China car sales fall for seventh month as EV exports surge

China’s auto market widened into two starkly different stories in April: weakening demand at home and rapid expansion abroad. Domestic passenger-car sales fell 21.6% from a year earlier to 1.4 million vehicles, marking a seventh straight month of declines, while exports of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids surged 111.8% year on year.

The numbers underline how China’s car industry is relying more heavily on foreign buyers as the domestic recovery loses traction. EV and plug-in hybrid sales still accounted for 60.6% of total passenger-car sales in April, but even that heavily promoted segment slipped 6.8% from a year earlier, its fourth consecutive monthly decline. Cui Dongshu, secretary-general of the China Passenger Car Association, said combustion-engine sales missed expectations because of high oil prices and sluggish plug-in-hybrid demand.

The export picture was much stronger. Overall passenger-car exports rose about 80.2% from a year earlier, and the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said shipments reached roughly 796,000 units in April. That suggests Chinese automakers are leaning harder on overseas markets to offset softer demand at home, a shift that could intensify trade tensions as more Chinese vehicles land in markets already wary of Chinese industrial overcapacity.

BYD, the world’s largest EV maker, showed how sharply the two trends can diverge. Its overseas sales of passenger vehicles and pickup trucks jumped 35% to 130,000 vehicles in April, yet total vehicle sales still fell 15.5% from a year earlier, extending the company’s downturn to an eighth straight month. For a company that has made scale and global expansion central to its growth story, the gap between foreign momentum and domestic weakness is becoming harder to ignore.

Analysts are also bracing for a slower home market. Morgan Stanley kept its forecast for a 2% decline in China’s total car sales in 2026, raised its export-growth estimate to 33% from 15%, and said domestic sales could fall 11%. China has also been scaling back trade-in subsidies for entry-level electric cars and plug-in hybrids, a policy shift that may be removing some support from the market just as competition intensifies.

For Beijing, the April data are a reminder that China’s car industry remains powerful enough to flood global markets, but not yet strong enough to guarantee sustained demand at home. That imbalance is now shaping both industrial strategy and the next phase of China’s trade frictions abroad.