China Car Firms Gear Up For Booming Sales - BBC

[hatrack]

Oh BOY!

Shanghai's urban planning museum has a useful exhibit - a series of photographs taken from the same spot, now, and 20 years ago. The transformation is startling. Where once there were muddy lanes, now concrete highways soar.

In two short decades, roads that were crammed with bicycles have given way to highways choked with cars. China's landscape is being remodelled by the car. Ten years ago there were almost no privately owned cars in China. By the end of 2005 there were almost 24 million.

China now has more car brands than the United States, and the desire to move from two wheels to four shows no sign of disappearing. The Chinese car market has just overtaken Japan and is now the second largest market in the world, after the United States.

"There will be another 20-25% growth in 2007," says Yale Zhang, an auto analyst in Shanghai. "There were nearly seven million vehicles sold in China 2006, Japan made around 10 million, but most of those were sold for export, not in the domestic market."

EDIT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6364195.stm

[whistle]

1. Imagine a country the size of the United States with 1.3 billion cars and trucks

:yoiks: