Chinese carmakers edge toward European market dominance by 2035
62%. That is the probability that Chinese carmakers hold at least 15% of the European automotive market by 2035 — Citi's floor, not their ceiling, and the number that matters here. The range they published, 15 to 30 percent, is the honest admission that nobody knows where European trade policy lands between now and then; the midpoint implies a structural shift that legacy German and French manufacturers have not yet priced into their capital allocation. What the market is actually being asked to judge is not Chinese competitiveness — that case is already closed — but European political will to sustain tariff barriers against accelerating consumer price sensitivity in a region running 40-degree summers and energy cost fatigue. Protective trade coalitions fracture fastest when constituents are hot and stretched.
