The ABC's Foreign Correspondent went back to China after five years away and found a transition that has already finished. Reporter Allyson Horn opens in central Beijing, a city she first visited in 2008, and the detail she leads with is not a specification but a sound. The traffic is quiet. The report says around half of new cars sold are electric, identifiable by their green plates, and that almost 75 percent of the world's EVs are now built in the country. None of this was accidental. The program traces the policy back to 2001, when China identified electric vehicles as a strategic priority, and to 2011, when the funding arrived at scale. The result is an industry that now sets terms everyone else responds to.

For an audience outside China, the gap between this report and the local showroom is the whole story. Most of the vehicles in the program are not sold in North America, where Chinese built EVs face steep import tariffs, and Europe has applied duties of its own. That is why the prices sound implausible. Bill Russo, an EV strategist interviewed in the film, makes the point himself: double a Chinese EV's price to simulate a 100 percent tariff and many of them are still cheaper than the average new car sold in the United States. So the useful question for a Western buyer is not whether these cars arrive, but which of their features arrive first through joint ventures, licensing deals and shared platforms. The report's Renault segment, filmed at a Shanghai research lab, is the clearest example of that route already being used. Data security gets a hearing too, and Russo's answer is measured rather than reassuring: he acknowledges risks around where connected car information goes, while arguing the framing that Chinese carmakers are collecting data to target individuals is overblown. His preferred response is rules for how Chinese firms operate abroad rather than a straight block.

The reporting is strongest inside factories. In Hefei, a city of 10 million that the program says produced nearly 1.4 million electric vehicles last year, Horn tours a NIO plant with more than 1,200 robots where she is told a car comes off the line every minute, around 600 a day. At a NIO swap station a depleted battery is exchanged for a full one in a little over four minutes on camera. At the Beijing Auto Show, YouTuber Ethan Robertson walks through a BYD hall running from cars under 10,000 US dollars to electric supercars above 250,000, and describes a charging system BYD says takes a battery from 10 to 70 percent in five minutes. Analyst Tu Le tells the program that competition has been intense enough that few Chinese EV makers are profitable, and argues a shakeout would leave the industry healthier. Le also puts a number on why adoption moved so fast: he says more than 80 percent of vehicles sold in China go for under 300,000 renminbi, which he converts to under 45,000 US dollars. The consumer side gets covered too. A couple in Zhuhai tell Horn they traded a petrol car for an EV costing around 60,000 Australian dollars after incentives. At a Renault research lab in Shanghai, an engineer says a Chinese EV programme can run about 20 months and that the company's China developed model could land near 23,000 Australian dollars in France with subsidies. And on a Beijing racetrack, Horn rides in a Xiaomi that she is told reaches 250 kilometres an hour in about ten seconds.

Bottom line: the most useful thing in this program is not the flying car or the five minute charge. It is the phrase Robertson translates as fridge, big screen, sofa seats. That describes a market where comfort technology is the entry fee rather than the option package, and a car without it does not leave the lot. Western carmakers keep benchmarking Chinese EVs on price and range and keep missing that the baseline expectation moved underneath them. Watch this one for the factory footage, then go read the spec sheet of something sold in your own market and see how it reads afterwards.

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