The company plans to open 20 dealerships in the Great White North.
While the US auto industry has been actively trying to keep Chinese carmakers out of American showrooms, Canada seems to be welcoming them. Chinese carmaker BYD will open 20 stores in Canada this year, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Just last month, trade groups representing US automakers sent a letter to President Donald Trump asking him to bar Chinese carmakers from selling vehicles and building factories in the United States.
Reuters reported last month that trade groups representing facets of the US auto industry raised “serious concerns about China’s ongoing efforts to dominate global automotive manufacturing and to gain access to the US market. These actions pose a direct threat to America’s global competitiveness, national security, and automotive industrial base.”
Canada, rankled by uneven trade status with America, seems to be welcoming the Chinese.
BYD is opening some 20 sales locations with partners in Canada this year as the Government of Canada is considering Chinese auto industry investments to reduce dependence on the United States, Bloomberg reported.
“The overture of Canada is a very important one,” Alfredo Altavilla, a former Fiat Chrysler Automobiles manager who now advises BYD in Europe, said in an interview in Paris. “We immediately took action to establish a sales network there.”
Canada wasn’t always so welcoming. Through last year, the Canadians kept Chinese carmakers out with high tariffs. But in January they made a deal to allow up to 49,000 Chinese-built electric vehicles a year, Bloomberg reported.
This came after BYD said last month that it wants to build a factory in Canada.
BYD sells about 26,000 hybrid and electric vehicles a month in some regions of Europe, according to electric-vehicles.com. It hopes to reach 7% of the European EV market.
Last year BYD became the world’s largest seller of EVs, passing Tesla. In 2025, BYD sold over 4.5 million new energy vehicles (NEVs) worldwide, a figure that includes both battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs). This total, which included over 2.25 million pure electric cars, made BYD the world’s top seller of electric vehicles and marked a 7.1% increase over 2024. Over 1 million of those were sold outside BYD’s home market of China.
