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Creating a Car Culture in China
Maureen Fan, Washington Post
New Owners Among Growing Middle Class Find Sense of Freedom, ‘Taste the Fun’
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…As China’s middle class expands, Chen and his customers are among the hundreds of thousands of new car owners hitting the roads each year, driving up imports of luxury cars, snarling traffic, creating a car culture and reveling in what many Chinese describe as a newfound sense of freedom. In China today, owning a car is what owning a television set was in 1950s America.
“I’ve been to Sichuan, Shandong and Jilin provinces, and I plan to spend Chinese New Year driving to Yunnan,” said Zhu Chao, a Web site engineer and K-One club member who often takes long drives during his holidays. “I really like what the car brings to my life — convenience, freedom, flexibility, a quick rhythm. I can’t imagine life without it.”
…Most people in this country of 1.3 billion still do not own a car. For example, in Beijing, a city of 16 million people, there are just slightly more than 3 million cars.
But car ownership in China has grown by 300 percent in just six years. The capital’s roads and intersections were not designed to cope with such an influx. The air is thick with pollutants, many from the emissions of the more than 1,000 cars being added to the streets each day.
(21 January 2008)
Any color…as long as it’s pink
Kipp Report
Saudi Arabia may be about to allow women to drive. The car industry gets ready for a windfall.
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Car ownership by women in Saudi Arabia rose 60 percent from 2003 to 2006, according to figures from state oil firm Saudi Aramco, reported in Kuwait Times. It said 75,522 women owned 120,334 vehicles by the end of 2006. And not one of them is allowed to drive.
That might be about to change, and the car market go through the roof, if reports from the UK media are to be believed. The Daily Telegraph says Saudi Arabia is to lift its ban on women drivers in an attempt to stem a rising suffragette-style movement in the deeply conservative state. Government officials have confirmed the landmark decision and plan to issue a decree by the end of the year.
The move is designed to forestall campaigns for greater freedom by women, says the paper, which have recently included protesters driving cars through the Islamic state in defiance of a threat of detention and loss of livelihoods. The driving ban dates back to the establishment of the state in 1932.
As expected, the motor industry is rubbing its hands.
“If women can drive, then the car industry will be booming,” said a sales executive with a major car manufacturer.
(22 January 2008)
Unsafe at Any Price: Building the New ‘People’s Car’
Brendan Smith, Tim Costello and Jeremy Brecher; Common Dreams
… Car sales in India are growing by more than 20 percent a year, compared with 3 percent globally. A recent survey by Invest India Market Solutions shows that as many as 12.8 million Indian households can be potential buyers for entry-level cars in the years to come, 1.6 million of them in 2008 alone. Sales are also booming in China: car ownership is up 300 percent over the last six years and the country’s total number of cars is expected to top 140 million in little more than a decade.
Meanwhile, car sales in the developed countries are plummeting. In 2007, U.S. car sales dropped to their lowest point in a decade, and analysts are expecting 2008 to mark the third straight year of shrinkage in domestic car sales. And according to Maryann Keller, an auto consultant, `It’s not just the United States that’s going down, it’s western Europe. Everybody is aiming at Russia, China and India.”
As a result of slumping sales, struggling Western car companies are, according to the New York Times, “looking to see where the cost-obsessed ethos of the developing world can help their bottom line.” On the same day Tata unveiled its new Nano, Ford Motors announced plans to more than double its investment in India-raising its total stake to $875 million-to make the country a regional hub for small-car manufacturing, compete for the fast-growing local low-cost market, and to build a new engine manufacturing plant.
Such plans have are keeping some in the environmental community awake at night. Transportation has the fastest growing carbon emissions of any economic sector and automobiles are largely to blame with more than 600 million passenger vehicles now cruising the world’s roads. The prospect of millions of new cars spells an exponential rise in carbon emissions as well as other kinds of pollutants. The top U.N. climate scientist and chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Rajendra Pachauri, recently told the Washington Post that he is already “having nightmares” about precisely this scenario.
It’s not just the number of new cars rolling out of manufacturing plants, companies like Tata cut costs by avoiding the use of expensive emissions-cutting and modern safety technologies/
(22 January 2008)
Canadians’ dependence on cars rising
Shannon Proudfoot, Canwest News Service via Times-Colonist
Car dependence is on the rise, even as more Canadians declare concern for the environment and live in urban areas with access to better public transit.
In 1992, 68 per cent of Canadians aged 18 and over drove everywhere, according to a new report from Statistics Canada. By 1998, that proportion was 70 per cent.
n 2005, the most recent year for which numbers are available, 74 per cent of Canadians were full-time drivers. Biking and walking rates, meanwhile, declined to 19 per cent in 2005 from 26 per cent in 1992. It seems hypocritical, but Dale Marshall, climate change policy analyst for the David Suzuki Foundation, says many have no choice. Canadian cities are sprawling almost unchecked, he says, and the search for affordable housing has pushed many people to the outskirts where a car may be the only realistic option.
(23 January 2008)
Detroit Car Show- An Unconvincing Shade of Green
Richard S. Chang, New York Times
…Hyperbole isn’t exactly new to the Detroit auto show, where auto executives for years have been promising everything from nuclear-powered cars to vehicles that can read your mind.
This year’s overreaching theme had to be green. Automakers desperately tried to make converts by rolling out a woozy parade of concept cars designed to run on renewable fuels like ethanol as well as less plausible dream machines that consume hydrogen or recharge from a wall plug.
There is some definite progress, but the steps are generally smaller than automakers were preaching at the show or the breathless headlines would have you believe.
As you would expect, General Motors and Toyota, the two biggest auto companies on the planet, tub-thumped the loudest. G.M. staged three press conferences along with a pre-auto show party, G.M. Style, to bolster its green message.
(20 January 2008)
Related from NY Times: Dr. Jekyll Meets Mr. Hybrid.
