UK Chinese Car Brand Sales: July 2026

New car registrations in the UK rose 11.7% year-on-year in July 2026, the strongest July performance since 2019, and Chinese brands were responsible for a disproportionate share of that growth. We’ll be publishing a version of this article every month, each one covering exactly the period in its title, so older editions stay a genuine snapshot of that month rather than data quietly going stale.

July 2026 registrations, three brands compared

MG posted the only one of these three with a directly published exact figure this month, the other two are calculated from the market share percentages SMMT-linked reporting confirmed for July, so treat BYD and Jaecoo’s totals below as a close estimate rather than an official exact count.

MG: steady, established growth

MG’s July was its best in some time, up 27.8% on July 2025 to 7,203 units, enough to rank it the sixth best-selling brand in the UK that month, ahead of long-established names like Skoda. It’s a reminder that MG, now the most mature of the Chinese-owned brands in Britain, is still growing at a pace most legacy manufacturers would envy, even if its growth rate is the gentlest of the three brands here compared with the newer arrivals.

BYD: doubling year on year

BYD more than doubled its July registrations compared with the same month last year, a genuinely remarkable rate of growth for a brand that’s already well established in the UK rather than a brand-new entrant. That pushed BYD to roughly 4.2% market share for the month, its best showing of the year so far, and reportedly gave it around a 50% larger share of the market than Tesla, a comparison BYD itself has been keen to draw attention to.

Jaecoo: the fastest grower of all

Jaecoo’s year-on-year growth rate, up 187.3%, was the strongest of any of the three brands here, and reflects just how new Jaecoo still is to the UK market, having only launched in early 2025. The Jaecoo 7 and Jaecoo 5 both individually ranked among the UK’s ten best-selling cars of any kind in July, a striking result for a brand that didn’t exist here eighteen months ago. Jaecoo’s sister brand Omoda, sold through the same UK dealer network, also grew strongly over the same period.

The bigger picture

These three brands are really just the leading edge of a much broader trend. Chinese-owned brands collectively represented over 11% of new UK car registrations in the first quarter of 2026, up from around 6% a year earlier, and that share has continued climbing since. Battery electric vehicles as a category also had a record July, up 44.5% year-on-year to a 27.5% market share, a trend Chinese brands, with their strong EV and plug-in hybrid line-ups, have been particularly well placed to benefit from.

Figures in this article are drawn from SMMT registration data and industry reporting current as of early August 2026. See our full Brands page for individual brand and model details.