In underground garages across China's cities, a new and increasingly common scene is playing out: a driver in a 300,000-yuan (about $42,300) smart electric SUV carefully guides the car into a marked bay, guided by 360-degree cameras and ultrasonic sensors. The hard part, owners say, comes after the gear selector is pushed into Park. Opening the door leaves a gap of less than 20 centimetres, often blocked by a mirror or a concrete pillar, forcing the driver to squeeze out sideways or climb out through the window.
This is not an isolated problem in old neighbourhoods. In the Baorujing estate in Wuhan's Wuchang district, a resident named Liu told the outlet Huxiu that her Li Auto L7 could be parked perfectly centred in its bay, yet there was still not enough room for an adult to get in or out normally. She now reverses out of the space, lets her elderly parents and child out in the aisle, then uses her phone app to drive the car into the bay on its own. Once marketed as premium convenience features, remote parking and self-parking are now being used by owners as survival tools, according to Huxiu.
Why Chinese EVs got so wide
The root cause is a five-year "size inflation" in China's car industry. For decades, mainstream sedans such as the Santana, Jetta, Sylphy, Lavida and Corolla stayed within 1.7 to 1.8 metres in width and rarely exceeded 4.8 metres in length, constrained by engine packaging, aerodynamics, fuel economy and displacement-based taxes. The shift to new energy vehicles broke those limits.
According to data cited by Huxiu from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA), new-energy vehicles now account for 50 to 60 percent of monthly retail sales in China. In the same period, the average length of passenger cars grew by more than 0.13 metres, and the width of most popular models increased by 0.05 to 0.07 metres over the past three years. By 2024, the industry had settled on a de facto "532" standard for large electric SUVs and MPVs: length above 5.2 metres, wheelbase above 3.1 metres and width above 2 metres.
Current flagship models illustrate the trend. The Zeekr 009 is 2.024 metres wide, the Nio ES8 2.01 metres, the Li Auto L9 1.998 metres, the Aito M9 1.999 metres, the Xpeng X9 1.988 metres and the BYD Yangwang U8 more than 2.05 metres. Even more mainstream family models such as the Li Auto L7, Xpeng G9 and Chery Exeed Sterra ES are between 1.96 and 1.99 metres wide.
Behind the marketing language of "mobile first-class cabins" and "moving three-bedroom apartments" lies a hard commercial logic. To deliver the 700- to 800-kilometre ranges that sell in China's BEV (battery-electric) market, automakers need bigger battery packs, which force longer wheelbases and wider tracks. At the same time, new-energy vehicles are exempt from the displacement-based consumption tax that once penalised large petrol engines, so stretching a car from 4.5 metres to 5.2 metres and pricing it at 300,000 to 500,000 yuan (about $42,300 to $70,400) yields far higher margins than selling a small commuter car. CPCA data cited by Huxiu shows that sales of large and medium SUVs grew several times faster than the industry average in 2024.
Old standards meet new reality
The problem is that China's parking infrastructure was built for smaller cars. Most residential underground garages follow the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development's JGJ 100-2015 standard, which requires a minimum clear width of 2.4 metres and a minimum clear length of 5.1 metres for a perpendicular parking bay. That standard dates from 2015, and in practice many developers shave space to cut costs, leaving actual bay widths of just 2.2 to 2.35 metres, according to field surveys cited by Huxiu.
When a 2.0-metre-wide SUV is parked perfectly in a 2.4-metre bay, the theoretical gap on each side is just 20 centimetres. Add exterior mirrors, which typically protrude 15 to 20 centimetres on each side, and the total width reaches 2.30 to 2.35 metres, leaving less than 5 centimetres of clearance to the line. Given that an average Chinese adult male has a shoulder width of 40 to 45 centimetres and a compressed torso thickness of 22 to 28 centimetres, there is no physical way to open the door and step out.
The mismatch is made worse by a regulatory gap. The national vehicle dimension standard GB 1589-2016 allows passenger cars up to 2.55 metres wide, while the parking design code still assumes cars of about 1.75 to 1.8 metres. Automakers, encouraged by regulators to produce larger and more luxurious new-energy vehicles, have taken full advantage of the freedom, while the buildings that house those cars have not changed for a decade or more.
For the millions of Chinese families now driving 2-metre-wide electric flagships, the daily struggle is no longer about range or charging, but about whether the car will fit the space it was bought to occupy. As Huxiu puts it, the industry's "size arms race" has turned the country's underground garages into a zero-sum battleground between carmakers, developers and drivers.
