Chinese carmakers: nowhere to go but up

Found here

CARS: "Chinese aim to be king of the road: Beijing motor show; The home market is massive and local carmakers want to dominate it," by Patti Waldmeir, Financial Times, 22 April 2010.

CARS: "China embraces freedom of the road: Cars are liberating the country as they did in the US in the 1950s," by Patti Waldmeir, Financial Times, 23 April 2010.

Stat I've long used: cars per 1,000 people in China stands at about 30. In the US, it's somewhere between 7-800.

Yes, most Chinese automakers stand way behind the Western ones in terms of technology, quality and service, but local brands dominate in the West and Japan, and they will eventually in China too.

Over 90% of the cars sold in Japan are Japanese. It's roughly half for Germany and the U.S. In India and China, it's only one-third.

The Chinese brands will come to dominate as the highly fractured industry consolidates, like it did in the US in the 1920s.

And then those new models will start showing up over here too.

Meanwhile, China's rapid-fire development of a US-style car culture continues apace. Their version of our interstate system is about a decade away from being realized. This is the first time in China's five millennia that ordinary people have had the freedom of individual mobility.

Of course, this will have no impact on the population's relationship with the government. Just look at how conservative America got after the 1950s.

Comments

[David Emery]

Warren Brown, the automotive columnist for the Washington Post, writes very interesting columns. This one discusses Hyundai and goes way beyond just the car, into a sense of Korean competition with Japan: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/02/AR2010050201557.html

It'll be interesting to see how China and Korea duke it out in the automotive market.

[Ted O'Connor]

So it's "Chinese Graffiti." Are they in to drag racing yet? Or will it be "drag-on" racing? The family situation comedy was big here in the 50's, but we had more than one child per family.

Just as some say the automobile "liberated" us, others say it actually "trapped" us in the suburbs. Made us dependent on it. Families left the cities for the new houses in the boonies. Then stores followed them and "malls" appeared. Then light industry and business parks dropped out of the sky on what had been farmland a few years earlier.

Well, it is certainly more fun to watch this happening than to see tanks and troops marching past giant posters of Mao. "All power grows out of the...exhaust pipe?"