Beijing’s draconian license plate limits have a stimulating effect on the creativity of Beijingers. To skirt the new rules, complex schemes are being devised. Beijing’s courts are turned into accessories of the fraud. According to China Daily, the scheme goes like this: Read More >

More Chinese sales numbers for January are coming in as China slowly begins to return from the Chinese New Year holidays. We are keeping a wary eye on the January numbers. They are seen as an indicator for the whole year. Most of the world’s auto industry relies on China for growth and volume. A marked slowdown could have serious consequences. Read More >

The China Passenger Car Association reports that sales of passenger cars rose 12.6 percent to 965,238 units in January, says the Associated Press. However, as explained in my small lecture on the use and abuse of auto industry statistics, this is not the number we are waiting for. We are waiting for the sales of all motorvehicles in China with 4 wheels and over, also known as “automobile sales.” Read More >

For quite some time, we have been tracking a growing trend in China: Chinese cars. Well, Chinese cars, made by joint ventures with foreign carmakers. Here could be a new one, with a twist: Toyota so far has been hesitant following Nissan and others on the plugin bandwagon. Its Chinese joint venture, FAW-Toyota, will change that. They will come out with a Chinese-branded car that is a Toyota on the outside, and a Chinese-developed EV on the inside. If the information of BJNews (via Gasgoo) is correct, that is. Read More >

The wild Chinese autoblogosphere had been abuzz about a Chinese version of TopGear for a week now. Truth be told, it escaped my divided attention. No excuse, it will happen again. First on the story was my good friend Tycho, the intrepid red-haired Dutchman who runs the TheTycho car blog. He had an inside source at China’s state TV CCTV. Now, the matter is (semi-) official. Read More >

As reported here, GM’s and Volkswagen’s Chinese partner SAIC will halt the trading of its shares on Monday in anticipation of a major plan. The plan doesn’t appear to be fully hatched: According to People’s Daily, “SAIC will make an announcement on the plan in five trading days.”

But what’s that secret plan? Speculations by our commenters range from buying more of GM  to buying Saab. One of the Best & Brightest appears to be close to the truth – as far as we can fathom at this point. Read More >

Reuters reports:

Trading in the shares of China’s top carmaker SAIC Motor Corp will be suspended from February 14 pending a material corporate announcement, SAIC said on Friday.

SAIC, the Chinese partner of General Motors and Volkswagen, and owner of the MG Rover plant in Britain, said it has been notified by its holding company SAIC Group that it is working on a major plan involving SAIC and discussions over the proposal are continuing, it said in a filing with the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

SAIC said it expects to make an announcement regarding the plan in five trading days following the trade suspension.

SAIC owns about one percent of GM, it is the majority owner of its Shanghai-GM joint venture and controls GM’s Indian-market operations… in fact, the last time SAIC suspended shares this way was when it took over GM’s Chinese and Indian ventures. So, what’s next? The mind boggles…

China’s prognosticated car bubble does not appear to experience its prognosticated burst. One by one, Chinese sales numbers for January are coming in, and none of them are bad. Read More >

Less than two weeks ago, GM China hinted that their sales may have risen more than 20 percent in January. This was seen as a good omen, because most pundits (except this one) had predicted a miserable January for China. GM China released its numbers today, and they over delivered. GM China reports a record month in January. Read More >

Despite fears of building overcapacity in the Chinese market, GM is still very much enamored of its chances in the Middle Kingdom. Terry Johnsson, vice president of the automaker’s China operations tells Reuters

We sold everything we could build in 2010 and the same holds true in 2011. We could actually sell more than we will be able to (build) if we are not capacity constrained. We are actually short of capacity. The total business is going to go up by the size of a single plant. It’s not just about this year. We’ll have to look about a real rapid increase in our capacity

After all, the Chinese market may have slowed to a “mere” 10-15%, but GM’s sales were up by 20% last year as foreign automakers solidified their hold on the Chinese market. And even if the Chinese market does hit a wall (crazier things have happened), China’s desire to boost exports of its domestically-produced cars will help justify further investments in Chinese production capacity. Johnsson adds that GM will a “substantial amount” of its made-in-China Chevy Sail to emerging markets over the coming years, a decision that further justifies an investment in Chinese capacity. Only 5k Sails were exported last year (to Chile), but exports should rise to 20k units this year. Still, even those increased numbers pale in comparison to Chevy’s 125,625 Sails sold in China last year. But GM is already looking at shipping knock-down kits of the Sail abroad as it looks to increase Sail exports beyond even the 20k units planned for next year. After all, if The General has to bump UAW workers into the second tier to build subcompact cars in the US, production of low-cost cars like the Sail will have to stay in China for the forseeable future.

Again, China’s vaunted export machine received a black eye: China imported more cars in 2010 than it exported. Of the 18.27 million cars China produced in2010, a pittance of 2.98 percent left the country according to statistics released by China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) via China Autoweb. Read More >

Another indicator that the Chinese car market is not about to collapse, as projected (hoped?) by some: Daimler is guiding towards robust sales in January. “I hope that we will see double digit gains again in January,” Mercedes sales Chief Joachim Schmidt told Reuters. With the month nearly over, executives won’t “hope” what they don’t already know. And what does that have to do with China? Read More >

The oft predicted collapse of the Chinese market does not seem to happen. GM is the canary in the Chinese coalmine, and January, the month before the Lunar New Year festivities, is a key selling month. So goes GM, so goes China, so goes January, so goes the year. This time, January was especially critical: Many had predicted that the cancellation of tax incentives for sub 1.6 liter cars, that went in effect on January 1, would have serious pull-forward repercussions. Not as far as GM is concerned. Read More >

The civilian version of the car shown in the video will soon be available for purchase, reports TheTycho from Beijing. It won’t come with the microphones and the stand-up podium behind the driver. Instead, it will have full reclining seats in  the back. Read More >

Troubled BYD has even more problems: Dealers defect the Chinese car maker, because the alleged master of the electric vehicle has perfected one ancient tradecraft: The art of channel stuffing. A Beijing BYD store switched to another brand because BYD required them to carry a whopping six times the monthly selling rate on the lot. The poor dealer that moved 70 BYDs in a good month was sitting on a steadily restocked inventory of 400 units.

Even that generous inventory strategy did not help: Read More >