If you’ve never heard of Geely, then get ready to hear all about it soon. The Chinese auto maker, already the owner of Volvo, Polestar, and Lotus (which many Canadians will recognize) is set to start selling cars using its own brand here, perhaps even before winter rolls around this year. Perfect timing too, because there’s nothing better than proving how good your car is than by surviving Canadian winter. And it just so happens to be coming at a time when Geely is having its best year ever.
Wait, Geely Already Owns Volvo?
Yes. Geely bought Volvo in 2010, invested in Lotus, and even formed their own brand called Polestar for electric vehicles. All that was done by one company from Hangzhou called Geely Holding. In an indirect way, Geely has been present in driveways of Canada for more than a decade without any of the car owners realizing that fact. The novelty for the year 2026 is going to be the “Geely” marque per se, not the brands owned by the company.
How We Got Here
The reason behind this is the trade agreement signed by Prime Minister Mark Carney and President Xi Jinping in January, which reduced the tariff for Chinese EVs from almost 100% to 6% under a quota regime for approximately 49,000 cars annually, which are split into two allocation rounds. Geely has been competing with BYD and Chery for the opportunity to get a slice of this quota. By spring, Zeekr – Geely’s luxury division – had already placed job offers in Toronto for the Head of Sales, Head of Marketing, and four other positions for the launch of the Geely brand in Canada. Andy An, CEO of Geely Holding, told Bloomberg in March that certification in Canada was imminent.
Geely-owned Lotus has been first out of the gate: a few units of Lotus EVs have already arrived in Canada in July, according to Reuters, which says that the brand plans to set up about six Canadian dealerships this year. Meanwhile, Polestar is working on getting its Polestar 2 back to Canadian dealers, which had stopped selling it due to the surtax on Chinese EVs.
But not all is rosy with the door opening this quickly. Unifor, which is the primary union representing auto workers across Canada, referred to it as “self-inflicted wound” for an already struggling domestic industry that has been targeted by tariffs from the United States — which is particularly harsh coming from a nation that still views its auto manufacturing industry, in part, through the lens of the “Big Three.” The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, is calling on both Quebec and British Columbia to get rid of any provincial mandate regarding electric vehicles since the federal government has decided to get rid of theirs, saying that it is only hurting local car manufacturers. In the United States, the U.S. Trade Representative referred to it as “problematic.”
The Fine Print — What This Actually Costs
Here’s the part that matters if you’re the one signing the loan paperwork. The trade deal isn’t a tariff cut with no strings attached — more than half of the Chinese EVs imported under the quota have to be priced under $35,000 CAD by 2030, which is Ottawa’s way of making sure “cheaper EVs” doesn’t just mean cheaper luxury cars. And the tariff drop is a bigger deal in real dollars than the percentages suggest: Lotus’s Eletre SUV is reportedly listed around $119,900 here, down from roughly $313,500 under the old 100% surtax — same car, nearly two-thirds off, purely because of which side of the tariff line it landed on.
Don’t count on federal rebates to soften things further, either. Reporting on BYD’s Canadian pricing notes its China-built models won’t qualify for the federal EV incentive, and there’s no sign the rest of the Chinese-badged field will be treated any differently.
The bigger bottleneck isn’t the quota — it’s certification. Permits opened back in March, but none of BYD, Chery, or Geely can actually ship a car here until Transport Canada signs off, and industry watchers say that process can take a year or more for a brand with no history of Canadian-certified vehicles. That’s exactly why Geely has a real head start over its rivals: Volvo and Polestar are already certified and already have dealer networks here, so anything badged Zeekr or Lotus can ride on that groundwork instead of starting from zero. It’s also why Lotus, not the Geely nameplate itself, ended up first through the door — already six dealers open across Canada as of early 2026, with plans to double that to twelve by year’s end.
