THE GREAT HAUL of CHINA

The cars are improving, but is China truly destined to take over British roads? TopGear presents the most in-depth investigation into Chinese cars ever...

- OLLIE MARRIAGE

Every Chinese car on sale in the UK right now. As in today. Tomorrow there will be more. Three years ago Chinese built cars accounted for just three per cent of European sales, now it’s 20 per cent.

But first, a point of order – that opening statement needed an asterisk. Of an eight model range, we only have a single MG here. Why? Well initially MG refused to lend us cars for this story, insisting it was a British firm. The definition is interesting. After all, where do you draw the line? Volvo is owned by Chinese giant Geely, electric Minis are built not in Cowley, but Zhangjiagang. Does that make them Chinese? And what about Lotus? Owned by and built in China for a global audience wanting e-SUVs.

What of MG then? The British elements are a London design studio, a small engineering team still at Longbridge and the name. The rest is Chinese. Now, do you care about where your car comes from, who owns it? Obviously MG believes you do or it wouldn’t have had an issue with lending us cars. But do you? Probably only because of scare stories you've read about your car being able to spy on you.

We can’t fully debunk that, only point out that every firm we spoke to is signed up to GDPR data privacy regulations. But China is more opaque to us than say Korea or Japan, and some of its biggest automotive firms (among them MG’s parent SAIC) are state owned. Got an issue with that? Fair enough, shop elsewhere.

But are the cars any good? That’s what we're going to find out. Once we've identified them. Mostly these badges are unknown to us, so what’s the hierarchy when there’s no brand equity? Who’s the BMW here, the Renault, the Bentley, the Toyota?