Letter from Shanghai: Right car but the wrong way

This is one of the most recent additions to the Shanghai Automotive Investment Company's stable of vehicles.

However, unlike those produced by its massive joint ventures with Volkswagen and General Motors, this one is all its own.

The 750 is part of the booty that SAIC acquired when picking over the entrails of the dying Rover car company, at that time rather inaccurately named Phoenix.

It also bid for the rest of the carcass from the administrators but lost out to its rival upriver at Nanjing Auto.

This produced a bit of a mess as well as serious Shanghai loss of face. Both companies would be producing former Rover models with room for considerable confusion. Not one to be put off by minor technicalities, SAIC turned round and gobbled up its rival. No more confusion.

So now everything was fine? Well, not quite. There was the little matter of the name. The Rover name had gone to Ford with Land Rover, and they weren't giving it back. SAIC had to find a new one.

It started with the Chinese name. Rong Wei was chosen, meaning glorious power. Good name in Chinese. However, with a pronunciation of "wrong way", this was not a great name for a car, even with satnav.

Enter Roewe, the international alternative. Why Roewe? Use German pronunciation and it sounds very like Rover. Not so good in English. But our spelling is notoriously idiosyncratic, and we can be trained.

And the Shanghainese? They say "wrong way" unless they speak English when it becomes "roe wee". Let's hope someone is speaking
to Tata.

* Nothing like a bargain to bring out the shopper in Shanghai. New World on Nanjing Lu has just clocked up a Shanghai retail record. A million visitors and £11 million spent on its weekend promotion. So hot was trade that it had to turn the aircon to cool, despite bitter weather.

* In a flurry of government statistics for November, the Consumer Prices Index was up 2.4%, continuing a downward trend since the 8.7% peak in February. Retail sales growth eased slightly to 20.8% but was still strong. Government hopes are pinned on rising domestic consumption. It might just work.