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White 7 (0:54)
Topic(s): Auto Industry / Car Culture
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Video Transcript

I've just been, I've just been to China and in China, what you see is an enormous tension between the economic growth that they want to promote by having a modern car industry. The fact that in the big coastal cities of China, Shanghai and Beijing, you now have the real risk of repeating all the mistakes that the United States made heading into the 1970s when there was sort of this big kind of awakening of, goodness, if we're going to just choke on the smog and we're going to choke on the congestion, we've got to do something about this, which led to, you know, the Clean Air Act and various, you know, a lot of what's happened since then to basically clean up the air, clean up the tail pipes. In China, I think they kind of want to do it all, but they want to do it all in a third the time that it took, say, the United States, to kind of get from the beginning of its car culture to where we are today, which is of course, by no means perfect.