Paris Motor Show 2026: Europe's Last Stand Against China?

What if Europe's greatest weapon against China isn't battery technology or lower prices? What if it's the ability to make people fall in love with the cars? Paris Motor Show 2026 feels like the beginning of Europe's great automotive fightback. Then again, it could also be the automotive equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Has Europe remembered how to make us want cars? This is the question. so for the first time in years a major motor show has made me stop stare and actually go whoa that is pretty cool paris 2026 is overflowing with outrageous concepts evocative names and european manufacturers that seem to be rediscovering their personalities i mean there's an adorable little citroen 2cv concept the renault espace or really they're calling it the e-space the peugeot rcz Z Vision, the ET16, remember the Peugeot 205 16, the Renault 8 Gordini, the Alpine 310 Vision, the Fiat Multipla, and the Alfa Romeo concept. Even saying those names or trying to say those names is exciting, right? Especially when we live in an era when you go into a showroom and all you see is 17 different versions of the same grey crossover template. so the question is has europe finally remembered how to make us want cars or are we watching a spectacular last performance from an industry living on past glories let's get into all of that right after this so something has changed in paris i feels like at the paris motor show for several years to be honest i've largely ignored the major international motor shows the excitement and just seems to have gone out of them right manufacturers withdrew from them the launches all moved online because they could all just go right well you know what we can just directly launch our car to our captive audience online rather than having to compete with a dozen other car launches at a major motor show and then trying to get the same sort of press coverage so they all did that and they all basically dismissed motor shows out of hand and many motor shows just became glorified shopping centers with expensive coffee and some nice leaflets right I mean the Geneva motor show just isn't as sexy as it used to be Detroit has kind of lost its international importance um and this the surviving European shows I mean they were there but you know you had no desire to go to them right now I'm feeling like I missed out by not going to the Paris motor show because this really felt different I mean yes to an extent it was the Stellantis show because they brought nine concept cars and more than 60 vehicles from eight different brands and its stand covered 5,000 square meters, the largest at the show. But, you know, there were other manufacturers like Renault and, you know, Volkswagen Group and other people that were also doing some crazy stuff there. So, Reuters reported that a record 20 Chinese car brands were also attending. That's twice the number that was seen in 2024. this feels like a motor show with something of a battle kind of happening i mean you could say that china revived the motor show because they brought so many cars to it and so that's a kind of an irony there right Reuters again says that western motor shows had been declining until chinese cars or chinese manufacturers began arriving in force about four years ago so So Europe's established brands saw these newcomers filling the exhibition halls, dominating coverage in their local market, speaking directly to European customers. And according to, it was reported, I think, in the Times, one industry insider said that Renault Alpine and Stellantis had been, well, they'd been taken aback by the scale of the Chinese presence in their market. The paper says that the resulting struggle for attention has become kind of an arms race of concept cars suddenly the europeans have returned with well with fireworks actually perhaps the motor show still matters because photographs you know online cannot reproduce an entire hall collectively losing its mind as an outrageous concept car is unveiled cars are physical and emotional objects you need the scale you need the lights sound the dancing girls the crowds the music the speeches you know we need that moment when everyone stops uh talking and simply just stares at the thing and Paris has sort of become that theater again Europe has rediscovered its greatest advantage over these Chinese um upstarts if you like this is something that actually i've been arguing for some time the legacy i mean we're talking about Europe but actually let's just say legacy car manufacturers right because that's ultimately what we're talking about legacy car manufacturers as i've always said they have an advantage over these emerging Chinese car makers and that is their legacy their heritage China has scale it's got speed it's got technology and increasingly excellent engineering that almost you cannot compete with but what most of its native brands cannot instantly acquire is history right you take brands or you take names like the Alpine A310 right you you remember something that Peugeot RCZ maybe not that big of a name but i remember testing the car back in the day and it was it was different it was cool Citroen 2CV of course which actually to be honest i think was the ultimate star of the Paris Motor Show not only in its normal form but they even showed a van version of it as well and people just you know they went crazy i mean look at this thing part of me as i said in my original post regarding that when I covered it part of me really wanted to like it and part of me thought it's a bit a bit contrived it's a bit of a pastiche but is that such a bad thing? Let's get into that a little bit