By Lingling Wei

HELSINKI — "Yes, we have them upstairs," the receptionist at a Mercedes-Benz dealership on the edge of this city told me last month, after I asked whether the showroom carried any Chinese electric cars.

Upstairs, past a row of certified preowned German sedans, was a showroom-within-a-showroom: a fleet of BYD models — a yellow Dolphin Surf, a navy Atto 3 EVO and a black Seal 6 DM-i wagon marked sold, "waiting," as the salesman put it, "for my new owner."

It looked like the start of a familiar story: China's EV makers quietly colonizing another corner of the Western car market. But Finland may be one of the toughest places in Europe to test whether low prices and strong engineering are enough. Here, skepticism about China runs deep, reflecting broader European concerns over governance, human rights and security. It also offers a glimpse of the hurdles Chinese EV makers face in winning over Europe.

Mikko, the dealership's BYD specialist, told me the shop sells eight to 20 BYDs a month in its area, out of roughly 60 nationwide — real momentum, it sounded like. Still, it barely registers nationwide. Esa Juntunen, who covers cars and economics for Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's largest newspaper, told me BYD's actual share of the Finnish market, though rising, was just 1.8% in the first five months of 2026 — the country's 13th-best-selling brand, far behind Toyota and Volkswagen.

Pan-European figures make BYD look unstoppable: registrations roughly tripled year-over-year in early 2026, and it even briefly outsold Tesla continentwide. In Finland, so far, it's been an uphill climb.

Juntunen described three things working against Chinese EVs there. First, Finns have mostly stopped buying anything big: only 71,888 new passenger cars were registered last year, well below the usual 100,000, a slump he ties to the war in Ukraine, an unpredictable U.S. administration and the conflict with Iran. "People are putting money under the pillow," he said.

Second, EVs themselves remain a hard sell to conservative Finnish drivers. The country's own transport minister told Juntunen that "the internal combustion engine will stay forever." Then there is China-specific suspicion. Finns ask whether the cars spy on them, Juntunen said, whether they have "kill switches," and whether their money flows to the Communist Party.

Those obstacles, not unique to Finland, illustrate a broader challenge for Chinese EV makers: convincing European buyers that trust matters less than price and technology.

Juntunen reads the EU's tariffs on Chinese EVs, in place since 2024, as "a subliminal message that there's something going on." Few people are buying cars at all, he said; of those who are, some distrust EVs; of those open to EVs, some still distrust China.

In short, he said, "a massive number of obstacles can't be resolved quickly."

In the dealership I visited, a BYD sedan starts at 49,690 euros, compared with a Tesla model that the salesman estimated at around 65,000 euros. The salesman also pitched BYD's lithium-iron-phosphate battery as safer than some Western technologies.

China tests Western tariff rules

BYD's answer to EU tariffs is to build inside the wall: a new Hungary plant began trial production this year, aiming for EU-made, tariff-exempt cars by year's end. Mikko offered a hypothetical: a manufacturer, he said, could ship a car to Finland without its side mirrors and attach them locally, just enough to make it seem assembled there and dodge the tariff. Whether any company can actually pull this off, he didn't say.

It captures the mood in this supply chain, with Chinese makers testing the limits of Western tariff rules. Washington, by contrast, has banned Chinese-linked connected-vehicle technology outright, with enforcement phasing in from 2027.

A Chinese EV executive recently told me the company's strategy remains aggressive despite the trade tensions. Canada has opened a window of opportunity for Chinese EV makers into a North American market that Washington has otherwise sealed shut. Chinese companies, the executive said, need both Europe and America to scale globally. "No matter how difficult it is," the executive told me, "we must not give up on these two markets."

Finland's headline EV numbers still impress: 47.8% of new cars sold in the first half of 2026 were fully electric. But many of those, Juntunen said, are company cars leased for corporate environmental targets, not bought by individual Finns weighing a BYD against a Volkswagen with their own money.

Juntunen isn't dismissive of the cars themselves. As part of his reporting, he had a Chinese-made MG4 inspected after three Finnish winters and 80,000 kilometers, checking for underbody rust and wear, and found little to complain about. But he cautioned that one car proves little.

Would he buy a Chinese EV himself? "Yes," he told me. "Would I do it without very careful consideration of all possible angles? No." That may be the most honest review a Chinese EV has gotten in this Nordic country.

It also points to a lesson that could travel well beyond Finland. Chinese EV makers have largely solved the engineering problem. They haven't solved the trust problem. In Finland, that shows up in slow growth in sales. In faster-growing markets like Germany, the same doubts about data, quality and geopolitics haven't disappeared — they've just been outrun, for now, by price.

Would you trust a Chinese EV? Write to me at lingling.wei@wsj.com. Include your full name and location, and I might publish your response in an upcoming issue (if you're reading this in your inbox, you can just hit reply).

