Beijing International Auto Show 2026 - Journalists and Influencers Are Wrong | Learns Car Series

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:01]I just came back from a week-l long work trip from China from what I believe was the biggest car show on Earth.

[00:00:16]And if you're thinking that I'll be putting up a video on the 1,300 plus cars that were showcased there, right?

[00:00:23]Well, you'll be wrong because I'm going to say something that might not sit very well with a lot of people covering the show in the past two weeks. I mean, I think most of the content you are seeing about the Beijing International Auto Show, well, they're actually wrong.

[00:00:49]Nope. I don't mean that the presenters and the QRS are inaccurate on the facts and figures that they delivered because if you watch my along blog on the show, which you won't, you'll find that I got a lot more facts wrong. But what I mean to say that they are wrong is many of them are missing the points. And I say this as someone who isn't a motoring journalist. I'm not from a media platform or an influencer. I'm just someone who talks about cars from a buyers and an owner's perspective. So, probably that's exactly why what I saw there felt very different from the dozens of uh Beijing auto show videos uh that I've watched.

[00:01:39]Now, just to be upfront, this work trip was sponsored by Omoda Juru Singapore.

[00:01:44]invited me to Beijing for the auto show and also to Woohoo in Anwi province uh to visit Cherries factories do some test drives and attend some summits and conferences and I had a privilege to do this trip uh with some famous and credible journalists and editors from major automotive platforms whom I'm genuinely amazed at how exceptional they are in doing their stuff. But what I want to share here isn't a journalistic feature of the exhibition like what they did. I was initially doing a vlog style walkthrough like some KS, but I decided against putting that up and I don't want to turn this video into a car showcase where I kept reading uh out specs, you know, and say how beautiful each car is.

[00:02:27]Those you can easily watch on the other excellent videos out there. Now, for me in this video, this really how this entire experience have changed the way I think about what actually matters when I'm choosing a car here in Singapore.

[00:02:40]And because I'm just the average cargo who's quite undecided and even fle about the car I would eventually buy, right?

[00:02:47]Considering how uh expensive cars are here in Singapore, I guess what I'm sharing here would relate and resonate with you too. I just hope that my sponsor for this trip won't be upset that this isn't the video that they're expecting to see.

[00:03:11]Now, if you go and watch uh most of the coverage coming out of the Beijing Auto Show, right, you'll start to notice a pattern. Everyone is talking about how much uh horsepower this car has, whether it's running on 400, 800, or even 900 volt architecture, what platform is built on, how fast it goes from zero to 100. I mean, I get it. These are natural car things to talk about. They are measurable. They are impressive and they make good headlines, I guess. But when someone buys a car in Singapore, right, they are not thinking is 400 horsepowers enough or wow, this car can do a 3.8 second century sprint. It's more like how much am I paying for the monthly installment and for the road tax? And that's a starting point because after that right the question will turn to can I trust this brand? Will this car hold value and is it going to give me problems down the road? And then we start looking at the things that we actually interact with the car daily.

[00:04:20]The interior space, the practicality of the storage options, how big the boots is for the baby pram, how comfortable it feels when you sit inside. And most importantly, right, this which you might see as trivial, but it is super important to me, which is how much I turn back to look at that car while I'm walking away from it. Because at the end of the day, right, we are not driving a spec sheet. We are living with a baby.

[00:04:49]We often spend more time grooming it than our own skinare routine. As I was going through boos after boos at the Beijing Auto Show while I was rushing through shooting my vlogs, right, the question that kept coming back to me was when this car arrives in Singapore, would someone actually spend $250,000 on it? And once you start looking at things that way, right, a lot of what's been showcased starts to feel very different.

[00:05:17]And then at all the boos and all the stages, right, it's just not a display of cars anymore. is a display of intense, of logic, of confidence. It is a signal of which companies are actually serious about competing globally and which ones are still figuring things out along the way. So I changed my whole narrative and started asking myself this question and each manufacturer's booth.

[00:05:44]Is this model actually ready for Singapore which is a market where prices are exorbitantly high? uh buyers are cautious and expectations are honestly quite unforgiving. But with four hours to conquer eight exhibition halls with 1,300 plus cars, right, there was only so much I could cover. So, like I said, right, if you want to see the cars, feel free to watch other videos. But if you wish to discover what really matters to you, like should you wait a few months or even one to two years for this car to come to Singapore, then I guess this video should be worth your time. But meanwhile, can you help to give this video a like and subscribe if you haven't done so? Yes, the trip was sponsored, but this video isn't. And if you like what you have watched so far, right, you might even want to click on the thanks icon to contribute a small sum towards the cause of making this video. I mean, so many people have generously contributed and I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge them here. Oh, do share this video too to a car enthusiast friend and let me know what excites you when you go to such car exhibitions. All right. Okay.

[00:06:53]I'll share more about my thoughts about what I've observed at the paging auto show a little later. But now let me continue with the uh second portion of my trip which was partly more exciting and partly more mundane.

