WSJ reports on Chinese car designers

China’s car makers are increasingly ambitious, as illustrated by plans to grow at home and, in some cases, expand abroad. One big impediment they face in taking on their foreign rivals: design.

Big global companies spend years, and millions of dollars, designing new cars. But many home-grown Chinese auto makers actually do very little of that.

A senior executive of one small auto maker in Hebei recently laid it out for us over a cup of tea: the reason his company can sell cars much cheaper than foreign auto makers who also produce cars in China, he said, is that his company does no engineering or design work whatsoever. Instead, they tell an outside engineering consultant which existing model they want to copy, and ask them to come up with a product counterfeited in a way that it won’t attract intellectual property lawsuits. In some cases that means companies combining styling ideas from two separate cars into one.

The problem isn’t a lack of talent — as China Journal found one recent day on a visit to the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. There we met Phoenix Wang and Jackie Lin, two students whose edgy car designs have put them near the top of their class. Both Wang, a 22 year old from Sichuan, and Lin, a 23 year old from Guangdong, have long been determined to pursue car design professionally. But they and their peers have dim prospects in a domestic industry that doesn’t value their skills.