The hot, and merely lukewarm, models of the Shanghai auto show

In the late 1980s, there were only 176 cars registered to private individuals in the entire nation of China. Those stats did not include the cavalcades of outmoded Hongqi limousines used to ferry about key Party members, which likely brought the total beyond the three-digit range. Still, contrast this with 2012 when, in what is now the world’s largest automotive market, nearly 20 million vehicles were sold.

That is a significant and rather abrupt increase and has not come without some concomitant (cough) havoc. It is also is nearly one car for every human living in Shanghai, which now ranks as the globe’s most populous city, and is the site of this week’s Chinese Auto Show, an honor it alternates, annually, with Beijing. Having attended the festivities in the capital last year, this sitting was beyond preferable. Alluring, cosmopolitan, and at once fiendishly diverse and monolithically immense, Shanghai is kind of like Haussmann’s plan for Paris, but with every block sprouting brightly illuminated seventy-story erection. In contrast, Beijing is more like 19^th century Leeds, but with every block sprouting recalcitrant glandular growths and a rheumy pallor.

We could count about 11,000 constantly moving construction cranes from our perch on the 86^th floor of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, and similarly ceaseless crowds at the block-square, seven-story Louis Vuitton store across the boulevard. Yet the mood among the American and European and Japanese auto manufacturers was cautiously sober. After a decade or so of ludicrous record-breaking growth, the free-range catbird days are, apparently, over. China, we kept being told, is maturing.

This means different things to different manufacturers.

It means that the ultra-luxury segment is no longer the market’s sole automotive focus, though it continues to churn inexorably toward its imminent position as global leader, as evinced by the ten-deep crush of spectators vying for an opportunity to be prevented from accessing the cordoned stands where the Rolls-Royce Wraith and Bentley Flying Spur made their Chinese debuts.

It means that there is room for a brand like Maserati, which introduces a new car about as often as the Canadians coronate a king, to show two all-new vehicles — its elegantly dilated Quattroporte, and its sharply aggressive E-Class-fighting Ghibli — both part of their China-fueled plan to increase global production ten-fold in the coming years.

It means that Audi can choose, after a quick-peek preview prior to the New York Show, to officially debut a pair of premium and super-premium small sedans, in the handsome, and positively B3 80-echoing A3 and S3.