A Guide To A Bunch Of Weird Chinese Car Brands You've Never Heard Of

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A Guide To A Bunch Of Weird Chinese Car Brands You've Never Heard Of

I was in Shanghai, China, recently to report on Volvo’s new electron-slathered premium/performance brand, Polestar. Even though I was only there a short time, I wanted to be sure I captured what the general carscape of Shanghai is like, because it’s bewildering. And now I want to bewilder you, too.To get more chinese luxury cars, you can visit shine news official website.


Automotively, China is sort of like turn of-the-20th century America right now, at least in terms of just how many automakers there are operating. In the early 1900s, making cars was sort of the internet bubble of that era, and there were many, many now-forgotten companies making cars.

China seems to be in a period like that right now. One estimate I heard pegged the number of active Chinese automakers at 103! Walking around Shanghai, it sure seems like that could be an accurate estimate, because the number of badges and brands you’ll see at any moment is, to American eyes, pretty staggering.

The average age of the cars is quite young, and almost all the cars look pretty modern—the strange, low-speed electric vehicles with the crazy styling or really blatant Western knock-offs are mostly out in the countryside, so the cities are populated with new-ish cars that all look sort of like the generic cars used in insurance ads or the made-up cars from videogames.

I found it all quite exciting. Seeing a car badge that you don’t immediately recognize isn’t something that happens often in daily life in America, but in Shangai I was perpetually walking around in a state of gleeful bafflement, saying things like “What the hell was that? Was that a starfish on the grille? What’s that one with the horse head? Are those two dolphins?”

Anyway, join me on this little tour of the mostly unfamiliar bestiary of Chinese cars!We’ll start with a familiar one, at least to our British readers. The newer London Black Cabs have been Chinese-built for some time now, and in China they’re free to be colors other than black. Such as cartoon-pig pink, like our friend here.

The oldest cars I saw in general use were these Volkswagen Santanas. There’s a number of versions and faces on these things, but they’re all based on the second-gen, 1981-1988 Volkswagen Passat.

They’ve been built in China since 1985, and have stayed in production until at least 2012, maybe longer. They’re mostly used as taxis and other fleet-type cars now, but you do see an occasional private one. They’re about as close to a Chinese Crown Vic as you can imagine.