Wheres all the Chinese cars?

fonecrusher1

Practically every second car in this country & the uk is Japanese. How come there seems to be practically no chinese brand cars over here?

They have a huge auto industry yet virtually no interest in exporting their cars globally & ive always wondered why? Surely for a car manufacturer to keep going they need to expand beyond the borders of the country of origin ie; VW (germany), Renault (france), toyota (japan).

Why not China?

Is it simply a case that with a population of 1.3 billion they don't need to worry about having a big enough customer base?

peasant

fonecrusher1 wrote: »

Is it simply a case that with a population of 1.3 billion they don't need to worry about having a big enough customer base?

that ...and without exporting they don't have to worry about meeting international standards (safety!) either

Gregor Samsa

Their safety ratings aren't usually the best. This ramdomly selected article from a google search is from 2005, but I don't think things have impoved:

"The first Chinese car to be sold in Europe has scored zero — the worst-ever score — in safety tests."

"Testers calculated that a driver would be unlikely to survive a head-on collision at 40mph, and in a side-on collision at 30mph the driver would suffer severe head and chest injuries due to a lack of side protection."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article567349.ece

af_thefragile

Wait 20 years and we'll all be driving chinese leccy cars!

Matt Simis

fonecrusher1 wrote: »

Practically every second car in this country & the uk is Japanese. How come there seems to be practically no chinese brand cars over here?

Why not China?

We should all be thankful we have Safety laws keeping out China coffins for the time being.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=china+car+test&aq=f

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=245NCBsj4Lc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D827IxEJVS4

peasant

for the tenthousandth time ...that second vid is not a chinese van

It's an old VW loaded with sandbags and crashed into the test facility at 120 km/h ...to test the facility, not the car

lesson ...do not crash into a wall at 120 km/h

spurious

You see a lot of Audi and VW on Chinese roads. I think they have manufacturing plants there.

You also see a lot of the old Fiat 131 too.

EPM

If they start bringing that scrap into this country I will actually topedo the boat myself

bbam

So many Chinese people are now able to afford to trade in their cycles for cars there is large demand for second hand cars in China..

Japan is different as they have had a more developeloped society longer and there is less demand for second hand cars there..

MetzgerMeister

The only brand taht clicks in my mind with China is MG/Rover, or as it is now (thanks to BMW) Roewe.

I think they released a trial run of the "new" MG TF and it didn't go down very well as it was basically the same thing as when it was last on sale.

Maybe it's just not worth the money to market Chinese cars in Europe??

fonecrusher1

If the claim that chinese cars are death traps is actually true & not just pub talk then fair enough.

If they can't produce cars that can pass basic safety tests over here then they can keep them. Screw that.

My question has been answered.:)

Matt Simis

peasant wrote: »

for the tenthousandth time ...that second vid is not a chinese van

It's an old VW loaded with sandbags and crashed into the test facility at 120 km/h ...to test the facility, not the car

lesson ...do not crash into a wall at 120 km/h

Lol, I actually remember that conversation now that you mention it! :pac:
Still, just 2 vids from many that can be pulled from YouTube and reports.

alias no.9

The chinese car industry is still in it's infancy. Many cars currently made there are slightly tarted up versions of cars no longer sold here (some that haven't been sold here for decades). Other cars sold there are shameless facsimilaes of European, American, Japanese and even Korean cars and it would be a breach of the original manufacturers intelectual property to sell them in western countries. Most of the cars produced there are not going to stand up to any kind of crash test.

Meet the Yema SQJ6451 which manages to do all of these things at once.

It is a shameless facsimilae of the second generation Subaru Forrester, based on the pannel van version of the long forgotten Austin Maestro which looked like this


They'll up their game in time. A few decent manufacturers will rise above the countless rubish ones and they'll become accepted the quicker than the Koreans have, who in turn became accepted quicker than the Japanese did.

Joe 90

I used to work for an outfit which imported quite a lot of stuff from China. While some of it was in fact OK and bloody good value, on a lot of the stuff the quaility control was non existent. I'm talking fairly simple stuff like power tools so God knows what their cars would be like.
I read something somewhere about them hpeing to produce acoomercial aircraft. Shudder.

Tea 1000

The Japanese became accepted because their work ethic made their engines more reliable than anything else in the world. The culture over there is that you live for your company, and your company looks after your family, so you always give 100%.
Anywhere else all you have is cheap labour.
China have the potential to be big, with the right attitude by a company who'll hire a good design team and good engineers.

plonk

The majority of taxis in china I was in are vw jettas, tha late 80s early 90s model but they are 2010 in china. They cost about 8000 euro new and havent changed inside or out from the one I used to be in as a child on the way to school.



They have a new 4x4 out called the great wall or something to that effect. When I was there someone told me rouugly 600 people die on the roads there every day and from seeing their driving I'm not that suprised tbh.

I'm sure it will only be a matter of time though before a Major chinese car brand starts exporting large numbers of vehicles to the western market. Twenty years ago who would have thought kia and hyundai would be as big as they are now.

