Economic Observer Online
June 15, 2012
By Zhang Xu (张煦 )
Translated by Gao Xin
Original article: [Chinese]

Beijing’s second-hand car market is freezing up, as the city’s auto buyers shun older vehicles and smaller cities raise the technical requirements for used car sales.

The capital’s Department of Motor Vehicles has been returning applications from dealerships trying to transfer ownership of five-years-and-older cars to other cities.

Some dealers had feared that the department has blocked the transfer of vehicles out of the city, but Luo Yan (罗磊), deputy secretary general of the China Automobile Dealers Association, said that the measures were temporary.

Around 200 cities now require used cars to meet national standard III in order to be sold on, and at least half of sellers from Beijing are trying to shift vehicles below this level.

Since the introduction of Beiijing’s “license-plate lottery" at the beginning of 2011, residents have mostly chosen to buy new cars, and the city’s secondhand cars have flowed to other regions. If those regions keep raising the technical requirements for second hand sales, ageing vehicles from Beijing are going to be even harder to shift.