hardest to service in 2029. Procurement needs to weigh brand longevity as a genuine line item.

Dealer networks face a slower-burning transition. EVs need far less routine servicing, and Chinese brands run different parts ecosystems, which erodes the aftermarket economics that ICE-oriented workshops were built on.

And the fuel-cost pressure driving consumers applies just as hard to commercial fleets. The economics of electrification are now moving faster than most fleet replacement cycles, which means the decision to switch is being forced on businesses earlier than they planned. The showroom floor has already changed. The question is which of these brands will still be standing to service what they sold.

Sources

• New car sales climb 14.9% – Autofile (2026-08-03)
• Chinese Brands Drive NZ’s 14.8% Jump in July Passenger Car Registrations – Tarmac Life (2026-08-03)
• The cars Kiwis bought in July: Ranger tops the charts as Chinese brands grab a quarter of the market – AutoTrader NZ (2026-08-03)
• Chinese brands lead charge – Autofile (2026-08-03)
• Boom in buyers of Chinese-made cars as fuel crisis turns more Kiwis towards EVs – Newstalk ZB (2026-08-04)
• EVs driving up car sales in July, report reveals – Newstalk ZB (2026-08-03)