The Chinese automotive design trend – where will it go?

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From GM Inside News

What creates an automotive trend? Is it aesthetic appeal? Perhaps it’s practicality….I don’t think so. While it would be fool hardy to dismiss social conscience, even this latest wave of public pressure will not be the primary influence in the next automotive cultural shift.

As always, it is the largest market that determines the trend. For 6 decades, this has been the US market. During the 50′s, America was experiencing growth at a level previously unfathomable. Winged beasts of metal and chrome adorned the landscape and driveways across the country, each one a louder patriotic trumpet of national success than the last. The aspirational lifestyle of carefree road trips, wind caressing your wife’s beehive, as she smiled across at you in the latest luxury convertible, was reinforced through popular cinema. The fins and wings can be seen in rival markets of the time, as other countries clumsily attempted to portray a vicarious level of success.

It was all repeated through the Muscle car era and that brief but proportionately horrific era of minvans. But, as globalisation gained speed, the influence of car design has become the product of a desire to reduce overheads borne of more stringent regulation and a demand for greater return from investors. Safety, research and development of rapidly increasingly complex systems, and, the administrative burden of operating empires that span the globe, have all detracted from the effort that was once put into automotive aesthetics.

The most recent example, of course, was the SUV craze. In a return to the “mine is bigger and shinier than yours” theme of the 50′s and 60′s, SUV’s where relatively cheap to make and represented an opportunity to charge more for older technology. It has driven marques normally associated with the opposite end of the automotive spectrum, to ditch their nomex gloves and helmet in favour of picking up the kids from soccer. BMW, Porsche, Mercedes Benz and Audi have all followed the US, releasing their own interpretation of the SUV phenomenon, with varying effectiveness.

You can’t fault the logic. There is no doubt that if these companies had stuck to their traditionalist guns, they would have been swept away in the current financial debacle. Instead, they have generated enough cash, through the perceived value of automotive acreage/dollar, to weather the storm, at least for a little longer. Unfortunately, it was this very pursuit of a market vulnerable to resource prices, that left many with yards full of rapidly diminishing returns.

But what now? The US still maintains significant cultural influence in many parts of the world, with dominance in the music industry as well as popular film, but this is all driven by one thing. Cold Hard Cash. Which is something, as well as the leverage on resource demand that being the largest market used to command, that the US is desperately running low on.

Search any media outlet and the trend is clear. China is fast becoming the centre of the car market. Possibly this year, and almost certainly in 2010, China will overtake the US in automotive sales. With a rapidly growing (rather than shrinking) middle class, it will be a matter of years before more profitable models will start penetrating the mass market. So where does that leave the SUV? What do they drive in China and how will this effect what YOU will be driving in the future?

Read the rest at GM Inside News Forum