bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

that seemed so far away, right? now it's less than 5 years.

nipponbird

Trust me Mike, they are. Few countries are as spoilt for choice as this one as far as cars are concerned. A miniscule market in comparison with the USA, but every motoring manufacturers in the world believes it should have a firm footprint here. We even get the Ford Mustang in right hand drive this year.
But back to Chinese cars. Believe me I'm as critical as you are of the Chinese motoring industry. All their manufacturers have the same background and are almost clones of each other. Mostly established in the last decade or two by the Communist government, with a gradual privatisation policy. Some are now fully in private hands, especially those in which the European and Japanese manufacturers bought a stake. If you think you will find the clearcut identities of US or European manufacters in China, a cullture shock awaits the uninitiated.

Do they make rubbish? I'm not sure anymore, remember that people were also very sceptical of Japanese cars in the early sixties. I myself will and actually did buy recently a known brand of light truck (Ford Ranger T6, assembled here, but in Australia developed by Americans), but if I was a guy who employed ten people in for example, a plumbing business, I would've considered the Chinese trucks seriously. Remember most employees are hard on their employer's vehicles, no sense to buy an expensive vehicle for them, they're not going to look after it. So, buy something at a cheap enough price, so you can dispose of it and buy another one without too much tears.

mmarshall

It's not so much that I'm critical of it. I just don't have much exposure to it, or many chances to evaluate their products. I have to go mostly by what I read...and from posters like you who HAVE had at least some exposure to it. Some facts are well-known....that the Chinese love Buicks, and that the Verano (Excelle) is the country's best-selling product. But how well those Buicks are built, in Chinese plants, compared to American-market versions, is not well-known outside of China itself.

spwolf

Foreign companies can only own 49% of Chinese companies, hence all these JV's... when this gets abolished, they will all start their own fully owned companies.

It is a fact that Chinese companies own developed vehicles sell poorly in China though, so thats not a subjective opinion. Haval (by GW) for instance is best selling Chinese brand and it is currently 11th best selling brand in China.

As to your story about prices, it reminds me of how people here in Eastern Europe talked about Lada Niva - its vehicles were 3x cheaper than Toyota's for instance.

Thing is - by the time Chinese car satisfies all Europe regulation, and is modern vehicle with modern engine, it ends up costing the same since cost of labour is small part of car production costs.

Latest example of spectacular failures in Chinese market is Quoros brand, which was designed by Europeans with Chinese money, and made big waves about "competitive" engines, vehicles and 5* crash scores... problem is, they priced them the same as Volkswagen... and right now it is spectacular failure in sales.

mmarshall

Quite possibly. Though they still slightly undercut their competitors, we've seen the list prices for Hyundai and Kia products escalate quite a bit in the last several years from quality improvements, more equipment, and production costs. Prices for the Rio and Accent jumped an average of $2000 just last year alone.....they formerly started in the very low teens.

nipponbird

Interesting that you mention the Lada Niva. Our experience with vehicles from Communist countries was always a dismal trip into unreliability, apart from the fact that technology sort of froze at the time when they carted off the plants and the blueprints in 1945 out of Germany. Companies like Fiat did provide some technology in the sixties, but even the vehicles that came out of those marraiges were abysmal failures.
We expected the same from the Chinese, but it was not the case. Of course cars were preceded by scooters and up to 500 cc capacity motorcycles and they didn't start flying apart, like for example the copies of German wartime bikes, that came from the USSR.

Sulu

The Orientals -- the Japanese 40 and 50 years ago, the Koreans 30 years ago, Lexus 20 to 25 years ago -- have proven that they are very good at learning and learning from their mistakes. We see the same progression from the Chinese now. They start off by copying the Westerners: Lexus did it by copying Mercedes-Benz; the Koreans did it; and Toyota and Nissan (badged as Datsun at the time) when they first got a foothold 40-some years ago.

The first Chinese-brand cars that are sold here in large numbers will not match Toyota or even Hyundai levels of quality and styling sophistication (they will probably be like the first Honda Civics -- quirky but definitely driveable) but it won't take them long to learn what North Americans like and they will start producing and selling high-value, acceptable-quality cars within 10 years (2 generations) of first selling here.

I am old enough to remember how poorly we spoke of "Made in Japan" cars, supposedly made from recycled tin cans. Yet, not 10 years after that, my father bought his first Japanese car, a tiny, quirky Honda Civic Wagon, and he and I have had nothing but Japanese cars since then.

The Chinese automotive joint ventures must be Chinese-controlled. That is part of their learning curve. They insist on knowledge and technology transfers as part of these joint ventures. They gain knowledge, they gain technology (it does not matter if it is not the most innovative technology) and they gain control of their destiny. They learn, they learn well and they learn fast.

chromedome

The fly on the ointment is the presence of foreign brand cars in China. Chinese with even a bit of money would rather get a Nissan or Peugeot rather than a Great Wall or Geely, while the wealthy jump straight to German brands without considering local luxury cars. FAW are a major VW assembler and they also have their own brand using old Mazda platforms - guess which one isn't selling.

The Chinese automotive market now is very different than Japan or Korea 20-30 years ago where imported cars had huge tariffs slapped on and local assembly of foreign brands wasn't encouraged.

nipponbird

I'm fully aware that this thread is not solely focused on Chinese cars, but concerns Volvo which is about to shift production between countries with extremely different cultural outlooks.
I'm also a car guy and can still feel in my bones the thrill of holding a part coming out of a dusty and faded box with the GM logo from the fifties. After all it was made by honest American hands. Nowadays if you want to buy something from the guys as for example the Brits, who made your treasurd pocket knife like a Joseph Rogers when you were a kid, you must haul out big bucks. The Germans, I don't even want to mention, they simply think nowadays that money grows on your back, where are the days you could have bought a Stahlwille set of spanners with the money in your back pocket?
Now the Chinese come along and you say to yourself: "Horror upon horror, that stuff won't even fetch the going rate in the scrap metal yard!" But money talks, like it always does and motoring manufacturers seem not to know that. Not everybody buys a car to last a lifetime and a lot of people can't even think beyond tomorrow, so people will buy Chinese cars even in America.
Do look at this link. The same mag was very apprehensive when the first GWM arrived here seven years ago:
http://gwm.co.za/news/item/gwm-steed...-the-year.html
The Toyota Hilux is the best seller lihgt truck in South Africa, even outselling most sedans and SUV's, but this mag is convinced that a Chinese truck is now a better buy. I happen to have had the privilege to have met the Editor's dad in my day. Mr Lupini senior was a well-known supplier of performance kits here for Italian cars and trust me he was an honest to a fault Italian gentleman. One has no reason to suspect that his son doesn't know what he is talking about.

However, however, the analogy between the Chinese onslaught and the Japanese success is not to be fully applied. The difference between the Japanese and Chinese culturally makes it an open question if the Chinese will achieve the perfectionism with which the Japanese astounded the motoring world.