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Global companies are plotting a fightback in China against the rise of Chinese brands, with next week’s Shanghai motor show offering them the perfect stage to show off their recovery.

New models from the likes of Audi, Lexus, Mazda, Mercedes, Nissan and Volkswagen will take to the stands in a bid to convince showgoers that they're still relevant in this electrified, tech-led age.

Volkswagen Group CEO Oliver Blume called the German company’s Shanghai new-model extravaganza a "milestone" in its reinvention to counter local brands.

“Our products are tailored to the needs of Chinese customers, with a clear design language and cutting-edge technologies,” he said in a statement.

Attracting the biggest crowd of all the global car makers' displays will likely be that combining both Audi (four rings) and its alter ego AUDI (four letters). The latter will be showing off the highly anticipated E5 Sportback, the first of its new youth-oriented, China-specific models with a tech-led spin, including an advanced semi-autonomous mode.

Meanwhile on the Volkswagen stands will be three concept cars, two of which are electric SUVs and the other the brand’s first ever range-extender model, entering a hot new category for EVs with an on-board petrol generator.

By 2030, Volkswagen Group is targeting 15% of the Chinese market with models it promises will be more than 80% electric or plug-in hybrid. 

Five years ago, that statement would have been insane, given that in 2020 the Volkswagen Group had a 19% share of the market.

But the rapid evolution of local brands operated by the likes of BYD, Chery, Geely and Li Auto have slashed away that leadership to the point that in the first quarter this year, the market share of all German brands combined – including Mercedes and BMW – stood at just 17%, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).

Meanwhile, over the same time frame, sales of Chinese brands surged to 63% of the market, up from 41% in 2021.

The punishment dealt to the likes of the Japanese (a 12% share in the first quarter, down from 23% in 2021) and the Americans (a 5.7% share, down from 10%) has damaged them financially.

For example, General Motors booked a $4.1 billion (£3.1bn) write-down on its Chinese operations for its 2024 accounts, with one of its joint-venture plants reported slated for closure.

Nissan meanwhile cut 500,000 units of capacity from its manufacturing operations in China after last year closing the Changzhou plant it ran with Dongfeng.

But China is too big to cut and run from. Stellantis chairman John Elkann told shareholders at the firm's AGM on 15 April that he believed the car market in China this year would be greater than the American and European markets combined.

The joint venture between Dongfeng and Peugeot/Citroën might be on its last legs and Maserati’s China sales may have been down 73% last year, but Stellantis has stayed engaged with China via its innovative link-up with Leapmotor.

With the US throwing up tariff barriers to car makers not building there and the European market shrinking, China has taken on a renewed importance. 

“Even though the market conditions have shifted significantly, even though China is a different place now than it was maybe three or four years ago, I would say that we're staying the course,” Mercedes’ CEO Ola Källenius said on his company’s annual earnings call on 20 February.

China was still Mercedes’ biggest market last year, taking 34% of its global total despite a sales drop. The 683,568 cars it shifted there last year was double its US tally.

Likewise, BMW continues to heavily rely on China, with the market still accounting for 29% of its sales in 2024, at 715,000. The US meanwhile accounted for 16%.

“The China market is very big. You're talking about 25 million units per year. And even if it's a 20%, 25% share for European manufacturers, you're still talking about a huge marketplace,” BMW sales head Jochen Goller said on the firm's annual earnings call on 14 March.

BMW saw its China sales fall 17% in the first three months of the year amid a wider premium slowdown, but the company is planning to launch 10 new models this year and another 20 in the following two years. Many are tailored to the Chinese market, for example the new long-wheelbase X3 SUV that will take a bow at Shanghai.

Like many other global companies, BMW is scrabbling to overcome its perceived technology shortfall compared with more nimble Chinese players. It has just launched the new 5 Series with local firm Joynext’s V2X communications tech linking it to connected street furniture like traffic lights and other cars, paving the way for safer autonomy.

While some like Ford, GM and Nissan are closing plants to reduce excess capacity, Toyota has secured land in Shanghai to build a wholly owned EV plant there – only the second foreign firm after Tesla to do so without the assistance of a Chinese partner.

At Shanghai, Toyota's premium brand, Lexus, will unveil the latest version of its big-selling ES saloon, which it says “refines advanced electrification”.

