A two-hour drive beyond the traffic jams of São Paulo, past the vast valleys of sugar cane, one of the first Chinese battery-powered-car factories in the Americas is getting ready to open.

Its goal is to reinvent the way Brazil drives, and ultimately, the rest of Latin America, much as Chinese automakers have already done across much of Asia and want to do in Europe.

Until recently, this factory was run by Mercedes-Benz, the German giant of 20th century automotive innovation that churned out cars powered by gasoline. Today, it’s owned by Great Wall Motor, a company that decades ago made rugged pickup trucks for the Chinese countryside but is now one of China’s leading exporters of stylish, affordable electric cars.

The change in hands reflects a profound disruption for one of the world’s most vital industries. If American and European gas-guzzling cars once dominated global tastes and trends, that era appears to be fast turning to China’s favor.

Today, not only does China make and export more cars of all types than any other country in the world, Chinese firms dominate the global manufacture of battery-powered vehicles of the future. They also control the supply chain for virtually everything that goes into those cars.

China’s E.V. s are among the most advanced in the world. Some today go as far on a single charge as top-of-the-line Teslas, at lower prices. One Chinese carmaker, BYD, short for Build Your Dreams, has developed technology that can deliver a full charge in just 5 minutes, roughly the time someone might spend at a pump fueling up a gas-burning car.

Little wonder that Tesla sales in China are lagging, and that the United States, under both Presidents Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Donald Trump, have essentially banned Chinese car imports.

For China, that leaves the rest of the world.

Its electric and hybrid manufacturers have set up, or are in the process of setting up, factories in Hungary, Indonesia, Russia, Thailand, Turkey. These efforts, including Great Wall’s Brazilian factory, are part of a globe-spanning campaign by China to seize a major share of the world’s auto industry, a powerful source of revenues, jobs and also national prestige.

The technological upheaval is a moment of opportunity for China. While the Trump administration is trying to halt the advance of electric vehicles in the United States, Chinese leaders see E.V. s as a rare chance to crack a market long dominated by German, Japanese, Korean and American companies.

Toyota, General Motors, Volkswagen and their Western peers have struggled to master electric vehicles. But for China, the disruption is a gift. Beijing has lavished support on carmakers whose names — Great Wall Motor, BYD, SAIC — might not be familiar to Americans, but whose vehicles are flooding much of the rest of the world. They have become potent symbols of China’s economic and technological ascendance.

Western auto giants are alarmed.

“We are in a global competition with China,” Jim Farley, the chief executive of Ford Motor Co., said at the Aspen Ideas conference in June. “It’s not just E.V.s. And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford.”

In Europe, Chinese carmakers this year have doubled their market share for all cars to 6 percent, and now command about 20 percent of Europe’s EV market. This despite hefty tariffs that Beijing has been negotiating to try to cut. Showrooms for Chinese electric vehicles have opened from Milan to Mumbai, and Chinese car brands are an increasingly common sight in Thailand and India.

Now, in what reflects Beijing’s swelling industrial confidence and geopolitical influence, China is making its way into the big car-buying economies of Latin America.

Great Wall Motor took over the Mercedes plant in the industrial town of Iracemápolis, near São Paulo, after the German carmaker closed shop in 2021, blaming a slump in luxury car sales. BYD took over a Ford factory after years of poor sales and steep losses forced the U.S. car giant to end its long history of manufacturing in Brazil.

Mr. Farley at the time called the closures “difficult but necessary actions.” Ford had assembled cars in Brazil for a century, starting with the Model T.

“For the first time in decades, we’re seeing a real challenge to the dominance of American and European brands, not just in terms of market share, but in shaping the future of mobility,” said Natalie Unterstell, president of a climate research and advocacy organization called Talanoa Institute, based in Rio de Janeiro.

Brazil, the world’s sixth largest car market, is trying to take advantage of it, instead of being steamrolled. It’s prodding companies, no matter where they’re from, to make cars on Brazilian soil, the less polluting the better, while also imposing steadily rising tariffs on imports.

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. There have been union clashes over Chinese labor practices. But the government’s overall message: If you want access to our car buyers, then come and create factories and factory jobs here.

