Shanghai Auto Show

Lynk & Co Stalls Sales Launch for U.S. and Europe

Unlike the majority of Chinese automakers looking to the West, Lynk & Co seemed well-poised to bring a physical product to America — even though it had a share-based business model and a distribution plan that seemed counterintuitive. However, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group has announced that it is delaying Lynk & Co’s product launch for Europe and the United States.

The reasoning behind the stall revolves around that unconventional distribution model, which initially involves online ordering and at-home deliveries. Zhejiang Geely now feels that Lynk needs more time to cultivate a company-owned dealership network.

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Get Used to Seeing This Design On Future Mercedes-Benz Small Cars

Mercedes-Benz is showcasing its updated design language via its new Concept A Sedan. While many of its production cars have gradually adopted the new “no folds” philosophy, the Concept A Sedan and earlier AMG GT Concept are the premiere examples of the styling theory.

The flowing bodywork and absence of hard edges is likely a precursor to what Benz will roll out in the coming years, especially after the A Sedan arrived at the Shanghai Motor Show looking like the GT Concept’s baby brother.

Mercedes is definitely sticking to this aesthetic and, when it begins production on its next generation of small cars using the MFA2 architecture, expect gobs of similarities between those vehicles and these concepts. While 2.76 inches shorter and 1.18 inches lower than the present-day CLA, it’s the easiest car to parallel the A Sedan with. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the CLA reemerging with the concept’s more rounded shape and smaller headlamps.

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China 2015: The 10 Most Impressive Carmakers at Auto Shanghai (Part 3)

This is it: the most impressive carmaker at Auto Shanghai, Haval.

Like in Beijing last year, I was most impressed by Haval at Auto Shanghai, and for a variety of reasons. Haval is Great Wall’s SUV marque, a standalone brand since July 2013. Above all, having topped my ranking last year already, I had high expectations for the brand and they didn’t disappoint, which was a very significant achievement on its own.

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China 2015: The 10 Most Impressive Chinese Carmakers at Auto Shanghai (Part 2)

It’s Leopaard, with two A’s.

Last time we had a look at the 10th to 6th most-impressive Chinese carmakers at Auto Shanghai 2015, it’s now time for ranks No. 5 to No. 2. By now, either the carmakers in question have made tremendous progress compared to last year in Beijing, or they are approaching world class. And we’ll start with the “Most Improved” award.

Drumroll, please:

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Shanghai 2015: Buick Verano Debuts

Aimed at those “who value a personal and dynamic driving experience,” the next-gen Buick Verano debuted at the 2015 Shanghai Auto Show.

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Shanghai 2015: Chinese Domestic Market Ford Taurus Revealed

Bowing at the 2015 Shanghai Auto Show, the Ford Taurus’ arrival marks the sedan’s first-ever appearance in the Chinese market.

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Shanghai 2015: Volvo S60L T6 Twin Engine Ready For The Spotlight

Debuting alongside the XC90 Excellence at the 2015 Shanghai Auto Show, the Volvo S60L T6 Twin Engine PHEV brings hybrid power to the Sino-Swede party.

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Shanghai Auto Show: Repent, The End Of Fake Chinese Brands Is Near

When the Chinese government invited Western carmakers to China, the trade was a huge and untapped Chinese market for access to Western technology. Foreign carmakers had to form joint ventures with Chinese. This triggered fears that the laowei would be kicked out in short order, while the Chinese would flood western markets with cheap cars made with expropriated intellectual property. It didn’t work out that way. At the Shanghai Auto Show, new attempts of the Chinese government to gain technology for free have the smell of death.

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Shanghai Auto Show: This Year, Guaranteed Safe For Work

And here the part you have been waiting for (especially those of our readers who suffer from Yellow Fever): This year’s round-up of the show’s product specialists. After last year’s excesses at Chinese auto shows, the calls for a more family-oriented posture show disappointing results: This year, the racy part is mostly left to the choice of cars on display.

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Shanghai Auto Show: Oh, What a Media Day

The Shanghai Auto Show truly is a reflection of the Chinese car market: It is huge, and it is one big disorganized mess. This year, the media days were shrunk to one, with the effect that nearly 20 press conferences ran at the same time. If you went to Audi, you could not go to Fiat, Chery, Nissan, and a host of others. Getting admitted was a whole other matter.

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Shanghai Auto Show: Qoros Debuts In China

BMW Mini’s former chief designer Gert Hildebrand and Volkswagen’s former North America vice chief Volker Steinwascher enjoyed the adolations of the adoring masses when they unveiled their new Qoros brand at the Shanghai Auto Show.

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Shanghai Auto Show: Waving The Red Flag

FAW evokes the bad old times when China’s leaders, tired of the Long March, ordered hand-made parade limousines. The originals had been chronicled by Tycho de Feyter. Now they are re-lived as the Red Flag L5, L7, and L9.

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Shanghai Auto Show: Two New EVs, Along With Two New Brands, Both From Toyota & Co.

