Last year, ChangFeng Motors packed a couple of hundred journalists into the bowels of the Cobo Center and announced their plans for building cars for the United States market. The speech by ChangFeng Chairman Li Jianxin was indecipherable, save one curious and embarrassingly mistranslated phrase.   

The buzz from ChangFeng and Geely lead journalists to declare "The Chinese are Coming!" Some of them took the Chinese presence in Detroit as a yet another threat to the American car industry, while others derided the announcement as yet another attempt by China to dump cheap, inferior goods. 

But that wasn't the message that I heard. For example, last year Wayne County Executive Robert A. Ficano welcomed ChangFeng with open arms, almost begging for them to ramp up and export their vehicles here. Keep in mind, Wayne County is the heart of the same automotive megalopolis that includes all three automotive capitals in Auburn Hills, Dearborn, Detroit. 

ChangFeng returned to Cobo Monday. Mr. Ficano came to the stage and bragged that he had gone on three trade missions to China and Chairman Li was again indecipherable, but he soldiered on through a difficult twenty-minute speech anyway.   

During Chairman Li's speech, he unwrapped two of its cars, the Liebao CS7 small SUV concept vehicle and the Kylin, a compact wagon already being sold in China. Pininfarina supposedly designed the CS7, however the exterior was a dead ringer for a Hyundai Santa Fe. Closer inspection of both vehicles showed that there was nothing special about either. They included some blatant copying of well-known styling cues once or currently used by Chrysler and Toyota. And both vehicles were rather crudely finished by automotive show standards. There were plenty of severely misaligned body panels, loose door stripping, and areas of the exterior where the paint goes from shiny to matte, as if they ran out of clear coat before they shipped these cars to the States.   

So, what can we make of this press conference? It's obvious that Wayne County's Ficano wants to find jobs for displaced automotive workers and white-collar professionals. ChangFeng definitely needs to polish their apple before they sell it in an already highly competitive market. And why wasn't an American CEO up there patting Mr. Ficano and Chairman Li on their backs, when such an automotive company stands to gain from a Chinese alliance?

What we're witnessing is a very public feeling out of possible trade and business partners. Detroit has the engineers and designers to make ChangFeng's automotive lineup shine, so the Chinese automaker can compete globally. ChangFeng has inexpensive labor and production costs and could very well sell an insanely inexpensive car and still make decent profit. The last group missing is an American automaker. Wayne County and ChangFeng cannot succeed with their goals unless one of the Detroit automakers becomes a corporate suitor and provides the marketing know-how, supply and distribution network, and dealership group to provide the backbone such a venture needs. 

When it is all said and done, you might not even know it when Chinese cars reach these shores. It may be a car designed in the United States by one group, manufactured in China by another, and sold under varying names in different parts of the world. Look at GM's confusing relationships and international sales efforts involving Daewoo and Suzuki, for example. Throw in General Motors European Opel division in the mix and even astute insiders get confused about who designed what, who makes what, and who markets what for whom. You'll probably see a similarly complicated set of business relationships emerge from this within the next year or two.

Chrysler is already working with Chery of China on the production of a subcompact called the Dodge Hornet, so the Chinese are practically here. So it's not a question of when the Chinese are coming, or a question about how they're coming, the real question is whether or not the consumer will even know it when it happens. 

—Cliff Weathers

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