In 2025, Chinese direct investment in Europe reached €16.8 billion. That is the highest figure in seven years and 67 percent more than in 2024 (source: Rhodium Group). The amount says little on its own; what matters is where it is being put to work. Of the automotive share, €7.6 billion, around 93 percent is tied to electric-vehicle supply chains. A record €9 billion went into greenfield investment: new plants, on European soil. Built from the ground up.
For anyone who actively trades European automotive stock rather than only selling it, that changes the cost structure. The earlier blog in this series looked at how Chinese brands affect dealer margins and aftersales. This one looks at how the vehicles reach the European market. The fact is that more Chinese cars are arriving, and that they have increasingly already been made here. That has a major impact on logistics and on the sector as a whole.
Key takeaways
- The money is going into factories, not acquisitions. Chinese investment in Europe hit a seven-year high of €16.8 billion in 2025, of which a record €9 billion went into new plants. This is durable production capacity, deliberately located inside the EU.
- Production is moving inland. New production sites such as Szeged, Zaragoza, Madrid and Rennes sit closer to Western European dealer networks than the import ports do. S&P Global Mobility expects that by 2035, around 44 percent of the Chinese cars sold in Europe could also be built in Europe or Turkey.
- The logistics flow is shifting from port to factory. As vehicles are increasingly delivered straight from European plants, fixed routes and static price lists fit reality less and less. Flexible routing, spotfilling, smarter compound management and corridor-level emissions reporting become essential to stay efficient and competitive.
The numbers behind the shift, and why this time is different
The scale of the investment is striking. With €16.8 billion of Chinese investment, Europe saw its share of China's global outbound investment rise from 17 to 25 percent in a single year. Germany attracted around €2.5 billion, almost three times as much as the year before. France came in at roughly €1.9 billion, a fourfold increase on a year earlier.
But the most important shift lies not in the size of the investment, but in its character. Where the pre-2018 Chinese investment wave consisted mainly of acquisitions of existing European companies and brands, this round is about creating new production capacity. Record-high greenfield investment translates into new plants, new jobs and new production lines, deliberately anchored inside the European Union.
A key driver behind that development is the European import tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. Since 30 October 2024, company-specific rates have applied: 17.0 percent for BYD, 18.8 percent for Geely, 35.3 percent for SAIC and 7.8 percent for Tesla models produced in Shanghai. The measure was meant to slow the inflow of Chinese EVs. The effect turned out, in part, to be a different one.
When importing including tariffs becomes more expensive than producing locally, the business case shifts towards European production. The considerable cost advantages that Chinese manufacturers have built up in the EV market also give them the financial room to make those investments. As Ron Zheng of Roland Berger observed in the Rhodium analysis: "The model is no longer just about selling cars in Europe. It is about embedding entire industrial chains locally."
This creates a paradoxical effect. Trade barriers intended to slow import flows are, at the same time, encouraging the build-up of production capacity inside Europe. The cars cross the border less often, but the factories all the more.
The new production geography, factory by factory
The map of European EV production is being redrawn right now. No longer along the major import ports, but straight through the industrial heart of Europe.
BYD is building its first European passenger-car plant in Szeged, Hungary, and is also investing around one billion dollars in a plant in Turkey with a capacity of 150,000 vehicles a year. Stellantis and Leapmotor, meanwhile, are turning their distribution partnership into shared production in Spain. Their joint venture, Leapmotor International, came about in October 2023 when Stellantis acquired a stake of around 21 percent in Leapmotor for €1.5 billion. The company, structured 51/49 in Stellantis's favour, now has more than 850 sales and service points in Europe and recorded over 40,000 deliveries in 2025.
The next step is local production. In Figueruelas, near Zaragoza, the partners are studying a new production line for an electric Opel C-SUV, with a possible start in 2028. They are also considering assigning a new Leapmotor model to the plant in Villaverde, Madrid, from the first half of 2028. On 20 May 2026, Stellantis and Dongfeng additionally announced a separate 51/49 joint venture to produce the Chinese premium brand Voyah at the Stellantis plant in Rennes, France. At the same time, Volkswagen and Xpeng are working on joint models and a shared electronic architecture. For vehicle manufacturers, the question is less and less about which cars they build, and more and more about where they build them.
A single corporate strategy shows how fast that thinking is changing. With its FaSTLAne 2030 programme, presented in May 2026, Stellantis aims to restructure around 800,000 vehicles of European production capacity without closing a single plant. It does so by sharing or repurposing existing sites for Chinese partners, while cutting the development time of new models from about 44 to 24 months. For logistics planners, that means something fundamental: existing European plants turn into new points of departure. Vehicles that once arrived by ship will increasingly leave an assembly hall a few hundred kilometres from their final destination.
