Chinese hybrids: for two years a petrol engine was enough to dodge the EU duty
13 October 2026, 18:24
Beijing, 9 October. The European Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič closes a deal on Chinese hybrid cars and announces it like this: arrivals in the Union will fall "by more than half".
On 12 October China's Ministry of Commerce describes the same deal in different words: an arrangement that "expands volumes based on the 2025 level".
The deal is the same. According to an internal European Commission document published by Bloomberg, at most 350,000 hybrids will enter in the first year, then 6 per cent more every twelve months, for four years.
In 2025, according to the EU statistical office, 302,000 arrived. The cap is 48,000 higher: compared with 2025 it cuts nothing, it lets in more Chinese hybrids than before.
Šefčovič's "more than half" is calculated on 800,000 hybrids: the ones Brussels expects for the whole of 2026, not on those that actually arrived.
Brussels does what a shop does when it raises the price on the tag the day before the sales: that way the discount looks bigger.
How we got here is in a 2024 regulation. The Union imposes a duty on electric cars built in China; hybrids, which also have a petrol engine, stay outside it. So Chinese carmakers shift their sales to hybrids, which pay only the ordinary 10 per cent duty: arrivals go from 107,000 in 2024 to 378,000 in just the first seven months of 2026.
The bigger problem is this: for two years, to avoid paying the European duty, it was enough to add a petrol engine to an electric car. The European Commission, which had decided that duty, waited for hybrid arrivals to triple before acting, and now it acts with a cap higher than 2025 arrivals.
The ones who pay are the European carmakers the duty was meant to protect, and the companies that make parts for their cars: for four years they will have to make room, every year, for more Chinese hybrids than arrived in 2025.
So the question, for Commissioner Šefčovič: the 800,000 hybrids on which he calculated "more than half", in which statistics can they be found?
The 2024 duty did not stop Chinese cars: it made them arrive as hybrids.
This article was prompted by a news item published in Reuters on 12 October 2026.