Chongqing’s mountainous, cyberpunk panoramas and sticky summer season warmth appear worlds away from flat and dry Detroit. However carmakers within the Chinese language metropolis can not cease drawing parallels with the American metropolis. Standing outdoors one in every of Chongqing’s sprawling car-assembly vegetation, a boss at Changan, a state-owned auto big, notes with pleasure that the sheer variety of automobiles being produced within the metropolis—some 2.5m final 12 months—has earned it the moniker “Motown of China”.