Who is GWM?

GWM, or Great Wall Motor, is a Chinese company headquartered in Baoding, a city of nearly 12m people around 90 miles southwest of Beijing. And the Great Wall does indeed pass nearby the city, which is where the inspiration came from. 

GWM sold 1.3 million cars last year, which makes it one of the biggest car companies you’ve never heard of. Unusually among many carmakers, it's privately owned (not state backed) and sits on the Hong Kong stock exchange. And it all started as a workshop for agricultural vehicles in Baoding in 1976, founded by Wei Deliang. 

In 1984 the company started making its own commercial vehicles and was renamed Great Wall Industry Company. Wei died in 1989 and the company reverted to the ownership of the local council and a new director was sought.

When did GWM start?

Great Wall Motor company started in 1990, when current chairman and megarich businessman (he owns the holding company that owns GWM and is now worth over $12bn) Wei Jianjun took over in 1990 and moved the company into passenger vehicles. He’s actually the nephew of the company founder, so it stayed in the family after all. 

The first few cars were copies of well known Japanese cars from the likes of Toyota and Nissan, which don’t appear in the official history. 

It wasn’t until 1996 and the ‘Deer’ pickup truck that GWM started making its own unique designs. It exported its first car abroad in 1997 and by 2019 it reached the grand milestone of five million sales worldwide. 

Great Wall Sailor another highlight from the back catalogue – this is 2001 vintage, as you can tell by the rudimentary Photoshop

How many cars did GWM sell in the UK last year?

GWM sold just 542 cars in the UK in 2025, which hasn’t really added a great deal to the company’s 1.3 million sales worldwide. That number was a 50% drop on the previous year as the novelty of its Ora 03 electric supermini waned. 

Fear not, though, the company is very ambitious for the next few years and has a number of cars on the way, mostly petrol and hybrid ones though, it must be said. Boo hiss, etc. 

The Ora 03 made a splash when it first launched, these days it's more of a tinkle. But check out that rear spoiler...

What cars does GWM build?

GWM has a bijou little range in the UK – and interestingly, unlike most other new Chinese brands in the UK, Great Wall has no desire to plough through with an all-electric line-up. It's got the full range of EV, hybrid and diesel engines within its (currently) teeny selection of cars. 

The hybrid petrol Haval Jolion Pro SUV and the POER300 turbodiesel pickup truck are largely irrelevant for our purposes though... Thankfully GWM does have a nice little electric car on sale, the car formerly known as the Funky Cat that these days goes by the name of the GWM Ora 03. No, we don’t know what happened to Oras 1 and 2 either. 

Great Wall has a number of sub-brands – Haval, Wey, Ora, Poer and Tank. In China these are all marques in their own rights, but when (if?) the cars come to the UK they’ll be badged as Great Walls. Hence the strange model names. It would be nice to see more of the Ora range in the UK, though perhaps not the Ballet Cat. 

Our favourite GWM car (just for it name), which almost definitely will not be coming to the UK is the Great Wall King Kong Cannon, which sounds like something you’d find in Mario Kart but is actually a large dieselly double cab pickup truck. 

The Ora 05 is one of the few cars in the Great Wall line-up that we'd actually like to see on sale in the UK

What other brands is GWM associated with? 

GWM and BMW have a joint venture project in China to build and sell Minis in the country, so since 2023 ‘Spotlight Automotive’ has been selling the Mini Cooper E/SE and Aceman electric cars in the country. There are strict rules in China about how foreign companies can operate, so western carmakers have to form joint ventures like this with ‘local' firms. 

The Aceman is among the electric Minis built by Great Wall and BMW's joint venture in China

Why should I be interested in GWM?

It has a brand research and development centre in Germany – that’s not interesting in and of itself, but it signals a company that’s interested in growing in the European market rather than just exporting whatever tat it sells in its home market. Chinese and European audiences have very different tastes, and what passes in one market might not be acceptable in another. 

What warranty does GWM offer? 

You get a five-year unlimited warranty when you buy a new Great Wall car in the UK, with an eight-year/100,000-mile guarantee for the battery. And oops, we didn’t include GWM in our list of what breakdown packages are offered by different carmakers, but Great Wall also gives you 12 months of free AA breakdown cover for peace of mind. 

Five years and unlimited miles – seems like a generous warranty to go with your new Ora 03

How can I buy a GWM?

The Ora 03 starts from £24,995, but GWM is actually running an offer at the moment where it’s matching the terms of the UK government’s plug-in electric car grant. So you get £3,750 off and an eight-year battery warranty from the company. 

There are some great finance deals available too – 0% APR at the time of writing this, so you can have an entry level Ora 03 Pure for £159 on a four-year/32,000-mile PCP deal with a £4,569 deposit. Even with a deposit of just £249 you can get the car for £249 a month. 

There are 46 GWM dealerships in the UK at the moment, but the company says that it has plans to expand that number to over 100 within the next five years, so there should be a good spread of them about the place. They will most likely be car sellers upset that SsangYong went upmarket.

Interested in reading more? Check out our guide to BYD here.