The first event for the CEO of Swedish electric car brand Polestar at this month's Beijing auto show: a two-week quarantine in a hotel. The auto show, the first major in-person sales event for any industry since the coronavirus pandemic began, opens tomorrow in a sign the ruling Communist Party is confident China has contained the disease. Still, automakers face intensive anti-virus controls including quarantines for visitors from abroad and curbs on crowd sizes at an event that usually is packed shoulder-to-shoulder with spectators. "The car show will indeed be different from any other car show," said Thomas Ingenlath of Polestar, owned by China's Geely, by phone from his hotel room in Tianjin, east of Beijing. The automakers' willingness to tackle the show's logistical challenges highlights the importance of China, their biggest market. Chinese sales have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels while U.S. and European demand is weak and the industry struggles to reverse multibillion-dollar losses.
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