China is set to become the world’s biggest car exporter this year, overtaking Japan. The watershed moment will mark the end of decades of dominance by European, American, Japanese and South Korean groups.

Yet driving China’s global ascendancy are deep structural problems in the domestic auto industry, which threaten to upend car markets across the world.

A stark mismatch between production at Chinese factories and local demand has been caused, in part, by industry executives mis-forecasting three key trends: the rapid decline of internal combustion engine car sales, the explosion in popularity of electric vehicles and the declining need for privately owned vehicles as shared mobility booms among an increasingly urbanised Chinese population.