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Chinese firms are targeting the UK with electric hatches that offer much, at least on paper. Do Europe’s established players have anything to fear? Illya Verpraet lines up the Chinese-built Smart #1 and BYD Atto 3 against the Cupra Born to find out

Forget everything you know about Smart.

Tiny city cars? Well, the #1 (pronounced Hashtag One, I kid you not) is a chunky hatchback-roughly Volkswagen Golf-sized but a bit taller - and bigger Smarts still are on the way. Made in France? Wrong again, because the Hambach factory that was specially built to make Smarts now produces that ultra-British off-roader, the Ineos Grenadier.

Owned by Mercedes? Well, sort of. The Germans realised that making tiny but expensive cars in Europe wasn't very profitable, so Mercedes set up a joint venture with Geely (which also owns Volvo and Lotus) to build Smarts on Geely's SEA platform and assemble them in Xi'an, China.

The #1 is a very different car from the Smarts that came before, but it feels like the right product for this moment. The electric medium SUV class (VW ID 4 and friends) has filled up rapidly, so now it's time for the smaller ID 3 to get some more competition too.

But if your German EV hatchback is going to be built in China, why not skip the middle man and go for one from a Chinese manufacturer? Those are arriving in Europe thick and fast now, and the latest hopeful is BYD, short for Build Your Dreams. The Atto 3 is the first passenger car BYD is marketing in Europe, but the company is far from new to selling vehicles here, having had quite a bit of success selling electric buses to public transport companies all over.

BYD is an interesting company because it's very vertically integrated, which is a fancy business term to say that BYD makes almost every part of the car itself, rather than using external suppliers. In particular, it makes its own battery, a lithium-iron-phosphate item that uses far less cobalt than most EV batteries.