China's Styling Deficit

Edward Niedermeyer
by Edward Niedermeyer

Even though China is the largest car market in the world at the moment, Chinese car designers have a tough row to hoe. The Wall Street Journal’s China Journal blog explains that while there are plenty of well-educated Chinese industrial designers, the prevalent design philosophy keeps their best work in school. According to an unnamed Chinese auto exec, the competitive advantage for Chinese automakers vis-à-vis their foreign partnership competitors is that they never start engineering or designing from a blank sheet of paper. Rather, the standard practice is to “tell an outside engineering consultant which existing model they want to copy, and ask them to come up with a product counterfeited in a way that it won’t attract intellectual property lawsuits. In some cases that means companies combining styling ideas from two separate cars into one.”

This will hardly come as a shock to seasoned autoblogizens, for whom decrying of Chinese rip-offs is just a little Beijing Auto Show coverage away. But as the Chinese firms ponder global expansion, this “plagarism dividend” is already proving to be an albatross, causing nasty lawsuits and casting a negative pallor across the entire industry. So are Chinese firms likely to start paying large numbers of laid-off western designers and stylists to create their future cars? Don’t count on it. Instead they are shipping over pros like former GM stylist Ed Wong (who penned the Beijing Auto 800 concept above) to teach a new generation of Chinese stylists to, you know, actually design future vehicles. But can true artists emerge from a culture of copycatting?

Edward Niedermeyer
Edward Niedermeyer

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  • Menno Menno on Mar 19, 2009

    carlisimo, I hate to break it to you, but the "famous" Mitsubishi Zero WWII Japanese fighter plane? The design was apparently purchased (at least it was not stolen) from Howard Hughes' aircraft company. The American government did not want it because it was not high-tech. The airplane was constructed of 'antiquated' wood instead of aluminum. To be fair to Howard Hughes, it was not illegal to sell his design; at the time of the sale, Japan was not at war with the United States.

  • Pch101 Pch101 on Mar 19, 2009
    I hate to break it to you, but the “famous” Mitsubishi Zero WWII Japanese fighter plane? The design was apparently purchased (at least it was not stolen) from Howard Hughes’ aircraft company. No, it was designed in-house at Mitsubishi. There was some speculation at the time that the design was a copy of a US design, but that was proven to be incorrect.
  • RetardedSparks RetardedSparks on Mar 19, 2009

    So how is it that when everyone trashes "American auto makers" or "American corporate greed" or whatever with a broad, collective, brush it's OK, but substitute "Chinese" and it's racism?

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