Interesting note – At the Beijing autoshow, the majority of manufacturers who had locked their cars and didn’t allow people to sit inside were Chinese brands. The guys who were letting everyone check out their latest models regardless of cost/ how new they are to the market *including cars such the 300k euro G63 AMG) were the foreign manufacturers.

Time for a lecture…

The Chinese automotive industry has an inferiority complex – they don’t have the confidence to face judgement on their latest vehicles even from the market in which they are selling most of their vehicles.

There has been talk since years that ‘China is catching up’, that ‘the world markets will be flooded by cheap Chinese cars’ and that China will develop its auto industry much quicker and more efficiently than Japan and Korea previously. However, the fundemental fact is that there is no motivation by these Manufacturers to develop truely world-class cars, regardless of the knee-jerk policies of a Government which is out of touch with the industry (hence these insigificant JV sub-brands, the ‘forced’ electrification policies without the real organisation and investment into infrastructure needed for people to have confidence to buy EVs etc).

Also, Chinese automotive manufacturers have gotten such a free ride in generating capital from JVs that it just doesn’t pay off to invest the R&D to generate their own know-how – its a smaller return on investment, especially when the option is coordinating with the foreign partner to ramp-up production to meet demand for the foreign models which sell like hotcakes in comparision. Of course, you get guys like FAW-VW refering to the VWs and Audis they build as ‘their cars’ or ‘Chinese cars’, but the reality is far from such. Even models which have been ‘developed by the JV alone’ such as the Sagitar have had so much input (and hence money paid to) in testing and engineering from the foreign partner that the situation is far from the ‘technology transfer’ paradise that the Chinese government fantisized about when they set up this policy. A visit to FAW-VW’s testing facilites says a lot when you see the dust covering the expensive, state-of-the-art German testing equipment they bought there since months ago…

Anyways, thats it for now folks!