In 2006, a German motoring journalist published a crash test video of the Brilliance BS6, a Chinese-built saloon that had entered the European market with considerable ambition. The car, tested by the German automobile club ADAC, scored one star out of five. The A-pillar buckled. The airbag deployed into the driver’s face rather than away from it.

The footage spread rapidly and became shorthand, across the European automotive press, for everything that was wrong with Chinese cars. Within three years, Brilliance’s European importer had gone bankrupt. The brand’s international venture was over.

That was not an isolated incident. The years between 2000 and 2015 saw a series of Chinese brands attempt international expansion, only to be repelled by safety tests, intellectual property litigation, the absence of any compelling reason for consumers to choose them, or simply by the slow strangulation of insufficient dealer networks and the lack of after-sales infrastructure.

Their failures were not random. They followed patterns. And those patterns are directly relevant to the brands currently attempting the same journey. While BYD, Nio, and Xpeng are operating at a different level of competence than their predecessors, not every lesson from the first wave has been fully absorbed.

This article examines three of the most instructive cases: Brilliance, Landwind, and Qoros. Each failed for different reasons. Together, they map the three primary failure modes that have defined Chinese brands’ international attempts, and that still pose risks to the current generation.

Brilliance: How One Crash Test Ended European Ambitions

Brilliance Auto, the Shenyang-based manufacturer best known in China for its BMW joint venture, entered the European market in 2006 through a German importer, HSO Motors. The car it brought was the BS6 saloon, a mid-size four-door that the brand positioned as evidence of China’s readiness to compete in Europe’s mainstream segment. The BS6 had a conventional enough profile: it was designed with input from Italian styling house Pininfarina, was priced below European equivalents, and was certified as road-legal across the continent.

What it was not was safe. When ADAC tested the BS6 in 2007, the results were damaging in every sense. The car achieved a single star out of five. The frontal impact caused severe structural deformation. The A-pillar intruded significantly into the passenger cell. The airbag deployment was mistimed, striking the driver’s head rather than cushioning it. In the side impact test, the door structure offered minimal resistance. ADAC’s assessment was unambiguous: the BS6 was not a safe car by European standards.

The footage circulated quickly. European automotive media covered it extensively, and consumers’ response was decisive. They did not buy the car. HSO Motors sold just 502 Brilliance vehicles across all of Europe between 2007 and 2009, before going bankrupt. Brilliance withdrew entirely from the European market.

The most damning detail is not the crash test result itself; first-generation export products often have safety deficiencies, but what it revealed about Brilliance’s decision-making. The company had developed the BS6 primarily for the Chinese domestic market, where C-NCAP safety standards were considerably less demanding than Euro NCAP or ADAC’s equivalent. Rather than engineering the car to European safety requirements before export, Brilliance exported a car it had built for a different regulatory environment and hoped the gap would not be noticed. It was noticed immediately, publicly, and permanently.

Landwind: Zero Stars, Then a Plagiarised Design

Landwind, a brand jointly owned by Jiangling Motors and Changan, holds a distinction few automotive brands can claim: it failed in the European market twice, in two completely different ways, a decade apart.

The first failure came in 2005. Landwind launched an SUV in Germany, priced aggressively at under €15,000, and Euro NCAP tested it promptly. The result was zero stars out of five. Not one star. Zero. The steering column drove into the driver’s chest in the frontal offset test. The car’s structure offered almost no protection. The German press widely reported the results, and Landwind withdrew from Europe within months. The company later acknowledged the car had not been engineered with Euro NCAP requirements in mind.

The second failure was different in character but equally damaging. In 2015, Landwind launched the X7 in China, an SUV so similar in external design to the Range Rover Evoque that photographs of the two cars side by side became a widely circulated symbol of Chinese automotive IP practices. The X7 was not a licensed derivative or a joint venture product. It was a near-identical copy of a competitor’s design, sold at roughly a third of the price of the Evoque in the domestic Chinese market.

Jaguar Land Rover pursued legal action in China, and in 2019, a Beijing court found in JLR’s favour, ordering Landwind to halt X7 sales and pay damages. The ruling was not enforced promptly, and Landwind continued to sell the X7 domestically for some time. But any residual possibility of a European return was extinguished: no European regulator or consumer would welcome a brand with a court-ordered plagiarism finding against it.

Landwind’s two failures illustrate two distinct failure modes. The first was the same C-NCAP versus Euro NCAP miscalculation that doomed Brilliance. The second was the decision to clone the Evoque, which may have generated short-term domestic revenue but foreclosed any future abroad and invited exactly the kind of high-profile legal defeat that defines how a brand is discussed abroad. It is difficult to think of a cleaner example of a company trading its long-term international credibility for a short-term domestic gain.

