Get In, Losers—China's Driving the Car-Biz Bus

Motor Trend

21-05-2025

I first traveled to China in 2000 as a tourist, and as luck would have it, my arrival hotel was across the street from the hall where doors were opening on the first media day of the Beijing Motor Show. Tempting as it was to try to talk my way in there with my business card, tourist visa, and old-school camera, I stuck to the tour-group itinerary—Great Wall, Forbidden City, and a Chinese opera (an ear-splitting agony I vowed never to endure again). But the fact that a hotel that close to an auto show was billeting tour groups speaks volumes to the turn-of-the-millennium state of the Chinese car biz.
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Front-end photo comparison shows uncanny resemblance between China's Chery QQ3 and South Korea's Daewoo Matiz (aka Chevy Sprint).
I embarked on that trip knowing next to nothing about the car scene in China. Japanese cars had spent a few decades morphing from junk to state-of-the-art in the U.S. market, and Korean-made ones were making that transition way faster. The Chinese-made vehicles our tour buses were dicing with on the roads seemed decades behind the Koreans, and it appeared the masses were mostly getting around on two wheels. In those days the joke was, 'R&D in China means receive and duplicate,' and indeed China's Chery QQ had just launched as a complete knockoff of the Daewoo Matiz.
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The Markus family visits the Forbidden City in 2000. That's Frank on the left, next to his mom.
25 Years' Worth of Massive Change
The political climate then versus now certainly couldn't have been more different. The Chinese people we encountered back then seemed genuinely thankful for America's help in freeing them from Japan's ugly occupation of their country prior to and during WWII, for which they were darned grateful. (Buick's popularity as a brand in China partly stems from imagery of our army generals riding around in them.) Today, the average person on the street is confused by (and pretty pissed off about) our tariff policy, as it stands to make their lives difficult, too.
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The Markus family tours the Great Wall in 2000.
Now as then, I'm neither a political nor a business reporter, so I don't keep religious tabs on every nuance of international trade, but I've been aware of the disadvantageous (to the U.S.) and one-sided automotive tech transfer that's occurred with China over the past quarter century. China enjoys a planned economy, and the automotive plan around the time of my 2000 visit was this: Foreign automakers that desire access to our billions of buyers must build cars here in a 50/50 joint venture with a Chinese automaker that is granted access to all your technology and intellectual property. Basically, 'to sell cars here, you must show us how you design and build them.'
Had America had a central planning commission, we might have nixed that plan, but the GMs and Fords of the world couldn't resist the access to China's burgeoning market. Even outside of these arrangements, it seems fair to say that international patent law enforcement has been a little lax, to put it mildly. And, of course, one-party rule prevents China's grand plan from drastically changing every few years.
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Man moves his car from blocking tour bus in 2000.
By everything I was able to determine during this most recent visit, the Chinese were quick studies and have zoomed past us in the car development game. The present and future is software-defined vehicles, and China is long-suited in the software, firmware, and hardware engineering talent needed to develop them—with many engineers having been schooled in the U.S.A. Can you name an American or European automaker that has designed and developed its own silicon chip capable of outperforming Nvidia's offerings while using less power? I can't, but I came across two Chinese automakers on the floor at Auto Shanghai 2025 (Nio and Xpeng) that have, and I may have missed others.
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Bikes seemed to outnumber cars in 2000. Now, most of the bikes you see are ride-share rentals.
A stereotype/misimpression many Americans have of the Chinese is that they are less creative and individualistic, but individualism is now revered here, which is why the roadways are jammed with so many bright, pastel, and otherwise vibrantly colored cars. Well, that and the fact that people generally order their cars, because delivery often takes just a few weeks. And car styling in China has advanced rapidly in recent years, if the Shanghai show floor is any indication.
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The Porsche Taycan influenced the design of many Chinese cars including the Xiaomi SU7.
Sure, there's still plenty of copycatting. China has fallen hard for the look of the Porsche Taycan and Panamera, because most automakers offer a reasonable facsimile of those designs, in both their fastback and turismo/wagon guises. (I was told the actual Taycan itself has fallen out of favor, as folks view its electrical architecture as outdated.) The Ora Ballet Cat is a pure VW Beetle knockoff (upsized and given four doors), and many would-be rivals to the global bestselling Tesla Model Y bear more than a passing resemblance to that ubiquitous original.
