Some great reading about chariots

[Phrossack]

The Parthian and Sassanid saddles were around when chariots had been abandoned by pretty much everyone. In the time of the Assyrian empire, where chariots and horsemen coexisted, there don't seem to have been saddles, and there certainly weren't stirrups.

Chariots could be large things that could overrun scattered infantry or horsemen, but to do so they needed to be deployed on flat and open terrain, and it seems like they'd have a hard time defeating cavalry if the latter simply got out of their way and shot or stabbed from the flanks and rear, which shouldn't have been a problem given their greater mobility. Sure, a charge of a long line of chariots across ideal terrain would be very hard to stop- and in the (early) Song dynasty there were battles in which commanders chivalrously agreed to the ideal battlefield and let each other prepare their chariots, but this was a rarity, and in other cases it would be tricky to effectively deploy chariots and they should have been vulnerable to flank and rear attacks by larger numbers of more agile horsemen.

 

[da dick]

i guessing the early chineses preferred chariots because smaller armies ,from "barbarian" or smaller states ,couldn't afford much chariots or horses, so they were mostly made up of infantry or conscripted militia who would be easier routed by a chariot charge. the success of mongolian mounted archers probably made them eventually change their mind