This paper aims to update and explore further a set of medium-term Chinese e-mobility scenarios, previously published nearly 10 years ago (Tyfield et al. 2015a): how has Chinese EV actually evolved and where does this suggest things may unfold over the next 10-20 years (vis-à-vis the original time horizon of 2042)? In asking this question in 2024, though, we must also expand the purview of our investigation to incorporate now increasingly global dynamics of Chinese e-mobility, regarding an increasingly geopolitical, and digital and cultural, ‘global EV race’. Academic, industry, policy and press commentary (e.g. Reid 2024) has in recent years not only turned its attention to this ‘EV race’, but also quickly settled on an emerging orthodoxy about its outcome. Here, so it is argued, the evidence is now overwhelming, and constantly growing (if still dynamic, so perhaps not settled ‘once and for all’), regarding Chinese ascendancy as seemingly unstoppable. We concur, at least to the extent that there now seems to be no EV future in which there is not a disproportionate Chinese presence globally. Yet we remain unconvinced that matters may be extrapolated with such confidence from the current Chinese domination of many key technological and market/supply chain aspects of EVs. Rather, consistent with our previous arguments regarding the need to shift to a perspective that acknowledges (Chinese) EVs as a much more qualitatively disruptive, intensely political/cultural and as-yet-undecided socio-technological novelty, we call for greater patience than presuming a straight line from ‘here’ to total global dominance of e-mobility transition globally by Chinese EVs. While the key materialist concerns of political economic capacities and dynamism are (increasingly) firmly in place, it remains far too soon to declare the EV an effectively ‘Chinese’ technology, that will be dominated and rolled out globally by Chinese entities alone (e.g. Forsythe et al. 2023, Ma et al. 2022, Liu et al. 2020).

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Electric vehicle,digital rebound,scenarios,China,sinoglobalism