“We don’t want to be an importer of technologies produced in other countries only,” said Rafael Dubeux, special adviser to the finance ministry, in an interview in the capital, Brasília. “We also want to take advantage of this profound change in the world, in manufacturing facilities, so that Brazil also has a part in the value chains that we think are the ones that will prevail.”

The Brazilian appetite for Chinese electric vehicles has shocked the legacy Asian, European and American brands that had been making cars in Brazil for years. Chinese imports tripled between 2023 and 2024, according to Brazil’s National Association of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers. It immediately cried foul, accusing Chinese companies of flooding the market with cheap cars.

Brazil’s government responded by ratcheting up import duties on all cars and encouraging production at home.

Chinese automakers are complying. Sort of.

At least three Chinese firms are opening assembly plants in Brazil. In addition to Great Wall Motor and BYD, another Chinese automaker, Chery, has teamed up with a Brazilian company, Caoa, to produce cars in central Goias state.

Nevertheless, Marcio Lima Leite, head of the Brazil automaker association, remains worried. The new Chinese auto plants are mainly assembling cars with components imported from China, including the most valuable component, batteries. That, he said, will not advance the industry in Brazil.

“It’s very important to have competitiveness in Brazil, to produce the new technology in Brazil,” he said.

Chinese carmakers have had to bend to local needs in important ways. In Brazil, that means the needs of the powerful ethanol industry. Ethanol is produced from the country’s huge sugar cane crop, and Brazilian law requires every liter of gasoline to be a little more than 25 percent ethanol.

So the auto companies aren’t just making fully electric cars in Brazil. They are also having to make hybrids that run partly on the gas-ethanol blend and partly on batteries. “We need to produce what customers are looking for,” said Marcio Renato Alfonso, a Brazilian who worked for an American carmaker for many years and is now Great Wall’s director of research and development for Brazil. “High technology with an affordable price.”

He pointed to his own car, a plug-in hybrid SUV, the Haval 6 GT. It has a big enough battery that it can make the entire 170-kilometer (105 mile) trip from his office in São Paulo to the factory on a single battery charge, never once firing up its fossil fuel engine.

Global carmakers need Brazil. With a population of more than 200 million, it is Latin America’s biggest economy. But also, cars made in Brazil can also easily be sold in other Latin American countries, thanks to cross-border trade deals.

What do Brazilians want?

There was a party vibe one recent Saturday morning in front of the BYD showroom in the upscale São Paulo neighborhood of Villa Lobos. Banners promised discounts. Cheerleaders danced with balloons. Music blasted into the streets.

People streamed in, sipped glasses of chilled juice and inspected the price tags carefully. Some were wary of going fully electric. Others had done their homework and knew exactly how much they would save. There were fully electric models for sale and plug-in hybrids. There were big sedans and SUVs. Brazilians like their SUVs.

Around midday Juliane Rodrigues, a lawyer, showed up with her husband, Rafael Mendes, an insurance company analyst. They were ready to graduate from a 2009 Toyota Corolla borrowed from her grandfather. They were ready to buy their own wheels.

They took the lowest priced fully electric hatchback, the Dolphin, for a test drive. The range was fine for city driving, around 380 kilometers (236 miles), and so was the price, roughly $28,000, or 159,000 Reals. They didn’t mind that their apartment building doesn’t allow chargers in the garage. They could charge up in a supermarket lot nearby.

But Ms. Rodrigues had reservations about buying a BYD. Reservations about its name, to be precise. “Build Your Dreams,” she whispered. “So cheesy.”

Next, they went down the street to the Great Wall dealership. They took a sporty electric model, the Ora GT, for a test drive. She was smitten by the sunroof. He liked how easily it drove.

Lastly, they tried a Great Wall plug-in hybrid SUV, the Haval H6. It cost more than they thought they would spend, just over $42,000, or 244,000 Reals, but it would allow them to make road trips without worrying about range. “We decided it was worth it,” she said.

Other buyers had other desires.

Alexandre Pacheco came to see if he could trade in his BYD plug-in hybrid for one made by Great Wall Motor. He liked his car. He wished he could keep it. “The savings I’ve been having — wow,” he said. It was just that for trips to the family’s beach house, the trunk was too small.

