If you want an idea of which way the balance of automotive power in the Far East is tipping, take a look at this list of car manufacturers: Ford, Ferrari, General Motors, Hyundai, Kia, Lamborghini, Bentley, Fiat, Rolls-Royce and Aston Martin. These are just some of the manufacturers exhibiting at the Beijing motor show this week who chose to skip the Tokyo motor show back in November.
Read all the latest 2012 Beijing motor show news.
While Tokyo diminishes in size and apparent importance, by rather stark contrast, Beijing (and its Shanghai sister with which it alternates each year) now seems an indelible event on the calendar of the industry’s biggest hitters as Frankfurt or Geneva.
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And you don’t need much time in the sprawling halls to know why. Time was when Beijing was most notable for its comical homegrown caricatures of established European product. No longer. While the occasional grotesque could still be found, the show’s focus has been sharpened, pulled around and now falls upon important cars from the mainstream European manufacturers.
Finding a star was not difficult. It doesn’t really matter whether you look at the Mercedes CSC in terms of its visual impact as a concept car on a show stand or its rather more important role as a near production ready compact premium four door coupe, it’s real significance is that it is a completely new design from a mainstream manufacturer that mere mortals are likely to be able to afford. And it was launched in Beijing.
Even more convincing in flesh than photograph, the word from Mercedes top brass is that the production version is changed in detail alone. Price positioned below the C-class as it will be, the CLA seems likely to create an entirely new class of car now, in much the same way its inspiration, the CLS, did in 2004.
But this being China, a place with potholes that can swallow a car whole, SUVs were very much the order of the day and large ones at that. In addition to the now familiar Maserati Kubang, a new Porsche Cayenne GTS and Bentley’s endlessly controversial EXP 9F, Lamborghini unveiled its Urus SUV concept to collective gasps from the crowd. Despite its size and likely weight, even grizzled hacks appeared disinclined to take against it, the general view being that its projected 3000 units sales represented revenue Lamborghini could scarcely pass by on principle and that if it had to make an SUV, it was as well it looked like that. Somewhat cruelly it was unveiled within easy sight of the Bentley and if Crewe had come to China hoping its SUV might look slightly less out of place than it had in Geneva, the proximity of VW’s other super premium SUV might have come as something of a blow.
Read the latest Beijing motor show blogs.
Over at Land Rover there were no such problems. Its gamble to drive the 1 millionth Discovery from Birmingham to Beijing went so smoothly it must have kicked itself for going to the expense of taking three back up cars. It duly rolled onto the stand, a heroically filthy mess after 50 days on what was rarely recognisable as road. It struck a pleasing contrast to the limited edition Range Rover Evoque with remarkably tasteful paint and interior design by Mrs David Beckham intended primarily for the Chinese market but available (in theory at least) in the UK for a trifling £79,995 each, though that does buy you Victoria’s signature on your handbook.
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