[00:07:09]But nonetheless, this leg of the trip was uh still important because after Beijing, we went to Uhu. Uh now, I didn't know the existence of this city in Anui province. Uh it is an hour southwest of Nanching and it's not a big city, but what I'm told is that a sizable population from the city works for the Cherry car factories and offices there. But more than that, right, Woohoo is very different from Beijing. So to me, uh, Beijing shows me the surface or, you know, the front of the restaurant, but Woohoo shows me what's at the back, uh, of the house, like what's happening in the kitchen, the the store room and the backyard. So, Woohoo is where Cher's factories are, where the cars are actually built literally and where we got to see uh how everything comes together beyond the glitzy exhibition lights.

[00:08:07]So, my first stop is to their IRA factory. Now we currently actually have an iicar in Singapore which is in the guise of this JU 6 which is the Iicar 03 there in China and I core 03 in Malaysia. But at this factory right they make the IAR V23 and the V27 both of which will be arriving in Singapore in the next few months. Also that's where they make the third generation Cherry QQ. Yes, the present day uh successor of the terrible but very cute Cherry Q from the mid200s.

[00:08:45]Now, I wasn't allowed to take any photos or videos there, but the first thing that really hit me is the scale. Now, the factory is huge. I mean, huge is an understatement. I estimate that the entire cherry factory city which can produce over 1 million cars a year is the size of our entire twas estate. And where I was at the Iicar factory, right, our guy informed us that the annual uh production reaches 300,000 units there.

[00:09:15]That's over 800 cars a day. And honestly, I've seen videos of car factories, but only with my own eyes can I fathom how orderly, how clean, how automated, and how massive the scale of the IICAR and Cherry factories are. But to me, right, the scale here is not about being impressive. It's not like they built the factories for show. The factories that we visited actually are producing real EVs as we toured around with real workers and real robots and real assembly lines. Now to me all this is about the car makers commitment because if you see the level of investment they put there right the infrastructure the machinery the manpower you start to realize this is not for short-term play this is a car company that's built for the long run and that matters a lot for export markets like Singapore because when we buy a car here nowadays right we have to probably commit to that car for some 10 is the second thing that I gathered for my trip especially during my test drives which I did quite a few of the various models like the JU 5 and JU 8 which just launched here in Singapore and an Omod 5 which we won't see here anytime soon.

[00:10:41]All of these in a short but confidence inspiring race course and the IICAR B23 and B27 in a super muddy super wet off-road course which is really a once in a lifetime experience for me. All of these to me tells me about their confidence because anyone can build one good car. The real question is then can they build 20 30 good car models then replicating them 10,000 100,000 and a million times over consistently I mean can they maintain quality across different patches different models and different markets because after the production lines right this is where we get to experience their cars being tortured with the accelerator flawed and the uh brakes pumped hard over and over again and at the off-road track, right?

[00:11:36]The boxy SUVs are being pushed to the limit with Hington turns, heels, uh waiting pools, uh a 50 kilometer per hour straight sprints, and dozens of undulating bumps torturing the suspension rounds after rounds. And when I asked the instructor, he told me each car had been subjected to such abuse two to 300 times during the test drive runs.

[00:12:05]And since our Singapore entourage was always among the last to experience a test drive, right, even after that much stress and abuse, the cars felt fine to me. So really, while it's all fun and acceleration for us, when we get to do things to those cars that we wouldn't bear to do in our own cars, right, it starts to give us a different kind of feeling, confidence. And when I layer that with the fact that Cherry has actually been around for 30 years, I realize that this car maker really has come a long way since the days of the QQ. Because what I've experienced in those few minutes at the test track didn't happen overnight. is the results of decades of uh mistakes, improvements and refinement over and over again. But for me, the most important part of this entire trip though it is also the most mundane. It wasn't the uh factories or even the test drive. It was the talks during the summit and the conferences that delivered what I call certainty.

[00:13:11]I mean the skill of the speeches of by their chairman uh CEO VPs and a dozen of them at least right speaking on various stages at the uh car show uh in Beijing uh and at different venues in Woohoo one of which house 3,000 participants that's built more like a rock concert hall than a conference. So all these talks though boring and somewhat uncomfortable with me sitting on a dining chair for 4 hours. I thought at first these were all the usual Chinese propaganda. You know the Tongai sharing their goal to sell 1 million Omodu cars in one year instead of the current three years. Now the also the fashion shows by the uh real beautiful brand owners from 10 different countries. uh and even award presentations for young KS from Malaysia, Dubai and Indonesia who aspire to own an ICAR but hasn't gotten to do that yet. I thought all these were to put up a show but I come to realize that after 3 days that my key question are they building cars mainly for the domestic market and then by the way adapt them for export later or are they thinking about global markets especially us right-hand drive markets like uh Indonesia, Malaysia uh and Singapore from the very beginning. Now this question was sort of answered because Cherry specifically have a division looking at the right-hand drive market and I think they understand that beyond moving the steering wheel to the right side of the car right uh the regulations here the buyers expectations here uh the after sale standards and even the pricing model all these are very different from China so if Cherry didn't make an effort to be certain in understanding our market from the start.

