Little off topic. I thought I'd check car sales in China as I'd...

Little off topic. I thought I'd check car sales in China as I'd mentioned them as a continuing driver for oil price strength (pardon the pun).

The chart below shows passenger and commercial vehicle sales from 2008 to September 2015. There doesn't seem to be evidence in this chart of any significant slowing (sales for 2014 in the last 3 months of the year were strong and if 2015 follows the same pattern 2015 should be stronger than 2015).

China is worlds largest market for automobile sales.

In 2012 statistics from the Ministry of Transport recorded 200 million licenced drivers and 88 million privately owned vehicles. Considering China has a population of 1.4 billion, that still leaves room for more sales to be unlocked assuming pollution and congestion constraints allow.

My personal future vision is, that because China is more adaptable, it may end up heralding in the age of the electric car as pollution engulfs its large cities. Once they show the way using economies of scale to build affordable and high performance electric cars the rest of the world will follow and the era of fossil fuel propelled personal transport will grind to an end. I think the miracle of China's rapidly growing and newly developing society has the capacity to leap frog stone age technologies like the petrol driven engine and the like in its search to overcome the problems associated with rapid development.

Eshmun