This is an edition of the WSJ China newsletter, a weekly dispatch of exclusive insights on the contest between the U.S. and China, brought to you by the WSJ's top China correspondent. If you're not subscribed, sign up here.

China in a Few Headlines

  • How Xi Jinping steamrolls dissent with tactics from Stalin and Mao.
  • China releases imprisoned pastor Ezra Jin after U.S. pressure.
  • China is devastating the last stronghold of German industry.
  • Beijing says pilot who crashed into skyscraper had suicidal thoughts.
  • Video: the mystery behind Beijing's skyscraper plane crash.

The Number

This is the year-over-year surge in China's air conditioning machine exports to France in May, Chinese customs data showed. Only about one-fifth of European households have an air conditioner, a problem for the continent in the current heat wave.

A Closer Look

The mid-2010s were a golden age for Western carmakers in China, the world's biggest auto market. Brands such as Buick and Volkswagen thrived as a newly empowered class of buyers couldn't get into foreign cars fast enough. But now that footprint is slipping away.

Reader Responses

Last week, we asked our readers to share the most American stories they have as America turned 250. We were floored by how many of you wrote in — so many rich, personal stories that we could only make room for a handful here. Thank you to everyone who took the time to share. We read every single one. Readers shared their thoughts:

"I grew up the youngest of three in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and my father was a WWII vet who I idolized as the smartest man on earth. One evening in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I sat between his legs watching Walter Cronkite and asked, 'Dad, do we hate the Russians?' He answered without pausing: 'Oh no. We don't hate the Russians — we care about them as much as anyone. But what we hate is their government and how it treats its own people and the rest of the world.' I was six years old. I've never forgotten it." — Mary Healy, Florida.

"In 1985, I was one of the first five U.S. economists awarded a Fulbright to teach in China — the government wanted its students to hear about capitalism from the 'horses' mouths.' One student showed me a letter from a friend studying in America that began, 'Why couldn't I have been born in this country?' Months later, I wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal's Asian edition about China's first bond issuance in 30 years. Within a day, security police came to my university to arrest me. My department chairman intervened, and I avoided arrest — though a student later told me my apartment was likely bugged. I've written many op-eds since, all in U.S. papers, without incident. On America's 250th birthday, I'm grateful to have been born in this country." — Burton Abrams, Minnesota

"When I arrived from Germany in 2014, my landlord wasn't home, so I spent the night in a cheap airport hotel. The next morning I found my passport and a bag with a bagel and an apple, under a note: 'Help Yourself.' It took me 12 years to understand what it really meant: you'll have to make your own luck. I was 52, with an Emmy and 500 hours of German prime-time TV behind me, and Hollywood had no use for me. I built a business selling storytelling skills abroad; the pandemic killed it in a week. I ended up a contract worker at a tech giant, making less than the staffing agency that placed me — but I learned plenty about the industry's overemphasis on tech and underemphasis on substance. Now I'm a citizen, running my own company again. When the immigration officer says, 'Welcome home, Michael,' I know I earned it." — Michael Esser, California

"I met my wife through an online site called China Love and traveled to Wuhan three times while pursuing a Ph.D. after retiring from the Air Force and Army. In 2009, Wuhan's airport was old and its streets chaotic. By 2023, when we returned to meet her son's family, the traffic moved like a drill team and the trains ran smoother than any I'd taken back home. Her son, his wife, and their daughter are now in the U.S. We have a second granddaughter, born here. I don't speak much Mandarin, but my four-year-old granddaughter already translates between her mother and me — two languages, and she's not even in kindergarten. I never had children of my own. Until now. I want them to write an American story." — Peter J. Szyjka, Ohio "Our daughter, an undergrad interested in Asian culture, asked us to meet some Chinese students at her college. We ended up meeting all, then their parents and visiting professors. I'd go to the airport just to be the first American they met when they arrived, and I taught about a hundred of them to drive, free. The hardest moment was showing one student CNN's coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre — she'd never seen it and was totally shocked. Some of those students have since married and settled in the U.S. and started families of their own. Our daughter married a young man from Taiwan; we now have twin grandsons who are part Taiwanese. We just love those kids." — Ron Auvil, North Carolina

(Responses have been condensed and edited.)

A Name in the News

Video blogger Geng Hongwei, a 33-year-old graduate-school dropout, alleged in May that Shanghai University scientists faked data in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. A month later, the university confirmed the misconduct. A flurry of such cases involving top Chinese researchers and prestigious scientific journals has made Geng a celebrity in China.

About Us

WSJ China is a weekly newsletter with exclusive insights on the contest between the U.S. and China, brought to you by WSJ Chief China Correspondent Lingling Wei, with help from Chuqin Jiang. Reach Lingling at lingling.wei@wsj.com or at @Lingling_Wei on X (if you're reading this in your inbox, you can just hit reply). Sign up to get an alert every time she publishes an article. Got a tip for us? Here's how to submit.