By Mark Landler
FRANKFURT: It is hardly surprising that a car billed as the "ultimate driving machine" would spawn imitators. But for BMW, the Shuanghuan CEO is less a respectful homage than a brazen knockoff.
BMW is going after Shuanghuan, a Chinese carmaker that hopes to break into Europe, on charges that its sport utility vehicle, the CEO, is a copy of BMW's popular SUV, the X5. The German carmaker has filed a lawsuit in Munich to prohibit the sale of the CEO in Germany.
Shuanghuan's European importer defied BMW by exhibiting the car on the first day of the Frankfurt International Motor Show on Tuesday, providing a vivid glimpse of the low-grade war over intellectual property rights between China and the West on goods ranging from designer handbags to computer chips.
"We did not like it," the chief executive of Bayerische Moteren Werke, Norbert Reithofer, said during an interview here.
Neither did DaimlerChrysler, which is taking legal action against Shuanghuan to prevent it from selling the Noble, a little car that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Smart mini-car made by Daimler. The Noble did not turn up at this show, though the importer, China Automobile Deutschland, insists that it has decided on its own not to distribute the car in Germany.
"Naturally, our cars are inspired by European carmakers," said Karl Schlössl, a German who is the chief executive of China Automobile. "But we reject the charge that these are copies."
Schlössl seemed to be reveling in the dispute, which catapulted his Chinese brand from obscurity to center stage at this auto show traditionally dominated by the titans of German auto-making.
At a circus-like news conference, Schlössl refused to speak the name BMW, instead humming it. He spoke of having a southern German accent that would make him at home in the hallways of BMW, based in Munich, and he introduced a tall blonde woman as his companion.
Still, there are serious issues behind the theatrics. Few European executives doubt the Chinese will be genuine competitors here in a few years - perhaps learning faster than the Japanese or the Koreans - despite a bumpy start in the market because of safety concerns with their first cars.
And with the web of alliances between Chinese and Western automakers, there are plenty of opportunities for European innovations to turn up in Chinese cars that are then peddled to Europeans.
General Motors and Honda have accused Chinese carmakers of copying their designs - often slavishly - but have gotten little relief from Chinese courts. Some analysts said the European manufacturers needed to accept copying as the price of doing business in China.
"There are three copies of the Smart," said Graeme Maxton, an independent auto analyst in Hong Kong. "When it comes to body panels, I almost sympathize with the Chinese; it's not that big a deal."
Maxton said Chinese carmakers sometimes copied the exterior of a car from one model, and the interior from another. In the case of the CEO, it is not even clear that the BMW X5 was the only source for the outside. Automobile critics have said that while the rear end of the vehicle is a dead ringer for the X5, the front end is reminiscent of a Toyota Land Cruiser.
BMW emphasized that under the hood, the CEO was no X5. Small wonder: The X5 starts at €59,000, or $86,830, in Europe; the twin turbo diesel model on display here goes for €92,000. Schlössl said the CEO would sell for a base price of €25,900.
"Someone who buys a BMW for €100,000 is not the same person who will look at a CEO," he said.
Still, the Germans are zealous about protecting their image, particularly at a car show held on their home turf.
"I think it's confusing to our customer base," said DaimlerChrysler's chairman, Dieter Zetsche. "Showing a vehicle that looks very similar to a car on our stand raises unnecessary questions." Zetsche said he would consider more litigation against the Noble, the Smart look alike.
DaimlerChrysler and BMW have manufacturing operations in China as well as thriving export franchises, and neither seemed keen on turning the dispute into a broader offensive against China. Zetsche and Reithofer said they believed the Chinese government would protect intellectual property more zealously as their own engineers begin turning out original technology.
But Zetsche acknowledged there were likely to be further such flare-ups, as China develops its industry. "In Asia, in general, the culture does not define copying as something bad or unethical," he said.
For now, the Chinese are struggling with even more basic issues, like designing a car safe enough for European roads. Two other carmakers, Brilliance JinBei Automobile and Landwind, suffered when their cars performed abysmally in crash tests conducted by the German automobile club ADAC.
Landwind stopped selling here temporarily while it retools its cars to improve safety, said Peter Bijvelds, a Dutch car dealer who holds the European distribution license for the brand.
Brilliance, which collaborates with BMW in assembling cars in China, insisted Tuesday that it had improved its safety, though it still received only a middling score in another crash test. It introduced a compact car, the BS2, which could be a low-cost alternative to the Volkswagen Golf.
The vice chairman of Brilliance, He Guohua, said he, too, believed China would regulate intellectual property more strictly in coming years. In any event, he said, his company's cars, which were styled with the help of an Italian design studio, did not rip off any European rivals. "We do our own design work," He said.
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