The first Chinese-made car Omar Rana ever drove was a gas-powered SUV that he rented while on a trip overseas in 2015. To say it didn’t leave much of an impression would be an understatement.

“It sucked really bad,” Rana, aka OmarDrives, tells me. “A horrible experience.”

Flash forward nearly a decade to last year, when Rana received a DM from a company he’d never heard of called DCar Studio inviting him to check out a few Chinese EVs in Los Angeles. It wasn’t surprising that DCar would reach out to Rana. With his 90,000 subscribers on YouTube and over 280,000 followers on Instagram, he’s built a small but respectable following over the years reviewing a variety of cars and highlighting the best and worst from the auto industry. This was the first time he was offered a chance to review a Chinese car. And given his past experience, he was worried about wasting his time.

“I didn’t think it was legit at first,” he remembers. “The emails had bad English. I’m like, ‘This is spam.’”

Knowing that other LA-based car influencers would be getting similar invitations, Rana quickly overcame his hesitation. He was shocked to learn that in the years since his first experience with a Chinese-made car, the country’s auto industry has exploded to include over 150 distinct brands intensely competing with one another to win over customers with ultra-luxury designs, insane specs, and high-tech features. It was catnip for a car creator like Rana.

Take Geely’s Galaxy E5, for example, Rana says: a $20,000 compact SUV equipped with heated, ventilated, and massaging seats, a digital display cluster, heads-up display, reclining passenger seats, and 360-degree camera. There’s nothing in the North American market that compares at that price point. While EVs have struggled to achieve mainstream acceptance in the US, electrification has become a baseline expectation in China. And internal combustion engine vehicles are seen more as novelties than legitimate choices.

“It was really cool to see how far they’ve come in just five years,” Rana says. “It’s a world of difference.”

Rana ended up publishing a video on the Galaxy E5, initially titled “Five Reasons Elon Would Be Pissed If This Car Came to the U.S.”

By most metrics, China’s EV growth in the last decade has been off the charts. The country went from being a middling player in the global auto industry just a few years ago to the largest auto market in the world and number one exporter of EVs. More than half of new cars sold in China are electric, putting the country on a path to all but erase gas-powered cars over the coming decades.

But this is mostly invisible to Americans, surrounded as we are by Japanese, German, Korean, and, yes, American-made vehicles — but none from China. Steep tariffs and laws that prohibit the sale of cars with software from China have basically made it impossible to sell Chinese vehicles in the US. The only ones you’ll see are hiding behind familiar nameplates, like Geely-owned Volvo.

That makes Chinese cars enigmatic, feature-rich, and ripe for discovery, while also maintaining a whiff of the forbidden — the perfect ingredients for YouTube content. According to Rana, Chinese automakers have a preternatural skill at designing features to enhance user convenience, like gesture-controlled screens for kids who often lose remotes.

“The fact that they’re able to pack all these cars with such advanced technology at such a low price point and still be, like, making money,” he says.

EVs, in particular, are basically built for the social web. They boast bold spec sheets, shockingly low sticker prices, and an array of camera-friendly party tricks. To borrow a phrase from Doug DeMuro, one of the best-known and most popular car reviewers on YouTube, Chinese EVs are the ultimate quirks-and-features machines.

Last year, Marques Brownlee featured the Li Auto Mega on his Auto Focus channel. The video, titled “The Best EV You Can’t Buy,” racked up 1.6 million views, making it one of the best-performing videos on his car-focused channel. Brownlee, who declined to be interviewed for this article, called the Mega “sick” with “the most features, the most tech I’ve ever seen or experienced in an EV.”

Click over to any other car YouTuber, and you’ll find similar reactions. “I know why Chinese cars aren’t sold in America,” Forrest Jones says in his video about the Yangwang U8 (3.3 million views on TikTok). “Because they would dominate.”

Dive into the comment sections, and you’ll start to get the picture: comment after comment bemoaning the fact that these magical EVs aren’t for sale in the US. Gen Zers confused why they can’t buy a $10,000 BYD Seagull. Is the US a backwater? they wonder. Is China is the future?

This attitude may help explain why Chinese automakers are so interested in getting US content creators behind the wheel of their EVs, says Mark Greeven, professor of management innovation and dean of Asia at IMD Business School. Chinese automakers may not be able to sell in the US, but they certainly can in other countries and are currently grabbing market share in Europe, South America, and Africa. But the US is still seen as the ultimate tastemaker.

“The charm offensive is to work with American influencers about Chinese EV cars because we still have a dominant opinion in the Western world, which is formed by English-speaking influential figures on social media,” Greeven tells me. “It makes sense for them to talk about Chinese cars.”

He points to popular internet celebrity IShowSpeed’s recent tour of China, which was seen as a major soft power win for the Chinese government. IShowSpeed, real name Darren Watkins Jr., who has 60 million followers across various platforms, traveled the country for two weeks, posting numerous videos along the way. During the tour, he bought a $250,000 BYD Yangwang U9 electric supercar. The U9 can actually jump several inches in the air at the touch of a button, which IShowSpeed was particularly eager to show off. (It’s unclear whether he was actually able to import the supercar to the states.)

There’s a strategy at play here, and it doesn’t entirely make a difference whether Chinese EVs are available for sale in the US or not.

“I think this is part of [Chinese] companies trying to become more global,” Greeven says, “whether or not that’s for the American market specifically or to have an overall presence in the social media landscape, which in the Western world is still very much dominated by American influencers and English-speaking social media.”

