Stephen Wilmot

The manufacturers have been looking for ways to, in this intensely competitive market, to stand out and to actually make higher profit.

And larger vehicles tend to be more profitable.

That's one of the reasons why Detroit focuses on these large vehicles.

Well, that's right.

The Beijing Auto Show is a real showcase for the industry of the future, really.

It's the largest show in the world.

It just has hundreds of launches, hundreds of manufacturers, which is astonishing given that we've had maybe a dozen major manufacturers in the West for years.

And I think that this is the result of the massive capacity build that we've seen in China in the last few years combined with actually a somewhat tepid car market.

And that's led to this very, very intense period of competition.

Yeah, absolutely.

There's a lot more focus on interior tech than you get on a Western car show.

At the same time, you saw a lot of vehicles which would look very familiar to Americans, big SUVs and pickup trucks, but electrified or semi-electrified.

So one trend of the show very much is

I would say solving the pain points around EVs, which Chinese consumers also have.

People often focus on range anxiety, even though more than half of car sales last year were what they call new energy vehicles, which is electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.

But yeah, they're very focused on things like fast charging technology, putting small gasoline engines into electric vehicles so that they kind of recharge the battery.

That's something called extended range electric vehicles or EREVs.

That enables the growth of the body style from what was the dominant style, I would say, which was small SUVs, the kind of Tesla Model Y lookalikes, essentially, to what we saw a lot of at this show, which was the three-row SUVs, the pickup trucks, what you think of as the core of the American car market.

The manufacturers have been looking, I think, for ways to, in this intensely competitive market, to stand out and to actually make higher profit.

And larger vehicles tend to be more profitable.