is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
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The first Chinese-made car Omar Rana ever drove was a gas-powered SUV that he rented while on a trip overseas in 2015. To say it didn’t leave much of an impression would be an understatement.
“It sucked really bad,” Rana, aka OmarDrives, tells me. “A horrible experience.”
Flash forward nearly a decade to last year, when Rana received a DM from a company he’d never heard of called DCar Studio inviting him to check out a few Chinese EVs in Los Angeles. It wasn’t surprising that DCar would reach out to Rana. With his 90,000 subscribers on YouTube and over 280,000 followers on Instagram, he’s built a small but respectable following over the years reviewing a variety of cars and highlighting the best and worst from the auto industry. This was the first time he was offered a chance to review a Chinese car. And given his past experience, he was worried about wasting his time.
“I didn’t think it was legit at first,” he remembers. “The emails had bad English. I’m like, ‘This is spam.’”
“The emails had bad English. I’m like, ‘This is spam.’”
Knowing that other LA-based car influencers would be getting similar invitations, Rana quickly overcame his hesitation. He was shocked to learn that in the years since his first experience with a Chinese-made car, the country’s auto industry has exploded to include over 150 distinct brands intensely competing with one another to win over customers with ultra-luxury designs, insane specs, and high-tech features. It was catnip for a car creator like Rana.
Take Geely’s Galaxy E5, for example, Rana says: a $20,000 compact SUV equipped with heated, ventilated, and massaging seats, a digital display cluster, heads-up display, reclining passenger seats, and 360-degree camera. There’s nothing in the North American market that compares at that price point. While EVs have struggled to achieve mainstream acceptance in the US, electrification has become a baseline expectation in China. And internal combustion engine vehicles are seen more as novelties than legitimate choices.
“It was really cool to see how far they’ve come in just five years,” Rana says. “It’s a world of difference.”
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