China did not just build electric cars. According to ABC News correspondent Allison Horn, reporting from Beijing, it built an electric society, and the difference is the whole story. Horn returned to a city she first visited in 2008 and describes air that is dramatically cleaner, which she credits to how much of the country's transport now runs on electricity, from cars and buses to bikes and scooters. The report opens with a striking data point from home: BYD came within a whisker of overtaking Toyota as Australia's best-selling car brand last month, with almost 19,000 vehicles sold. The segment frames China's rise as the result of a long plan rather than a lucky break, and it goes looking for where that plan has actually landed. It also flags premium Chinese brands such as Zeekr and Xpeng expanding fast in Australia, and shows a car the report says is fully electric and fully autonomous, with no pilot or driver, that is due to go on sale in Beijing by the end of the year, even if the rules to let it fly are further off.
The report says China set out as far back as 2001 to lead the world in EVs, chose not to compete on oil and gas, and now controls the supply chain from raw materials to export, backed by roughly 230 billion dollars of state investment. The piece adds context the numbers alone miss: China now has the largest charging network in the world, which Horn puts at about one charger for every 10 cars, against roughly one for every 45 EVs in Australia. Worth noting alongside the report is the regulatory backdrop it only touches: in open markets like Australia, Chinese brands have been gaining share fast, while the United States and the European Union have leaned on tariffs to keep the cheapest Chinese EVs out. That split is a big reason the ABC can film this revolution up close in Beijing while it barely reaches showrooms in some Western markets.
The detail that lands hardest is speed. Horn describes driving into what looks like a petrol station for batteries, taking her hands off the wheel while a robot swaps a depleted pack for a charged one in about four minutes, faster, she says, than filling a tank. She also reports fast charging from 10 to 70 percent in around five minutes on some hardware. Inside a factory, the report describes a finished car rolling off the line every minute with barely a human in sight. The segment says China now accounts for 75 percent of the global EV market, and that legacy carmakers are leaning in rather than pulling away: Renault, which does not sell cars in China, is said to run a research lab in Shanghai and to be developing cars three times faster as a result. On data-security worries raised in Australia and the US, Horn says the experts she spoke with call the fear somewhat overblown, while still advising firm guidelines. Horn frames the shift as bigger than cars: she describes not just EVs but electric bikes, scooters, and buses, and contrasts the smog she tasted in 2008 with air she now finds clear on most days. The through-line is that engagement, not avoidance, is the pragmatic path she hears from experts on the ground.
Bottom line: The uncomfortable takeaway for Western buyers is that the gap is not mainly about any single car. It is about a country that built the charging, the factories, and the swap stations as one system, then let the products compete on top of it. Tariffs can slow those cars at the border, but they do not replicate the ecosystem underneath. If you want to know what a mature EV market feels like, this report is the closest look most of us will get, and it should worry anyone betting the transition can be stalled indefinitely.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.