China may have grown powerful enough to lecture the US on its debt problems but, when it comes to luxury cars, most local consumers still do not trust their own automotive industry.
That is good news for global luxury carmakers, which have seen China vault from the bottom to near the top of their sales charts in less than a decade.
“I’m buying a car, not a bicycle,” says Zhang Shengli, aged 36, who explains that he checked out the reputations of various homegrown brands online and decided instead on a BMW. “I feel I can’t trust a Chinese car,” says Mr Zhang, who has dropped into Shanghai Fande Automotives, the German carmaker’s first dealership in China, to pay the deposit on his new Rmb441,000 ($68,600) BMW 520 executive sedan.