Qoros: The Good Product That Nobody Bought

Qoros is the most instructive failure on this list precisely because the product was not the problem. Founded in 2007 as a joint venture between Chery Automobile and Israel Corporation, Qoros was built from the beginning with European ambitions at its centre. It hired a German design director, Gert Volker Hildebrand, the man who designed the modern Mini for BMW.

It developed its cars in partnership with Magna Steyr, the Austrian engineering firm that builds vehicles for Porsche, BMW, and Jaguar. When the Qoros 3 saloon was tested by Euro NCAP in 2013, it scored five stars with a rating of 82 percent, the highest score for any Chinese car tested under Euro NCAP at that point.

The car was genuinely competitive. Automotive press who drove it found it well-built, well-equipped, and sensibly priced. It was a credible product by any objective measure. And it sold almost nothing in Europe.

In 2014, Qoros’ first full year of European sales, the brand sold 51 cars across the entire continent. Fifty-one. The reasons were structural rather than product-related. Qoros had no dealer network of meaningful scale. It had no brand recognition. It had no story that differentiated it from established alternatives at the same price.

A buyer considering a Qoros 3 could, for identical money, walk into a Volkswagen or Ford dealer with decades of established service infrastructure, known resale values, and an established ownership community. Qoros offered none of those things. Good safety scores and engineering credentials are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for competing in Europe. Qoros shelved its European ambitions in 2017 and retreated to China, where sales were also weak.

In 2018, the Baoneng Group, a Shenzhen-based property conglomerate with no automotive experience, acquired a controlling stake. Under Baoneng, Qoros briefly reported extraordinary sales figures that later investigation revealed were substantially inflated by the parent company purchasing its own cars through its property rental platforms. The underlying genuine demand was a fraction of the reported numbers. Baoneng’s financial difficulties in the property sector eventually dragged the car brand down with them. Qoros filed for bankruptcy in January 2026, thirteen years after its promising Euro NCAP debut, having never found an answer to the question of why anyone should buy its cars rather than an established alternative.

What the Current Chinese Automakers Have Done Differently

The brands currently succeeding in international markets have absorbed the most visible lessons of the first wave. Nio tested its ET5 and ET7 under the 2023 Euro NCAP protocol before a significant European rollout. The ET7 scored 96 percent in adult occupant protection, the highest result of that test year.

BYD routinely tests its export models under Euro NCAP before launch. MG, operating under SAIC ownership, has built a dealer network across Europe that predates its EV push by years. Xpeng has been explicit about treating software capability as its primary differentiator, a narrative that is at least coherent, even if the brand is still building recognition.

The IP problem has also shifted. The current generation of Chinese EV brands is largely, not entirely, but largely building original designs. BYD’s Dynasty and Ocean series are visually distinctive. Nio’s design language is consistent and original. Xpeng’s cars are not copies of anything. The era of the Landwind X7 is not quite over, but the brands with serious international ambitions have recognised that a copied design is a liability, not an asset, outside China.

The brand vacuum problem has not been fully solved. Most Chinese EV brands arriving in European markets are building awareness from near-zero levels, in segments where consumers have 20 years of loyalty to established names, among buyers who are asked to trust an unfamiliar service network with a significant purchase.

MG has an advantage because the nameplate carries inherited British brand recognition, softening the unfamiliarity. Nio’s battery swap infrastructure is a genuine differentiator. For most others, the answer to ‘why choose this over a Volkswagen or a Hyundai’ remains underdeveloped.

The Graveyard Is Instructive

The failure of Brilliance, Landwind, and Qoros was not inevitable. Each had assets that, managed differently, could have produced better outcomes. Brilliance had BMW’s engineering expertise available through its joint venture. It chose not to apply those standards to its export product. Landwind had an established presence and a price advantage, but squandered them first on a safety-blind launch and then on a plagiarism gamble. Qoros had the best product in the room and no idea how to sell it.

The current wave of Chinese brands is operating in a more sophisticated manner on almost every dimension. But the Qoros problem, the brand vacuum, the distribution gap, the absence of a compelling consumer narrative, has not been engineered away. It is being addressed slowly, at significant cost, over time.

Some brands will succeed. Some will not. The ones most at risk are those who have solved the product problem and concluded that the hard work is done.

It is not. The graveyard exists. The lessons are specific. And the consumer in Düsseldorf or Amsterdam, asked to choose a Chinese EV over an established alternative in 2026, is asking exactly the same question that the consumer in 2007 asked when a Brilliance salesman handed them a brochure. The question is whether today’s brands have a better answer.

Sources: Autoevolution, EuroNCAP, Carnewschina

Tags: BYD, Europe, History, international, Nio, Xpeng