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MIKE SPINELLI: It's a typical Saturday morning in the city
of Beijing, People's Republic of China.
The G6 expressway swarms with Japanese and German cars,
miniature delivery vans, and these apocalyptic looking
18-wheelers, their swaying, dragon-like tails painted in
the jade asparagus green of the
People's Trucking Industry.
And there's me.
Creeping through the gridlock in Bentley's latest Flying
Spur, a quarter million dollar ceremonial motorcade of one.
Checking out the scenery and trying not
to smash into anything.
And by anything, that includes cameraman Josh, who's shooting
this from the open rear hatch of a Hyundai Crossover.
A Hyundai Crossover that happens to be driven by the
Chinese Jason Statham.
That's this guy.
We've come here for two reasons.
To drive the new Bentley Flying Spur in one of its most
important national markets, and also to find out a little
about the car culture of China's capital.
From its ravenous hunger for multi-million dollar supercars
to a strange and wonderful government-funded complex with
nothing but tuning shops in it.
Trouble is, we have barely two days to do that and the trip
hasn't quite been free of the People's hiccups.
Traffic in Beijing makes me homesick for rush hour on the
Long Island Expressway.
At least the LIE has carpool lanes.
Here there's only one rule.
If there's a space, you fill it any way you can.
If that means dive-bombing into the gap in a Cultural
Revolution-era dump truck with sketchy brakes, so be it.
You only live once.
Really, you only live once.
A few years ago the government banned Buddhist monks in Tibet
from reincarnating without permission.
I'm not kidding.
You only live once.
It's the law.
Behind me inside the Bentley is the space where a captain
of Chinese industry might be if this Flying Spur were
locally owned.
Here in cosmopolitan China, luxury motoring often means
hiring a driver who attends to business in front while a rich
guy or Party official attends to a very different kind of
business in back.
Take that any way you'd like.
But today those rear seats, covered in a sneeringly
luscious grade of leather and trimmed in a walnut veneer fit
for the Jacobeans themselves are empty.
The two flat screen monitors are dark and without signal.
The wireless device that controls everything from the
climate to the DVD player sits untouched by human fingers.
Today it's just me, up in front.
Me and this gorgeous wood trim steering wheel, a pathetically
under-utilized twelve-cylinder cluster-bomb of an engine
resting beneath my right foot, and this time-thwarting vortex
of Beijing Saturday traffic.
So where is everyone going?
Well, the weekend, and by that I of course mean the two days
off at the end of a work week, is not a
universal concept here.
For many of these Saturday drivers, it's off to another
day cranking over the super-power engine.
With cars stacked up as far as the eye can see, maybe this is
also a good time for a Chinese near history lesson.
Back in 1985, nine years into Deng Xiaoping's sweeping
economic reboot, mainland China had just
20,000 private vehicles.
By 2012, there are around 100 million.
And China's astounding economic growth has only
accelerated through the past decade.
In an industrial sense, fast forwarding from the 1950s to
the 21st century in just 10 years.
And while the rest of the world suffered a crushing
economic [BEEP]
down in the late 2000s, China just kept on trucking, racking
up titanic personal wealth, which of course led to a sharp
increase in luxury car ownership.
And if you hadn't already noticed, it also leaned a bit
*** the environment.
The smog here is epic.
It's like the whole cities been hot boxed by diesel
trucks, coal fired power plants, and heavy
industry of all kinds.
A visitor imagining this posh Bentley sedan sheltering one
of Beijing's new upper class from the choking brownish
yellow haze that covers the city might be forgiven for
also imagining a far larger bubble of denial.
But whatever.
A little bit of toxic pea soup in the air is just the cost of
doing business in a country that's producing new wealth
like it produces Dora the Explorer tricycles.
That is to say, a [BEEP]
lot of it.
As the traffic subsides and we make our way further outside
the city, the more the landscape changes.
Out here, there are no luxury hotels or world-class
architecture.
It's not about sitting in the lap of luxury.
It's about sitting by the side of the road bundling sticks in
a pile or baking bricks in a family kiln for a few bucks.
For all the big money that's flowed into private hands,
there's still a rural culture just a couple
hours outside the city.
Here, spending six figures on a luxury car would be just
like riding a dragon--
that is to say, a wild fiction-- and nobody would
ever believe you did it.
And before we know it, we arrive at our
destination for the day.
The Great Wall of China.
An amazing, awe-inspiring site that makes us think we're in a
country where anything is possible.
A country where amazing wealth, created seemingly
overnight, may just be a good start.
How much new wealth, exactly?
Well, enough for John Fu's Beijing supercar dealership to
sell 12 brand new Koenigsegg Ageras in less than two years,
each one costing upward of 3.5 million dollars.
That includes the price of the car as well as customs fees
that can add up to 100% of the car's value.
