Locations

Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Rizhao car show mish-mash

Well, the cars in China look different - brands never heard in Europe, styles from past or future, sometimes very hard to understand if more from past or from future. For some strange reason I finished up walking through the Rizhao car show in April. This was not exactly the new concept cars' exhibition, more of a car dealers show to boost sales in Rizhao.

Together the show made a confusingly beautiful combination of new-old-true-fake, some stands even spicing up things with non-wheeled models.
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Get a Mazda 6, whatever generation desired
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Chinese Lotus and a model. One of them with a big poster "Engineered by Lotus", not sure how much actual input the small workshop in UK had to this car.
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The "V" car and Mazda 3, who is who?
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April was still chilly month, model turned rather white in cool spring winds
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Place of contrasts, in the same stand the grand ~30 old taxi-Santana (11,500 EUR) or machine called New Santana (price starting from 10,800 EUR).
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Focus on models
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BALC car company stand. First it looked the central piece of their exhibition is the Mercedes. My first guess: partnership with Mercedes factory. Took a closer look of both cars, the 2 looked extremely similar. In interior the "Mercedes" had actually a BALC logo on steering wheel, very odd! Finally it came to me, the only piece of Mercedes was the logo on the bonnet.
The short conclusion: not a problem at all to borrow other car's logo to promote the new baby in their own official stand.
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Best value for money, grand old mega-mini van, 3,800EUR. It might look big on this photo, actually super small van that would wobble in any wind and driving 80kmh feels like its preparing to take off like a plane. Not much luxury there, but this is the legendary mover in far inland provinces of China. In trips to Sichuan, Yunnan, Fujian etc. this was usually the top choice of our illegal taxies.