Happy Birthday, CCT!

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China Car Times is officially three years old this week. As the story goes, the idea for CCT was officially born just before the Beijing 2006 Auto Show when I wrote an article about the launch of Roewe on my own (now defunct) personal blog, that article became quite popular and as I was researching my own car purchase at the time I realized that at that time there was little to no English information about the Chinese car industry, thus I thought it would be a great idea to start a nice little blog about the industry as there is a mass of information on Chinese websites. So CCT was born, a bridge between the Chinese media and the English media, but as the Chinese car industry grew so did other websites that came into being.

Arguably the first English resources for Chinese car industry info English is China Car Forums, but every thread inevitably ends in arguments. Then there is Gasgoo, a site with a strange name and a liking for China Car Times articles, we like them, and I think they like us, there was also The Tycho but that seems to have fallen by the wayside as time went on, which is a pity as the writer often found some unusual content that CCT would miss. So after three years, there only really remains CCT and Gasgoo as the two largest Chinese automotive news websites.

In three years online, CCT has served out millions of pages (quick maths says somewhere in the 100 million marker), Americans seem to be our biggest consumer of bandwidth, but also Europeans, Chinese, Africans and Australasians visit us on a daily basis, every month we transfer hundreds of gigabytes of data across the world.The first article was the previously mentioned Roewe article, from there I, and others, wrote a combined 2376 articles (including this one) and received 14,819 comments from you guys, the readers.

During the early days of CCT, it quickly appeared that CCT wasn’t going to be a small side blog, it soon became a full time job for me, spending days in front of the PC, updating this, updating that, after a year of intensive CCT, I decided it was time to go and work on another new project, so I signed up with a small American-Chinese Bio Technology company that keep me relatively busy but leaves enough time during the day for CCT updates.

The next year is going to see a kick start of some side CCT projects that have fallen by the wayside due to other commitments. More test drives are waiting to be written, including some popular models that many people have been requesting, and also some Chinese models that are soon to become American models (hint hint).

If this was an acceptance speech for an Oscar, I’d probably say something along the lines of “I’d like to thank my wife for not minding me (or perhaps she is thankful) that I spend a lot of time in my home office, and my dad for reading everyday”

So, 1,2,3, Happy Birthday CCT!