later on, but what else did we have? We had the Renault Espace, we all loved that thing, was like a pioneer in its time, right? Except it's now an E-space, yeah. You got the Peugeot 205 T16, I remember back in the day I was a big rally fan and that thing was just a pocket rocket beast of a thing and they brought this thing back and you know, I think it's going to herald the 208, I think the design is going to be the next 208 which is of course going to be electric and most of these were electric, but it had the look, it had the stance, it had the silhouette of the car that I remember, so it's quite evocative and part of me was like, whoa, you know, and the interior was completely wacky and you're like, can you please build something like that? You know, these names uh, they they already have, they're already storied they already have stories, you know, they evoke like I said, rally stages or or motorways or French driving holidays, a motorsport victories and posters on bedroom walls, and Chinese companies don't have that, I mean they can purchase established names as they have done with MG and Volvo and Lotus, and over time of course they will build their own heritage, that is inevitable, that will happen but right now Europe has an emotional bank account that's accumulated over well over like 130 years and Paris suggests that it's finally remembered where they left the pin number Stellantis design chief Giles Vidal says that the future of automotive design must be both bold and meaningful and each concept reinforcing the identity of its brand and you know what I think this is one of the brilliant things about the concepts that they brought to the Paris Motor Show because not only were they at least not just another bland crossover which all are starting to look the same but they had a unique identity they look different they look wacky they look futuristic and contemporary but at the same time they did this amazing trick of evoking the shape the stance the personality the style of the original car that they were based on there are some exceptions i recently posted about you know Lancia bringing back the Gamma name on a crossover that doesn't work and then to put an HF Integrale badge on the back of it outrageous don't do that but they are doing it it's a high performance version so there they are missteps i'm not saying they hit every single you know ball out of the park but so many of the concepts really kind of made you go oh whoa i like that you know and that Alfa Romeo for example the RCZ i mean you know actually think about the Alpine oh my goodness right um now what Vidal says it may sound like just designer speak right but it addresses a genuine problem a shared platform shared batteries and shared software have made too many cars basically feel like they're sharing the same design as well they look interchangeable to be honest like i said to somebody the other day like i used to be that person back in the day you show me a fender or a bumper or a headlight and i would tell you what the car was today i could be standing in front of a car looking dead at it going, I don't know what that is no idea, I mean, and I'm sure that quite a few people feel the same way because they just they're just the same car with different badges and sometimes you don't even know what the badge is because it's a new badge from China car content Brown Car Guy has written the only comprehensive guide that tells you exactly how, get it now from Amazon or Kindle Unlimited so at Paris the Chinese response was there but it was more rational rather than romantic BYD, Cherry, Changan, Leapmotor which is part of Stellantis, I believe, and others brought real cars, formidable technology, rapid charging equipment and aggressive prices of course and these are not weak cars and to be fair they're doing really well by the middle of 2026 Chinese manufacturers had reached 6.4 percent of the EU market while their UK share has doubled to approximately 15%, I recently covered this in September, Chinese brands accounted for almost a quarter of UK registrations with the Jaecoo 7 part of the Cherry group which was dominant that for the second month this year has become the best-selling car and could become the best-selling car for the year. So the motor show doesn't mean that we've won or anything like that. The Chinese are diligently chipping away at our marketplaces and bringing in great cars with great technology at very attractive prices and full of kit. A beautiful concept of course earns a headline but an affordable production car earns customers money. China's development cycles of course remain much faster. Stellantis itself is adopting Chinese style methods because of its relationship with Leapmotor. Europe may be rediscovering desire, but China continues to deliver cars that people can actually afford and order and drive on a daily basis. Now, we have tariffs and tariffs can buy time. Batteries, however, expose the irony of the European protectionism that is going on, because if you think about it, the batteries are still coming from China. So while the European Union does apply additional duties of 17% to Chinese-built BYDs, 18.8% to Geely vehicles, and 35.3% to SAIC products on top of the standard import tariff, and also, actually, you might be wondering, why is there a difference in the different percentages for the different manufacturers? well the um they were calculated according to the government subsidies that each manufacturer received so they actually went down to the the level of going well how much does each manufacturer receive and our subsidy percentage was actually based on that which actually if you think about it it's quite clever than just going