The Company Behind the Push
None of this happens in a vacuum — Geely’s had the kind of year that makes an aggressive market push look less like a gamble and more like momentum. The company sold just over 3 million vehicles in 2025, up 39%, and set an even bigger target for 2026: 3.45 million, including 2.22 million electrified models. By mid-year it had already delivered 1.42 million vehicles, with profit growing faster than revenue — never a bad sign. Exports were the real standout: more cars shipped overseas in the first half of 2026 than in all of 2025, with June and July both topping 100,000 units for the first time ever. That’s exactly why Geely bumped its own export target mid-year, from 640,000 to 920,000 — a company revising its own goals upward, partway through the year, isn’t something you see every day, eh?
Lynk & Co, Geely’s other in-house brand, is having its own moment too: it’s moving into electric sports sedans for the first time with the 10 and 10+, while its existing 08 plug-in hybrid is already the best-seller in its class in Vietnam and Mexico. None of these brands build everything in China anymore, either — new plants came online this year in Egypt and Indonesia, with Kazakhstan now running dual factories and dual distributors at once.
The person steering all this changed in August, too. Founder Eric Li handed the chairman’s role to Andy An and stepped back to honorary chairman for life, keeping his controlling stake. An’s already talked about where this is headed: 6.5 million vehicles sold globally by 2030, more than a third of them outside China.
What Might Actually Show Up Here
There’s no confirmed Canadian lineup yet, so take this as an educated guess, not a spec sheet: whatever lands will likely draw from what’s already selling well elsewhere. The Geely EX2, a small electric hatchback, was China’s best-selling car in 2025 and has become a genuine hit in markets like Brazil — a compact, city-friendly EV is a logical first mover. The Galaxy sub-brand’s Monjaro, an SUV already pitched against the Honda HR-V, makes sense too, given how hard Canadians have fallen for the crossover segment.
On the flashier end, Zeekr’s dual-flagship 8X and 9X SUVs — the 8X packs three motors, an 800-volt platform, and over 1,400 horsepower of grunt for a sub-three-second sprint to 100 km/h — are more halo car than daily driver, the kind of thing that draws a crowd at a car show rather than idling in a Costco parking lot in February. More useful to an actual buyer: the smaller Zeekr 7GT just became one of the first vehicles anywhere to pass Euro NCAP’s stricter 2026 testing, pushing the group’s tally of five-star-rated models to nine.
What nobody’s said much about yet is how any of this holds up through an actual Canadian winter. Cold weather is where range anxiety gets real, where battery preconditioning either works or it doesn’t, and where whoever’s selling these things here will need a real answer on winter tires — not just the all-seasons they roll off the boat wearing. Until Geely’s actually been here long enough for owners to report back, that’s an open question, not a marketing claim.
Further Down the Road
None of it changes what shows up at a Canadian dealer this year, but it’s worth knowing the company chasing your business isn’t just playing for third place: Geely’s talking up matching Tesla’s current driver-assist tech sometime this year, then building toward full autonomy over the next two, alongside a steady drip of concept reveals — including a rugged, Land Cruiser-rivalling Galaxy Battleship teased for 2027.
The Bigger Picture
Geely is not the only Chinese automaker setting up shop. BYD has registered its assembly facilities with Transport Canada, and will set up twenty dealerships. However, BYD does not seem keen to take the joint venture path being offered by Ottawa. It is already employing local labor, while Omoda & Jaecoo models of Chery have reportedly been seen on Toronto’s roads. Tesla too is trying to utilize its Shanghai factory to make some space for itself amid this low-tariff quota.
But whether this is a good thing depends entirely upon whom you ask: cheaper and more equipped electric vehicles for the Canadians or just additional pressure on an automobile industry that was already anticipating trouble?
But if you really are cross-shopping something for next year, then the practical thing to do is exercise patience; hold off on getting emotionally attached to any particular model until Transport Canada makes its announcement on certification, and recognize that a published sticker price is a price that has yet to get hit by dealer markup, shipping costs, and PDI fees in Canada. It is not a question of if the tariff reduction is a good deal, but rather whether or not it is going to be a good deal for you.