Top Speed Cars And Motorcycles: Top Five Cars from the Shanghai Auto Show

The bustling megalopolis of Shanghai is a good place – in fact, better than most others – to have an auto show. This city of almost twenty million people, situated on the banks of the Huangpu River, is at the forefront of what the modern Chinese city has come to embody in the 21st Century - evolution. With skyscrapers that reach to the heavens situated next to the ancient parts of the city, Shanghai is where the East meets the West and where the global "Next" is created.

China is also a big market for the global automotive industry and the place where corporations are hedging their bets on the future. It is also a whole different world. In China, General Motors is the number one sales leader. Audi and BMW both make special long wheelbase models - those who can afford a luxury car usually have a driver to go along with it. Furthermore, automobile sales in China keep growing at a torrid pace year over year.

That said, China is still a country with its learner's permit. The country's burgeoning market is so new that there is still a sense of excitement about its nascent automotive culture.

That excitement was palpable at the 12th Shanghai International Automobile & Manufacturing Technology Exhibition. The 120,000 square meters of the New International Expo Centre were overflowing with hundreds of cars and thousands of journalists, fog machine smoke rising to the rafters and the sound of music blasting from the packed stands.

The floor was littered with a wide array of different models – from the odd, tiny El Camino-type Changfeng concept to Scion-like Great Wall Coolbear. Below are some of the highlights from the Shanghai show and, perhaps, the very near future. In China, to paraphrase Thomas L. Friedman, not only is the world flat, but so are the roads.