Michael Dunne saw his first Chinese car in 1986: a powder blue Shanghai sedan he says was based on a 1950s Mercedes design that had passed through the Soviet Union before it reached China. Only a few thousand were built, and party officials got most of them. Dunne grew up in Detroit, studied Chinese, and now runs the advisory firm Dunne Insights, where he tracks the global car industry for investors. Speaking with the Everything Electric podcast, he describes what has happened since as two earthquakes. Electric vehicles went from roughly 6 percent of Chinese sales to about half of them last year, he says, and the export machine that grew out of the country's suddenly idle factories has been reshaping markets from Britain to Australia ever since.

What makes the conversation worth an hour is that Dunne is not arguing China got lucky. He is arguing the outcome was bought in pieces over thirty years, in places nobody was watching. Hold that against the present. Forbes reported on July 20 that XPENG launched its new L03 in 65 markets simultaneously, with an Ultra trim priced at €46,600 in Germany carrying the company's urban self-driving hardware. A decade ago, a Chinese automaker launching one model into one export market was news. For buyers in the UK, Europe and Australia, the practical questions have moved on from whether the cars are any good. They are now about dealer coverage, parts lead times, how long the software will be supported, and what a five year old Chinese EV is worth when a newer and cheaper one is already on the forecourt. Those are the questions the podcast does not reach, and they are the ones that decide what ownership actually costs.

Dunne dates the deliberate phase to 2014 and the Made in China 2025 blueprint, which he says set national targets in batteries, electrics and autonomy, backed by infrastructure spending, manufacturer subsidies and consumer rebates. For most of the decade after, he says, it looked like a top down program consumers were ignoring, with complaints about range, design and charging. His view is that Tesla's 2020 arrival flipped that, less because buyers fell for electric drivetrains than because they wanted a big screen and over the air updates. He points to the 2023 Shanghai show as the moment foreign executives understood the scale of the problem, and estimates around 2,000 foreign automotive designers now work in China. On state support, he describes long zero interest loans from provincial banks, cheap land and discounted power rather than headline cash incentives, and says local governments keep loss making automakers alive because each one signals activity. He also puts total Chinese vehicle capacity at roughly 50 million a year against a global market of about 90 million, and tells the story of a General Motors rare earth magnet subsidiary in Indiana, sold in the 1990s and eventually relocated to China. He is blunt about the copying question too. The old joke in the industry, he says, was that Chinese R&D stood for receive and duplicate, and his point is that the receiving stopped being the interesting part once companies started building on top of what they had taken in. Consolidation is the one prediction he will not make. He says the government was already complaining about having too many automakers in 1990, when there were around 26, and that the count had risen to 33 by 1995. It has gone up since. The host's read from the UK is that public resistance to Chinese brands proved a blip rather than the long suspicion that met Japanese and Korean arrivals.

Bottom line: The uncomfortable part of Dunne's argument is that it has no villain in it. Nobody stole that magnet business. By his telling it was sold, and the paperwork was signed. Anyone hoping tariffs will buy back thirty years of supply chain decisions is going to be disappointed, and the honest options left look like the ones he names: build the software and autonomy layer, keep engineering talent at home, and stop pretending manufacturing scale can be conjured on a five year timeline. If you listen to one China EV conversation this year, make it this one.

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