here's a blanket tariff which you know is being spoken about and considered here in the UK um and also there is another European uh another um European initiative that is being looked at and discussed which is to limit Chinese hybrids to 350,000 annually which is a lot less than for example I think they're hitting 800,000 this year so that's like less than half of what they are I think there's going to be six percent growth is for a certain period of time but these are the kind of things that they are looking at the that may make Chinese cars less price competitive of course because if you think about the fact that you're constricting supply and if they still demand then the prices have to go up and also they have to justify the investment that they've made in setting up in the European market and that may well give European manufacturers some breathing room however breathing room achieves very little if it's spent producing you know another anonymous SUV with a 50 grand starting price and here of course like I said um you have to think about the irony that i mentioned earlier china accounted for more than 80 percent of global battery cell production in 2025 and the european market share of chinese battery producers has almost doubled since 2023 so some of europe's great electric fightback is still actually going to be running on chinese cells materials manufacturing expertise and technology because that's where it's coming from because most of these cars certainly the concepts and things that have been displayed and announced at the Paris Motor Show, most of them are electric. So this contest is, let's be honest, far more complicated than just Europe versus China. It concerns who designs the car, who supplies its components, who manufactures it, where is it manufactured, and ultimately whose badge, nameplate, design look appeals to you that will make you sign that finance agreement. This is Brown Car Guy's exciting new thriller. New York Times bestselling author Rick Hoskin said of it, it's a spy story through a different lens. Get it now at Amazon or Kindle Unlimited. And here comes the biggest question. Concept cars do make promises under, you know, the beautiful flattering light of a motor show stand. I mean, the Citroen 2CV, it looks credible. It looks like it could work. It looked like that's something people would go to the showroom for. However, they say it's a concept. It does preview a European-built electric car that we might be getting in 2028. And they're talking about a target price of just £13,000, which would be amazing. But will it actually look like that when it comes out? Will it actually have that interior on it when it comes out? You know, that's a question that one has to ask. And the same goes for some of the other cars that were shown. And even aside from the ones I've also mentioned, there were some others, like for example the Cupra was showing a Tavascan and the Tendaya I think is a production car around coming in around 2030 and it looks quite striking it doesn't look as radical as some of the other concepts that we're talking about but it does look quite striking I've had a lot of reaction with some of these concepts that I've put up so for example the Alpine A110 you know and the Peugeot RCZ people are like that's really cool somebody's like I need one of those in my life you know but these are not cars that they have promised that they're going to build these are cars that they have created to get us excited about their brands um and the e-space as you know that looks actually quite practical and sensible and looks like it's production ready but they say it's not available for purchase yes the Fiat Multipla now that is one of those wacky old school motor show uh cars where they go oh look it can it can be an mpv or an suv or and then it can turn into a pickup truck and it's quite clever what they've done with it but it's one of those things you know yeah that's not actually going to make production that would be extraordinary and if it did i don't think it necessarily would get people buying it although i have to say it's much better looking than the Multipla as i remember it uh even though it's called a Multipla um so you know there is all of these questions that are out there and are standing out with these cars that have been presented to us at the motor show and had us you know have had us sort of looking at them wide-eyed and salivating um and the question is that is all of that this experiment of you know rejuvenating these brands just really going to just turn it ultimately into a mass frustration you know because people are going to share these cars they're going to they're sharing them they're sharing them right now i said that and my script i was going to say they're going to share them but they are sharing they're being shared all my feeds are full of them right they're going to argue about them and their feedback is going to get back to the manufacturers that you know yes please build these cars we like them but the manufacturers they don't go on that alone anymore you know because they don't trust the customer anymore because customers in the past have said that and then they haven't bought the cars and ultimately for them it's about the bottom line if they're going to invest in taking a concept but don't forget is a one-off maybe a clay model maybe a one-off builder is at a motor show that's an expense but the expense of them transitioning that into a full production car is humongous. And they're not going to do that unless they're 100% sure that they will be able to sell that vehicle. Instead, what you probably are more likely to end up is another crossover that carries maybe the light signature