Why I want to drive a car in China

Driving a car in Beijing will seem unnecessary to many foreigners. Ridehailing and bike-sharing services add to an expanding public transport system, racing to cater to the capital’s residents who are constantly on the go.

So my decision to get a Chinese driver’s license raised more than a few eyebrows.

“Why do you need to drive?” asked many of my friends. The city’s roads can be daunting for green motorists, they said, with traffic congestion still very much a part of urban life.

Not a few of them also asked the more pertinent question: “Are you getting a car next?”

It was certainly an important one. Obtaining a private vehicle license plate in Beijing can take at least a few years under the latest regulations. The transport authorities are expected to rein in the total number of vehicles on city roads to fewer than 6.2 million by the end of this year.

Beijing is one of the first cities in the country to limit vehicle numbers, issuing about 100,000 new license plates a year.

Total new and used-auto sales in the city stood at about 605,000 last year, according to the China Automobile Dealers Association. The number of new car sales is expected to hold steady this year.

But shrinking vehicle sales also are set to continue their significant drag on the country’s total retail sales in March, according to a report from investment bank Citic Securities earlier this month. Passenger car sales fell 19 percent year-on-year during the first three weeks of March alone, according to industry figures.

The decline was attributed partly to the expiration of favorable purchasetax policies — authorities restored a car-purchase tax to 10 percent at the beginning of last year, after setting it at 7.5 percent in 2017 and 5 percent in 2015 and 2016.

The country recorded about 1.19 million passenger-car sales in February, dropping for the ninth consecutive month.

Despite the dents, the industry is gearing up for the next big thing — intelligent self-driving vehicles.

Nearly 60 self-driving vehicles clocked a total of more than 150,000 kilometers (93,206 miles) on Beijing’s roads last year, municipal authorities reported.

The fleet from internet search giant Baidu comprised more than 80 percent of all the tested self-driving cars last year, according to the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport. Other participants in the road tests included electric-car startup Nio from Shanghai and self-driving car company Pony.ai in Beijing.

The capital is set to raise the number of roads used for self-driving tests, with the report citing a road map that aims to cover 500 square kilometers of area and 2,000 km of open roads for testing intelligentconnected vehicles within the next three years. Many other major cities, including Shanghai and Chongqing, have issued car plates for testing the intelligent-connected vehicles.

Beyond the hardware and inroads in artificial intelligence that promise to start taking over steering wheels, getting a Chinese driver’s license of my own seemed like an opportunity too good to miss.

I have driven in various parts of the world using at least three different licenses, requiring both left- and right-side driving. There is still nothing quite like the freedom of mobility that driving a private car offers, and when you consider the open roads beyond Chinese cities, into the vast expanse of the hinterlands, the travel possibilities are endless.

Obtaining a Chinese driver’s license itself was simple enough, much like most other public services in the country that are increasingly becoming easier for foreigners to access. All in, it took me less than two weeks to convert the driver’s license issued in my country into a Chinese one.

Now all I need is to get my hands on a car.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS