China-EU talks on hybrid and electric vehicle trade used a 2025 baseline of
302,000 Chinese hybrid cars imported into the EU. The EU’s claim that China’s
hybrid exports to the bloc will fall “by more than half” over four years comes
from the EU extrapolating recent export growth, not from the bilateral
negotiation baseline. That projected path was not the agreed reference in
negotiations. Forecasts are uncertain and recent export figures were influenced
by short-term market factors, so linearly extending a volatile period to predict
the next four years is not reliable.