or some element of it or the name like Lancia have been doing with the Gamma. And that would turn the Paris Motor Show into a very expensive customer satisfaction survey and nothing more so is this the fight back or is this the last chance saloon now personally I do want to see this as Europe's turning point as the moment in which Europe said we've got an idea and the idea is we've got a fallback on our history and our heritage and our legacy and that's where we're going to beat the chinese and they did and they gave us the cars that we all went wow now i know they're electric and i know a lot of people are going to read i don't like it because electric but you know it's a new generation of people right these cars at this motor show are not aimed at generation x like i am they are aimed at the next kid who was taken to a motor show and looked at the Alpine 310 and went oh i want one of those when i grow up you know although to be honest the alpine 310 has a very 70s kind of retro futuristic look to it so i love it too but anyway and and that future crowd is going to grow up to be much more amicable and accepting of electric cars so and and paris has reminded us or basically told us that electric cars can be eccentric beautiful playful practical and desirable and they can carry recognizable identities that will look towards the future and give us that future with some level of history and heritage and nostalgia there. Let's be honest, most cars these days, they drive the same anyway. The electric platforms are such that there's very little. I mean, I review new cars and ultimately I know what a car is going to drive like before I've even turned the wheel in it because they all pretty much drive the same. And the drivers these days are not looking for anything that is unique or exciting or different. They're just looking for something that does what they need it to do, which is to get from A to B. and especially as we're now getting into an era of autonomous cars then we're going to do that and also with these electronic platforms and with everything being electronically adjustable and drive by wire and brake by wire and and not even having transmissions all of those will be ultimately adjustable by consumer so you know cars will be able you know very soon we'll be able to get into cars and we can literally tune them into what kind of car we want you know a soft riding thing or a sharp or sports car that will probably happen so ultimately it's not about the driving dynamics anymore ultimately what it's about is what does that car appeal to you can you relate to it do you look at it and go oh i want one because ultimately that's basically what it's going to come down to you know and and heritage can be the answer to creating that but at the same time you know it might be a backward step because if you're just going to photocopy your greatest hits and put them out there that may not necessarily put you on to a winner you know it may capture the headlines but people be like yeah but you know we've been there we've done that we're not interested and maybe the younger generation like yeah no we're not interested in the past we're interested in the future that's one way of looking at it personally i think if it's a great product that looks cool and it's got a cool name it's got to be a winner if you can put it into production at a price that makes sense so and you know and i would gladly take that sort of reinterpretation of something from the past rather than just a bland soap bar 21st century crossover EV so i say to the manufacturers you know what don't just show us these cars build them you know keep the character keep the styles keep the craziness that you've put into these concepts because you know what now it's easier than ever in the past you'd make concept cars and it would be quite difficult to put them into production but now it's easy especially with an EV platform EV platform everything lives in the lower part of the car so you can build anything you want on top of that right you don't have to be restricted you know that you need to put a petrol tank or an engine or a gearbox no because it's all in the platform right so build whatever you want on top of that give us those crazy cars even if they are limited numbers but they will create the halo car effect that will get people excited again you know about those brands and those cars and you know that going into a showroom or going to a motor show you know allow production versions to retain some of that courage that you've shown in these concepts at the motor show If Europe does that, then like I said, Paris Motor Show 2026 may be remembered as the moment that the European car industry regained its confidence and rediscovered its greatest assets, which is the ability to make people care, you know? However, if these machines quietly disappear into the back rooms or wherever they keep old concept cars, then Paris will just have been the last gasp of the dying glory days of the European car industry, very, very sadly. so now over to you you tell me has europe remembered how to make us want these cars again or is it just an exercise in seeing if they can win some headlines over the chinese is that all that was about tell me what you think of the paris motor show the concepts that have come out of it which one really made you salivate which ones made you angry which ones made you go where's my checkbook let me know in the comments below like share subscribe share the video all the rest of it and I'll catch you all in the next one. If you found this video useful or entertaining, support the Brown Car Guy channel at these links. Hit like, leave a comment and make sure you're subscribing.