Shanghai motor show: full of wild, pie-in-the-sky ideas... that'll probably happen

No hand-wringing here about sustainability. No pious pronouncements about low carbon. The Shanghai Auto Show is like motor shows used to be: upbeat and chock full of pie-in-the-sky, never-gonna-happen ideas. Only here they probably will.

Who were you if you didn’t have an AI robot or flying car on your stand? You were no-one. It was kind of joyful. In Europe we’d be rightly cynical about any of this happening, but not here.

Next year Xpeng (actually pronounced chow-pung) claims it will have the AeroHT on sale. It’s a six rotor, two seat helicopter that parks itself inside a six-wheel van. The whole thing, car plus helicopter, will cost the equivalent of £200,000.

The mainstream car ranges are maturely styled but very generic. Tesla has obviously been a massive influence on design out here. Everyone has a Model Y-style high-roof, low back crossover with flush fit doorhandles, slim lighting and rounded body panels.

What’s coming next? I can tell you that. Centrepiece on every stand was some sort of take on the Defender/Bronco theme. MG had one, the Cyber X, and it was actually pretty cool. They’ve even managed to work in pop-up headlights.

Great Wall has the aptly named Tank brand. The 300 is a Bronco in very light camo. There was the Geely Galaxy Cruiser, and in front of its flying car, luxury brand Hongqi had the biggest, chunkiest off-roader of them all, called... well, the script was in Chinese, so we’re not sure.

We spoke to Giles Taylor, ex-head of design at Rolls-Royce, who’s now been with Hongqi in China for seven years. We talked timescales. “In the BMW Group it would take six or eight years for initial sketches to make it through to production - here it’s 18 months," he said. The pace of development is astounding. Hence the Defender and Tesla clones.

What wasn’t there was any form of racing car. OK, there was an M4 GT3 on the BMW stand, and some sort of pseudo rally car from Firefly, but that was literally it. Motorsport just doesn’t figure out here currently.

There’s not much in the way of sports and supercars either. The jumping Yangwang U9 still draws a crowd, but the only other domestic sports car I saw came from Denza, a BYD offshoot, which showed a large two door GT called the Z.

There is some innovation around. The Zeekr Mix is a neatly packaged mid-sized family car with a snub nose and sliding side doors that part front and back to reveal a lounge-like cabin which includes rotating front seats and sliding rails. It’s a clever take, but unlikely to come to Europe. Here, Zeekr is targeting the 001, 7 and 7X. In China they’re badged 007. Not when they come to Europe, for obvious reasons.