In other words, one multimillion dollar supercar
for the price of two.
Indeed, it costs gigantic money to buy an already really
expensive car in China.
But a lot of these guys have it.
And Mr Fu's FFF Automobile, which stands for his family
name and that of his two brothers, as well as the
dealership's slogan--
Fast, Fly, and Fabulous--
is where the city's wealthy go to feed their insatiable
supercar jones.
And now that we're back in the city, we meet up with John to
ask him about the supercar business.
JOHN FU: [SPEAKING CHINESE]
MIKE SPINELLI: But even China's super wealthy have
their breaking point.
Some have even tried smuggling their cars into the country
rather than pay those big fees.
Last year, the government confiscated this one-of-a-kind
Koenigsegg Agera R-BLT after the owner tried to sidestep
the customs process.
And who could blame him?
Instead of $2 million, this Swedish supercar would've set
him back the astonishing sum of $4.7 million, enough to pay
the average monthly salary of 6,403 Beijing residents.
Nonetheless, business is booming.
To paraphrase that famous saying often applied to
Confucius, may Mr. Fu and his well-heeled cohorts all
continue to live in interesting times.
And by interesting, I of course mean filthy rich times
with a side of up to their *** in gold bullion.
In fact, Fast, Fly, and Fabulous, or whatever you call
it, is doing so well, Mr. Fu just opened a new dealership
at a place on the outskirts of town known as Tuner Tribe.
A place some locals call Cool Cars Town.
What the hell is Cool Cars Town?
We're just about to find out.
Located on the outskirts of Beijing, Tuner Tribe is like a
neighborhood where every business has
to do with car tuning.
You say you want to mirror wrap your Volkswagen Passat CC
in purple Mylar?
No problem.
A body kit and four Giottos for your Audi A6?
Absolutely.
Lamborghini doors for your Mini Cooper?
I would have said no, but the answer is actually yes.
Just ask this guy.
Do you guys do mostly cosmetic stuff, or are there also
performance--
like engine tuning or exhaust or anything like that?
-[SPEAKING CHINESE]
MIKE SPINELLI: And then we roll into Jimmy's place.
Jimmy is the vice president of Manthey motors China.
That's the local office here at Tuner Tribe of a German
tuning house and motor sports firm best known for fielding
Porsche 911s in the Nurburgring 24 hour.
Jimmy's shop does performance build and provides track day
support for a club of local racers and motor sports fans.
But with all these storefronts and all this speculation and
what might be described best as government
entrepreneurship, it all seems to be very top down.
What about the regular guy car culture?
Where are all the stance kids?
Where is the drag strip crowd?
Where are all the drift kings of tomorrow?
There's something I've been wondering ever since we
stepped off the plane.
Does China even have an automotive popular culture?
That is to say, is there a Chinese version of "Fast and
the Furious", maybe "Fast, Fly, and Furious." What about
a Chinese "Initial D" or Lightning McQueen?
some kind of mass cultural experience that galvanizes car
culture and calls the car-loving masses to action?
Apparently there isn't.
That because as many cars here as there are, owning one isn't
for everyone.
Although China has recently overtaken the US as the
world's largest car market, here in Beijing, a city of
more than 22 million people, the government only allows
240,000 new car registrations per year.
To be one of those lucky few, you have to win
a sort of DMV lottery.
And with so many people applying, the chance of
getting one in any given year is around 60 to 1.
And so with neither the cars nor the disposable income to
mess around with fart can exhausts or slamming their
Celicas or tweaking an extra tenth of a the second from
their five oh Mustang's quarter mile time, most young
people turn to other pursuits, like schoolwork, or smartphone
apps, or hacking into the NSA's supercomputers.
Whatever it is, they're mostly not owning a car and even less
likely modifying it.
That's still a rich kid's game.
You know what the crazy thing about China is?
You just get a feeling that they're on their way
somewhere, right?
You've been to the countries where they're pretty much
satisfied with what it is.
You know what I mean?
-Yeah.
MIKE SPINELLI: Here, you just get the feeling that they're
on their way somewhere, and somewhere big--
and they're really casual about it.
But I think they know.
I think they know what it is that
they're sitting on, right?
These guys are like America around the turn of two
centuries ago.
What century are we in?
-That doesn't sound very flattering place to be though.
MIKE SPINELLI: No-- but--
-Two centuries ago?
MIKE SPINELLI: Two centuries ago, we were sort of at that
dawn of American superpower.
Before America became a superpower, it was loaded with
people who didn't give a ***, right?
Who just made a bunch of money on everybody else's backs.
But eventually, we figured out a way to deliver that wealth
to a good amount of the rest of the country.
And these people are going to do that.
Like that guy, see that bike?
He's going to be riding CB 900 very soon.
Like tomorrow.
He's on his way to pick up his new bike.
It's like a Hayabusa.