COPYING in China goes far beyond fake DVDs, watches and handbags. “We can copy everything except your mother,” goes a saying in Shanghai. Soy sauce with fizzy water passed off as Pepsi, fake Cisco network routers (known as “Chisco's”) and mobile phones that look like the latest offerings from Nokia can all be easily found. So, too, can fake blood plasma.

AP

Oh, sorry—I thought this was my BMW

Of all the products to copy, however, a car is surely the most complicated. Cars consist of around 6,000 precisely manufactured components made from a range of different materials. For a car to be cheap, reliable and long-lasting, says conventional industry economics, these parts need to be put together in factories with huge volumes, lots of expensive machinery and many well-trained engineers.

So it came as a surprise when counterfeit cars started to appear in China eight years ago. Early VW look-alikes were soon followed by the infamous Chery QQ. It appeared six months ahead of the car it copied, the Chevy Spark, because a Chinese firm somehow got hold of the blueprints.

What was once a trickle has since become a stream. Toyota's badge, Honda's name (which became “Hongda” for motorcycles) and Nissan's bumpers have all been the subject of legal wrangles. Shuanghuan Automobile got into trouble for copying Audi's famous four-ring logo a few years ago. It then copied the design of Honda's CR-V, called it the SR-V and appears to have won the subsequent legal tussle. Last month the firm won an export licence, and it plans to start shipping another model, the CEO (pictured)—a sport-utility vehicle with a striking resemblance to the BMW X5—to Romania and Italy.

Copying DaimlerChrysler's small two-seater Smart car seems to have become especially popular. In January Shuanghuan launched an electric version, called the Dushi Mini. It followed in the tracks of Shandong Huoyun Electromobile, a firm that makes golf buggies, which launched its own version last year and announced plans to sell the car in Europe for less than half the price of the original. After Daimler threatened to sue, the car was temporarily withdrawn. A spokesman for the Chinese firm said he had been surprised by the way his car resembled the original, explaining that the company had simply copied a toy car. Shandong Huoyun is now redesigning its car in preparation for a relaunch later this year. A third copy of the Smart car was introduced recently by CMEC Suzhou, a maker of electric vehicles.

There are many other examples. Jiangling Motors' Landwind, which spectacularly failed European crash tests last year, is a copy of Opel's Frontera. BYD, a battery-maker, has a concept car that marries the back of a Renault Laguna with the front of a Mercedes CLK and the badge of BMW. Great Wall, a producer of cars with Monty Pythonesque names like Sing, Wingle and Sailor, makes a version of Toyota's Hilux, which it calls the Deer. It is in dispute with Toyota for copying its Scion models and with Fiat for copying bits of its new Panda.

So far, legal action by foreign firms has proved nearly useless. The many writs, threats, injunctions and court cases have become embroiled in slow-grinding legal machinations, been thrown out on technical grounds or failed because foreign firms had not properly registered their designs. Foreign carmakers are reluctant to make too much of a fuss, lest they be excluded from a fast-growing market or generate unwelcome negative publicity.

The great mystery about these copycat cars is their price. Chinese counterfeiters obviously save on research and development costs, but they still have to buy steel and other materials at market prices. Most of them make cars in very small volumes, so there are no economies of scale. That they can sell these cars for half the price of the originals suggests that something odd is going on. They either do not know their own costs (a distinct possibility), have revolutionised carmaking (highly unlikely) or are being subsidised in some way. For the time being, no one knows.