Would he consider going back to a gas fueled car? Absolutely not. “Sustainability. Comfort. Noise,” he said.

Oswaldo Rejas and his wife, Marcia Fernandes, were not at all sold on the all-electric models, saying they would take too long to charge. “Brazilians are impatient. Well, I am,” she said. At the Great Wall Motor dealer, they traded in their gas-powered SUV for a hybrid. To consecrate the deal, a DJ pumped up the music. Strobe lights flashed. The couple walked to a stage to get their pictures taken.

The Brazilian market for battery-powered cars is small, but growing at a fast clip. According to estimates by BloombergNEF, while only 6 percent of cars sold in 2024 were electric or hybrid, they are projected to dominate the market by 2037.

Following the lead of the Chinese brands, incumbent carmakers in Brazil, including the American brand General Motors, are making plug-in hybrids. Ford is also selling hybrids in its Brazilian showrooms.

From Model T to BYD

Along Henry Ford Avenue in the industrial city of Camaçari, what was once a Ford factory is now becoming a BYD factory.

This had been Ford’s newest plant. Every day, starting in 2001, it churned out hundreds of gas-powered cars. It employed some 5,000 workers. It also lost huge amounts of money.

In 2021, the Ford plant shut down.

“It was a shock,” said Júlio Bonfim, who was president of the metal workers’ union at the factory. “I imagined my son would also work at the plant. It didn’t happen.”

The state government offered BYD a basket of incentives to take over the plant. But almost as soon as the Chinese company arrived, it got enmeshed in a labor scandal.

Last December, Brazilian officials accused BYD’s contractor, Jinjiang Construction Group, with keeping 163 Chinese workers in “conditions akin to slavery” and in violation of Brazilian labor laws. It embodied the reckoning that Chinese companies face as they seek to expand in Brazil, which has robust unions.

The workers were sent back home. Construction slowed down. Company officials said they expect to start production later this year. When it does, Mr. Bonfim’s union insists that Brazilians must be hired to work the line. It has threatened to strike if Chinese workers are brought in.

BYD’s top executive for Brazil, Alexandre Baldy, said the firm had taken steps to address the violations. In May the labor prosecutor’s office said filed charges against the carmaker and its contractors for human trafficking. The company said it plans to challenge the charges.

In the meantime, the Great Wall factory in Iracemápolis will almost assuredly already be fully operational. An opening ceremony is planned for August. Cars are due to roll off the factory floor soon after.

The factory first plans to produce one hybrid model and three plug-in hybrids, including the model that Ms. Rodrigues and Mr. Mendes recently bought.

Brazil has ample electricity, and most of it is renewable, from hydropower. But in a country that spans 3 million square miles, nearly as big as the United States, going electric is a challenge. Building charging infrastructure is costly and time-consuming. Moreover, cars that can run on ethanol are eligible for the same kinds of tax incentives as cars that are fully electric.

Great Wall Motor aspires to produce 50,000 cars annually within three years, Mr. Alfonso said. They will range in price from 219,000 to 324,000 Brazil Reals, or $37,000 to $55,000.

To Mr. Alfonso, it’s obvious why Chinese carmakers are expanding so quickly in Brazil. They had invested in new technology and new design. “If you’re not cost-competitive, you don’t have innovation, competing is tough,” he said. “Not only Americans, but everyone.”

Brazil, for its part, is trying to take advantage of Chinese ambition.

China is Brazil’s largest trading partner. It sells enormous amounts of soybeans and oil to Beijing, and is one of Beijing’s top customers of clean-energy technologies, including solar panels and batteries. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, met with Chinese president Xi Jinping on a state visit in May. He spoke glowingly of Chinese investments in Brazil, including in the automotive sector.

His remarks stood in sharp contrast to Beijing’s turbulent relationship with Washington over tariffs.

André Corrêa do Lago, a veteran Brazilian diplomat who will preside over the next round of global climate negotiations, said that because of low sticker prices and the global trade threat they represent, “some countries are a bit afraid of Chinese electric cars.”

That shouldn’t be Brazil’s concern, he said. “I look it at as very positive news. They are making electric cars much more affordable.”

Flávia Milhorance contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro, and Jack Ewing from New York.