Not all foreign companies are on board with the Shanghai 2025 display of optimism. Missing from the exhibitor map are Citroën, Chevrolet, Genesis, Hyundai, JLR, Kia and Peugeot. This looks gloomy, given the accepted wisdom at the big Chinese shows is to turn up or risk customers thinking you’ve lost your appetite for the fight and are heading for the exit. 

That might still be true for some, like Peugeot and Citroën, but more likely is that the smaller foreign brands, already suffering financially from the never-ending price war in the country, are heeding their global account departments and pulling their motor show budgets, as they’ve done in the US and Europe.

It also avoids the awkward sight of crowds surging past your stand of older ICE models to reach the hottest new Chinese EV.

That threat will be reduced somewhat this year after the news that tech brand Xiaomi won’t be showing off its new electric SUV, but plenty more local brands will gathering their armies of influencers to ensure they gain that crucial show buzz.

“Don’t worry, the Chinese will pack it out,” one Chinese car executive told Autocar.

With their new local partnerships and fresh launches, the global players (excluding the luxury brands) will become indistinguishable from the locals at shows like Shanghai. It’s becoming the only way to survive.

The Porsche 911 GT3 is now the fastest manual car to lap the Nürburgring, beating the previous record-holder by nearly 10 seconds.

Porsche has sent the recently updated '992.2' around the Nordschleife – with ambassador and ex-racer Jörg Bergmeister at the wheel – in 6min 56.294sec.

That's not only 3.6sec quicker than the pre-facelift 992 with a PDK automatic gearbox but also substantially quicker than the previous fastest manual car, the hardcore Dodge Viper ACR, which Porsche notes has a "significantly more powerful engine". 

The American supercar, with a 645bhp 8.4-litre V10, claimed its record lap time of 7min 1.3sec in 2017 - but that was around the shortened 20.6km circuit and corresponds to a time of 7min 5.8sec around the full-length 20.832km loop, according to Porsche.

By that metric, the stick-shift GT3, with a 503bhp flat six, was 9.5sec faster around the Green Hell. 

The car used for the attempt was equipped with the Weissach Package – a £20k optional extra that brings a raft of weight-saving measures to shave 12kg over the standard GT3 – and was shod with sticky (but still road-legal) Michelin Pilot Sport Cup2 R tyres.

Andreas Preuninger, who runs Porsche's GT division, said: "More and more 911 GT3 customers are opting for the six-speed manual transmission. And more and more often we are asked by these customers how fast a 911 GT3 with manual transmission would be on the Nordschleife. We have now answered this question and, although we know that the variant with PDK is significantly faster, we drove our official lap time with a manual six-speed gearbox."

Porsche told Autocar that just under a quarter of standard GT3s are ordered with a manual gearbox in the UK, while just over half of wingless GT3 Touring orders are manual.

Horse, the engine-making joint venture of Geely and the Renault Group, has revealed a hybrid powertrain designed to be retrofitted into electric cars.

It contains the internal combustion engine, electric motor, gearbox and related electronics in a single unit that, Horse said, can be squeezed into the same space as an EV’s main drive motor.

This means manufacturers could retrofit an electric car with the unit without needing to comprehensively re-engineer the car or having to set up a new production line.

The powertrain can be fuelled using petrol, E85 ethanol-petrol mix, pure methanol and synthetic fuels, Horse said.

It can operate both as a traditional parallel hybrid (driving the wheels) and as a range-extender (generating electricity for a drive motor).

It bolts directly into a car’s subframe. Although it has been conceived to replace the front motor in an EV, it can also be used in ICE car platforms.

The new Horse unit comes as several manufacturers slow their transition to all-electric line-ups.

Notably, Fiat is currently developing a new version of the 500e retrofitted with a hybrid powertrain to replace the old petrol 500 and to buoy its business amid slow sales of the EV.

“For over a decade, it looked like battery-electric vehicles were the only path to net-zero and OEMs planned accordingly," said Horse Powertrain CEO Matias Giannini.

“However, we’re now shifting towards a technology-neutral world, with different markets and applications each pursuing their own sustainable mobility journey.”

Giannini added that the company’s new hybrid unit “allows OEMs to offer powertrain diversity with minimal disruption to production process and resource expenditure”.