There was a time, not so long ago, when a Chinese car was little more than a punchline with four wheels and a questionable crash rating.

Twenty-five years back, the pinnacle of Beijing’s automotive ambition was the Lubao CA6410 - a Frankenstein’s monster that grafted the snout of an Austin Montego onto the rear of a Maestro, powered by a Toyota engine and held together by little more than hope.

How times change. Today, the joke is firmly on the establishment. After two decades of frantic economic expansion and a ruthless, laser-eyed focus on electrification, the copycat era has been consigned to the scrapyard. The traditional logic suggested that if you bought Chinese, you were buying on price alone - the automotive equivalent of a supermarket own-brand digestive. But the new wave of metal landing on our shores suggests otherwise.

While they remain aggressively priced, the budget label no longer fits. In terms of tactile interior quality and - crucially - driving dynamics, some of the latest exports are now hounding the heels of the European, Japanese, and Korean elite. The plastics are soft, the screens are gargantuan and the waft is becoming wafiter. factor is becoming standard.

The era of the cheap and nasty import is ending. And the era of the genuine contender has arriving.

Below, we’ve curated the cream of the current crop from China.