How far this shift can reach is clear from the forecasts. S&P Global Mobility expects that by 2035, around 44 percent of all Chinese cars sold in Europe will also be produced within Europe or Turkey. That is not a certainty, but even if only half of that share is realised, a substantial volume moves off the traditional import routes through Antwerp, Bremerhaven and Zeebrugge and onto intra-European transport corridors.
What this means for logistics flows
The essence of the change lies in the starting point of the logistics chain. The traditional flow runs from port to compound to dealer. Vehicles enter Europe through a limited number of gateways, are buffered near the coast and then distributed onward. The new flow increasingly begins at a factory gate inside Europe. From Szeged to Munich and Amsterdam. From Zaragoza to Madrid and Lyon. From Rennes to Paris and Brussels.
That brings shorter distances to key sales markets, but it also creates new challenges. Different lead times. Different volume patterns. Different compound needs. And transport corridors that historically saw little finished-vehicle traffic.
That shift also arrives at a moment when the sector is already under pressure. Europe produces around five million fewer vehicles a year than it did in 2017 and 2018, while more than half of the logistics companies surveyed by the ECG reported a decline in volumes in 2025. The new production capacity does not automatically add transport volume. It relocates existing flows. It is precisely that redistribution that makes planning more complex, because it is uneven and stretches across several years.
For fleet owners and dealer groups sourcing internationally, a practical question follows: are sourcing flows, transport contracts and stock buffers still in the right places?
Compounds are central to that question. Their function is shifting from a port buffer to a redistribution hub for vehicles from multiple production sites. No longer driven by ships' arrival schedules, but by demand-led distribution. As the number of origins grows, professional compound management becomes more important, not less.
The same development rewards flexibility over fixed routing. Traditional price lists and fixed import routes were designed for a world in which vehicles entered Europe through a handful of known ports. They are less suited to a network in which production capacity gradually spreads across multiple European locations.
That is where our model fits. As a digital transport platform, we work with more than 2,000 transport partners in Europe and operate without a fleet of our own. Our smart spotfilling algorithm uses available capacity on both existing and new corridors, so that trucks do not keep running half-empty along outdated routes. The cost of a wrong call rarely shows up as one major disruption. More often it appears as dwell time as a silent cost, with vehicles standing too long in the wrong place while the logistics reality moves on.
The compliance layer follows the shift in the flow
When logistics flows change, the reporting requirements change with them. CountEmissionsEU, the European framework for harmonised emissions calculation agreed politically in 2025, is expected to develop from a differentiator into a baseline requirement.
New corridors call for new reference measurements. A route from Szeged to Amsterdam has a fundamentally different emissions profile than the deep-sea-plus-inland leg it partly replaces. Those differences must be calculated reliably and reproducibly. The strategic cooperation between the ECG and CALA to harmonise standards for new Chinese OEMs shows which way the market is moving.
For logistics partners, the ability to measure and report emissions at corridor level therefore becomes an integral part of sustainable vehicle transport, rather than a separate reporting exercise after the fact.
Three signals that show the flow is really shifting
Forecasts are interesting, but operational signals are more valuable. Three indicators show when this shift moves from a strategy presentation into daily logistics reality.
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BYD's production output in Szeged. Once the first volumes from the Hungarian plant actually reach the market in 2026 and 2027, the first large-scale intra-European corridor from this new production network takes shape.
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The start-up of Stellantis-Dongfeng production in Rennes. The moment the first Voyah models leave France for the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany instead of arriving from China marks a tangible shift in the logistics reality.
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The ECG's volume figures. Watch for the point where throughput via import ports begins to flatten while intra-European corridors grow structurally. That tipping point, more than any single announcement, is the real evidence that the market is changing. It also fits the wider pattern of structural change in car transport in 2026.
The map of Europe will not rewrite itself in a single quarter. But anyone who waits until the new flows are visible in market data and transport invoices only reacts after the shift has already happened. The orchestration layer needed for a multi-origin, compound-led and emissions-reporting logistics chain is being built now. Or outsourced to those who already have that infrastructure.
If you want to see how we orchestrate transport flows across Europe for dealers and fleet owners as the origin of vehicles shifts, our car transport across Europe is the best place to start. As soon as a concrete transport need arises, you can request a transport directly.