Influencing in China is big business, as is livestreaming. Local brands work with local streamers and influencers, who sometimes blur the line between social media stars and sales associates. Many of these content creators also happen to work for companies like Xiaomi or BYD, selling products through their shops while livestreaming the whole time, Greeven says. In other words, while US influencers tend to emphasize authenticity and independence to connect with their audiences, Chinese influencers don’t seem to have those same hang-ups.

“These people are employees,” Greeven says. “They’re not social influencers, they’re just employees who build up their following in the online and offline world as sales associates.”

The next level up is the really big influencers, who typically don’t trade cash for videos for fear of jeopardizing their audience, Greeven says. Still, there’s an expectation for positive content from the brands. Likewise, Chinese content creators are often paid much more than their American counterparts — sometimes as much as $150,000 for a single vertical video — whereas in the US, creators typically earn far less.

That’s led Chinese automakers to turn to US content creators to reach new audiences. And they’re willing to pay for it, too.

Rana says that invitations to check out new EVs typically come from trade groups representing multiple Chinese automakers rather than individual brands or PR agencies. He doesn’t accept compensation for these reviews, nor are they labeled as paid promotions. But that’s not necessarily true for everyone. Rana says he’s heard rumors that some influencers receive undisclosed payments to praise Chinese EVs.

Other creators corroborate this. DeMuro, the quirks-and-features guy with 5 million subscribers on YouTube, has only reviewed a handful of Chinese EVs on his channel: the Fangchengbao Leopard 5, the Xiaomi SU7, and the MG Cyberster. While he himself does not accept compensation for his videos, he acknowledges that there’s pay-for-play going on. “Some creators may be getting paid under the table,” DeMuro tells me, “but I don’t take money from automakers in any form. Many of my colleagues do, and I can’t speak for them.”

To be sure, none of the creators I spoke to could produce evidence of pay-for-play, and all of them insisted they would never accept any cash from any company, Chinese or otherwise, without reporting it. But all of them cite unethical payments as among the reasons why Chinese cars appear to be suddenly everywhere on social platforms.

That could be true, though it also seems just as likely that the cars are weird and different enough to go viral organically, without anyone putting their thumb on the scale. “I think the appeal of covering Chinese-market vehicles is that we aren’t offered these vehicles in the US,” DeMuro says, “which makes audiences interested in how they operate and how they differ from American-market vehicles.”

Some creators say they’re worried that pay-for-play is going to lead to the downfall of independent auto journalism online. Roman Mica, a former broadcast reporter who founded the channel TFL Studios (1.53 million subscribers on YouTube), notes that there’s little transparency or accountability regarding sponsorships on Facebook and Instagram. Many creators fail to disclose paid partnerships, even though regulations require it. This allows automakers, especially Chinese ones, to manipulate narratives, reaching huge audiences while controlling how their products are portrayed.

“We’re getting paid the traditional way, which is YouTube,” Mica said. “We don’t take money from car manufacturers, but YouTube advertises cars. And then when somebody watches a video, there’s an ad next to it, and we make money if we get enough views on the thing. But these guys are getting checks from the car manufacturers, and that’s a hard pill to swallow.”

Roman’s son Tommy Mica, who is also a cofounder at TFL, warns that the traditional expectation of editorial independence is rapidly eroding across digital automotive media.

“Especially as the short-form stuff becomes more and more popular, it’s becoming really, really hard to compete on that scale,” Tommy Mica says, “because we’re finding the manufacturers also give earlier access to these creators that are able to be paid and are able to have their content controlled.”

I asked Rana to connect me to DCar Studio, the group seemingly at the center of this explosion of Chinese EV content from US-based creators. I had so many questions about how Chinese automakers see their vehicles being received in the US. The group’s website is like a mashup of YouTube and CarMax, with dozens of overlapping videos and drop-down menus and car shopping tools all smashed together.

I connected with Hanyang Xie, a content creator manager at DCar, who also goes by Ben. At first, Hanyang seemed excited to talk and eager to share more information about how DCar operates. But after a few days of trading emails, I became less sure that he would actually follow through.

“So sorry for not getting back to you sooner, it completely slipped my mind. Been filming with creators all day,” Hanyang wrote. “Yes! What do you want to know about our company? I would love to answer your questions and help with your story.”

I’d already discovered a few new details about DCar, like that it’s actually a car trading platform known as Dongchedi, owned by TikTok parent ByteDance. In 2024, Dongchedi raised $600 million on a $3 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. It has tens of millions of users, both on mobile and through WeChat. Its aim, it would appear, is to operate as an independent e-commerce platform, both in China and overseas. Chinese automakers have too many cars to sell, which is leading to an out-of-control price war; perhaps Dongchedi could alleviate some of that burden.

It makes sense that the company working to get Chinese EVs in front of US creators would also be owned by the same platform on which said content is inevitably published.

But it was growing increasingly clear that the company was in no rush to answer my questions. After all, The Verge is probably very different from most of the outlets and creators DCar works with. We don’t accept money from the companies we cover. We either buy or borrow and return all the products we review. We have a strict ethics policy that governs all the coverage we do.

After several of my attempts to schedule a call were ignored, I tried to get my questions answered over email. Why are Chinese automakers interested in working with US content creators? What do they get out of it? I’ve been told that some Chinese companies pay for content. Is that accurate? Are the Chinese OEMs satisfied with how their cars are being received in the US? And what relationship does ByteDance have with all this?

More silence. Finally, after several months of trying, I gave it one last go. To his credit, Hanyang let me down gently.

“Thank you so much for following up and for your interest in DCar! At this time, we’re not able to schedule any interviews, but I really appreciate you reaching out and your interest in our work. I hope we can connect sometime in the future.”