While most Belgian car drivers generally stick devotedly loyal to trusted European or to lesser extent Japanese quality, and up to 80% don’t trust Chinese cars, 52% of the professional lease drivers start admitting these ‘Dragons on Wheels’, EVs with an attractive price and lots of high techs, could be a good deal.

The distrust against all that comes from China regarding design, quality, safety, and high tech suddenly vanishes in thin air when cars are shown without a badge. Prejudices rule, and most private drivers won’t even be able to distinguish Chinese from Korean, the latest survey by LeasePlan/ALD Automotive (now Ayvens) shows.

Lack of confidence

Lack of confidence and the lack of a dealer network are the major drawbacks for most, and only 7 to 20% of respondents with a lease car currently are prepared to consider an attractively priced Chinese car above an established European brand.

Dealer loyalty (70%) is still extremely high in Belgium, and half of all Belgians stay loyal to the brand. Still, 52% are susceptible to Chinese EVs being a good deal, and 78% are even convinced that the share of Chinese cars will rise substantially in the following years.

Only 4 000 Chinese cars in 2022

The leasing company asked German market research company Gfk in 2023 to survey 2 211 of its own lease drivers and 1 204 ‘general drivers’, half of whom were private drivers, about their knowledge of Chinese cars. Last year, 16 Chinese models could be seen on Belgian roads, far less than in the Netherlands, where more brands are introduced for the first time in Europe.

In 2002, the EU imported €62 billion worth of cars from abroad, with China’s share being 15% or €9,4 billion. Although Belgium is a major transit port for China-made cars with Zeebrugge, only 4 000 Chinese-branded vehicles out of 374 000 new cars were registered in 2022.

Bad reputation

German cars (55%) are still the most popular in the Belgian market, and when the Belgian doesn’t have to pay for it himself as he’s getting a company car, even 69% goes German. French, Swedish, and, to some extent, the Japanese also rank high in confidence.

When it comes to feelings about China, for 66% of Belgian drivers, it has a bad reputation, fed by prejudices and stories about bad quality. Most of those go back to the disastrous introduction of the Landwind X6, an Opel Frontera-lookalike from Jiangling Motors Corporation Group (JMCG), the first Chinese car to get an EU homologation back in 2005 despite bad crash tests.

5-star excellence

But today, most, if not all, of the Chinese brands currently available in Europe are passing the EuroNCAP tests with 5-star excellence and generally offer good quality, plus all luxury and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) found in European cars (often from the same Western automotive suppliers) for a drastically lower price despite +30% import taxes.

However, although the negative perception still prevails today, only 30% of the respondents with a lease car say they do not like the design of the Chinese EVs, and only a minority of 25% think they are not safe.

‘Blind tests’

In ‘blind tests’, where the respondents get to see photos of an ‘unbadged’ Chinese EV, the vast majority think it is a technological (82%), advanced (72%), well-equipped (66%), and beautifully designed (64%) car.

Remarkably, when it came to identifying a car as ‘Chinese’, lease car drivers were better at it, primarily recognizing brands like BYD (14%), MG (5%), and Polestar (§5%) as the ones seen most in advertising. On the other hand, for the average Belgian with a car, the ‘Chinese Dragon on Wheels’, as it was called in the survey report, was the big unknown, often mistaken to be South Korean.