[00:15:07]I don't think they would have lasted this many decades.

[00:15:21]And if you didn't know, Cherry and their subbrands did exceptionally well in Malaysia. And here in Singapore, right, JCU just attained third EV sales ranking with 600 EVs and PHV sold in quarter 1 of 2026 alone. Now for comparison, right, the whole of last year they did only 760.

[00:15:42]So with the new J5, the J8, V23, and V27 coming to Singapore, I reckon they could have a chance to top 3,000 units in 2026. But let's see. Now one more thing I think I need to share which is the subbrands. I was like you puzzled why any car maker needs so many subbrands.

[00:16:03]Now if you don't know right Cherry has Pomoda uh Juicar or IC here and then there's Jour in Malaysia uh and Lass uh and Luxit Exit and Freelander in other markets and these are just only for the passenger car brands. So why need so many? Turns out Cherry wanted to plant not only a cherry tree but a forest of different trees to compete with different segments of the market. Now for example right cars will feel very uh design forward more lifestyle driven and targeting a younger audience who are gamers and love to dress differently than us old farts. And Ju right on the other hand is a little bit more rugged, a bit more premier leaning, more for family people who needs the space and the flexibility. And I car are for the rebels, the non-conformist who yearn to drive a boxy SUV where everyone else's is egg shaped and they get to customize their cars however they want. and Luxit and Exit uh belong to the more matured, more premium, more uh affluent market with Luxit focusing more on technology and Exit on class. So no, Cherry is not like a legacy brand such as uh Toyota anymore with one brand targeting everyone in the entire budget spectrum from the budget conscious with the Toyota subcompact hatchback right to the chairman befitting Century top-of-the-line SUV. I can see that with uh intentional target uh audience segmentation this way right they can be more adaptive to the different buyer groups in a more structured way and I think this signals both maturity and uh forward thinking and like I mentioned right certainty in their market approach but now with all that said does it mean that Cherry and all it subbrands are perfect of course not I mean I can still see that despite all the preparations that they have made to a crowd of uh 500 at their launch announcement at the ping auto show, right? 2,000 people turn up and it got real uncomfortable real fast with the loss of my personal space and at the summit talks in Woohoo, right?

[00:18:21]They were constantly late in starting their events, preferring to delay the start so that the hall was filled up first, which is kind of a Chinese thing instead of uh adhering to uh strict timings like the Japanese. But one thing's for sure, no one beats the Chinese in being able to build big at speed. And in the past, right, it's all about sacrificing quality for efficiency. But today, Chinese quality have surpassed the Europeans for sure.

[00:18:49]But don't forget, brands like Omoda, Ju, and I are just 3 years old. And despite all their exceptional achievements and sales figures, right, they are still at the infant stage of building trust, especially here in Singapore. Perception takes time to change. Quality can definitely be improved some more. And service standards will require more lessons learned to attain perfection. So I think given a few more years, given the tensity and the grits of the Chinese people in Cherry International and coupled with the decadesl long uh experiences of the local dealership that is Vertex Automobile and given how a shift in the appetite of the Singaporean car buyer market to be so much more accepting to Chinese EVs today, right? I cannot see a future where JU and Nicar won't do well. So after this entire trip, my biggest takeaway from the Beijing International Auto Show uh and the site visits, test drives, and summit talks at Uhu. Well, it's not about the glitzy likes, the freebies, and more even the shining cars. It's more about the understanding of which companies are actually preparing themsel to compete seriously in markets like Singapore. To me, right, it's really about the perception, the belief and the trust of the car maker and how all this can be translated to you and me. And after a week with Cherry, I believe I have new found certainty and confidence with their commitment to be a global brand to be reckoned with. Now, thanks to Omoda Ju Singapore for sending me to this work trip, especially by business class flights and accommodating us in five-star hotels. Now, it's honestly my first time going to a Grand Car show in China and my Virgin trip into any car factory. And I hope this won't be my last door with Vertex or any other dealerships. Although, I actually turned down an offer this month from another brand because of work commitment, but that's another story for another time.

[00:20:57]Oh, and also I would like to extend my gratitude to Cherry International for hosting me along with our intimately sized Singapore and Tourage for feeding us exceptionally well and giving us more free time to uh catch up on our work. Uh after all, right, this is not an incentive trip. Uh there are still videos to be edited and post to be published. Lastly, I would like to thank you as well for watching my videos, especially this one, which is more like a recount of my trip than a feature of any cars at the car show. So, please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. And finally, let me know if given a chance, will you throw down your job for a week to go for such a trip?

[00:21:41]Well, maybe, just maybe, I can make it happen for one super supportive longtime subscriber in the future.