Chongqing’s mountainous, cyberpunk panoramas and sticky summer time 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 exterior one in every of Chongqing’s sprawling car-assembly crops, a boss at Changan, a state-owned auto large, notes with pleasure that the sheer variety of automobiles being produced within the metropolis—some 2.5m final yr—has earned it the moniker “Motown of China”.