BERLIN -- Chinese tech companies will play a key role in the global automotive industry in years to come, Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, director of CAR Center Automotive Research Duisburg, a research company focusing on mobility, said in an interview with Xinhua on Friday.

He said he expects the car market to "change radically" over the next 10 years, with electric cars and intelligent or software-driven cars increasing their market share at the expense of traditional automobile technologies.

"In this new car world, tech companies such as Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Xiaomi are becoming game changers," he said.

Huawei and Xiaomi, for example, are developing new cars that offer "an entire digital ecosystem," Dudenhoeffer said. "This is much more than having a smart car," he said.

In a report released recently, Dudenhoeffer predicted that Chinese car manufacturers will become global market leaders in the automotive business in around 10 years, with BYD surpassing Toyota.

It is because the Chinese market "has been growing very dynamically" in the new energy vehicle (NEV) segment, Dudenhoeffer wrote in the report.

BYD increased its global sales by 309 percent in the last three years to more than 3 million units in 2023 and was "clearly the market leader" for NEVs, according to the report. Chinese startup Li Auto saw an even faster growth of 318 percent last year, but it was still "considerably smaller" than BYD, with 376,000 new cars sold in 2023.

"China is the breeding ground for new car manufacturers that will play a central role in the electromobility segment of the automotive industry," Dudenhoeffer said, noting that the largest plant of US electric car manufacturer Tesla, measured by production figures, is currently located in China.