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Counterfeit Cars
Chinese manufacturers have been known to counterfeit everything from Gucci to Pepsi. But as an article in this week's Economist points out, counterfeit cars, produced by manufacturers like Shuanghuan Automobile and Chery, must be the most difficult. (Above, BMW's X5 and the Shuanghuan CEO. Below, a Toyota dashboard and a Shuanghuan dashboard).
With nearly 6,000 parts in the average car, not to mention the teams of people needed to fit them together in such a way that the car is actually driveable, no one can figure out how the Chinese still manage a profit. A running automobile requires a materials cost that simply cannot be offset by cheap labor alone. As the Economist puts it:
That they can sell these cars for half the price of the originals suggests that something odd is going on. They either do not know their own costs (a distinct possibility), have revolutionised carmaking (highly unlikely) or are being subsidised in some way. For the time being, no one knows.
Until someone figures it out, you can get your Shuanghuan pimped out in Shanghai on the cheap.
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Comments
If the orginal is better than the fake then it is OK no one will buy the fake one, but if the Chinese fake comes out better quality than the original then we have a problem and off course the Ford Motor Company will have a really big problem that why people will prefer the fake Mustang instead of the real Mustang.
Well I hope that Geely won't come out with Dragon that looks like a Ford Mustang and has a dragon instead of a horse and hope not to come out better than the original when it comes to quality.
I believe you mean the author of the original Economist article has a bias, not the blog author. But I must say, bias or not, the car does look like a knock-off. It's a different world indeed, but in this case, a very sad shift.
Bigger issue afaic is that people will soon be pirating designs and trading them on p2p networks. Plenty of old discussion about that on the Core forum.