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To keep the proportions looking right, the four-door Ora Ballet Cat is way bigger than any VW Beetle, New or vintage.
Government Planning Advantages Come with Less (and More) Cost
The European Union devoted quite a bit of time and energy to studying the Chinese auto industry and the degree to which the government subsidizes it, to determine a reasonable and commensurate tariff to levy. I'm not at all sure how they managed that task, arriving at 35 percent on top of an existing 10 percent tariff. How many dollars/Euros is it worth when the government bears all the capital expense of providing land and building a gigantic factory that it then leases back to the automaker? How do you put a tariff value on monetary policy that ensures export-friendly exchange rates? What's the worker wage subsidy of nobody having to pay for healthcare or social security insurance? Any cursory glance at the feature content versus price of some Chinese cars makes it difficult to imagine free labor screwing together the bill of materials for the price being asked, if all said parts had been made by companies that pay their employees reasonable wages and benefits and while returning shareholder value.
Chinese streets seem to be filled by happy citizens enjoying consumerism about on par with our own. Shopping malls are filled with designer brands and dining out on amazing food is crazy cheap. Chinese citizens and residents don't dream of owning a home and the land under it, because the government essentially owns all the real estate. Most people rent, but folks who are able to buy an apartment, house, or building enter a 70-year lease on the land it sits on. This keeps the economy planners' options open, drastically reducing 'eminent domain' red tape. Of course, America's younger generations find themselves tempering their own homeownership dreams for entirely different reasons.
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Beijing was never as bad as Xian, and they're both much cleaner now, but the air quality is not up to North American standards.
The pace at which stuff can happen in a planned economy is utterly mind-blowing. An auto factory's groundbreaking to Job One rolling off a line can take as little as two years. Giant apartment blocks go up in a heartbeat. Planned economies certainly are efficient. Of course, a pristine environment has yet to top the planners' priority list, so while air quality has improved since my 2000 visit (my lungs never ached this time), it's still way behind our own.
I was aware of the curtailed speech freedom. China is like one big corporation, with everybody toeing the company line. Global leadership in autonomous driving has been part of 'The Plan' for quite some time, but a few days before my arrival there was a nasty wreck involving a vehicle navigating on its ADAS systems. As a result, the government announced new regulations on the development and marketing of autonomous driving technology.
The feature content versus price of some Chinese cars makes it difficult to imagine free labor screwing together the bill of materials for the price being asked.
Can the U.S. Get Back in Gear?
So what were my big takeaways? America (like Europe) seems to have become a passenger on the automobility bus, which China is now driving. Our government (including presidents from both parties) has effectively barred Chinese EVs from our market. And although there has been some talk of turning the tables—making U.S. market access contingent upon 50/50 JVs with tech transfer—I sense it's way too late for that to help.
In hindsight, we probably should have also offered every Chinese engineering graduate of a U.S. institution a sweetheart deal to stay here in the land of the free instead of hassling them with anti-immigrant visa and green-card hurdles, essentially forcing them to return home. This toothpaste is all out of the tube for good, I'm afraid, and our continuing lack of investment in education seems sure to force us ever farther toward the back of the line.
Instead, our current leadership seems intent on trying to emulate Chinese planned-market efficiency by removing as much of the red tape as possible so the industry can blaze ahead unfettered. Can this really work, absent a China-level plan? Is there a political playbook that could pull us out of our auto-industry nosedive? What if these efforts simply leave us with a dirty environment and end up compromising free speech, while driving our best and brightest to emigrate?
Maybe I'm just unable to see the big picture. Maybe the globe's biggest, most fractious democracy will somehow come together and grab the stick, pulling hard enough in the same direction to arrest our current nosedive and regain some altitude. Maybe today's efforts will fix America's auto industry (and others), restoring the classic American dream for our young people.
Whatever ends up happening, hopefully it won't take another 25 years for us to figure out how we start driving the bus again.