Photos: Tour the Mind-Blowing, Ultra-Futuristic Cars of the Shanghai Auto Show!
SUVs you can take across a lake, electric-powered 911 fighters, robots, and flying cars: This isn’t your average auto show.
Back in the '50s Americans used to go to GM’s Motorama shows to get a glimpse of the future, gasping in awe at fully functional concept cars like the turbine-powered, titanium bodied Firebird III and exhibits that showed autonomous driving technologies. Fast forward seven decades and the world comes to China to see the future arriving in real time. Auto Shanghai 2025 is a mind-melting mass of color and noise, hardware and software wrought as cars and trucks and SUVs that at times defy comprehension and categorization.
To walk Auto Shanghai 2025—our first day’s excursion through the sprawling halls of the National Exhibition and Convention Center totaled 7.5 miles, and there were whole areas we didn’t have time to explore until day two—is to wonder what happened to the auto industry we’ve known all our lives. Sure, familiar names were there (Cadillac and Ford, Audi and BMW and Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen, Toyota and Honda and Nissan) but they almost seemed relics of a bygone era.
Shanghai sizzled with the shock of the new: Brands like Avatr and Jetour and iCar, Luxeed and Denza and Stelato, Arcfox and Aios and Tank, to name just a few, all showing vehicles that rivaled almost anything from the American, European, and Japanese automakers. Indeed, Auto Shanghai 2025 revealed big trouble ahead for the automotive old guard: It’s hard to see how their mainstream, non-luxury brands can survive five more years in China. The average Chinese vehicle now offers the average Chinese consumer a product of more or less equal quality and better technology, at a lower price.
Yes, as our testing has revealed, Chinese automakers still need to improve the dynamic elements of their products, things such as ride and handling and the responses of their advanced ADAS technologies. Some of their software stacks are buggy, too, and long-term durability remains an open issue. Beyond that, the raw and brutal competitiveness of the Chinese auto market also means not all will survive.
But Auto Shanghai 2025 shows that so-called "China Speed" is not an empty cliché. Once focused on motorizing a nation that in 1985 had barely 170,000 cars, Chinese automakers are now challenging fundamental notions of what the modern automobile is, how it should be made, and where it can be sold, at a pace legacy automakers are struggling to comprehend. Beyond those macro trends, Auto Shanghai revealed that while Chinese cars are getting larger and more lavishly equipped, some Chinese EV makers are still struggling to break out of the Tesla Model S/Porsche Taycan design template, particularly at the front of their cars, where the lack of a grille removes the incentive to give them a unique "face."
It also showed that while the Chinese have traditionally loved sedans, SUVs are taking over, just as they have here in America, and that the hot trend among SUVs is to give them the chunky, boxy form of proper off-roaders such as the Land Rover Defender, Ford Bronco, and Mercedes G-Class. Some of those SUVs backed up the form with the function, using body-on-frame construction, long travel suspension and locking diffs to give them proper 4x4 overlanding capability. Here’s a look at some of the vehicles and technologies that caught our eye at Auto Shanghai 2025.
