Shanghai, how you've changed

Post-Covid, China's car industry has hit its stride and its city streets are changing. James Attwood sends us a postcard

- James Attwood

Dear all,

Stepping out onto a street in China is always an assault on the senses: an ever-shifting cornucopia of unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells. Even in a city as relatively international as Shanghai, a 10-minute walk invariably leaves you feeling exhilarated, unclean and slightly unsettled.

So after a three-year break from visiting - a period in which China largely isolated itself from the wider world through its 'zero Covid' policy - you might expect our first experience of a Shanghai street to be particularly intense.

And yet, on arrival in the city for this year's Shanghai motor show, the first thing you notice is how surprisingly quiet it is.

Granted, China is still loud: the country retains an ability to develop machines that produce annoying bongs, beeps and jingles that could come from nowhere else on Earth.

What we're talking about here is road noise. There are still an awful lot of vehicles on the road but, in the centre of Shanghai at least, the proportion of them running quietly on electric power is, somewhat ironically, impossible to ignore.

It's visible, too, thanks to the green number plates that denote New Energy Vehicles - EVs and plug-in hybrids capable of zero-emission running. Around 1.2 million EVs were sold in China in 2019, around 4.7% of the market; last year, about 22% of all cars sold-six million or so- were electric, despite the phasing out of direct subsidies in favour of a credit system.

Unsurprisingly, many older vehicles are still on the roads, and as you edge further away from Shanghai's centre on inevitably traffic-snarled elevated highways, so the proportion of green plates starts to dip - but not dramatically so.