Two decades ago, the Irish new car market was a stable, sure-footed sort of place. Back in 2005, we were buying basically the same cars our parents and grandparents had bought: Toyotas, Fords, Volkswagens, Renaults, Opels and Nissans flowed from vast ships moored to the docks in Dublin, Cork, Rosslare and, by way of dealerships, into Irish driveways.
In the two decades since, the car market has changed utterly. While a familiar name topped the sales charts yet again in 2024 — Toyota — the best-selling car in Ireland has been, since 2016, a Korean-made car; the Hyundai Tucson. The Tucson’s mechanically identical brother, the Kia Sportage, also rides high in the sales charts.
The two Korean brands — part of the same massive conglomerate — have risen to prominence in a very short space of time. Now, even that prominence might be under threat, as the Irish car market is changing faster and more comprehensively than ever before, such that the conversion of Hyundai and Kia from cheap to commanding might one day be viewed as a small blip.
An avalanche of new car brands is about to land in the Irish market. Many of them - albeit not all - are Chinese, as the country ramps up its quest for dominance of global car sales, especially electric cars.
Two such brands have already achieved significant success in Ireland. MG is hardly a new brand — the name has been around from 1924, all the way through to the collapse of the MG Rover company in 2004. At the point of that collapse, Shanghai Automotive Industrial Corporation, or SAIC, swooped for the remains of MG, and has spent two decades carefully nurturing and re-inventing it as a maker of electric and hybrid family models.
The MG 4 electric hatchback is a former winner of the Irish Times car of the year award, while the recent HS hybrid SUV can stand easy comparison with the best from Toyota and Hyundai. There’s even been a return to sports car making with the all-electric Cyberster two-seater, whose price, vertically opening doors and performance all raise an equal number of eyebrows.
BYD — a contraction of Build Your Dreams — has also already carved out success in Ireland, with its aquatically-named Seal saloon and Dolphin hatchback, as well as the Atto 3 crossover which has proven so popular with taxi drivers and more new models will arrive this year. BYD is an enormous company, with ambitions to become the biggest global maker of electric and hybrid cars. It’s just notched up its 10-millionth sale of such models, in spite of the fact that the company only made its first car in 1993. The company will this year open factories in Hungary and Turkey which will allow it to side-step the higher import tariffs recently imposed by the EU.
“As BYD’s sales volumes to-date show, Irish motorists are responding enthusiastically to the cost savings that electric motoring brings, and to the ‘more for less’ value that Chinese-built vehicles deliver,” says Ciaran Allen, a director of Motor Distributors Limited (MDL), which imports BYD cars into Ireland. “Now, with the arrival of Xpeng on to the market here, and the launch of its hi-spec G6 SUV the added competition that this new market entrant brings will drive growth and increase customer interest even further.”
XPeng? Oh yes, MDL isn’t stopping at just one Chinese brand. Even though the company has long been the Mercedes importer for Ireland (a position it has held since the 1950s), BYD has now been joined in the MDL stable by XPeng. Technically, that’s pronounced “Shao-Peng”, but, whatever you fancy calling it, it’s another brand intent on wresting the world’s electric car making crown from an increasingly troubled Tesla. Its first car in Ireland is the G6 SUV, which, aside from being generically-egg-shaped, is smooth, easy to drive, packed with high-tech features, and has a lengthy one-charge range, not to mention the sort of ultra-rapid charging speeds which so far have been the preserve of Porsche, Audi, Hyundai, and Kia. The G6 won’t be alone for long, as other XPeng models — including a larger, grander SUV, a seven-seat MPV, and a smattering of sleek saloons — are merely waiting to be loaded on to ships in Chinese ports.
There are hordes of other Chinese brands, just waiting for the go-code for the Irish market. GAC (Ghangzhou Automotive Company) makes sleek-looking all-electric SUVs and hatchbacks and counts no less than Honda as a global partner; Leapmotor - part-owned by the same Stellantis Group that also owns Peugeot, Opel, Fiat and many other brands - makes a mixture of arrestingly cheap small cars and more luxurious SUVs, all powered by batteries.
The twinned brands of Omoda and Jaecoo, both subsidiaries of the vast Chery Group, are already on sale in the UK, and although early road tests show them to be dull to drive, never underestimate the ability of Chinese engineers to respond and respond quickly.
Nio, a company which has already built an enviable reputation in Germany and Norway, is also poised for right-hand drive production for the UK and Ireland, and it may be the brand that solves the worries over battery range and longevity: its cars are designed with battery packs which can be swapped out at automated stations, taking away a depleted pack and replacing it with a fully-charged one. That’ll put range anxiety to bed.
While all of these brands are Chinese, European car makers aren’t averse to creating new brands to compete. Seat has already spun its Cupra high-performance brand out into a marque all of its own, and it’s proved a successful move. Cupra’s Irish director, Gaspar Alciade, says: “We’re making a big investment in the brand, and building it up from zero has taken a big effort. In other markets, Cupra had some heritage because of its performance models, but in Ireland this didn’t really exist because of our CO2 legislation. But now you can see our investment is way above our market share, and we have a dedicated network of dealers, who have invested in big, standalone showrooms.”
Volvo (technically Chinese-owned, but still a European brand as far as most are concerned) has spun off its old high-performance brand, Polestar, into a standalone, all-electric marque. Sales have been slow so far, thanks to the brand having only one model — the Polestar 2 saloon — but the arrival late last year of the impressive Polestar 3 and four SUVs should give it the shot in the arm it needs. All models are superb to drive and have lengthy electric ranges.
One other European brand will finally arrive in Ireland this year and will be fully electric. Alpine has for many years been Renault’s high-performance brand — it has its own Formula One and Le Mans racing teams — but it’s been absent from Ireland because its only road car model since it was revived by Renault in 2017 has been the expensive, two-seat, mid-engined, Porsche-rivalling A110 sports car. This summer that all changes, and Alpine will go on sale with a rapid and fun electric hot-hatch based on the new Renault 5 E-Tech, and later this year it will introduce a swoopy, low-slung five-seat electric crossover.
Which of these new brands will emerge triumphant? If any of the newly arrived brands can come to dominate the Irish car market, BYD is probably the most likely candidate, but we’ll put money on Alpine as being the most desirable.
