THE NAVIGATOR

In the past two decades, the global automotive industry has been flipped on its head. Even before I started writing professionally about this business, Chinese-made cars were something of a joke and European and North American automakers were dominating the still-nascent market for consumer vehicles in China. China is now the largest automotive market in the world by a wide margin, Chinese-brand vehicles are generally highly respected, and American politicians are lying about why consumers here can't get access to them.

In the late 2010s, we began to see a shift in the Chinese market that has come to fruition in the past five years. When I attended the 2007 North American International Auto Show in Detroit as a member of the media for the first time, the first Chinese vehicles were being displayed on the show floor. Let's just say no one was impressed. Much of what was coming from Chinese brands at the time were either weird, outdated machines or the automotive equivalent of the Rolex knock-offs you could find on Canal St. in New York.