Leapmotor Surpasses Great Wall, Chery in China Sales in July

Leapmotor Breaks 100,000, Overtakes Two Legacy Giants at Home

Leapmotor reported July deliveries of 101,300 units globally, its first month exceeding 100,000 and doubling year-on-year. Domestic sales came to approximately 84,300 units, enough to surpass both Great Wall Motor and Chery Group in China — the core market for all three.

Great Wall's total July output was 108,100 units, of which roughly 62,000 were exported and 46,100 sold domestically. Chery posted 276,800 units overall, with 202,500 destined for overseas markets and about 74,300 at home. The result: a 10-year-old new-energy brand outselling two traditional automakers with decades of history in China's most important segment — passenger vehicles.

Leapmotor's trajectory has been steady rather than explosive. Since March, monthly domestic deliveries climbed each month before topping 100,000 globally in July. Great Wall's domestic sales, by contrast, have declined every month since March — from 59,100 to 46,100 — while Chery's bottomed out at 65,600 in June before recovering slightly to 74,300.

Why the Gap Is Widening

The reasons are structural. Both Great Wall and Chery carry heavy fossil-fuel lineups that slow their transition; Leapmotor and its peers build around pure electric or range-extender architectures from day one.

Chery's new-energy share rose to roughly 46.6% of total sales in July, and exceeded 60% in China, but the company lacks a clear hit model. Its volume brand Fengyun saw its best-selling T9L move only 4,545 units in June. Meanwhile, several of Chery's best-sellers — the Tiggo 8, Tiggo 9 and Arrizo 8 — offer only basic Level-2 driver assistance, and city NOA is largely reserved for top trims.

Great Wall's new-energy ratio sat at about 32%, unchanged for three consecutive months, and its passenger lineup contains no pure-EV options beyond the Ora sub-brand. The company also has no sedan offering at all, deliberately ceding a market that accounted for 40.3% of Chinese passenger-vehicle sales in the first half of 2026. On smart driving, Great Wall's best-selling plug-in model, the Haval Menglong Plus, reserves highway NOA for mid-to-high trims and city NOA only for the top specification.

Chery's Response: Huawei Partnerships and a Brand Push

Chery is moving quickly. The Fengyun sub-brand has been elevated to a standalone label, and chairman Yin Tongyue announced at the Fengyun A9 launch that Chery will no longer hold back on pure-EV models in the second half of the year. The company has invested more than 2 billion RMB (approx. $278,000) through its joint venture with Huawei to develop the Luxeed brand and co-owns over 30,000 patents with the tech firm.

On the intelligence front, Chery's Lieying ADAS platform — developed with Momenta, Horizon Robotics and its own engineering team — will cover more than 35 models by 2026. Lieying 500 targets "smart driving for both ICE and NEV," Lieying 700 adds city NOA, and Lieying 900 is positioned as a pre-install L4 foundation for 2026–2027. Chery also signed a deeper strategic cooperation with Yinwang Intelligence in June to accelerate L3 and L4 development.

Internally, Chery is pulling back from pure volume growth. Yin said after reaching 20 million cumulative sales the company would stop "involution" and focus on premium branding, technology breakthroughs and customer satisfaction. Domestic deliveries were reduced by 150,000 units this year as part of that recalibration.

Great Wall Catches Up on Two Fronts

Great Wall is electrifying its legacy models — the new Tank 300 now offers Hi4-T and Hi4-Z plug-in variants, and the Haval H6L and DaGou have filed hybrid versions with the MIIT. On smart driving, Great Wall led a C-round investment in Yuanrong Qixing in 2024 and has begun rolling out the company's city NOA solution across its lineup. The Tank 300 Hi4-T also carries Great Wall's Coffee Pilot 3 system with a full set of 27 sensors including a LiDAR, enabling end-to-end highway-to-parking LOT capabilities.

Export Shine Can't Hide Domestic Softness

Great Wall's overseas sales have topped 60,000 units for two consecutive months, while Chery's exports surpassed 200,000 in July, setting a Chinese record. Yet both companies remain dependent on the domestic market for long-term survival. Without faster new-energy transitions and closer parity in intelligent driving, the gap with agile NEV startups is likely to widen further.