Every car listed for sale carries its model year, so sorting today's stock by model year shows when each brand's cars entered the market. It reads arrival, not past sales: older cars are also exported, scrapped or kept off the market. Cars from 2020 and earlier are almost entirely Japanese, American, European and Korean. From the 2023 model year, Chinese brands arrive in force.
Share of used cars listed for sale that carry a Chinese brand, by model year
Chinese brands' share of listings, used cars and new-car stock, by country
Combined Google search interest in ten Chinese car brands, relative to searches for Toyota (Toyota = 1), quarterly
Chinese brands by number of listings in the AutoData sample, GCC
Share of vehicles looked up through AutoData's VIN service that were built in China, and share that carry a Chinese brand, by model year
Share of each brand's vehicles looked up in one week that were built in China
Chinese brands compete on two levers at once. On the used market, a young Chinese SUV is listed at around half the price of a Japanese SUV of the same age. On the new market, their distributors offer warranties that run twice as long as the market leader's.
Asking price of used SUVs aged one to three years, by brand origin. Dot is the median, bar is the middle half of listings
Whole-vehicle warranty offered by the official UAE distributor, years
The question every buyer, dealer, lender and insurer asks about Chinese cars is what they will be worth in three years. The fleet is young, so the evidence covers the first three to four years only. Within that window, the data does not show the steep losses the market fears.
Value of a used car by age, relative to the same model at one year old. Within-model comparison; listings from five countries (Oman prices under review)
Asking price of a one- to two-year-old used car as a share of the same model's new-car stock price, median across models
Read with care. This is a first look from a sample of live listings, so these are asking prices, not transaction prices. The Chinese fleet is young: there are too few listings older than four years to measure. New-car prices for Chinese models have also been falling, which narrows the gap between new and used. The full edition will use 28 months of AutoData listing history to test whether the pattern holds.
Social listening sample in progress: Reddit, YouTube comments and a proof-of-concept X collection, in Arabic and English.
Share of used listings in the UAE that are not GCC spec (imported used, mostly from North America), by brand origin
Listings in the AutoData sample, median asking price in local currency, and median days the live listings have been on sale
Listings. AutoData collects car listings every day from dealer, marketplace and brand websites across the six GCC countries, cleans them and maps each one to its make, model and model year. For this proof of concept we took a systematic sample of listings, spread evenly across the live, catalogue-mapped listings on 13 October 2026. Cars with under 1,000 km are treated as new-car stock; all others as used.
Value retention. We compare each model with itself: the log asking price is regressed on age, with a separate baseline for every make, model and country, so a cheap model does not drag down an origin's average. Age is measured from the model year.
Brand origin follows the brand's home market and ownership. Search interest is Google Trends, monthly, rescaled to a common Toyota anchor. Warranties are taken from official distributor websites on 13 October 2026.
Thresholds. No figure is shown for a group of fewer than 30 listings. Figures are at country level only. All prices are asking prices.
Next edition. AutoData's listing history (June 2024 onward, about 580,000 records a day) will add monthly price trends, a GCC used-car price index, time to delisting, and the first AutoData Value Retention Awards.