Cars, cars, cars

The growth of the car market in China will cause huge headaches, where roads are built for bicycle traffic and there are few parking lots for all the multistory apartment buildings. It will also keep pressure on oil prices for years to come.

China is on track to sell 11 million vehicles this year, according to the China Passenger Car Association. That would be up 17% from 2008, and a stunning 20 times the number of vehicles sold in China just a decade ago. Zhang says this year China likely will overtake the USA, where expected sales are around 10 million units, and become the world's biggest car market for the first time.

China's 1.3 billion people "are simply wild about cars," says Michael Dunne, a Shanghai-based managing director of J.D. Power and Associates, an auto industry group. He says the surprising strength of China's auto market has been driven not just by economics, but also by a kind of psychological shift that has come with prosperity.

"There is the thrill of individual mobility, going from point A to point B in their own time, and on their own terms. But it's also an opportunity to declare and project their own success," Dunne says....

U.S.-style suburbs, where cars are a virtual necessity, are sprouting everywhere....

China has one-seventh as many autos on the road as the USA, Dunne estimates, but nearly twice as many traffic deaths — 73,484 last year, according to the Chinese government.