A bit of further reading

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/16/chinese-economic-boom

Largest producer of cars in the world

alias no.9

Tea 1000 wrote: »

The Japanese became accepted because their work ethic made their engines more reliable than anything else in the world. The culture over there is that you live for your company, and your company looks after your family, so you always give 100%.
Anywhere else all you have is cheap labour.
China have the potential to be big, with the right attitude by a company who'll hire a good design team and good engineers.

The japanese had all of that going for them but it took a general strike by British Leyland with the consequent lack of availability of BL cars for the Brits to actually discover this, the Irish too.
Similarly in the USA, it took the fuel crisis of the 1970's for the Americans to discover the virtues of the Japanese car. The quality was there but external factors were required to trigger the change.
All it will take is the right management to replicate Japanese levels of quality control in China. What was once a gulf in quality between Japanese and western manufacturers now very small, the Chinese will do the same.

fonecrusher1

alias no.9 wrote: »

The japanese had all of that going for them but it took a general strike by British Leyland with the consequent lack of availability of BL cars for the Brits to actually discover this, the Irish too.
Similarly in the USA, it took the fuel crisis of the 1970's for the Americans to discover the virtues of the Japanese car. The quality was there but external factors were required to trigger the change.
All it will take is the right management to replicate Japanese levels of quality control in China. What was once a gulf in quality between Japanese and western manufacturers now very small, the Chinese will do the same.

Maybe you can dispel this myth or maybe its true, im not sure.

I was told by an english guy years ago that the early Japanese car makers actually flew officials over to england to observe how the british auto industry made their cars in an attempt to familiarise themselves with the high engineering standards required to build good cars??!! It was the late sixties/early seventies.....apparently.
I find it hard to believe because wasn't the entire british car industry in the 70's riddled with worker strikes, poor quality control & generally poor standards.

Don't know if its a load of rubbish or just an oul pub tale. Im off topic as usual.:rolleyes:

sbms

Slightly off topic but came across this recently from India-anybody ever drive one?

http://www.carzone.ie/search/Tata/Safari/2.0-TD-L/200952196302692/advert?channel=CARS

alias no.9

fonecrusher1 wrote: »

Maybe you can dispel this myth or maybe its true, im not sure.

I was told by an english guy years ago that the early Japanese car makers actually flew officials over to england to observe how the british auto industry made their cars in an attempt to familiarise themselves with the high engineering standards required to build good cars??!! It was the late sixties/early seventies.....apparently.
I find it hard to believe because wasn't the entire british car industry in the 70's riddled with worker strikes, poor quality control & generally poor standards.

Don't know if its a load of rubbish or just an oul pub tale. Im off topic as usual.:rolleyes:

I don't know. I know there were early Japanese cars that were rebadged versions of european cars, similar to what the Chinese are doing now, no doubt figuring out along the way how to do it more efficiently.
The brits were decades ahead in terms of design. You might think it's easy to copy a design, but unless you understand the intent of each feature, you'll inevitably end up with the "oh, we didn't know what it was for so we left it out because we didn't think it was important" and the "oh we didn't know what it was for so we put it in just to be safe", all coming from the same design team. Even today the Japanese are rarely inovative when it comes to design or technology, hybrids being the one exception, even Mazda's rotary engine was highly leveraged, even if it greatly improved, from NSU's design.
Even beyond design, if you're doing something new to you and you can start by benchmarking against somebody else doing something similar, it's a great place to start. You can still make improvements once you understand the baseline.

Stephen

The most common car on the road (and taxi of choice) in China is the Volkswagen Santana, which is a newly manufactured version of the early 80s B2 passat. Pretty much the only differences between it and the original 80s one as far as I'm aware of is LPG fuel compatibility and slightly ugpraded safety equipment - ABS and airbags. They manufacture them at VW's plant in Shanghai alongside B5 passats and newer Santana 3000 models, which look to me like early 90's Jettas.

They also seem to really like the Buick brand-name, with lots of ****ty Daewoos badged as such.

Tea 1000

alias no.9 wrote: »

I don't know. I know there were early Japanese cars that were rebadged versions of european cars, similar to what the Chinese are doing now, no doubt figuring out along the way how to do it more efficiently.
The brits were decades ahead in terms of design. You might think it's easy to copy a design, but unless you understand the intent of each feature, you'll inevitably end up with the "oh, we didn't know what it was for so we left it out because we didn't think it was important" and the "oh we didn't know what it was for so we put it in just to be safe", all coming from the same design team. Even today the Japanese are rarely inovative when it comes to design or technology, hybrids being the one exception, even Mazda's rotary engine was highly leveraged, even if it greatly improved, from NSU's design.
Even beyond design, if you're doing something new to you and you can start by benchmarking against somebody else doing something similar, it's a great place to start. You can still make improvements once you understand the baseline.

A lot of the real innovation came from the French and the Italians, the Brits had some too. The Germans you could say were the ones who just made things better rather than coming up with something all new and fresh.
Everyone likes to criticise the Japs for being just a bunch of copiers, but to be fair in the motor industry there are an awful lot of those out there in every country!

ahal

I'm thinking if they sent over a boatload of ditchwind motors and the ship hit heavy seas it might bend the chassis!