Auto Shanghai 2025 Wasn't Just a Car Show. It Was a Warning to the West

[justaprogressive]

It has long been said that visiting China from the West is akin to landing in a parallel universe. Pick any major city and most aspects look and feel broadly familiar, yet the fundamentals are different. You can’t hail an Uber or use Google Maps to get around, and your hotel TV won’t have Netflix. Instead, there’s always a domestic alternative. One that is likely newer, bigger, quicker, and perhaps even better than what you’re used to back home.

And so to the Chinese car industry, whose latest opportunity to scare the living daylights out of Europe and the US came at the Auto Shanghai motor show. Held at the world’s second-largest exhibition space, the show saw more than 1,400 cars from 26 countries spread across 13 halls. Some 93 vehicles made their world debut in front of 1 million attendees. YouTubers would later upload whole-show walk-throughs with run times longer than Interstellar.

How many world debuts do you suppose took place at the 2024 Geneva International Motor Show? About a dozen. No wonder it was canceled for 2025.

To Western eyes, photos of Auto Shanghai are akin to asking ChatGPT to recreate the glory days of motor shows past. Anyone who strolled the cavernous convention halls of Paris, Frankfurt, Geneva, Detroit, even Birmingham, and gawped at the new and the exciting will recognize the scene. There’s lots of shiny metal and carbon, formed into cars of every conceivable size, shape and social status. But the badges are unfamiliar, model names nonsensical; prices implausibly low, performance claims from another planet.

Admittedly, some cars are dressed in fur like children’s toys, complete with bunny ears and tail, but perhaps that’s just the AI hallucinating. This still largely looks like the sort of auto show Europe and the US hosted every few months in a prepandemic world.

https://www.wired.com/story/auto-shanghai-2025-car-show-warning-to-the-west/

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[Basso8vb]

1. Believe nothing from Beijing. Chinese cars are complete garbage.

China, the land of shortcuts and fakery.

[JCMach1]

6. Except they aren't any more...

Chinese EV's are more than comparable to western models.

[Melon]

11. That's because at least historically....they were 90% copies of western vehicles.

Notice the Porsche? Or Chinese Porsh.
China steals technology and copies western innovation. They are just getting outside of that. It’s one reason why China is not an even playing field. They steal technology, have poor workers safety, poor product safety, and no workers retirement programs.

[JCMach1]

17. So think Hyundai ca. about 1999

I actually think they are quite a bit ahead of that schedule, especially EVs

[tinrobot]

10. Believe what you want. But remember what happened with Japanese cars.

They were crap until they weren't. And that's when they took over.

Same thing is happening with Chinese cars. They're getting better very quickly.

[boonecreek]

2. Remember the Subaru 360?

It was an early Japanese entry to the U.S. market. Consumer Reports rated
it "unacceptable". At that time, I thought to myself "who would buy a Japanese car"?
Flash forward to December of '71 when I bought my first new car, a Toyota Celica ST.
And now, Subarus are now rated as the most reliable cars.

[unweird]

4. We had one, '69 Subaru 360

Learned to drive a stick in the thing. Suicide doors and all, it was a funny, cheap little car.

[boonecreek]

5. Wow, didn't realize they had suicide doors.

Another early Japanese entry to the U.S. market that had me rolling my eyes
was the Honda 600. A few years later Honda introduced the Civic, and the rest
as they say is history.

[chouchou]

3. Hear come the storm. (Yes..Hear)

[lame54]

7. If they are so advanced in everything...

How did they fuck up the Olympics so badly?

[flvegan]

8. The author seems really excited about it.

That's all I got.

[yardwork]

13. Car enthusiasts are that way.

[flvegan]

14. I'm a huge car enthusiast.

Have been since I was around 9 years old.

[DFW]

9. I think this will mirror some of what I see in my work

Part of my job involves detecting and identifying counterfeit money in many forms, going back 2500 years (not Secret Service, but sometimes parallel).

Starting around 1990, extremely primitive fakes of all sorts of older silver coins started showing up out of China—everything from ancient Greek and Roman to American silver dollars. Tourists started showing up after trips to the Far East, convinced they had scored bargains, wasting countless hours of the experts at auction houses like Sotheby’s, Heritage, Spink, etc. But the Chinese forgers had the time and the willingness to learn, and now some of their fakes are really skillfully made. I mean to the point of “this LOOKS OK, but something is off about it, even if I can’t pinpoint it.” Then, when an Athenian tetradrachm from 2500 B.C. or an American silver dollar from 1795 shows traces of titanium, the scam is blown, but sometimes it mow comes to that.

The point is that the Chinese have nothing but time and a willingness to learn from psst mistakes, and they move at lightning speed, too—the bad guys as well as the good guys. The glacial pace of socialist bureaucracy is a thing of the past. If our technology gets poorly imitated there, they realize it very quickly now, correct their mistakes, and surpass the original if they can. Pollution and low/slave wage labor are not hindrances. They are to be taken seriously. Not all of them, but enough of them.

[yardwork]

12. The Chinese fake luxury goods better and better, too.

They've never minded copying others. Never signed on to IP and copyright treaties. With the advent of AI in manufacturing it's becoming very possible to make identical copies of things and then improve on them.

Interesting times we live in.

[DFW]

15. With centuries-old objects, it's trickier

Counterfeiters are perfectionists, and they often forget that centuries-old artisans worked with centuries-old tools, expertise, and schedules. The modern counterfeiters have neither the patience nor the mentality to duplicate that.

[GJGCA]

16. Fake news!