First, is average Chinese people’s income is about the same level. So if one average Chinese can afford the car, it means hundred millions people can afford it, then you see the market explosion. All Chinese have witnessed this before, like for bikes, TV, cell phones etc, anything you named it. On year 0, no body can afford it. On year 4, some one can afford it. Then come to year 8, suddenly all middle income household can afford it, then you have the explosion.
Second, the car price down a lot of. The car price was very expensive before because the car is not supposed to own by average people. When I grow up, I never dreamed I can own a car myself in my lifetime. The same thing happened to everyone. You can asked every Chinese you meet for this question. If he said he did, either he is from upper class family or he is too young. The Honda Accord cost 280K RMB 2005, that is 5 years back. That is about 40K USD at that time. 10 years back, the model is even not available in China. 10 years ago, it all Volkswagen. The Santana model sold around 200K RMB, 25K USD which is 70s model. Well everybody knows this, so everyone hold their cash waiting to the price to go down. At that time, people believed entering WTO will bring down the price. But the change is they bring in the 90s model of Passat and price remains the same.
Thanks to Cheery and Geely and other domestic vendors, they joined the market and sell the so-called copy cat like Raghav ‘s post about China's iClone joked about. It has brought the car price dramatically down. Now Honda accord is at 180K, which is still high about 26K USD. But a middle class can afford it. If you want domestic car, it is even cheaper. A Cheery 4 door, Accord size, sold around 100K RMB, which about 14K USD. A Cheey A3 4 door Civic size, about 60K, lower than 10K USD. Cheery QQ, which also be mentioned in that article, sold at 40K RMB, which is about 6KUSD. I can assure you it is much better than the original model. Thousands of people drive it to Lahsa, and it becomes someting you can boast about. Every Chinese car forum has someone post their QQ journey to Tibet and Xinjiang, Yunnan. A migrant worker with a couple years of experience, can earn around 3K RMB per month for being a factory worker, 5K RMB per month being in construction. So if a migrant working couple can buy QQ with one year’s saving and drove back to their home for spring festival.
The third reason, the government used to collect a lot of tax against cars because it is supposed rich people buying car. Because this recession, government reduce the tax. I think the rebate is 50%.
There is also one reason is if your neighbor brought a car, you tenderly to buy one also. We saw this thing in TVs, cell phones etc. So this is the car’s turn. China can easily sold 20-30 millions car in the 3 to 5 years. If RMB exchange rise, the car price will be go down even further. BTW: as far as I know, there is no bank loan for selling car. People pay it with cash
The high speed rail and car will change China in the foreseeable future.
Katare wrote:At such a high base these kind of growth figures are nothing short of scarily astonishing......
Pre global financial meltdown, No one, absolutely no one forecasted that China would overtake US as largest auto market as early as 2009. The growth is simply amazing, no wonder so many people have hard time believing Chinese numbers. They persistently defy logic and empirical evidence
China passenger car sales up 63 pct in Mar
I would blame it to the media. Noramlly when they report some postive thing about China they will use some negative stuff as the “balancer”. It is amusing for you to spot this last pargragh. But it is more amusing for the reporter to choose this news as the “balancer” because with 1.3 Billion people, if you want report negative thing there are plenty of them. Why choose this news? The inconvinent thing for this news is if you want to stop high speed rail service, you need to start it first. And currernly there is no high speed rail service from Beijing to Fuzhou. Normally the rail ministry reagrds the service with average operating speed above 250 kilometere per hour as high speed rail service. For mighty planning committee, there is no high speed rail service in China currently. The only high speed railway is Beijing/Shanghai line and still in construction. For all others, they called them Dedicated Passenger line. Anyway one tip for telling which line service is high speed, every high speed rail service started with G. Every EMU service started with D, every direct express service started with Z. 