In the past, Toyota had tried to resist the urges of the Chinese government to establish new joint-venture brands. The company also had been highly skeptical of the viability of the electric vehicle. All doubts have been tossed over board. Toyota launched two new brands and two new EVs in China.

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Shanghai Auto Show: Toyota Struggles With Island Issue In China, Tries To Re-Gain Share With Low-Cost Cars

The booths of Japanese automakers were mobbed today just like those of any other automaker at the Shanghai Motor Show. The action at the showrooms are a different matter. Sales of Japanese cars in China remain problematic more than half a year after rowdy crowds took to the streets last September to torch Japanese cars and showrooms. Sales of Japanese cars in China were down 14.3 percent in March while sales of U.S. carmakers were up 31.1 percent. Sales of German brands rose 24.6 percent.

Toyota does not expect to reach positive territory until August this year, Hiroji Onishi, head of Toyota’s China operations, told a small circle of reporters this morning at the Shanghai show. Asked why August, another Toyota executive quipped: “After previous riots in 2005 and 2010, it took half a year to recover. We figure, this time it might take twice as long.”

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Shanghai Auto Show: Buick MPV Attracts Interest In High Places

Buick shows a few interesting concepts in Shanghai. One, a business MPV attracted the interest on GM’s competition at Toyota. Soon-to-be Toyota chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada came for a quick visit, eyed the prototype for a few seconds, and left.

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Shanghai Auto Show: BYD And Daimler Show First Glimpse At Joint EV While BYD Gets Mad At Reuters

The Denza shows its stripes

So Denza, the odd couple joint venture between Daimler and BYD, lifted the veil of its upcoming all-electric SUV. A car in heavy camouflage rolled on stage here at the Shanghai Motor Show. The car looked, well, like the old B-Class from which it is derived.

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Shanghai Auto Show, Fads And Trends: Lenses

Lenses at the Shanghai Auto Show definitely test both sides of the envelope. Some photographers came with lenses long and wide enough to take close-ups of concept cars shown on the moon.

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Shanghai Auto Show: As Luxury Cars Fly Off The Lot In China, The Government Pulls The Brakes

At last year’s Beijing auto show, a man walked up to the Roll Royce booth with a suitcase full of “Red Maos” – as the 100 yuan note is called in China, the largest note equals $15.40 – and walked away as the owner of a Rolls Royce Phantom. At least that’s what AFP heard. Because of taxes and duties, a Rolls-Royce Phantom started at 6.6 million yuan ($1 million) a year ago. That translated into 66,000 red banknotes.

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Shanghai Motor Show: The Pad Fad

Aren’t iPads supposed to be in short supply, affected by the parts paralysis? The visitor of the Shanghai Auto Show wouldn’t know. Actually, if everybody would stop using the flat gizmos, just supplying car shows with them would be a great business. They are everywhere.At most large automakers, someone said: “I have a great idea: We will give all our booth ba …. I mean, productspecialists one of these iPads with a multimedia presentation.” “Super! It’s cool, and it’s green. Think about all the paper we save!”

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Shanghai Motor Show, Curbside Classic Edition

In Shanghai, you can see the latest cars, and the cars of the future with no future. You also can see a tiny bit of the past.

Citroen brought two classics.

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Shanghai Auto Show: BYD, Get A Handle On This

This is the BYD F0. I’ll leave it to the experts which other car this resembles. It reminds me a bit of that car, but maybe only because it’s so small and red. It should be red. It’s embarrassing.

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Shanghai Auto Show: Foreigners Create Pseudo Chinese Brands

When you have a larger joint venture with a Chinese automaker, at some point it will be strongly suggested to you to create a Chinese brand. At least this is how The Financial Times understands it: “Foreign carmakers wishing to build new plants or add capacity in China’s burgeoning car market are being told by the government that if they wish to expand, they must develop a low-cost local car brand.”

Early fruits of these suggestions can be seen at the Shanghai Auto Show.

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Shanghai Auto Show: Chery Gets The Girls

Chery doesn’t have much new stuff in its booth this year.

There is a QQme covered in rosepetals and the usual assortment of not-quite-ready-for-market electric prototypes every Chinese company fields. But Chery trumps every other car manufacturer at the Shanghai show in one respect: Women.

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Shanghai Auto Show: Test-driving Perisoft's WRC Sim

As the luckless inventor of interactive video (at least when it comes to car shows), I usually avoid electronic attractions. But then, amongst TTAC’s Best and Brightest is Perisoft, developer of bitchen race simulators, and I absolutely had to test-drive the thing. If you are at the Shanghai Auto Show, it is at the Ford booth, in the left corner. Perisoft can remote into the machine from the U.S. to China, and we discussed cheating enhancing the performance of the simulator. We dropped the idea, because we didn’t want Perisoft to lose future business.

The simulator consists of three screens (made by Dell) and a cab that moves around. There also is a button that says “Motion Stop” – in case you get car sick, I guess. Before they let you drive, you need to sign a release form bigger than what I signed when I drove offshore race boats – a truly murderous undertaking at times.

