I live in Anting, the “Automotive City” of Shanghai, home, among others, to the SVW plant, and see those things daily. Also the extra long ones with just one line of cars.

Both versions are actually illegal and a huge hassle on the streets. Image those things trying to take a 90 degree right turn. Whenever they are not going in a straight line they basically become unpassable crawling objects.

What they do is to take a legal sized trailer to registration, then later take the license plate and VIN from that trailer and put it onto the big, illegal ones. Also most of those “special vehicles” are registered in Guangdong Province, I guess the regulations there are more relaxed and the gov is taking a blind eye on those things since they keep pushing the auto industry.

These trucks mainly transport Japanese or Chinese cars. VW and GM use the, still illegal since too long, single line ones.

The drivers of those things are mostly pretty ignorant too. They ignore traffic lights, block whole intersections and often get stuck in toll gates.