While selling electric vehicles under their existing brands, major Chinese carmakers have launched a plethora of new EV marques since last year to fend off competition from Tesla and domestic EV startups.

While EV startups continue to follow Tesla in opening direct stores, several foreign automakers have taken a different approach to enabling direct sales for new brands or new products.

From the mid-1980s to the early 2010s, a large number of joint ventures were formed between global automakers and their Chinese peers to build passenger vehicles. The lure of heady sales and profits in the world’s biggest light-vehicle market was too good to ignore. Times have changed.

The Chinese market for gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles -- some 414,000 were sold in 2020 -- remains the reserved territory of Toyota and Honda. But the Japanese duopoly that helped popularize hybrids is about to face challenges anew from local automakers.