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Shanghai Auto Show: Why China Didn't Want A HUMMER

It becomes immediately clear why the Chinese government did not want an upstart manufacturer of bridge pontoons to buy HUMMER: Unnecessary duplication of what is has been available at state-owned Dongfeng for ages. They even have a Chinese version of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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Shanghai Auto Show: World's Baddest Convertible

“Herr Professor Piech! I guess all of us here at the Volkswagen Group are still working on becoming the world’s largest auto maker … by 2018, that’s right.

In the meantime, we built the world’s largest convertible!”

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Shanghai Auto Show: Mercedes Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Joint Venture

No, this is not the Mercedes B Class. It is the Beijing Auto BC301. Supposedly , it is a blatant copypaste, performed by Daimler’s joint venture partner BAIC.

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Shanghai Auto Show: The Very Much Tinted M5 Concept

The attentive TTAC reader knew long before the Shanghai Auto Show what BMW would put on display. What they wanted to see were pictures of the inside of the M5 Concept. Attempts to fulfill that request were frustrated. First of all, access to the car is barred. A metal-glass barrier, along with an earpiece-toting muscular guard, make it impossible to fulfill the journalistic duty. Also, the glass of the car is heavily tinted. Not just from the side …

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Shanghai Auto Show: The All Chrome Buick Excelle

Remember the gold plated Infiniti that was arrested by Chinese police? Did you think that was a bit over the top? GM China shares your sentiments. Instead of gauche gold, GM China displays an all chrome Buick Excelle XT at the Shanghai Auto Show.

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Shanghai Auto Show: Launch Of The Retro Rockets - Bumblebee Edition

The fifth generation of that other legendary car was launched on China by Shanghai GM. Ample 50s cues were not spared. Rock’n’Roll and a historic Camaro were on hand that had served as the official pace car of the 1967 Indy 500.

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Shanghai Auto Show: Launch Of The Retro Rockets - New New Beetle Edition

It’s odd that China’s two largest carmakers, Volkswagen and GM chose Shanghai as the launchpad of their retro cars. After all, the 50s and 60s have zero appeal in China. Nobody thinks of Rock’n’Roll when they think back in China. Those were the forgotten times of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The iconic cars of China’s past are the Santana, the Buick Century, the Jeep Cherokee of the 1980s and 1990s.

73 years after the original Beetle was launched, 13 years since the first-edition New Beetle came out, a new New Beetle took the stage in Shanghai.

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Shanghai Autoshow: The Vanishing Ripoff

Remember the Brilliance A3 SUV that the German press called “a brazen BMW X1 rip-off, with inspirations from Audi?” After BMW spokesman Frank Strebe said that the matter would be taken up with their joint venture partner Brilliance, Strebe had said: “Maybe the vehicle won’t be at the show.”

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Shanghai Autoshow: The CEO Dilemma


Due to some adroit planning, important auto shows in the world’s largest market and the world’s second largest fall in the same week this year. CEOs of the world’s top automakers have a dilemma: Shanghai or New York?

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Shanghai & New York Autoshow: Ask, And You Shall Receive
This coming week is the week when all car manufacturers wish they would have a split personality. The New York Auto Show and the Shanghai Auto Show will take…
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BMW Invades Shanghai, Wave 5 & 6: The New BMW 1 Series Coupe. The New BMW 1 Series Convertible.

And finally, a car for the working masses. Never seen or sold before in Asia, we present to you: The new BMW 1 Series Coupe and the new BMW 1 Series Convertible. They look cute. And one is shown in the requisite red. Topless Einser gallery after the jump. Right this way ..

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BMW Invades Shanghai, Wave 4: World Premiere Of The BMW 6 Series Coupe.
Now this is a car where the Chinese will say:”Leave it right here.” If not, it could get impounded for – they’ll find something. Prem…
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BMW Invades Shanghai, Wave 3: An Electrified Einser
Now we are getting from the concept cars to the kind of real ones. BMW electrified its BMW 1 Series Coupe and uses it as a test mule. “The knowledge ga…
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BMW Invades Shanghai, Wave 2: Never Seen In Asia Before, The BMW Vision ConnectedDrive Concept.

Honestly, I have no idea what this is. I googled it and found this great article, written after the concept was shown in Geneva. From what I can see, it’s more than a concept. It’s a vision of a concept. A vision that will most likely give Ray LaHood nights of distraction. BMW Vision ConnectedDrive concept gallery after the jump. Right this way ..

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BMW Invades Shanghai, Wave 1: The BMW Concept M5.

I had planned to go to the Shanghai Auto Show which will open its doors to the press on April 19th. Then BMW sent a long distance bomber over Beijing and carpet bombed me with pictures of everything they will show in Shanghai. Now I can save the money for the ticket and the hotel. I have seen all I need to see. Instead, we declare this Monday BMW Day. BMW Concept M5 gallery after the jump. Right this way ..

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